How much money do you earn from your games?

Ok thanks! I'm probably going to only open a company after my initial PC release, do you know if Steam has a problem with switching from a sole trader to a company?

 

This is really sad. We are two friends, hobby game developers in free time, but we hoped we could do this for living.
My first game ever sold 140 copies, my second one 120 copies. that was years ago.
The lastest game sold 5 or something like that. We have no Publisher, selling just from our Website.

My current game (the first game done with unity) is in a early access state now and I think about bringing it to steam, but it sounds like this is extremly overloaded / overrun already.

Anybody tried to publish on XBox / PS 4, maybe there are better chances there? Is it a good idea?
I currently only own a personal unity license...

 

Why are you selling on your website and not storefronts? Yes, steam is saturated, but no one even knows your website exists, so you'd really have better chances on a store front. Maybe try uploading your first two games to Steam/GameJolt/itch/GoG etc. and see how they do?

 

Yeah... website sales make sense if you're doing something to drive people to your website, but are you? After you've done that then you also need to overcome all of the other sales hurdles that every other online store has.

You are not Blizzard. Expecting to sell games the same way they do is most likely setting yourself up to fail.

Note that I'm not saying to only sell on the storefronts. I can see a solid argument for doing both. But if you're thirsty, you go to the watering hole. Or, in this case, if you're looking for customers, you go to the popular storefronts.

The other thing of course is that your game has to be good. Not "my mates and I think it's cool" but really, outstandingly good. Or, at least, good enough to get the attention of people who don't know you and have never seen your stuff before while it's in a store listing next to a whole bunch of competing products.

 

The first two games are really old ((2002 and 2004 both 2D).
Since we do it in free time only we always Need 2-3 years for a game to complete.
I could give them away for free now.

I hope to get some more attention for our new game. It is a 3D old school Action RPG combined with Minecraft procedural sandbox Level design but also a Story line etc. It is playable and kind of early Access but unfinished.

It is already linked on IndieDB.com and Itch.io but gained no interest there at all. I have made several Clips for YouTube, most have < 100 views, some around 150. My idea is to still work on it and maybe upload it to steam later when it is nearly finished, or maybe even try to get it on XBox or PS4 somehow? ... or just play it for myself...

From what I read here it all sounds pretty useless

Some other idea: Aren't there People around, who know much more about Marketing / self Publishing and getting Attention and offer more professional help for a share of the win? Instead of having a Publisher?

Thanks. This is an interesting thread.
I guess if I would calculate hourly earnings for my past games, it would be under 50 ct

 

@Firlefanz73
There have been a few post mortems including Ethan Meteor Hunter and Wrack that specified as good as sales were on their own website, a single day on Steam blew away those sales. Wrack had a good flow of people to their website since some of the biggest Youtubers covered it and he had a history with making a Doom engine Skulltag that had fame in that community.

Both Ethan and Wrack toiled away in Greenlight and raked up thousands or tens of thousands of positive votes while they sat for months.

Another interesting case of non Steam vs Steam would be Adam Ryland's class of Total Extreme Wrestling text based business simulators. They're $35 on his website, never go on sale, but have their hardcore fan base for the past 20 years. Then they go to Steam and get beat up for being sub par products with terrible resolutions and they get bundled frequently. I wonder which one he made more money from, off Steam or on Steam.

PUBLISHERS AND MARKETING

Let's turn to the "publishers" and "marketing" people. Its a gamble. You need to go with someone that has a proven track record of victory. Take Digital Homicide or tinyBuild. They have a track record of sales while say "Black Shell Media" and "Back 2 Basics" have a track record of having dozens of games, 2 are popular enough to make money and the rest get bundled into oblivion then they collect 30% or whatever it is.

MARKETING FLAT FEES

I've noticed other devs turn publisher.... right before they turn into marketing people with flat fees. They don't want a percentage of your game, they want a flat fee and if your game fails to do well, no big deal, they got their money. It seems like a conflict of interest.

There was one post mortem praising their marketing person. So I checked the marketing person's website. They "marketed" dozens of games, and yet I had only heard of the one that praised the marketer.

