Still struggling away at that first game? Quit the day job 3 months ago, cap set jauntily on head and the gleam of the golden Indie city in your eyes? Take hope, you can earn $1,000 to $10,000 a month! ... or, as in our case, you could earn £258, before hosting fees, since last July! Is anyone else doing quite so miserably after 2.5 years in business? Cas
Mabye it's time to look for profit elsewhere, such as make a java 2d/3d web arcade, and make money from adsense and charge people for banner impressions. I wouldn't give up though. There are people worse off, like myself , but the future is bright I promiss.
Well, we had a luck and found one US distributor who paid a flat-fee license for our 2 games (Avenger and Western RPG Shooter). In total we got $6.000 from him, but the point is that he gave us a contract for creating 6 screensavers worth much more. So we are afloat ATM and hope to be within a year or so. Several games are in production right now. So how did you manage to survive during those 2 years ? You got understanding wife, live with you parent, have no kids ?
Got a full time job and a part time job and sank heavily into extreme debt. Wife doesn't understand She thinks all my games are crap. For sure it's not worked out though. I had another thread a few weeks ago about new paradigms but having done the sums and added up the revenues it couldn't be more stark. Have to think of another way to make money programming games!! Cas
I've made less money than that over the same period. Well, that's life. Personally, I blame the way I haven't actually released a game in years. Sorry to hear your wife thinks your games are crap, though. They definitely aren't. My wife thinks all games are crap, so I can relate, but at least she hasn't singled out my games in particular.
Oh, now that's a loaded question... let's say she's rather "difficult to please", hahaa. She likes Bugatron, Platypus, Cosmobots, Crimsonland, Zuma, Rocket Mania, Bejewelled, Alchemy, Space Taxi 2, Icy Tower, Worms Armageddon, Invasion Pinball 2, Glory Zone, Outpost Kaloki, NetHack, and God help me, Windows Solitaire. She was ambivalent towards Insaniquarium, Mutant Storm, Supreme with Cheese, Tribal Trouble, Gish, Wik & The Fable Of Souls, BreakQuest, She hates, apart from all my games, Gridrunner++, Freedroid, any kind of puzzle game at all, Zap, Soldat, Overflow, Trials Pro, Frenezia (hah!), 'Troid, and Derelict. See if you can spot a pattern :/ Cas
There's absolutely no puzzle in either of those games. It's just reflex pattern matching, which is something she's good at. Try her on Aargon Deluxe or Dweep and she just yawns and gives up after a few minutes and goes back to solitaire. Cas
Yeah, and this is possibly the most annoying conundrum... it's clearly not the graphics or simple controls or reflexive gameplay that drew her to nethack. She was once a complete Diablo nerd as well. Cas
Sorry to hear that Princec...we've had a game out since late November and sales have been very poor and, as we still don't have any sales figures from the publisher, you may actually have earned more than us!. It's certainly not a money-spinner like we first thought...it seems to be the only thing that we can be assured of is Heavy Debt....meantime, we're gonna explore web games to see how much debt can be accrued that way!
I've been going much longer, but I'm doing much better. certainly at least $500 a month, often noticeably more. Two things I've learned: a) its hit and miss. Our top selling game literally sells over 100 times as much as the bottom selling one b) The games need to be relly packed with features. People ahve to think they are getting their moneysworth. Go out and buy the sims or simcity 4. now look at the price. People do expect a lot of content for their money. I suspect if you pulled apart your games, added new features, new game modes and new levels, they wouldnt sell 20% better, they would sell 100% better. You have 'Kombat Kars' syndrome. Everyone downloads and likes it, nobody thinks its worth buying
That's okay, my husband thinks everything I do is stupid too. Won't even test them. Will agree to do it and then not do it despite me sitting next to him complaining. And sure, I'm a miserable failure from the business perspective. But I live in perpetual hope!
Cas, when I see your games and your programming expertise it feels that you are very close to having success. I mean you seem to have everything that is needed to make great games (maybe it's just a wish because I'm one of the few that uses Java for games development and seeing you having success would give me a lot of additional confidence ) The only point is: you have about three games, and all of them seem to be pretty much the very same kind of game. They all have those pretty uncommon controls. It never appealed to me. I very much liked everything else. I'm not an arcade gamer, so that's one reason, but do why don't you try to make something more different? Somewhere I read a saying that goes "most surrenders happen right before success" or something like that. Obviously, making a living with creating games gets harder. A lot of people realize that and give up. The good point is: more space for the ones who stick to it I'm also seriously thinking about whether making games is the proper way for me. I'm not sure if I really want to pay the price for it, if I have this "burning desire" for making games that pays everything else off. I think, being an indie means two things: 1. making games 2. being an entrepreneur. And more and more I realize that 2. outweighs 1 for me. And the problem with games is, unless you have substantial funding, it's not very "bootstrapeable", meaning games cost so much money/time to create and it's not easy to "adapt". Or maybe it's because I passed 30 already and don't feel like a hacker anymore...
If I try doing something completely different, well, then I'll just lose focus and make nobody happy. My question as ever is how do I make what I've done pay for itself? Dudester has about the most casual controls of any game ever. Wave the mouse around, left button shoots. Your mum could play it. It's just not a very compelling buy at the moment but I've got some enhancements in the works. Cas
Tried that - it worked too, because people do buy the games. There are just hardly any visitors and absolutely no-one wants to affiliate the games on my somewhat simple 50% terms. I will have a little portal exposure soonish except the portals use an affiliation system that's fairly incompatible with mine which poses some complicated hassles. Cas