@@RobotronSageIn what way is it a good thing for the dev? He’s literally showing how it has barely made money. Freebie hoarders and paying customers are completely seperate audiences.
Exactly. 750k downloads for a free to play game isn't all that and it definitely doesn't equal to a lot of money (which is shown in the video.) It's one of those games that is fun to play for maybe an hour and then you get bored of it.
Couple game devs here, we recommend not making your game F2P if you're an indie studio. It is not worth it, and it will turn you money hungry, looking to monetize any feature you add in the game. The best way is to make a paid game, and shamelessly beg Charlie to play it for that overnight success.😅 Pls play it already Charlie, we sent you keys!
I respect the honesty lmao, currently building a game right now because of how much distain I have towards the modern game market and how greedy it has gotten
@@AquazytI don’t think 50,000 people would have downloaded it. For every 100 people maybe only 1 would have purchased it. So about 7500 still a lot better though
TBF, releasing a one man developed f2p game with microtransactions is going to have very different results compared to a one man developed single player game sold for 10 or 20 bucks. F2P games are very dependent on whales to be profitable, and whales gravitate towards bigger games.
Not to mention the unethical behaviour you need to engage in to pray on the whale's FOMO. Even if you are successful, you are tarnishing your reputation doing so.
let it be 5$, don't make it expensive, make it "huh 5$, you can't do nothing wrong here", now imagine 30% of that max download count bought it, already 700.000$ (after SteamTakings). Get it on a Steamsale for 1.79$ after a year and you probably make another 200.000$. There you go, your 5k Hour Game almost made a million.
@@pairot01 adding transactions and dlc thats completely optional and not forced is unethical in a f2p game? how? you obviously have no idea what you're talking about and should probably stop commenting random d0gsh1t
@@pairot01that’s also a problem, the smaller you are the more unethical you have to be with your f2p monetization to make money. Bigger studios can afford to be less predatory, do they actually do that most of the time? No. But they have the option
Multiplayer games in general are just a bad idea for small developers to focus on. Even disregarding all of the technical issues (and there are a lot of those too), the problem with multiplayer games is that nobody likes playing a dead game - even if the gameplay was really good, if you can't drive a lot of traffic to your game then any multiplayer game will fail - if you aren't already an established developer, then multiplayer games should generally not even be considered as an option (of course, that's not to say you can't have any multiplayer components at all in it - but the game should feel like a complete experience even if you have to play it solo). In regards to f2p games, the number of downloads is also not a very meaningful metric by itself, because f2p games have a lot of people that just try the game and then quit shortly afterwards. A lot of the downloads come from players that were never really invested in the game and never would've paid anything for it.
It feels like its hard to measure success on downloads alone when your game is free to play and paid cosmetics are 100% optional. Game dev is still very difficult and very risky but equating success on download numbers alone doesn't seem like an accurate way to measure success to me. Maybe I'm wrong?
i agree with you and i think you're right. i'm just looking at steamstats right now and all time peak was 75 players for the game, i don't know about you but i wouldn't call that popular. no wonder it made only about 4k gross over 4 years.
Only if the game is free to play and multiplayer. Single player games that don't require servers are probably much more profitable using the downloads metric.
Free to play immediately turns your game into a crapshoot. unlike a full priced game you don’t get paid if people play, only if they get suckered by extras. It’s a bad way to say anything about the industry as a whole.
I learned a while ago that indies should not try to mimic big studios. No free to play, no microtransactions, avoid long-term costs like servers. Successful indies just make a good old school game that people can enjoy.
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention.. But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is. The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
As an indie myself, I made a lot of projects (for learning purpose only, never released one for now) over the years, I'm currently making one and I'm planning to release it at a relatively low price (max 5$), no microtransactions, focused on gameplay and physics, it's 100% multiplayer but no dedicated servers required since it's a Host Clients networking. (The guy hosting the game is the server and the client at the same time, and others clients can connect to him) So yeah, tbh his project was doomed from the start, not only bcs of microtransactions & free to play, but bcs FPS/TPS scene is already flooded ! You can't just make a generic low poly shooter and expect to be popular with that.
