I Started my Patreon page for supporting the gameDev community

On my Patreon page I will post Models\Assets for gameDev and Monthly for the hightire Patreons they will be able to download my Animations with the asset created !
Here is the link https://www.patreon.com/MirceaPrunaru

And this is my "Site" http://fenix3darts.wixsite.com/fenix

 

On my personal understanding patreons only truly work if you already have a following of people.

I wish you luck on your endeavors, just felt I needed to say that so you don't get in over your head and wonder why nobody is doing it and getting you depressed.

On that note, it's highly recommended you show more work other than a simple based Smoke Grenade.
People will want to see highly complex stuff so they know you'll be giving them quality content, not stuff they can make in 5 minutes their self.

Just keep all this in mind.

Sorry if I sound like I busted your bubble, not trying too lol.

 

Typo. Should be "First Person" not "Frist Person"

I wouldn't start advertising it until you have a lot more content. So far, there isn't enough stuff for a one month payment of $5, let alone a subscription of $30 a month.

 

Well is just at start so i will be Posting more Images about other stuff too but for the moment i need to get my stuff together and make it look worth looking at unlike the smoke grenade xD

 

Thanks for the correction my damn keyboard has autofill and got it wrong somehow when I edited the page this morning :| And yeah I allready have my stuff together but i need more time to post it! + I started the damn page yesterday.

 

Keep the wind under your sails.... even if you fail, no matter what you'll learn something

 

Honest question: What exactly made you consider launching a patreon page? Imho you'd be much better off in almost every way by going about this differently. Monetizing "a hobby" kills intrinsic motivation for many people and I would almost guarantuee that you would make way more money by just regular freelancing. By uploading lets say 50 models on patreon to work your way up to (generous but unfounded estimate) 100-200 $ a month after 6-12 months of hard work and marketing, you'd make the same amount of money as 1 mid-tier freelance job could have made you, but have essentially made 50 "jobs" for that and have all the overhead of dealing with so many people on patreon. You'd be much better served imho if you just work on your skills, make top-notch portfolio pieces, and then look for freelance jobs. If one of those deals goes sour (some will for sure unless you are lucky and cherrypick your clients) you can then still put the assets on the assetstore and be disappointed at the low sales 3D assets make there. The patreon approach in your situation I think is unviable, but more importantly I think it will be super depressing to see very little income from patreon over a long time.

 

Yeah I wouldn't even attempt to start a patreon until there's at least a few thousand followers on Twitter, or whatever networking you use. At least then you have a viable chance of getting something.

Which getting a few thousand twitter followers isn't too too hard if you know how to communicate with people and just show them even if you are a company, that you are a human, occasional humor, etc.

It's about making people feel good when they see your page, posts, tweets, etc.

Then once you have that following, then attempt to monetize it if that's what your goal is (nothing wrong with that, because lets face it, free work don't pay the bills).

 

This. So much this. The conversion rate from community supporters to Patreon subscribers appears to be about 1000 to 1. That's from my YouRube to Patreon experience, and looking at the numbers on bigger channels.

It might be a useful learning exersice. But don't quit your day job just yet.

 

This. So much this. The conversion rate from community supporters to Patreon subscribers appears to be about 1000 to 1. That's from my YouTube to Patreon experience, and looking at the numbers on bigger channels.

It might be a useful learning exercise. But don't quit your day job just yet.

 

Seems a little low. My Facebook community converted at about 100 to 1, producing about 35 supporters at an average of $6 and change each, and I never even promised them anything. I just told them they should pay me for being awesome. Granted, they didn't keep paying me, but I probably could have kept that ball rolling if I tried.

 

@BoredMormon : Yeah I wouldn't doubt it honestly... I despite how much I hate marketing - love communicating with people about anything, well except for the "make me free game" people lol.... (I run into them people all the time), I finally just stopped being an Admin on a 30K+ Unity facebook group because I kept getting messages after messages, such as ("How do I mkea player hurt, sory for mi englis") lol.

But anyways, I know there's a secret formula to it, and that is probably just being as active as you can and given people a real passionate creation, etc.

 

Different communities may vary a lot. YouTube in particular doesn't attract commited audiances. The ratio seems similar for some of the bigger YouTubers, SciShow has a little over four million subscribers on YouTube, and about five thousand patrons on Patreon.

Although in fairness I haven't done a lot to promote my Patreon account. I'm active on YouTube, but fairly lightly.

 

That's probably it. I don't really pursue mass market audiences - the mass market usually thinks I'm an arrogant jerk, and they're not exactly wrong.

 

Serving underserved but dedicated niche markets seems like a good idea in general for indies. Getting higher conversion rates there seems plausible. I think this goes for games as well to a degree.


I bet almost everyone here has bought a game because they like the developer and want to support them. If you don't want to or can't be the product yourself, your actual product must be a hell of a lot stronger to stand on its own legs and be successful.

 

Is it possible to come up with a strong title with the free limited version of Unity?

 

The free version of unity has all the same features as the pro version and has since 5.0 came out.

 

Not the dark skin

 

That's a bug, not a feature. The dark skin is caused by the pro version of unity something something orbital wobble

 

This. The first thing I did when I got my plus subscription was turn off the ugly dark skin.

 

I thought Patreon was just for YouTube. I didn't know you could use it for other things.

I don't really get it, to be honest. Why would I give $10 a month to a single Pateron when I could spend the same money and get Netflix (other movie channels are available) and get 100's of Hollywood movies?

Does Patreon actually work? Has anyone actually made money from it? It seems unlikely to me.

 

Like most crowd funding platforms, Patreon only works if you are already popular and have a significant following. From my experience about 1 in 1000 followers chooses to spend money on Patreon.

So it will work for big guys. But it's pointless before you are big.