How much money do you earn from your games?

I don't have a direct link to my companies portfolio on here, because it's not normally relevant to game dev. But our local divisions portfolio is here if you are interested:

http://www.specifyinterpon.com.au/category/project-gallery/

 

Fairly certain he's talking about his chemical engineering career and not his game dev hobby.
Also @Kiwasi, finally got around to re-branding then? Thought someone had stolen your picture till I checked the post count

 

Yup. I occasionally get spurts of energy and time where I can do small amounts of business stuff. Figured while I was setting up for Steam I could change names everywhere.

That's about as far as I got.

 

Any backstory to this name or just thought it sounded nice?

 

Mostly just sounded nice.

The letters originally came from an amalgamation of Kiwi and Aussie.

 

Well its been a month. I'm back. There's a Steam sale going on. With my 2 games I have earned 50+ sales of the inexpensive game and a mere 3 sales of the larger game. With that said I'm not doing a fire sale or anything. I don't need the money. If anything I get 40 wishlists per day.

My friend that I helped make his game has offered to sell me his share of the game for $2,000. Its a game that has already been out for 6 months. Chances are its made the money it will make. On the other hand, its still tempting to buy out the game just to stop him from making the game worse. He wants to get out and says there's not enough money in game development. I think our collective share has been $14,000 in the past 6 months so I'm not sure what he's complaining about.

If I never mentioned it in a previous post, it was $500 to start an LLC. Its $250 to renew the LLC in my state and $50 for the convenience fee of paying online. Its more convenient to them. Its $17 a month for the tax software. It started at $12. Lastly I was told by my bank it would be $10 a month if my company account has under $1,000. I've only made $700 on Steam alone so I decided to dump $300 into the company account after its been a year. Its clear I won't break the $1,000. Turns out they upped the price to $1,500. Well then.

So just existing as a company for me is $600 a year which can be good or bad. While I can pay it... its still proof that I've failed marketing games.

 

That sounds a lot better than many do. It can take multiple games to get success. Just think of what you have learnt, and what you could do better next time. But it sounds like maybe you have had enough, which I can understand.

 

What terrible business practices for a state. What state is that, CA?

 

i make 100$ by Fifaonline3 :v
and the amount I invest in it is 300$ :v

 

There is one thing game dev and income have in common. They both take time.. Your never going to get quick rich with game development.. For me i am really happy to have this as a side project and side income. If the income over time makes sense, increased development time would make sense to.

 

Game dev costs me, I have a reverse income buisness model. I see it as an expense rather than a source of income. I can justify this with my self because I like to do it. Instead of spending my time and money playing games I am spending it making them which for me is a form of play.

 

Well its been a month and a more important month than usual due to getting paid for the June half of the Steam sale. I raked in a cool $36. $24 on my bad game and $12 on my good game. $2 were from market transactions. The cards from one of the games were getting sold for $0.80 every few days. To be fair the sale did extend through the first few days of July. Even after the sale the cheap game has still sold a few copies per week.

An artist friend asked how much I made from the sale... $36. He told me "That's impossible," his cut from his game was $3,000 and he feels my 2 games are better. His percentage is 24% for doing the art. I look at his game and it has 20 non key reviews. You'd never expect it to sell so many copies.

While we're on the "how much money have you made making games" its time to vent about money lost. My lawyer charged me $160 to retain his legal services for another year. Well wtf? That would make $760 in operating costs to have a company. Plus he charges a flat fee to even use his services. So anyway, time to let the lawyer go. Heck I should let the entire company go at this point if before the lawyer's annual retention fee its $600. I think I've made $700 from my own games. So now I need to call his office during business hours, because apparently he needs to change me to the legal representation of the LLC or something like that.

The lawyer has already cost me $1,120 over the past year. Great price if the company were making money or getting sued.

In other news IndieGala has asked me for a third time for one specific game to be part of their bundle site while they have only asked twice for the older, better game. I should probably just do it. According to a few people I've asked it comes out to be $500. Chances are it depends on your specific deal and how well the bundle does.

It seems like quite the return cost. Step 1: make game. Step 2: Add game on Steam for $100. Step 3: Bundle and make around $500. $400 profit. Step 4: Bundle on other bundle sites. Rinse, repeat. Step 5: Have so much shovelware you can make your own bundle on Steam.

 

I think I'm noticing a trend.

Can't quite put my finger on it though.