Everyone has different dreams and goals, dont expect everyone to create side scroller story game. Being an indie doesn't mean you can't make online games with microtransaction. Yes the guy was unlucky but his monetization plan was poor and he probably sucked at marketing.
@@K3rhos Yeah, despite being free, I'm still against microtransactions in general. It just makes me think 'cashgrab mobile game', even if that's objectively not the truth.
I'm a game developer that makes exclusively only free to play games, as a child I lived in poverty and could never afford to buy games. So I hope to make content for those who are in a similar situation. I also try to focus on low-end machine compatibility since the majority of players in the world play on APUs. Passion projects are a joy to work on, and the reward of seeing others play it is incredible. But it's stressful to develop games with no financial reward for sure. I feel for this developer. Slendytubbies got millions of downloads over the years, but with no financial benefit.
I believe that you can get more if you makes mobile game, I've seen a video of mobile game dev talking about how much he makes, he made $22k per month by putting ads into his games, the game name is pixel tribe
When a game is free on Steam, many people add it to the library, but don't actually touch it. It's just for collection purposes. In truth the game itself only had a few hundred players at most on a free game and the ones who paid anything are also only a few hundred. You can see it better at 1:01. So the 750 thousand downloads are a deceiving number a more accurate number would be a few hundred downloads if we count downloads as potential revenue and true downloads with actual players.
This is exactly it. I knew that it wouldn't be an actually decent representation as soon as he said it's a free-to-play game 😂 he'd have almost a million dollars if he charged like 99 cents, but then his download rate would plummet cuz he's actually charging
@@DragoNate Most people will add to library and download a small F2P game. added to library just reflects as ownership on steam. But downloads also don't reflect how many people have it downloaded now just how many have and may have reinstalled or deleted it shortly after. It's still a bad metric to judge the game by when the concurrent players are low it's a bad reflection and F2P in general is a bad way to put out a game if you are small or solo dev and want to turn a profit. If it's a practice game then it's what it is and helps get some pocket money in the mean time but still is not a real reflection of a popular game as the game isn't popular and never was
@@MyNamesHunter75 yes, that's my point. OP basically equated the 750K "downloads" to just being added to library. it's not the same. if this were a paid game, even $1, then 750K downloads would be great as that means $1 per download. unless it also accounts for uninstalls/refunds/etc, then yes, it's definitely a terrible metric to judge a game by for anything besides the potential "reach" it got.
at 1:01 you can see lifetime unique players is ~560k people..... his oldest month with 0 players is like july of 2021 brother. If the game is so not worth it that they don't touch it, I wonder where these "player counts" are coming from, let alone the "lifetime unique players". It's more likely a bunch of people who are looking for a quick game with a friend. They find this in the store, download for free -> PLAY it for an hour, then uninstall without removing from library (because its free). If they enjoy they buy DLC, 1800 DLC units sold. If the game was legit 1$ or 0.90$ he could have made a fortune of money. Push harder for the game to be seen by real active players (like the ones that had bought the dlc) and the game would do better. he could've gotten ~300k people to play for 75 cents and could've made a ton of money. I stand by it too since bro has 500k unique players and 750k people adding to library lol. remember just because we have brains doesn't mean timmy with moms credit card has one too. and even then, sometimes we want to shut our brains off and play a game like this for idk, some fun? lol.
Gamedev here (not for that game). Gamedev is for sure a risky business, and you rarely earn more than minimum wage, considering the time investment. But, this game isn't a good example. This game is free to play, has a median playtime of 13 minutes, only 6,916 wishlists, and only ~1,400 reviews. The large number of downloads are mostly bots, and/or people just downloading it because it is free. I don't think this game failed because gamedev is a tough industry, it also failed because it just wasn't that appealing to a lot of people. The average consumer doesn't care about how much time you invested into something, they only care about the final product. Hard work doesn't always pay off it the results aren't very good. He made a game that the market simply didn't want or need, that's why it failed.
its not downloads. its added to account. aka they used steamDB free packages. i have like 3000 games on my account i have never downloaded only added them to the account. through steamDB.
He's also made a large multiplayer arena game, which isn't exactly the smartest to do without an existing audience. Building up a player base is very difficult, and it's probably full of empty lobbies.