 

Hobby and "do this for a living" are TWO opposite points of view. You either have to dedicate more time/effort into making game development (including marketing/promotional efforts) into a purposeful part-time (hopefully one day) full-time gig - or - just continue as a hobby developer.
No shame in hobby game development. That view point releases the developer from any monetary expectations of the final creations, and allows for flexible deadlines for task completion.
But (imo) one can't be a hobby game developer and have expected sales. Either commit as much time/effort as possible - with a proper business plan based on available time and ability, or just be a hobby developer.

 

I'm still a hobbyist even if I own a company, contracted artists and work on game development more than 40+ hours a week. I try to spend 1 - 2 hours a day marketing and I've paid for advertising. Lots of people have argued I'm a professional, since I've been paid for my games. Yeah paid... but not enough to live on. Therefore I'm still a hobbyist.

I remember a GDC talk from the head of an indiedev company explaining "I program 8 hours a week, but I promote the game 32 hours a week." The funny thing is I think he referenced the fact they have a promotion / marketing guy.

 

It's really cool to see this thread. Out of curiosity, those of you who are making next to nothing, how much time / energy to you devote to marketing the game? If so, what are you trying?

 

Time and energy? 1 - 2 hours a day. That's more my downtime. Its how I start my development sessions and how I end it. The feedback people give me from Twitter is helpful to know where I should go next or focus on.

TYPICAL SOCIAL MEDIA

For me with 2 Steam games and multiple free ones, but 99% of the promotion is the paid games. I have a Youtube channel where I hype my games and do time lapses making models and animations. I also maintain a presence on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and imgur. I do devblogs on my site and more popular sites to get people talking back and forth, because I know my site gets 4 visits ever 7 days while bigger sites like this one are constantly viewed and visited.

GAME JAMS

Another way I felt would get my paid games more exposure was participating and competing in various game jams. The small jams I win, the big ones I always seem to get middle of the road judgements. I've done so many at this point, I stopped doing game jams and I stopped adding or mentioning my free games on my site. One of the game jam games lived well on past the jam and had lots of Youtubers cover it for a year. This meant nothing for promotion.

Actually, I have seen games that get big press or covered by a lot of Youtubers and then I check their other games. You see this lopsided 100,000+ downloads for the popular game while the other games have 50 - 500 downloads.

DEMOS MIGHT BE KILLING MY SALES

I have free demos of my $10 game on itch, gamejolt and even Steam. Gamejolt was great for me and resulted in a ton of plays for the demo, but never translated into money on Steam. Having a demo might be why my games don't sell that many copies. People play the demos say that was fun... then move on. I've had a giant disconnect between Gamejolt and Steam vs Itch.io. Gamejolt and Steam seem to have thousands to tens of thousands of downloads for the free demo, while itch has less than a hundred after 2 years.

On GameJolt, the demos and free games were reviewed quite well by dozens of tiny unknown Youtubers and a few big Youtubers that I've never heard of, but hey 4 million subscribers, they must be big. The demos and free games got a few thousand downloads each. They always seem to maintain a 4.5 rating or higher (now that I say that, I've cursed myself) and even with the games being so old I still get emails about a new rating.

Even with the demo everywhere I think the $10 game has a 15% refund rate with very little reason given as to why its been refunded. Some seem blown away I even have a demo.

DEMO = WAREZ?

Another issue is when I released a demo for the $10 game before the game's release, that demo started appearing on Warez sites. I setup Google to send me an email each time the game's name was mentioned. It gets mentioned on all sorts of Warez sites. So I check out the sites. They always claim the demo is the full version, when chances are its just some Trojan virus. Other developers would warn me they found my game on Warez sites. Well... seeing as how my game is bigger than 3 MB or 600 MB or 50 MB... its not my game. At some point I was reporting the Warez to their web hosts, but that did nothing.

PAID FOR ADVERTISING

I also payed Google adwords far too much money for a mobile game for pay per download. It became obvious people were downloading and never playing, unless they all had Google Play Services disabled. I paid to be an sponsor for a few websites that had a few thousand unique visitors visiting several times each month. The beautiful thing is the sponsorship didn't count as typical ads, so ad block never blocked them. They were just images that linked the games set in a rotating 50% one ad 50% another ad. I tried to rotate out the ads for both games every month so the ads would stay fresh. Each of the 2 games had about 6 ads, before I just gave up and stopped paying.