Starting to get an idea…

Ah, there we have it! The great, unwashed masses are only after the stinkiest crap. OK, so give them what they want and deserve. You'll probably not work as hard on the next pile, and perhaps you'll have time left to work on something good for your own pleasure.

Lazy designs ripped off the top 10 on mobile app stores for the win.

 

I want to hop on the share figures train!

For me it's $4000 so far. And still selling. Sure it's not a lot, not full time job material, but perhaps it's more than my game deserves. Either way Felis (my game), is currently shelved. If it had done just a little better I would have keep pushing the development, but I think it's time to re-group and plan a new direction from where I'm standing.

My experience is Steam > iOS. My game was aimed at mobile, and Steam is 70% of my profit. Making my game for mobile really made it difficult for me. I'm very graphics oriented ... and doing good mobile graphics is tough. I should have done much better graphics PC only, and use my time for better GAMEPLAY, which is what my game lacks a big deal. I feel 80% of my efforts was spent dealing with mobile limitations.

Felis is dead on iOS, but Steam is keeping my game alive.

I think the system of pushing games down and down as they don't sell, could be benefit from some "randomization". By bringing up some games randomly every now and then, it would keep many games from giving zero profits to developers.

Why is that important?

There's a world of difference between selling just a little, and selling nothing. Because if you sell just a little, you can accumulate games for profit, while also making better games as you improve.

Steam does this, Every now and then. Motivated by sales mostly. iOS requires you to be the best of the best in order to be profitable. Not saying it's impossible, not saying is "oh so unfair" no no, it's still a great deal, but Steam is better, at least in my anecdotal experience.

 

It's not a line, it's more like a weird curve.



Best jokes are short and to the point.

Same with games. If you work too hard on your game (but still not quite enough) you risk landing in that valley ... the valley of mediocrity, tepid water, tameness. Much like a joke that's too long, risks boring people. You're not required to write a comedy novel to make people laugh.

 

My first game I sank 18 months into. The second one on Steam I sank 3 months into and looking at it you'd never know. The game I did with a friend that has made us $14,000 I spent a few weeks smoothing out the 6+ months he spent into that disaster. He continues to update it 6 months after that. Its terrible. So my take from that was $6,000 for a few weeks work because the game has been bundled to infinity and sold to shady people meant so much more money for such little time.

Its the uncanny valley. I may have spent 18 months on a game but someone else spent 5 - 10 years making the same genre of game. Their game looks better even if chances are mine plays better. That becomes a story of the game "developers made this for X years." Then again I don't sleep and I can put in 40 hours a week into a game. Not even to get the game done quicker, its just making games is my game now. Its my entertainment and busy work since I just can't sleep 5 out of 7 nights.

My better, more expensive game has still made 3x more money than my lesser, cheaper game. One day its bound to surpass it. I'll even look it up. Yep it is.

Then again if I were to just bundle the lesser, cheaper game 2x I'd top the money made by the more expensive game. Hurray for math!

 

I respect your thoughtful outlook and opinion dogzer.
I have very little experience with iOS yet, but one kind of 'randomizer' that I have learned about from reading/listening to other developers say was helpful in increasing sales was the Best Update of the Month/Quarter lists. I think this top 10? allows for less successful games that are improved upon with an update at least to rise to the top of one chart in particular - which sits along side the other best selling / most popular charts.
If it sounds like I don't know exactly what I'm talking about - it is mostly because I don't, and I have never frequented the top 10 lists to find games. Personally I prefer exploring other games the drooling masses are not playing. The top 10 lists are an area I need to investigate and get better acquainted with to gain additional knowledge.

One thing is - about games we think are failures that result in less sales than expected - is that the result of the actual product, did they fail because of passive marketing, are there obvious glaring bugs that present to the gamers within seconds of seeing the trailer, or within minutes of playing the demo, does the production value reflect the time spent in development?

We all have some good/bad stories of spending X amount of months on a game and the return is underwhelming. I've made this mistake myself - 4 months of actual time spent - but upon reflection gestimation of about 200 hours total on the demo. My point is (if there is one to make) I think it is important to properly account for ACTUAL development time, in hours rather than weeks/months/years. Hours is the best measurement to properly show time spent - then a reflection on the quality of the product can be gauged a little better.


And last - if the developer is not always promoting/marketing (all the time) always, with links, mentions, pings, updates, references, screen shots always about there experience on a game they made, or the process they are going through, then I think the developer is failing the product, rather than the product being a failure.