I'm trying to get some skills so I can do my own projects eventually.Did you focus a lot on one particular thing like learning how to program or did you learn a engine or do a bit of everything?I had no delusions this wouldn't be really hard to get into but I feel like there's probably a better way to learn than I am doing
@@damonmlinaric9254 You should learn how to program first, or use an engine that allows you to write most of the code for the game yourself. You'll learn much more. Start off by trying to recreate simple games like Tic Tac Toe, Chess, Tetris. Add your own creative twists, and go from there.
100% true. The microtransaction formula also doesn't work for a game like this. He probably would've made a lot more if it was a $1.99 game or something like that. At the end of the day microtransactions are only successful in games with replayability and a multiplayer system with some level of longevity (clash of clans, csgo, cod, sport games etc). This game simply doesnt have any replayability and also very low interest in general aswell.
@@ferretyluvHis own time is still worth money. How many hours has he spent on developing? Multiply that by $20+ an hour. It might sound nice to not have to pay anyone but often the math doesn't check out in the end anyway.
I have a free game on Steam. "Lifetime total units" is not download count. It's just how many have added the game to their library. For free games a more meaningful stat is "Lifetime users measured" which is how many people have loaded the game. For comparison sake, at the time of writing, my free game's total license count is 28,850 where the measured players is 1,750.
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention.. But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is. The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
This is a terrible comparison. A paid game on steam with 750k downloads will make you a millionaire. The game didn't make money because it's free. The majority of money for indie devs comes from paid games, not cosmetics. He had a terrible business strategy that is extremely uncommon with indie devs. Comparing between triple A companies with investors and a small solo developer is also silly. They're on completely different universes in every term from marketing to monetization. I'm saying this as a developer.
pay to play with server running... basically a bad business plan@@eric7591 I know, we shouldn't measure all about profit but when we are talking about money to support your life.The we should be more strict about what he tries to do. Having a operational cost without any fix revenues will destroy your profit margin for sure.
That sounds right. If the game is free, how is it going to make money? Donations? Also, making a game is hard. It takes a special kind of person to make a game by themselves. It will take you a LOT of time.
Well yeah, it's hard to monetize free. It'll attract mostly kids without expendable income and they definitely won't pester their parents for micro transactions on super obscure games.
@@Xvladin Funnily enough, if you are going to make a free game and want to make money at the same time - the adult market is your friend. A lot of games make 2-3k a month in patreon/ko-fi subs due to early releases on there.
I would like to remind people. This game has 10 people playing, 35 at 24 hour peak, and 93 all-time peak. I actually think he made quite a lot of money with so little players.
The all time peak for this game is 75 players. On average there are about 10-20 players playing it at the same time. It's also free to play. So yeah these numbers aren't as surprising as charlie is making it sound. The original video is more likely a publicity move for the game.
The key here is that game devs should make a game that can stand out. If you're a solo developer making a multiplayer fps is probably not the best option. There are tons of games out there that are free and have bilion dollar corporations behind them and you cannot compete with that.
Definitely. You should only make F2P / Multiplayer games once you're financially stable and can afford to pay for servers, anti-cheat, live service, etc... Otherwise, you'll most likely fail
Honestly this feels like a really bad example of how much a "popular" steam game makes, since I would hardly call this game popular. It has never broken 100 concurrent players despite the 700k downloads. And it's a FTP game, which makes the 700k downloads moot. The only thing that matters is, is it a game people want to play? And this is definitely not that.
As an indie dev who will potentially be homeless if my game doesn't pop off on Steam when I release it, I can tell you the pressures of a release you've sunken everything into, is utter hell.
hey man, im gonna embark on a c# + unity journey i have some experience in java upto OOP ,my first project in c#+unity will be a simple 2d platformer, i think ill learn alot while building this, but can i have some tips kindly if you dont mind? Things i should know that i probably dont and might regret later, things to lookout for, etc? Thank you !
@@RG36c It's gonna be called Fever Meme. It's a cross between The Stanley Parable, Undertale, and rage games from 2007-2010 like I wanna be the Guy. It's really not quite like anything that currently exists. I'm currently working on the ending right now. It's on Steam, but no public store page is done yet. Been working tirelessly on it and the nerves are honestly setting in... but I have faith that it will at least have a bit of a cult following.