I've read that for me spending a few hundred dollars for advertising, its literally throwing money away without tens of thousands of dollars for paid advertising.

TRIED GIVEAWAYS

A friend of mine had huge success promoting his games with 100 - 1,000 copy giveaways at a time on steamgifts. He told me... that's what you need to do! I said nope... then no a month alter, then 3 months later its like eh... whatever, sure I'll try it. So that's what I did. I even managed to get a developer account there without having to give away 2,000 copies of the game. I gave links, people said "wishlisted" and thanks! I tried that a few times with 100 - 200 copies at a time, just as I was instructed to.

PRESS KITS

I have press kits. That was one of the first things I learned with a complete game. They didn't seem to do anything for getting press coverage. I guess I went the Youtuber route rather than the press route.

GREENLIGHT

It was good for publicity. My $10 game was Greenlit in 2 months. That's why I went the demo route so people could play the game and see that it deserved to be on Steam. The $1 game was justifiably stuck in Greenlight limbo and in all honesty, never should have made it to Steam. I like the game, others like the game, it has its fans, but it doesn't translate well to trailers and screenshots. You just can't see its addictive qualities. There are grander games that would put the $1 game at the back of the line.

STEAM SEEMS TO PROMOTE BETTER THAN I DO

I know that any publicity no matter how small is still publicity, but I just feel so ineffective compared to merely being on Steam itself.

My 2 games have official groups as all Steam games do, and I have more group members on Steam for my less popular game than I do for Twitter followers, Youtube subscribers, Facebook likers combine.

My games average 300 page views per day for the $10 game and 100 page views per day on the $1 game.

Looking at Google analytics now... The $1 game has between 60 - 80 views in the past 7 days with a 4 second view duration and the $10 game has 150 - 250 views in the past 7 days with a 4 second view duration. Maybe its just yandex constantly visiting the 2 pages. Then on the Winter sale, the $1 game spiked up to 1,500 views per day while the $10 game hit an amazing 15,000 views per day and the summer sale hit 33,000 views in a day. These page views are because Steam does "cards for queues" forcing people to at least see the game's page because they want the cards.

THE OTHER 3 STEAM GAMES I WORKED ON

For the other 3 games I participated in, I guarantee nothing was done to market them. No Twitter, no blog, no paid advertising. They just exist. I had to tell the devs in charge what to do and they still chose not to do it. As much as I'm willing to participate in the game's promotion since I'd get 50% of the revenue share I don't believe in "our games" as I believe in "my games."

OTHER THINGS I COULD DO, BUT DON'T

Chances are I can do conventions, I can do interviews, I can do "how to make art, models and animation" videos, but I just chose not to. Conventions are expensive. Interviews might not go that well, and I've seen a lot of misconceptions. Making how to videos to gain an audience seems like people would just like my games because they feel obligated to.

T-shirts and merchandise. Someone told me to make that stuff to promote the games. Does merchandise promote things or is it just an extra way to generate revenue. I've never seen a shirt and said... now that's a band I need to listen to. Unless you see enough of the shirts you just have to wonder "what is that shirt all those people are wearing?"

Oh yeah TV commercials. Can't do TV commercials.

 

Thanks for the info
And that makes around 0-50 Profit a month as I have read in your before posts...
Sad.
But I will keep up game developing for fun! It would be great to earn enough to buy a unity license for a year and a PS4 developer kit, but I believe that won't happen.

 

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. It's really cool to see. That demo point is really fascinating. I'm releasing my first game in a few months and will make sure to share my lessons learned. We have a lot of marketing related ideas, but are unsure of which ones will work or won't work yet.

Cheers,

Dave

 

I just clicked on your website and there are a lot of wrong/dead links (like appstore or sponsor logos linking to google instead) and I could find nothing about your game. I don't know much about SEO, but I can't imagine that's good. Wouldn't surprise me if a bot thinks it's a scam site with stuff like that. Also personally I find it weird to write so much about donating half of your revenue to charity and being open about your finances etc., when there's no product shown yet, but that's just me. Good luck with your game!

