Any Unity developers making money writing games?

Curious, are any Unity developers making money on games yet? If so I would like to hear from you. I am developing a game and would like to know if my efforts are going to be worth as much as I am hoping.

 

Unity is great for quickly turning your concept and feature ideas into a playable demo of a quality, I believe, is useful for investor seeking. Had unity been on the stage it is now back when we started out and had we not received a sweet deal for engine choice for our demo, its possible we'd have used unity to make our concept demo.

 

AngryAnt, what game are you associated with? Why would you not use Unity for the real game engine?

 

I'm working for ZeitGuyz on an action/adventure title. Unity is not (yet) interesting as it doesn't offer the quality and feature set provided by larger, older engines out there. A crusual point is also that the bulk of the game market is the consoles which Unity don't support (yet).

 

Working on a full blown Unity game here at the moment and am getting near to something to send out to publishers. So yeah... kinda... almost...?

Also involved in a paid research project with my university and we have been tinkering with Unity for that. So yeah... kinda, almost.

-Jon

 

AngryAnt, I just looked the ZeitGuyz website and it appears that you might know many other game developers. Do you anyone who has made money from a game(
specifically the casual-type of computer games)?

thanks

 

Yea this is my first position in the industry, but many of the guys I'm working with have experience - not in the casual-games genre though.

 

We've made a few dollars in donations for our widgets (I should hope so after almost 150,000 downloads and some pretty neat ISP bills :? ) but only a few. We've had quite a bit of interest and sign ups for the mailing list for the full version of Banana Warehouse, if we ever had the time to finish it. So while the immediate answer is "No" we're hoping to see some returns on our work sometime next year. The general answer however is "Yes, given a good game concept and decent art/scripting/gameplay, you could easily make money with Unity."

 

DaveyJJ, I was just looking at your site yesterday and wondering when your game was going to be done. It looks like a great idea for a casual style of game. I hope it works out for you.

 

I expect to sell at least 50 copies of my game per day. I'm making localized versions in English, Japanese, and French; so that marketability of the game will cover a huge portion of the world's Mac population. If the game sells at $15 US, that would be about $250k per year. Thoughts?

 

Go with spanish too and you will have all of C.A. and L.A. as well as spain. Jeff

 

Is the game marketable? Is it fun? Is it worth $15?

I'm only asking because, those factors have FAR more to do with reaching your expectations than what tool you are using.

Unity is relatively new, so just about everyone using it is still becoming familiar with how best to use it. Give it another year and you will see many commercially viable games developed using Unity.

Of course, there's GooBall. Is that making money, guys?

I'm personally choosing Unity to develop my games in order to sort of pass the buck to someone else concerning compatibility and deep technical bugs. That stuff is a huge drain on casual game and shareware developers and even though I've developed other games "from scratch" building on a platform like this is starting to suit me more and more. The pros far outweigh the cons for me at the moment.

The other possibility is that, with a unified engine like this, there is the potential for further cross-platform opportunities that could theoretically take something you develop once and allow you to broaden your market with very little effort. That's thinking in future terms, however.

As far as expectations, I don't know if you are targeting a retail box type of sale or shareware, but with shareware, the word is that many times the growth is a slow one, and as you add other games, each with a long lasting but slow income, you can increase the income to a doable level.

Again that's all predicated on offering a good, fun, marketable game.

 

Randy, I'd also like to add that Aaron knows of what he speaks. His post jsut above this one is spot on.

To answer your question ... it'll be done as soon as we can possible get it finished. There's so much else to do right now in our separate lives (Ron and I have families etc) that it's hard to even contemplate it getting done, honestly. It will get done, but my lack of presence on the boards here in the past few months is indicitive of how much little free time I have these days. And the holidays and the associated commitments those have also means less time to get going again in any meaningful way, to our regret.

We plan on keeping the community posted as to our "progress" as we have the time though.

Thanks for asking.

 

No money yet, but Unity sure has done a lot for me.

Because of my widget entered in the widget contest and the minor update that I made to it 2 months later I've...

...gotten a job offer from a mobile phone company looking for developers (that would have been a good deal of money, but conflicted too much with my current work/school schedule).

...been contacted by MacCreative magazine to make an exclusive version of my widget that will be bundled with issue 5 of their magazine. It will be on sale towards the end of the month! I also got to include a resume/contact pdf with it as well.

...been asked to speak about widgets at the Apple Store in San Francisco during the week of Macworld (I had to decline because I'm broke and couldn't afford to make it out there).

...given three guest lectures for professors at my university in the telecommunications department (this was also due some other work researching casual game development though and some other projects I was working on as well).

So, yeah. No money yet, but I'm working on it. I've started work on my next project that I have a plan to earn a little bit of money on, and I've begun talking to some other game developers about a larger project that could also turn out to be commercial.

 

Cool. Sounds like youve had an exciting few months.

BTW, I live in Indianapolis and used to live in Bloomington.

 

We did one for them as well ... err, a famous Apple person.