As a game developer I can expand this a little more. I have made 2 commercial games on steam. The 1st was a 3D roguelike that took me 1 year and the 1st month I got 2000 dollars. My 2nd game was basically a puzzle game focusing on putting together 2D models (gunplas) that took me only 4 months and gave me 82,000 dollars in the 1st month alone. I come from a Latin American country where the minimum wage is only approximately 400 dollars. Also I made all 100% alone. What I want to say is that there is no correlation between the complexity of the game with the money it can make, its just offer and demand.
This seems like it. Online FPS games are one of the harder genres. Tackling the casual audience seems like a much better idea to 'make money'. Simulator games, cosmetic collector games, card games, puzzle games, idle games
Having both a free version of my game on mobile and paid version on Steam I can confirm that the paid version on Steam made significantly more in two weeks than the free mobile version did in the past two years. Even though mobile games make up +/- 60% of the global gaming market revenue, it's really the top 1% doing all the heavy lifting there, with extremely large playerbases being required to come remotely close to being profitable (to the point where scummy monetization tactics don't seem that scummy anymore (in few cases))
As a developer myself, I will say there is some missing context here. This project was more about building up the resume than it is about making money. The returns on what this will do for a devs career are immeasurable. If you ask me, this was massively successful. Maybe not in a monetary way immediately, but for the future of his career down the road. Big kuddos. Very well done.
yeah, im not familiar with the free to play model but for regular games you can make a lot of money if done correct. the choo choo charles dev made the game in 4 months and priced it at $20 and it sold really really well. indie is hard but indie free to play while also making money is brutal. if he priced the game like among us, just really cheap, he wouldve made way way more. if he had priced his game at $1.50 his gross revenue would've been above 1 mill, which obviously isnt totally accurate, cause refunds and people who only downloaded cause it was free but again, still significantly better if he just got a fraction of the downloads
@@Laiminoi I mean the ultimate sin was making a multiplayer game alone, either it's free to play and he makes no money, or it's pay to play and noone'll pay for it and noone will want to because there'd be no playerbase
exactly if bro had 700k download on a 10$ game he would've been filthy rich. His monetization method was trash and his numbers reflect that, i don't think it's a "game dev doesn't pay" type of situation
Yeah Im thinking the same rn, these numbers seem so low because its a ftp game and most people prolly didnt bother with microtransactions since its not a cs or cod its just a fun little game they play time to time if it was even half a dollar he would make way more money off of that game.
8:49 I think if he had made the game $0.99, at least 5,000 people would've bought it. And at that price point, leaving in the microtransactions still seems ethical.
At 7:57 Charlie asks if it would have been better to keep the game "pay to play" and take fewer sales The issue is that a multiplayer game like this can't support a small player base... Even if you have 100 people online, you can't just match someone in Australia against someone in North America. It needed to be free to make it playable.
Only a few minutes in and this is what I think of it so far. • Passion project • free to play • (maybe inexpensive) micro transactions. • didn't intend game to become a steady source of income for himself. The fact that one guy created a game by himself, spending thousands of hours, developing it, testing it, and eventually releasing it and made over 2,000 dollars from it is really cool. It sounds like he has the skill sets and knowledge to make a bigger project. Hopefully with more people and maybe make a little more money. Just as long as it's not a cash grab or his last straw to make ends meet.
I immediately searched it up, this game apparently on steam has a height of 75 players max. No one in their right mind would've assumed this game would've made bank just by the downloads alone. I don't even think people look at downloads, they look at concurrent players
Depends on the choices the developer makes. If it's self hosted, chances are he's using steam transport, which is entirely free to use. For games that use dedicated servers, indies will often allow users to host their own servers to delegate costs. Then there's the poor few that use private dedicated servers, which come out of their pocket entirely and are often not cheap because server performance optimizations require a lot of dev time. These will hit the market for a quick cash grab then become unplayable once it costs too much to maintain
This is more about how a free game with micro transactions doesn't always make bank, but you can run the math on something like a 5 dollar game, if its a fun popular game, it will make bank. Simple.
Yeah but the problem is that if it was pay to play almost nobody would buy it and then it would immediately die since it's a multiplayer pvp game without a playerbase. Making the game free to play is the easiest way of getting people to play the game.