 

Hmm - simply put if you are attempting/expecting revenue from sales of products - you are not a hobbyist. Maybe indie but not hobbyist. Also - I don't know any hobbyists who have business lawyers.

Please tell - are you employed by someone (day job) in-able to afford the output expended on one $10 game and one $1 game? Or possibly you are supported fully some other way?
Just calculating roughly from the info you have generously offered - the outgoing expenses are at least 10x more than the incoming earnings - for the games you have mentioned. Not even considering the time commitment related to development as well as marketing.

I don't buy the suggestion that demos kill sales. If that is fact for your game - I surmise the reason it IS killing sales is more granular rather than just "having a demo for a game kills sales". Either the demo covers pretty much all there is to do in the game, which would also reflect in the praise and high rating, and therefore why would gamers want to pay for an 'extended' version full-release, OR the demo didn't present the 'hooks' well enough that players need to experience in order to be compelled to purchase the full-game (probably not the reason for your failed conversion rate), OR the demo just wasn't entertaining (not the reason for your low conversion rate).
Anything that drives traffic to the game is worth doing, so putting out a demo - even if it only results in 5% conversion is worth doing - imo.

 

PROFESSIONAL AND ACCOUNTING

That business lawyer thing is a good point. I really am all in. I had an accountant for a week before I realized my game won't be able to make money for the next month so I let him go and got a refund. His agency or whatever its called wanted $1,500 a year when the $12 per month software works just fine. I should point out the $12 a month software has been $17 per month for a year now. BUT I get free business tax preparation and free personal tax preparation. So what I would have paid for $75+ each year for personal tax prep makes up for the $17 per month.

DON'T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB

I'm employed and have a day job which allows me to do frivolous things like spend money on game development... even if I spend far less now than I did the first two years. I did my taxes recently, I got to see just how much my company lost in a year. Actually my business has to pay taxes 4x a year... the catch is the company loses money so the business hasn't had to pay taxes yet.

The day job factor is another reason why I'm reluctant to program for other people even with some good deals out there.

THE DEMO

The demo on Steam has tens of thousands of "owners." Looking at it now, it says 33,000+ owners. I'm uncertain if owners is downloads or plays or what. It used to get about 1,000 "owners" on Steam per week. On GameJolt it had around 10,000 downloads over a few week's time when youtubers were playing it. Since then I think its had 2,000 downloads over the past more than 2 years.

Looking at it now, Steam says there are 33,000 "owners" of the demo. Wow. The demo "owners" well outnumber the wishlists for the full game.

Oh... and the demo has 500 wishlists on Steam. Sure they can play it now, or they can wishlist it to remember it. From the look of it, Steam says the average playtime median for the demo is 6 minutes. Ouch. So according to Steam, people just aren't finishing it and that's a problem. I think that's quite a smoking gun.

CONVERSION RATE

I remembered to check today on the Wishlist to purchase conversion rate. The $1 game has an 18.5% conversion rate. The $10 game has a 5% conversion rate. That could just mean everyone is waiting for a 90% off sale. I've had 50% off sales, but I don't think I could ever have 90% off like people suggest to me.

WATCHING YOUTUBER HAPPINESS

I've seen so many Youtubers go through the demo. Seems to take them about 20 minutes. Everyone seemed entertained while playing it. One woman clearly did not want to play the game, but by the end she was into it.. There have been game jams and free games I made where Youtubers seem 100% angry at the game due to its challenge and yet still entertained. Its always good to pick up on cues of when they're entertained, if they're bored. Watch other videos from them to see if its my own game they like or do they like / hate every game they play. Lots of tiny Youtubers are so ultimately happy to just play anything that's free.

Its super tough to watch some Youtubers for the following reasons: their mics are bad, they're recording with a phone filming their monitor, sometimes Youtubers seem like hateful or mean people in general. Not even toward the game, just yikes I'd hate to be friends with that guy. Its lines like the previous one that make me happy to stay anonymous.