This is not intended to be preachy -
@justanobody I don't want to call you out - but I have no idea which two games you are talking about. I even made the effort to look back at your other posts, more than the average gamer would do.
You are missing opportunity to promote/market your products - even if the products are as you say - and this is a developer forum with the majority of the audience being game creators, not explicitly game purchasers - their is still possibility 1 or 2 people who might say - ah hell I'll check it out to see if it's any good. 1 may find it enjoyable enough to pass along the games name to another person. And if this happens all the places where you frequent, where ever that might be (twitter, fb, tig, other developer forums, cgtalk, politico, twitch, etc. where ever) 1-2 can turn into 10 or more per month.
I don't mean to soap box - I've never released a game so I have no successful experience to say "I did it and you can too" but I do sleuth out important information from indie marketing pockets and truly believe this is one area developers more often fail at - and don't realize - the best marketing material is ourselves - we just have to DO IT constantly - even when just discussing returns on product in a sub-thread of a developer forum.
TLDR: Links please

 

This. I've bought games from people here simply because I "know" them, even if the game isn't to my interest or honestly something I'm interested in playing at all. I consider myself something of a game "patron."

 

@theANIMATOR2b Its okay to call me out. I haven't mentioned the 2 games by name, nor my friends games especially since here I am harsh on them. Plus they never gave me permission to tell their sales figures.

I am free to be honest here since it is anonymous and well that whole non disclosure agreement on Steam. This is a secondary account and my primary account I do specify my games elsewhere and have the links in the signature.

I've even paid for advertising. Paying for advertising (pay per download) on Google Play was throwing money away $5 per download only to have people install and uninstall without getting an achievement. I see that as an exploit considering there's an achievement for opening the game.

While I'm here, a different friend has 2 games, 1 is a larger $10 game he made with someone else, the other is a $3 - $5 is a hunk of dull garbage he hobbled together over 12 weekends in 12 months in Early Access that is like watching paint dry. I bring it up because this past Steam sale the bigger game made $230 while the Early Access game made $133.

 

That makes total sense. No need to break nda confidence. I wasn't attempting to point fingers - glad you understand - it's good for us and others who come along to see an example - I was just providing an example to support my comment.

 

Actually Steam lets you reveal aggregate sales data. So there is a back door if you want to skirt the intent of the agreement.

 

@theANMATOR2b
Your inputs are always very accurate, man.
All you say is true, and in no way I will refute any of it, bur merely complement it with a bit of anecdotal info.

Lets forget my silly spontaneous idea about randomizing, it wouldn't work but ...

... let me put it in another way ...

The free exposure you get thanks to Steam and Apple Store is monstrously enormous. Trust me, it's big, very big. It's nothing that you can accomplish by daily tweeting for ... a year, or a very long time.

So in certain way, unless you're a very successful social media manager, you can't reach the heels of that. I'm not talking top 10, not top 50 of "what's popular" that would make you insta-rich (assuming the game's good) ... I'm talking page 5 to page 20 of the new indie releases ... the dodgy games list. That is already good enough.

And when your game takes so long to make, and sells for so little, you depend on that exposure.

It's really a fantastic thing, what Steam does. To give so much exposure to games. But the competition is fierce.

If Felis hadn't been so bad in some aspects such as gameplay, or core design, I would still be pushing its development. But as it is, I need to show up with a better game. But when I do, I'm most likely going to rely A LOT on Steam's free exposure, and releasing multiple games that come out of the same prototype.

I will also do everything else, social media, user involvement, but that's more thinking in the long run. That takes a long time and dedication to build. Perhaps longer than making the game itself.

 

Absolutely - when saying WE are our best marketeers I am saying this 'in addition' to the other provided available avenues. Of course we can never market better than what steam or apple can offer us - however relying only on that exposure provided by those 'hosts' on the store is not enough. Driving prospective buyers to the games should be done with (almost) every public and private communication we have.
This is exactly what AAA people do associated with a big name game - the promote/market/advertise every chance they get because they KNOW if the link to the game is everywhere (only a click away) there is a chance one or more people might want to learn more about it. Provide the links and people will click.

If the flaws are systemic this is probably not the case, but is there areas where making changes/enhancements will drastically result in an improved game? I think this is exactly the type of 'update' that Apple looks for in a game that may not have done well right out of the gate.

 

Steam's exposure is huge. The first few days of my first game on there was 14,000 views according to Google. I had a bit of publicity going in with Youtubers covering the game's demo with three videos that had more than 500,000 views each. There was also a link to the Greenlight in the game itself and that didn't help at all despite the demo getting 12,000 downloads over a week and 24,000 page views. Seems like no one bothered to visit the Greenlight or even give feedback. I was lucky to get the GameJolt ratings I did.