@@rallvegd Yes, and no. Yes to the extent its a competitive space so you need to be really good to break out. No, to the extent games such as HLL, R6, Squad, PS, or Battle Bit all are paid shooters that made bank. Issue is its harder to go super indie and break out it seems, but then you have to have foresight to just pick a different genre.
@@rallvegd if you dont know this on pc paying for indie games is very very common to the point where it is the norm 2-5 for a indie game is something i would rather pay for a good game over some ad infested hell
750k (ignoring the steam bloat) for a free indie arcade game is MUCH different from 750k on a 5$ indie story game or something. i personally didnt expect this thing to have made even as much as it had. Also if he was an experienced dev at the time of starting, this wouldve gone down from 3000 hours to maybe 200 hours. He was new but he got the skillset from it to get a better job or do this again
Yeah. People also don't realize that downloads doesn't mean that much (for money) if not a lot of people are playing it. Someone said that this game hadn't even broken 73 concurrent players, and that was at its peak. And that's for a game that's free too. 750K downloads is very impressive, and the dev should be proud. But it's not weird that he didn't earn a lot from it. PS. Big companies are still scummy for using so many micro transactions since they earn a ton from those games anyway since the playerbase for those games are huge. Indie games can use micro transactions though.
@@BlazeMaestro yep its just steamDB auto adding stuff to your account its not downloads game dev and charlie either dont know how to read stats. or its a publicity move
@@BlazeMaestro game has been on steam for like 4 years brother. We'll say consistent players for 3 years and an avg of 8 (counting for days with 2 and days of peak) 8k players.... so where is the 750k added to library? what about the 560k unique players? concurrent players is a bad way to judge because its only counting whats always happening at the current moment. Its not sharing player analytics or anything, its simply counting the amount of players at one time. You could have 50 people play in 2 hours and a concurrent view for every hour could show 25 on each hour if the players in the first hour got off and the players in the second hour got on, if that makes sense. bro had 39 players at 1 pm yesterday, do you really think those are the same people playing at 1 am yesterday? LOL do you think these people are continually playing for almost every hour of the day??? bro hasnt had a consistent low month since 2021 (meaning avg 0 player a month)......
To be fair, this it's why when you start to develop indie games on your own, it's recommended to make smaller games and learn from them rather than directly making a bigger game and then learning from the mistakes.
Yeah, I watched this video a few days ago, this video is trending among new game developers like me. The key takeaway is don't make an F2P game if you're an Indie dev. He definitely would've made a lot of money if his game wasn't F2P. While Steam takes 30%, Steam makes your game discoverable to more people than any other platform atm.
8:24 it’s so true. Big companies like Roblox or Fortnite have really made a fortune off of dlc or cosmetics. Just because their player count is higher, smaller free to play games don’t really make a whole lot off of cosmetics unless it’s tied to a brand
@@sadtimesalwayshigh player count of kids that don’t constantly spend 20$ to buy something like adults do. Also to run an app as big as Roblox with as many users that it has as well with all the crossplay and fees from google play and AppStore and that’s before they even got to pay their employees and they have to pay for the servers as well I believe that they are yet to turn a profit
The player count being higher is something that scales the revenue more than linearly too - the problem small multiplayer games face is that nobody likes playing a dead game. Not only do you gain revenue from fewer people, but the amount of money you gain per person is also smaller too because people aren't as invested into your game (it's impossible to do any kind of skill based matchmaking because you don't have enough players for it, and even the people that are interested in playing the game will quickly lose interest if they can't regularly find matches etc.).
I'd you recommend reading "Blood Sweat and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Mad" by Jason Schreier published in 2016 also having a sequel, but that sequel is about games that got a Restart. This book as the title suggests talks about the hell that companies go through to bring us those video games, I wholeheartedly recommend this book, it will really open your minds.