At some point it became a chore to watch Youtubers, so I'd do once a month. I'd also pick out Youtubers that I liked or found entertaining and gave them free keys to my games and my friends games. Mostly because if I was gonna be forced to watch someone play my game for a second time, I'd prefer to watch the ones I enjoyed.

 

I can imagine that to be a thoroughly draining experience on many levels. I'm not even sure I could do this regularly. Do you feel it's worth it to put yourself through this over and over? If so, in which ways?

 

For the first few? 100% worth it. For those that have their videos a month or a year down the line? like 5% worth it, it decreases by like 5% for each video past the first 5 or 10. With that said, no matter how bad the Youtuber is I still feel like I learn something new just because I see things differently when I see it through another person's eyes.

I picked up all sorts of technical things people hate, so I try to avoid them.

Tiny Youtubers find issues, mistakes and rough edges you can smooth out before the big Youtubers or the buyers find them. Its always helpful to have a video of a problem and when it happens and where it happens. I try to record progress videos 1 or so times a day. I do a full play through of whatever game I'm working on once a week on video. Playing through helps me get a flow going, what works better, what doesn't, what I can chop off and cut out. Having it on video is also helpful if something anomalous happens like something that only happens when you're playing 60 minutes to get to a part rather than playing 10 minutes from a save to get to that one part.

 

Agree'd, from looking at your site I see plenty about finances but I still know nothing about your game

 

Thanks so much for sharing!

 

We are still working on the website and will hopefully have a more game focused website soon. I hear you on that though... it currently gives a bad impression.

 

Do you think it would be better if I left the website under construction for the time being?

 

That makes everything much clearer. Thanks for sharing!

I'll also echo this position. Although I do not have a game on steam, for the demo I have on Gamejolt and itch.io, prior to choosing to hyperlink to the gamejolt build whenever I mention the game, gamejolt downloads/plays/impressions were at least 10 to 1 over itch.io.

 

Apologies for going a bit off topic, but:

Interesting. I thought itch was the place to be. Would you say small little prototypes like the one in my signature are appropriate for gamejolt? Again, I thought itch was the only place for such things.

 

A friend of mine who worked on Don't Starve Together thinks that a lot of the success from that game came from a significant giveaway - 200k free copies from what I recall (seems like a lot to me, I just remember it being a large number). I would be willing to bet that the large giveaway may have led to some free press at the time. Big gamble, but it appears to have paid off.

Survivorship bias FTW.

Of course, you could always try it with a first game, and hopefully build a userbase that would be interested in a second game you have in the pipe.

 

I always assumed Don't Starve Together's popularity stemmed from Don't Starve's popularity, not to mention the pedigree of the developers. I never bought either, but a friend did give me Don't Starve Together. It just wasn't for me, but I did play it with my friend who felt like a wikipedia of effective strategy where there just was no failure, only boredom for me.

If I remember correctly, SpeedRunners had given away hundreds of thousands of keys at various places. Streets of Rogue had a free weekend for its debut on Steam... probably because it was a free game before Steam. tinyBuild knows what its doing when it comes to promotion, no matter how crazy their ideas are. "Release Punch Club after Twitch completes 100% of the game."

 

What's the current state of the game? Because I've been completely unable to find anything on the actual game. Also, if you don't have a store page link, don't have the button, having a store button that goes to google really isn't good

Edit: For those unaware, it isn't a deadlink, the <a> tag actually points to www.google.com

 

I think it's a crap shoot, it seem from reading more "progressive/popular" indie accounts - they always default to itch.io without even mentioning gamejolt.
For me and justan - gamejolt far outpaced itch - massively! Though I'm talking in the mid-upper hundred numbers for my core mecahnics demo - justan has more traffic on his demo build.
I also have it on newgrounds as webGL build - also on gamejolt as both webGL and exe. Newgrounds has about the same 10 to 1 play/impression to itch.io.
From my experience newgrounds traffic comes in organically from the site itself. And gamejolt still has a steady organic downloads directly from the site. itch.io - results in practically nothing 3-4 every two months. But my build is simply a core build. Nothing to play beyond 5 minutes, I'm just grateful for the portals hosting the demo allowing players to check it out and provide feedback.