The demo sits at a 4.6 out of 5 rating on GameJolt. The second game was maybe 6,000 views on Steam in the first few days and it was after that visibility 2.0 update.

The Greenlight traffic was helpful too, but it was nothing compared to the traffic a few days before the games coming out and after the games coming out. The first game was Greenlit with 66 - 33% in a month while the second game was lucky to be Greenlit after 6 months with 40 - 60% I was a week from taking it down. Toward the end of that second game's greenlight, I could tell it was greenlit before it was greenlit, because the no votes stopped flowing in. For every yes there were a lot of nos.

 

Yes, mobile and PC are very different. For a game to be successful on PC, it should look good interesting when being played on YouTube. But for mobile I would say the fun-factor is more important.

 

I haven't published my game yet because new and improved, more irritating bugs keep on spawning.
However the day will come when I'll publish it, and expect at least a dollar the following year.

 

The bugs I love most dearly ... are the ones that break something that you had managed to make work just fine, quite a long time ago ... but suddenly decide to go INSANE for no apparent reason. Why now?? at the last minute. Just when you thought you finally completed a big milestone, with hopes of heading to bed to rest peacefully.

 

Haha, Is that croc in your profile pic staring so passionately at those bugs?.

Exactly my thoughts!, then some dude over the internet tells you to rubber duck debug your program then I'm like "Dude, you tellin me to explain over a few thousand lines to a lifeless duck made out of rubber?, you think I'm crazy? I'd rather dump my project"

 

Haha Staring Intensifies

 

We make minus figures, after all freelancers are paid the Steam early access fundings are gone and then some. And then me and my brother do not use any of it for salary, well, our salary is paid from a different project account not related to gaming.

 

Its that time again for me to vent! Steam gave me my July report now that its August 25th. That's cool, because refunds and stuff. I made $28 in 2 games on Steam in July and that's with the tail end of the summer sale. On the plus side I seem to have sold more copies in August, but I'll save that for next month.

Anyway, here's where I vent. My lawyer last month charged me $150 - $200 to retain his services another year for the LLC. I tolerated that when I probably shouldn't considering I don't need a lawyer even if I probably should have one. I'm checking through my credit card and I notice this month he charged me $320 to retain his services again for the next year. So what the F***? I called up his office, they're closed on Saturday so I need to call again on Monday.

Not only was last month's annual retention $150+ and this month's is $320 but how am I charged annually twice in two months. I'll need to dig through emails to ensure that nothing went up in price and he's not trying to make up for it. Then again, I can always stop the payment via the credit card, but its bad to challenge a legal office. I'm sure his office will explain and refund, but its really clear I shouldn't have a company and I shouldn't have a lawyer at this point on my own games

* edit * I called and it was some sort of billing error.

So to summarize July:
+ $28 Steam income
-----------------------------------
- $29 LLC ($350 per year)
- $14 lawyer retention per month ($158 per year or more until I get the $320 sorted out)
- $17 for bookkeeping software
- $10 for webspace
- $10 business bank account not having $1,500 in it
---------------------------------
= $ -52

I should clearly keep just working on other people's games since that makes me far more money.

 

@justanobody For what services are you actually paying to retain a lawyer? Anyway, thanks for these reports.

 

At this point I'm not sure what he's doing for me other than taking money. It something I need to ask when I talk to someone on Monday.

I think after the first setup last year I never heard anything from him until 2 months before I had to renew my LLC and that was it. He sent me a notice a month before the state sent me a notice. Funny the state sent me a notice when I had been paid up.

Last year he helped me do the LLC and gave me all 43 compliance / tax forms, 2 permit forms and 1 license form. In a way that was the help, but I think the state's attorney's office would do it for me as well.

I should also mention that I don't think I've been paid by Steam since April since you need to make $100 for them to put a deposit in your account.

August's money from Steam should be better than July even without the summer sale as my larger game sold 3 full price copies this month. Its quite a shock considering I don't think its sold at full price for maybe 4 months.

 

so far i've spent probably a couple hundred dollars on my game (mostly for assets i ended up not using, and for a license for Esenthel which is great but i don't have enough money to hire a studio for 3d modeling lol). i'm going to distribute it for free but use it on my resume (as a game programmer), so any success could earn me money in the way of helping me to land a sweet gig.