@@doctorstrange7768except this one isn’t a freemium game, the pay is purely cosmetic…. So it’s just a free game, as long as you aren’t a 8 year old with no self control and a parents credit card, it’s just a free game
Solo indie dev here. When it comes to online free to play games like this, you always have to take concurrent players into account. It is VERY HARD as a solo developer to make a game that is engaging enough to keep people coming back in the thousands. So many games just get added to people’s Steam library and they never end up touching it. Because of this, a solo developer can make a passion project like this, but still end up making actual pennies a *month* because they don’t end up keeping players engaged long enough to play it for longer than a day or two. This is why developers often look for publishers and backers for their projects.
Free-to-play games with microtransactions are cancer. The developer should now release a 'DLC' that permanently unlocks access to all the DLCs/in-store items for the price of what the game would be if it hadn't been made free-to-play. This way he gets another chance at making it work.
i dont see how any of this is shocking. the game has never had more than 73 players playing at one time. and its free, and it doesnt force you to buy anything.
I'm confused. What's the problem here? Just because someone spends a lot of time on something doesn't necessitate compensation for it. How is this Steams problem? The guy spent his time developing a game no one cares about. That's just a bad business decision.
Yea lol, it’s basically just concord in that no one plays it. But in this case it’s somehow sad because it’s one person who failed as opposed to a whole team of devs?
@@100StepProgramwell the concord devs don’t need the game to perform well to feed their families. They’re taking home the same amount of money either way. Indie devs don’t have that guarantee. I think that makes indie failures sadder.
Yeah I don't get it either. The game doesn't seem to attract players, so of course there's no money to be made. And I'm not trying to be mean, but 3000 hours is a lot of time for something that looks like an engine demo from 2010.
@@tango_cathal2029 True, but even the slop like Dustborn had 83 players peak. Mostly due to the Twitch streamers, but this game has like 5k - 10k downloads or something, so this can't possibly be that the free to play title with 70 times more downloads has slightly less peak players than a sloppy $30 title
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention.. But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is. The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
As a game developer myself his results are not an issue with the industry but rather his game. His game lacks any uniqueness and it is quite low quality.
@@xoomzera2830 most people don't differentiate games based on if it's indie or not. It's based on if it's a fun and unique experience. So your take on this doesn't seem to be in sync with reality.
@@ananyaig they do actually most of the educated people out there at least. Last time i was talking with my friend he said something along with "Oh its an indie game, It would be full of bugs" indie = low quality xD for other maybe just cuz they don't know
I'm a game developer for 9 years, I still haven't commited to my OWN game.. instead i work for others. The financial risk for every project is harsh.... most games do between 0$-15k lifetime... Games i worked on average around 200k but these games still don't break even (paying all the devs/artists etc). Only top games survive and even those have a hard time scaling.
@@mrECisME thats factually incorrect. making unpopular games doesnt make money. the guy in the video didnt have 700k downloads. he had 700k added to accounts. these are very very different. one can be automated by things like steamDB free packages
@@DeputyFish eh guy didn't make money cuz his monetization sucks... There are definitely lot of games that make just 2k. But most games are closer to that 15k. More advanced teams can typically secure at least 200k but still pretty hard
One thing about game design and dev: Everyone thinks they have a great idea for a great game. Then they tried to make it, and slowly strip down their ideas to the barebones due to time, money, technical and skill limitations.
Biggest tip for indie devs is to not spend a ton of time on a game, polishing it and making it look pretty, and continuously dumping time and effort into it if it doesn’t pay off. Instead make something quick, but unique and fun, maybe it doesn’t look incredible, but it’s still fun. Games entire purpose is to be fun, not look good.
as per steam, this game had 90 players peak, and is around 30 players average even tho a lot of people "downloaded it" they did not get invested enough to care about it,
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention.. But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is. The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
I was sorta shocked to hear that often developers will overprice their game by 20% and then have it at a 20% discount so that Steam sends emails out to those who have wishlisted it
2:16 you know what else is shockingly low Charlie? an all-time peak of 73 players, 6 reviews for the game... in 4 years. Making a little over 500 bucks a year for an absolute FLOP of a game that almost no one has played ? doesn't seem that bad when you actually look at the stats.
thats not the point, the point is that the game dev spent around 6k hours developing a game over the course of like 4 years that gave him a net gain of less than 2k dollars.