 

I think a lot of Gamejolt's hold has always been all the fan games good or bad. People stop in for the fan games, but stay for the real games. They also have top lists or at least they did where you can see the top voted games. One can argue jealous devs can downvote things so their games appear higher on that list or a dev can make 100 accounts to upvote their own game.

I've been lucky enough featured a few times on Gamejolt's homepage which always helped. It got the Youtuber traffic which continued to drive traffic long after it was on the homepage. Somehow even with free games on Gamejolt I've managed to earn $6.

itch.io's homepage has gotten better and experiences may vary. 2 of us say gamejolt all the way, while someone else might have had great success. I think from Gamejolt I've made $13 from people donating money for my free games / game jam games. Chances are I know those people.

NEWGROUNDS HEARSAY

I've only heard legends about how much money people earned on Newgrounds like it was just post anything and you'll get $100 in the month. Not sure if its true or not. I would assume those days are over if they ever existed. There's probably an appeal to having a game you don't have to download or install. Maybe work computers or a kid without admin privileged just wants to play something online.

 

We are still in alpha development but are expecting to release towards the end of the summer. Here is a super rough screenshot of a current sprint:

https://twitter.com/CasualMaverick/status/982607910856482816

I agree. I'll update the empty pages to coming soon pages.

Cheers,

Dave

 

I apologize. I should not have been so rude to Turbo Pug. It and its 4 sequels and spin offs are not shovelware. It is a breed of game with a magnificent pedigree and a successful track record.

 

MONTHLY REPORT

I knew the March report would be bad for me, what with no discounts but here I had to take a guess... did I make more in game sales or market transactions? Go on... take a guess.

+ $3 from 1 full price sale of the $10 game (Russia, Brazil and Mexico get games for 50% off)
+ $2 from 5 full price sales of the $1 game
+ $1 in card money from 120 market transactions.
================
+ $6 revenue
- $50 monthly fee of owning a company
================
- $44 in the red

March was bad. April will continue to be bad. May I'll have a sale and money will go up. These are old and dated games now. I'm shocked they had 6 full price sales as it is.

 

Maybe you should try to lower your cost a bit
My only cost is my Webpage around 5$ a month and sometimes buying assets.

But even this is higher than my Profit (or at least at the Moment and the last years)

 

Plenty of people suggest that, but I have a feeling lowering it to $5 will mean people will wait until its 50% off to buy it. Since I don't need the income from game sales I keep it at what it is.

 

No, sorry for my english.
I meant the money you pay for "- $50 monthly fee of owning a Company"
This sounds really a lot. Is it a registered Trademark or something like that?

 

Its more like an annual fee that I break down into a monthly fee. Its the LLC annual registration, the convenience fee to have it, the lawyer's annual fee to retain services to do nothing, its the accounting tax software, it used to be the amount the bank would charge me for having less than $1,500 in the account (started out as $1,000). Oh and also domain hosting and a dot com.

Off the top of my head, I think the breakdown is:
$180 for the lawyer annually and then extra to have him do things beyond a consultation.
$300? annually for the LLC
$50 for LLC convenience fee
$17 a month for the accounting / tax software.
??? annually for the website domain, can't remember

This has all been itemized in the past in previous posts with more and or accurate detail.

I can't recommend for someone of my size to start a company, but I was recommended by Steam to get a lawyer and an accountant. The lawyer recommended I get a LLC, so I did. I probably shouldn't renew the LLC when it expires in June. When I started the company, I thought my first game would make $10,000 in the first year.

 

You can publish to Xbox, just google the program. Basically you submit your game to them (with controls setup for Xbox,) they review it, and will get back to you if they want it on their platform. I made about $3k on one Xbox XNA game years ago when they had that program.

For iOS I pulled a report and have made around $6700 since iPhone 1 came out. Not very much frankly. On Android I think I've made $0.25 in the same period. Android sucks horribly for revenue for me.

I've tried Ad-Mob and Unity Ads on all platforms. They have never made me any $ to speak of.

