How I Made 7 Dollars Making Games (And How You Can Too!)
Originally Published on The Hidden Pixel, November 24, 2019
I made my first video game at the end of 2016. It was a Game Maker game called “The Walls Are Closing In”. The game consisted of a man in a room. The walls of the room closed in on him and the screen prompted you to mash a button to keep the walls off. The button didn’t do anything. You died every time. While this doesn’t seem like much, this was the first time, in all my flirting with development, that I made something with a ‘Game Loop’. A way to start, play and start again. I explained away my technical limitations with vague philosophical statements. This is a super common tactic among beginners “I can’t implement functionality, so I’ll just say the absence of the functionality is a commentary on something floaty and boring”.
I also did something different with this. I shared it. I showed it to other people and asked for feedback. People were nice, but not specifically so. That’s always a bad sign. Nevertheless, I kept going. I took an online course to learn c# and I made my second game. It was called ‘Say the Right Thing’. It’s a command-line app that asks the question “How could you?” regardless of what you type in, the command line responds “It’s over, goodbye”. Insert statement about high-minded concepts here. This, for me, was important because it was a game that I coded with a real-life programming language.
From there I ended up picking up a course on Unity. Unity is a popular game engine that powers a lot of modern indie titles. It’s popular largely because it’s flexible, powerful, and (relatively) easy to use. This was a game-changer for me. I got deeper into c# and started to make games that had something someone would be willing to call gameplay. I shared these as often as possible, I find an addiction to sharing your work and getting feedback for it is integral to improving as an artist or developer.
Eventually, I ran across Itch.io. Itch is a platform for people to host games. It’s a lot like steam with a few very important differences. 1) It supports a ‘pay what you want’ payment model. This is useful because indie games are very hard to price. 2) There’s no gate-keeping, anyone can post anything. This can be very good and very bad. 3) Itch.io takes nothing if you don’t want them to. You have the option to contribute whatever percentage you want to the website. Most distributors take 30%. Itch will take 30%, 10%, or even 0% and will still be more than happy to do business with you. Itch is now my only platform for release. It’s the home for my games, even when I post them on other sites. Everything links back to Itch.
For the most part, no one makes money on Itch. A friend of mine made a fantastic R-Type/Star-Fox shooter. It was huge and very fun. It was polished and had a unique, aesthetic. It was easily worth the 15 dollars he asked for it. Unfortunately, no one bought it. No one buying it also means no one playing it, which is much worse for most indie devs. The reason we make games is for people to play them. So he had to make the game free.
On Itch, making free games can sometimes be the better bet. People are likely to tip for a good game that’s available for free. Most of the tips I’ve received on my Itch account were for a set of animated keys I made to make building UIs easier for other developers. These tips, as of a few weeks ago, amounted to about four dollars. That has recently changed.
I made a game called Spelunk-King. You can read about its development here. The essence of the story is that I wanted to make a game of a certain scope and the impending deadline saw me tossing features like old banana-peels. I wasn’t satisfied with where the game was when I left it. Had it not been for my desire to close that chapter and work on other projects, I could have worked on that game for the rest of my career.
My dissatisfaction led to my complete shock and slight revulsion when I got an email saying that my game had been purchased for 10 dollars. My immediate thoughts were “that’s too much” and “the game isn’t worth 10 dollars”. I panicked. I had to fight the urge to email the buyer and offer a pre-emptive refund. The buyer turned out to be an indie developer that I had opened a discussion with the previous day. I waited for him to dm me saying “Hey man, I overpaid for your game.”. He didn’t. We talked about our respective projects. He gave me quality feedback on the game. I even bought his game at asking price to assuage some of the guilt and to get to know him better.
This brought my account to 14 dollars. I began to get curious about the process of actually getting to that money. I followed the steps on the site and that’s when I learned about the revenue share model that Itch used. I stuck with the default 10%. I love them and I want them to get paid, but I want some of my money too. After fees and tax processing fees, I ended up looking at a payout of about 7 and a half dollars. The money hit my bank account moments ago.
I know it seems silly. If you were to break down the hours I spent to make that 7 dollars, my rate wouldn’t be worth mentioning. For me, it’s symbolic. Tonight I’m going to use that 7 dollars to buy myself a meal. A meal that making games paid for. This isn’t the million-dollar payout that you hear in the indie success stories, but it’s my own little success story.
That’s how I made 7 dollars as a game developer. If you learn a suite of new skills and tools and work your ass off for the next three years or so, you may be able to do the same.
