There is a great article by Simon Carless about the hidden costs of getting to net on Steam. Applying these factors, we get to net revenue. So, even in the optimistic case where a solo indie developer would see reasonable success, they would make as much as an average developer in a typical games company in the US.
The downside is that there is no job security. If you want to find out more about indie game earnings potential, I reccommend this video by a successful indie developer:. There are successful solo devs out there and many things they do to improve their chances. Most of these factors are to do with business and marketing.
A successful solo developer realises that they are a solo entrepreneur. That means making the right pricing decisions, devoting a LOT of time on marketing efforts and doing proper research into the game space and competitors before fully getting into the development phase. You really need to understand the whole pipeline of creating a game from beginning to end and you really need to understand how all the different teams interact because you're going to be interacting with a bunch of different people doing a bunch of different things.
Again, meetups are really important for just meeting the right people to get a job at a smaller game development studio. Now, if there aren't very many game development studios in your area, it can be difficult to land a job at a company like that. A great option for some remote work is to start doing freelance and contract game development. So of course you can find work for these smaller jobs on websites like Upwork or Fiverr.
However, it may be difficult to stand out if you don't have a whole lot of game development experience. One way you might be able to do is to reach out to some smaller game developers on YouTube or Twitter and just ask to see if you could do some unpaid game development work for them.
And although you won't be making any money to begin with, you'll be able to build up that portfolio and start being able to show people work that you've made and then people will want to start paying for your work. The third way to make money as a game developer is to sell tools and assets on things like the Unity Asset Store. The Unity Asset Store is a great place for game developers to go, you can buy all kinds of assets and tools.
They have things like 3D models, 2D background, all kinds of things that you could need to develop a game. And if you're more of a programmer, which you probably are, if you're watching this channel, then you can make some tools to sell in the Unity Asset Store as well. And these tools can integrate with whatever game engine you're developing for and they can make game development a whole lot easier for end users and people will be willing to pay a lot of money if they can save a lot of time by using your specific tool.
Again, it's really important to have something that addresses a specific need or solves a specific problem if you want to stand out in the Unity Asset Store. It's certainly possible to make quite a bit of money on the Unity Asset Store. When you're going to submit something to the Asset Store, Unity basically tells you to not be afraid to price your asset or tool pretty high because people would be willing to pay that high price if it solves their specific issue.
The fourth way to make money as a game developer is to teach game development. So of course there are websites like Udemy and Unity Learn where you can make little courses and things like that to teach development or you could even get a job as a tutor or a teacher at a game development university or some local tutoring school. Or you could maybe even do some one-on-one consulting, again, in a specific area of game development to help them maybe with their programming or help them with their art direction or marketing.
But to become a good teacher, you're probably going to need to be fairly experienced in game development already. The fifth and final way that I'm going to be talking about today that you can make money as a game developer is, of course, to go indep. So the big thing these days, the thing that everybody wants to do is to be an independent video game developer.
And I mean, it really is the dream job, you get to work for yourself, you get to make something that interests you and you could potentially make quite a bit of money doing it.
I would say for someone who doesn't have very much game development experience this is going to be the hardest one to really succeed in. But I don't mean to deter you from doing it because there are plenty of people who started off making games by themselves and ended up making huge, massive hits. There are plenty of online resources that can talk about how to get started as an independent game developer, so I'm not really going to go into all of that today, but I do just want to go over some of the ways that you can monetize your game as an independent game developer.
So probably the most common strategy for independent game developers is to make a game and sell it for a fixed price. So maybe you sell it for 7,99 9,99, 12,99 whatever you want. Truthfully, many indie developers — from the makers of weird alternative games to more traditional entertainment products — sit somewhere in the middle.
The lucky ones are able to make a living from their work but often carry deep funding worries. Others supplement game making with side hustles or entirely avoid the pressure of financial success by making games in their spare time while building other, potentially more stable careers.
Some of the people I spoke to were anxious about a video game industry they perceive to be in flux. Apple Arcade and Xbox Game Pass are ushering in a new subscription model, similar to Netflix and Spotify, which could profoundly alter how we value games, despite offering a short-term cash injection for those it supports. Could I have made it without living there?
Probably not. But at the same time, I was not getting by. I was eating a meal a day. I ended up getting diabetes. The physical cost of poverty and untreated disability is enormous, especially in the United States.
We thought we were going to make a few grand on Paratopic, and we ended up making enough that I could justify moving out for an entire year to get my own place. Did it make a lot? No, we priced it five bucks. I also now have people hitting me up for freelance narrative design work. The freelance gigs individually pay a lot more, but the stability I have from funding is a huge [peace] of mind. The program was well funded, and I made Medication Meditation as part of my thesis.
One day a week, I would wake up at AM, teach yoga for two hours, go to my undergraduate class at AM, and then in the afternoon, go to the middle school. I never lived off any commercial sales. Most of my money comes from teaching and TAing at my university. With such small funding, people are just getting honorariums for their work.
My first game I was paid to do was Gardenarium in I got a really small amount, like a grand or something. Montreal used to be way cheaper. But I was making it work. At the same time, I was VJing. I made a comic book. So there [were] little bits of money coming in from other sources. I got by. That lasted for maybe three years.
Canadian arts funding is pretty awesome. Basically, percent of my core income comes from that and UK arts funding. I was a software engineer from to This is kind of my secret: work as a software engineer for 15 years living relatively frugally. I spent all of that plus all of my retirement savings.
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