The most I've made on a game was actually a Unity contest. I got 2nd place in the HoloLens contest and that was worth $36k in cash and prizes.

My current game (Rogue Frontiers) is slated for the Steam platform first and then Xbox afterwards. You can see the progress on it at my website: http://VectorX.Studio

 

I made $8.56 in 2 months playing my own game on Google Play.

TRUMP CRUSH PLUS

 

Sorry to hear. I only spent some oney on assets, some money on my webside and hundreds of hours ;-)

 

I personally have an LLC and an accountant and do not regret it even though I haven't made much $$ in game dev. I have made enough to pay my expenses though and that is good enough for me since I have a full-time regular job. Maybe someday I'll get a hit, but for not I'm just focused on making a fun game.

 

Has anyone set up a sole proprietorship? It seems to me that it would be a lot cheaper in terms of maintenance costs, at the expense of liability protection. However I'm pretty sure the risk in gaming would be extremely low.

 

I researched this quite a bit, llc vs sole proprietorship. Depending upon the state (US) the developer incorporates in, the start up and maintenance costs could be cheaper. The two main differences as you pointed out are liability protection & tax processing. For me - the liability protection FAR out weighs the minimal differences in start up / yearly maintenance costs.

Just thinking about someone suing over - installing one of my games on there computer and claiming the game caused the computer to fail/crash - resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in lost digital (stuff), and having to convince a judge with little to no knowledge in how computers and software work,, that would be a true nightmare.

From my limited research into banking regs related to all business formations, there are also higher waiver requirements and fees associated with banking, when structured as a sole proprietorship compared to LLC. I think this has something to do with liability and coverage of assets/expenses and possibly insurance requirements.

 

Does a EULA offer sufficient protection against a crash/data loss case? It seems to me that it would be very hard to prove definitively that your app caused the crash/loss.

Actually I suppose on the tax side there would be a benefit as income increases. Being able to pay yourself via dividend is generally more tax efficient when it comes to profit distribution.

 

On the surface yes - but that doesn't restrict someone from suing anyway. And with how judges 'interpret' laws liberally rather than enforcing/keeping within them, I wouldn't want my argument to be - but the eula says...

Regarding dividend payments - yes - this is something I believe a lot of people decide to do after they start making money enough to reflect on returns from 'investment' vs direct payment from sales. Great point!

 

Yes, that would always be a risk - you would be out the costs to defend. It would be a balancing act, I suppose, of the likelihood of being sued.

I'm in Canada and dividend payments are taxed at about half the effective rate of income. I think this might be the case in the US and elsewhere as well. The downside is that corporate taxes are more complex (expensive) to do, and there are higher startup costs as well as extra reporting capabilities, so there would be some point at which the extra cost is worthwhile.... though I'm pretty sure it would be in the low tens of thousands in annual income.

 

In sweden you can only cashout 50% of the companys total salary payments that year. Not a problem for a large company with many employees, but if you're just one guy you need to cash out a large salary to get any money to cash out as dividend. And here in Sweden tax on salary is crazy. Stil its better than those poor soles that are just employees and need to tax all their money as salary

 

About the sole proprietorship, I asked my lawyer about it. Even though I own a LLC, I'm taxed as a pass-through sole proprietorship. The company has to pay taxes every 3 months, but my company doesn't make enough to pay taxes.

It looks like I'm under 2 months from having to pay to renew my LLC.

While I'm here...

I should give closure on the game that was sold out from under me.

A few weeks ago in this post (here) I cited that a game I own 50% of was sold by the owner of the game and why you should never do revenue share.

I was never paid 50% of the sale of the game, nor have I been paid for revenue made with the game since December or so.

Things got progressively more messy with the game and the new owner. I had to see my company lawyer about it, even if this is a side project. The lawyer wants me to sue both the new owner of the game and the original developer for damages. The damages in this case would be they devalued my copyrighted content, preventing me from making money on the content as its seen as less desirable after being in a game.

The lawyer also told me to get my art registered, so I filed to get the copyright registered which will take 3 months. He told me to get it registered so I can sue for attorney fees as well. I don't want it to get to that point, but the new owner keeps pushing me, saying he has lawyers and the law on his side, which seems laughable when I own the copyright and he's using my copyrighted content.