 

28 USD? S*** and I thought we did bad

 

This is very interesting and I've noticed this same kind of thing. Except the whole chart should be drawn wider and even then I think the valley should be increased another 3 to 4 times.

Something more along these lines...


Where the yellow arrows represent the sweet spot for maximizing ROI. Until you go through the entire valley and climb up much higher. But the distance between those is huge. And if the interest doesn't become many times greater than the ROI is much worse on the right side. And that is what makes it much more of a gamble / lottery process over there. It can even look like the game was a huge success and really it barely covered cost of development or even failed to cover cost of development.

 

Yeah, it seems like that sometimes. I'm not sure it's true, but it certainly looks like some games which were clearly crapped out over a weekend and polished a little get far more popularity than what's reasonable, while games with actual effort behind them have a lot of work to do before they make even sign-up fees back.

Which is probably part of why so many games are filled with scummy, scammy, icky, ephemeral in-app purchases that ultimately do nothing for the player long-term. Make the real game portioned out over such a long time they think there is more game, and the impatient will pay to see more of that game.

I'm not saying those of you struggling should join the dark side…but they have cookies AND cash.

 

Lol cookies AND cash is a powerful combo! Seriously I wouldn't look at it lioe the "dark side". I think people talk about it that way too much really too extreme of a view. I don't quite get why people look at if that if a person spends 70 hours instead of 1,700 hours on a game they are trying to do something shady.

70 hours may be worth $140 to $7000 depending on where they live and how much their time is worth (as in what they have made on the jobs and other businesses in their life). So it is completely reasonable in this perspective. Spending 70 hours working hard on something should produce something of value unless a person just has no skill. So releasing such a game expecting to receive a reasonable sum is fine I fhink. Of course it is business and there are no guarantees just saying I see nothing wrong with the expectation of creating a game in a weekend releasing it and several dozen or perhaps even a few hundred people appreciate and enjoy it.

Now if people are spending only 100 hours and hoping to make $100k or $1 million from that then yeah that is just dreaming. And I agree going overboard with all of the iap and loads of ads and so forth seems kind of scammy at times. And releasing broken unfinished games but the AAA pretty much fit all of these so it shouldn't be the whole deciding factor just because they spent more money and time making the game makes it alright. IMO anyway.

 

Speaking of join the dark side...

So about 6 weeks ago I spoke with a "developer / publisher" of a local shovelware company. His model is he buys any game for the lower end of four figures (in my case he offered $2,000) and releases it as his own game on Steam (and elsewhere). He buys the 100% rights to the games so if its a big hit, he still paid a flat fee.

I can crank out a game jam game every week or two and sell it to him.
He told me if I could do 50 - 25 games a year he'd still publish and pay me for them all. He said he's tired of talking to developers because they want say $30,000 for their game because their game is their baby where as my games would just be game jam games made specifically to sell to him. He has quite a catalog and 90% is garbage.

I spent 5 weeks working on 2 games. I feel they're quality games when it comes to looks, features and gameplay, but I cut corners in the art department and diversity department. The 2 hour games that look great enough to be sold, but have their shortcomings.

I gave him test copies and he got excited when he played them. These test copies have what I call a dead man's switch where if he were to release the unfinished products without my knowing, they'd close when you open them after a specific date.

My 2 games must have been the straw that broke the camel's back as he got cold feet. I started hearing from him less and less until its nothing now. He never paid me, when he paid for what I'd consider unplayable garbage.

I assume he backed out without telling me because Valve is cracking down on game developers and publishers that ask for 100,000 keys at a time. Although I know someone who got around that by asking for 5 sets of 20,000 keys. Since the game I helped make with a friend made $14,000, chances are that guy was making the same amount of money for his published games.

A game might make $500 at most in a bundle on IndieGala and BundleStars and that wouldn't cover the money he spent. Without cards, shovelware seems less desirable to a consumer.

On the plus side I do have two quality games that I can add bosses, more diversity and more art to finish the products for a better experience.

If the 25 - 50 games thing worked out, it would have been nice quit my job income.

 

Yeah that is the ideal situation for going full-time Indie. If you have someone willing to pay you $2,000 for each and every game you knock out... geesh I'd take that. With a an additional 40 hours available each week it would be super easy to create 1 nice very simple game per week. Might even take a couple weeks off twice per year.

If I ever win the lottery I've thought about doing the same thing as him. Be a fun and interesting way to help someone go Indie and then I could pick the best of the best game concepts and remake them. I wouldn't pay $2k per game though but then again I'd be happy with cubes and rectangles.