@@monkeybooger89 That's because he's a beginner, lol. Dude just made a random game in which most of those hours were spent learning the things he needed, not because he was being productive with the time. The point is, there's good developers out there who've made a lot of money with not even half of this guy's effort. It's a skill issue, not a social / industry issue. The developer of the game in this video should expect to spent about 10 years making games over and over again, without seeing anything in return. That's how the life of a successful game developer looks like - makes 1,000 games throughout a decade of trial and error, and maybe he gets lucky with one of the projects.
@@Mitroiul bro said it is not a social/industry issue then states that a life of a successful game developer is to make 1,000 game to maybe get lucky with one. That is absurd bro and definitely sounds like an industry issue if developers are being paid less than minimum wage for a decade in the hopes to make profit eventually lmao. That sounds like a huge industry issue.
@@Solar-sx7kh It's like that with literally any creative job where you get to create what you want, I hope you're aware of that. If you want to be a singer, actor, painter, game developer, literally anything where you get to create whatever you want, then be prepared for the chance you'll do that your whole life without getting anything out of it. If you want safety, then you get a normal job where you're told what to do. It's not an industry problem because the game fails to have success because of its own shortcomings, not because it's not being payed back properly. 99.9% of game developers make retarded games and it's only them who thinks they're good. So yes, 99.9% of game developers will not make anything out of the "games" they make. It's a skill issue combined with a lack of business experience that creates this problem. 99% of game developers have no idea what to do with a game besides making it. Most game developers are shit when it comes to making games as a business instead of making games for the sake of making them for their own fun. And guess what, that will mean they won't be able to make a game that actually makes money. Making a good game and making a good game that makes money are 2 completely different things and they require 2 completely different skill sets, which the majority of people do not posses.
@@Mitroiul there’s no point in arguing with you bro if your argument is made on baseless claims and opinionated. You say 99.99% of developers are independent creators and i doubt the majority of developers are independently creating and not connected to a group of developers or some studio like affiliation. So indeed just like start up companies game developing comes with a high risk and one of the factors that determine the success is the need for the product, but to say the majority of game developers are “entrepreneurs” ( whatever term you would call independently creating your own game ) I think is absurd. The developers for bigger successful studios being underpaid is certainly more than a demand or supply issue and could be considered a social/industry issue.
I spend 1000+ hours on my top down game "Space Warden" and i made hold your horses guys (300 bucks!) but anyway now i am applying for gaming company and there is a big change i gonna get a job, me as self-tough to be a game dev in real AA company i am so happy ;)
The fact people are shocked that a free game didn’t make enough money is shocking to me. I had a game priced at 5 dollars that made me 1000 dollars in a week. What is even the point of this video
Yeah. "So, you are telling me that your niche free to play indie game that relies almost entirely on microtransactions that barely anyone is motivated to buy, makes only a handful of dollars? No way!!!"
To be fair, when making a free to play game with micro-transactions, downloads don't equate to people spending money. Especially now that the market is pretty oversaturated with the same model, people are becoming less willing to pay for in-game cosmetics.
3 things: - Free to play is a no go if you're indie and unpopular. Simply bcs ppls will never really spend money on microtransaction for a f2p indie game, unless it become really popular, but if it's not, ppls don't care about having a skin in a game with a player base of 75 ppls average ! - Tbh his game is very generic, there is already tons of low poly shooter around on Steam, so it's clearly not helping his case. You're better go with a niche community, like parkour game or something like that (this is just an example), the type of game you see less often (FPS/TPS scene is flooded) - It was probably a project made for fun or learning game dev.
no one would pay for it if it wasn't free and he wouldn't be able to have an active playerbase which is important for a multiplayer game. I think f2p was definitely the right call for him as a starting developer with no backing.
@@Solar-sx7kh Yeah for sure, with the current state of his product he would never had anyone purchasing it, what I'm talking is instead of making a generic shooter and make it free to play and pray for your game to get some "success", make a paid game, but a good one, that ppls will want to buy !
Just released my first game on steam. Around 20 people have downloaded it 150 wishlisted it and as an indie developer that is good enough for me and I am so happy people are playing it and having fun.