He always has a new tactic, telling me the game owns the copyright, that I need to prove I made the content (I have making of videos and a written and signed agreement with the original owner), that there was no agreement (which yes there was, signed by 2 parties and notarized by a third party), telling me that my name on the agreement isn't my name... which yes it is. He offered $40 for the forever, exclusive license to the copyrighted content and said "its either this money or no money." The new tactic is he's not an owner, he licensed the game and lastly he didn't license the game, he's a helper on the game. Its a new strategy each time I spoke with him.

Even a lawsuit will probably yield no money for me, as the law firm would be the one getting the money. The lawyer also said it didn't matter what country the other parties are in as long as they're in countries that abide by some overall global agreement. Starts with a B. Can't remember what its called. A lawsuit would only prove to serve to not be a pushy bully to people online.

 

Oh yeah, now for the point I returned to the forum...

APRIL SHOWERS BRING MAY FLOWERS

Here's the April report in May from Steam:

+ $0 from 0 full price sales of the $10 game
- $1 from 5 full price sales of the $1 game and 8 returns. I assume 3 of those returns were purchased in March.
+ $3 in card money from 140 market transactions.
================
+ $2 revenue
- $50 monthly fee of owning a company
================
- $48 in the red

April would be bad as I was unable to have a sale on either game. May should be better. Its tough to get worse.

As for the 8 returns, no reason was given for any of them.

I've been thinking about taking my 2 games off Steam and removing my website with all its free game jam games and just packing it in to move on with life. For anyone that feels oh its a $1 game with cards... of course it will sell, while I'm anonymous, I feel like I'm proof that no the $1 games don't sell even with cards. To sell cards you need to have cheap cards which comes with bundles and giveaways. In my case each card is almost as expensive as the game.

At least people buy the game because they want to play it. Reviews keep trickling in on the $1 game even 18+ months. It means nothing for the sales despite how positive the reviews are. Well both positive and dumb reviews "game is good."

THE OTHER 3 GAMES & REVENUE SHARE

In the case of the game (#3) I did with a friend it made like $22,000 - $40,000 in its life due to bundles and bulk sales which resulted in dirt cheap cards and some days or weeks making $300 - $400 in card money. He paid me the few hundred he owed me in revenue for the past few months he didn't pay me.

Game #4 had its own post above this one.

Last and certainly least, I took down game #5 (the 3 day game jam game) from the Steam store. Owners can still play it, but no one can buy it. Now that I fully own it, I'm just not proud of it and I can't devote the time to make it better. The original programmer seemed upset that I'd take down the game from purchase. How upset can he be when he gave me the game?

My game development experiences keep slipping further into darkness.

 

Sorry to hear.
I deleted my Websites and Forums, I will continue with my games for fun on IndieDB.com and Itch.io.
I will buy some assets from time to time, but not spent big money, I will continue for fun.

I still dream of selling some games to buy a ps 4 (5?) development system and a Unity License, but only if I earn that money before (with a game of course). I am still willing to spent time into my games, but not much money.

 

It sounds like he's just making excuses to keep you from actually taking the next step. Trying to throw enough things at you that you just get tired of dealing with him and don't bother to sue.

 

It did seem like he was trying to tire me out. Trying to make me believe I had no claim to my own copyright among other tactics. The next step was to lawyer up... and I did. Now with a lawyer and knowing I'm in the right, ensures that I don't have to listen to the new owner's tactics.

No matter what he does, the damage is already done so its my right to sue. So he should probably be less of a pushy bully telling me what my rights are and what I can't do. Once the copyright's registration is approved then I can make that call on whether or not I should let the lawyer file suit. I gave the new owner enough polite warning to remove the game from the Steam store and replace my copyrighted content and he never did. He was too content to laugh at me and bluntly insult me that my models and art weren't good enough to pay for.

To tie this in with how much money have you made... it cost $55 to file for registration with the US Copyright Office. If I'm correct, that brings me from $200 - $250 down to about $150 - $200 made on this game in six or so months.