 

I called up my lawyer's office asked about the $320. The secretary or whoever I spoke with said that was clearly an error so they refunded the money. Well that was easy.

 

I'm considerably in the red. Planning to change that next year when my big project I'm working on releases. We'll see.

 

You know, perhaps you just opened his eyes and he realised he have been paying for garbage, and he's rethinking and researching. However, good thing that you added a deadman switch, this guy sounds kinda shady for some reason.

 

I don't make any money yet

 

Very interesting thread. Hats of to all of you people who continue and keep trying even after not making it first few times. Respect.
Price's law (pareto distribution, or the 80/20 rule) says that 80% of income will be made by 20% of people. But, by not giving up you are getting closer to that 20%. And the future looks very bright. Gaming industry is only growing. We still have many people, like generations born in 70's, 60's and earlier who don't play games. But generations born in the 80's are still playing, and generations born later are all playing, and each new generation are gamers. This is not only generational growth, but also thanks to globalization, games are reaching all corners of the planet. This industry will only grow, and it will reach it's peak in 30-40 years from now when there won't be generations who don't play games left on the planet... But how will games look like in 20, 30, 40 years from now, who knows. They will certainly change a lot. But, this industry will thrive.

 

I was thinking 99% of the money will be made by the 1%. Game design and development is an art and there are a lot of starving artists.

 

I haven't self published any games, but I made money by selling my games as a contractor. I can earn around $500 per month, but I don't have a constant stream of projects coming in so I still need to have a day job.

I know a company that made $50k in half a year from 1 clone game, but I don't feel good if I were to do it myself. :\

 

Looks like Steam reports came out today, at least for me. My cut was $52 on my own 2 games. I consider making $52 a good month even if it still puts me in the red from the yearly cost of having a company.

The $52 comes from having one of one of my two games on sale back in August. I should point out that $52 nets more money than the summer sale and I had the same discount for both sales. $1 of that $52 comes from market transactions of one game. The other game had maybe 7 cents worth of transactions.

I think I will have broken the $100 payment threshold for the first time since May.

As for the game I did with a friend, its been a while since I've heard from him. In fact the last time I heard from him, he wanted to sell me his percentage of the game. So I assume he's gone on to a traditional job. I trust him to give me my money next time I talk with him.

A week or so ago I did a 3 day game jam with someone from a forum. I did the art and that guy programmed a terrible game. I only bring it up because 12 hours after the game jam, he told me he spent the $100 on Steam Direct, he's adding the game to Steam and wants me to sign a contract to split the money 50 / 50. Its a bad game. I'm not sure he's willing to put in the effort to make it a better game. Its like we had a one night stand and now we have a baby together.

Digging through the 5 - 6 page contract there were a lot of issues I found and it had to be revised far too many times. I would have my lawyer look over the contract, but that turns into an expensive arrangement for something that won't make money. I'm not even sure I want to be any part of a Steam product that's that bad and just S*** out, so I told him to keep my name off the game, even though there are no credits at all.

 

Its the 23 of October and Steam's September report came out for me. From my own 2 games my take was $42. I'm surprised its that much. A little over $1 of that is from market transactions (cards, backgrounds, emoticons and such).

From my own game making...
+ $42
- $50 monthly expense of owning a company
-------
- $8 profit
--- oh wait yearly fee to keep a lawyer is like $180 annually... so divide by 12 and
-----
- $23 for September (if only I counted food and rent, but those are covered by my day job)

In other news, the game I made with a friend didn't make that much and it ended up getting attacked in September for being a bulk sold game. Which yes it was. Its owned by 500,000 - 600,000 people according to SteamSpy. In total the game has sold 22,000 copies on Steam during 50 cent sales.

Anyway, my friend resurfaced to give me the money I was owed. In the 3 months he disappeared to work a real job the game made around $2,000 from actual game sales rather than bulk sales. So my take is $800.

I have 2 "rev share" games that came out this month. I will report on them next month as I won't get paid for a month or two. After another game jam, I was contacted by a publisher to basically make shovelware. Seeing as how the last shovelware publisher deal fell through when I wasted time making 2 games for that guy, I'm uncertain how well it will go with this publisher. This one says he will cover costs on music, models, animation and stuff like that. All I need is to program it. I will laugh if its all store bought packs. I will know more when and if he sends a contract.

Thanks as always for letting me anonymously vent.