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention.. But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is. The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
Game dev is legit probably one of the hardest professions available: volatile job stability, constant tech knowledge chasing, contract mercenary-like jobs, always behind and not knowing what youre doing even if you think you know. Low pay for the most part when junior jobs in other industry sectors get paid the same amount as someone in games industry with 10+ years exp, wild gatekeeping and silo'ed circles, corporate takeovers squeezing fun out of games and product for dollars to feed their own pockets and not the devs. Etc.
I guarantee you his living/human rights situation is far better than any sweatshop worker. Considering he had the time and means to be able to even dedicate so much time to this project.
As a developer, this is reasonable. Programming takes a fuck ton of time, too much time even. However, the amount of time his players actually spent playing the game is low af. Firstly, it'd a free to play game, most of the downloads are just that... downloads. He probably has a fraction of them actually playing the game. And finally, if his game is super generic, I'm not surprised that they will only play once, twice, or a few times. And they certainly won't feel like it'd be worth their money to make an IAP. Programming websites and games, is just like RUclips. The process to create the content takes a fuck ton of time, but what matters financially isn't the time you put into that product, but the time that the users of that product will use it... And if they actually like using it. Comparing game development to a chef or sandwich artist, is stupid as they're two completely different types of jobs in terms of payouts. If anyone thinks Steam should give them more money or something is just straight up wrong.
Solo dev here, one of my games currently earns me $20 a month, and it took about a year and a half to make. There's a lot of willpower and passion needed for someone who's working solo or in a small team to be able to create something they find meaningful, even though it takes so long and makes so little money. Obviously some games blow up, but that's usually not the case. I think it would go a long way if most people understood that. Sometimes I see small games that are just a few bucks getting chastised by players who think there's some collective of developers working on it with a salary when it's just some guy doing it for free. On the flipside, AAA companies will literally give you the bare minimum(for their caliber) and charge you $70 and there's always some people who will defend the game with their life despite being shown no respect by the company that produced the game. While this topic seems to be more oriented to how a developer can fare financially, I think some would be happy knowing the players understand how much love they've put into it, making a game is hard.
hey man, im gonna embark on a c# + unity journey i have some experience in java upto OOP ,my first project in c#+unity will be a simple 2d platformer, i think ill learn alot while building this, but can i have some tips kindly if you dont mind? Things i should know that i probably dont and might regret later, things to lookout for, etc? And what type of game did you make? Thank you !
@Memeaic I use unity to make games. I've only done 3D so I don't have much advice on 2D, but from what other devs tell me you'll need to put a lot of effort into the movement controller of the character to avoid issues. You also should plan early on for certain movement related features such as the ability to move up slopes, and then stick to that plan. I've heard of people try to add slopes later on in developement and coming across lots of problems because a lot of their systems are not built for it. There's probably a few devlogs you can find specifically about slope-induced issues. Basically, know exactly what you're going for, and keep things as simple as possible. I'm not sure if people use different coding techniques for platformers but you should also look up state machines before you get too far into making your controller.
@@CodeRed0 Thank you, would u say making 3d games is easier than 2d? Also how long did it take for you to learn to make a game so well that it can be sold? And how did you learn? youtube tutorials? Any recommendations about how i approach or not approach this journey? thank you very much :D
@@Memeaic I already had a coding background since my childhood so I kinda had a head-start there, but if I ever got stuck I would check youtube tutorials or the documentation. The documentation is basically a big 'book' of every class in unity, what properties they have, and what functions they have, so there's pretty much nothing you can't find in it. For me, 2D seems a lot tougher but I'm not very traditionally artistic, and most 2D games require lots of art. 3D feels like it has a lot lower bar for entry so I was able to start with an ugly game and learn a lot about 3D art and slowly improve. That being said, it definitely depends on the individual, some people are extremely talented at pixel art, and they'd probably have no problem with the art side of making a game.
I met you when you came to my University to film something, so, it's refreshing to see a Gamer RUclipsr address and learn this kind of thing. I was studying Game Dev at the time, so, feels good to hear stuff is finally getting to some people in the RUclipsr community.
There's so much to consider with this. As an indie dev with a multiplayer game I'm currently working on, or trying to find more time to lmao, I calculated the server costs (for my game in it's current state) to be about $2 per year per player if that player were to be playing 24/7 for that entire year, or about $0.0003 per hour played per person.
It’s important to differentiate when you’re speaking about a free game or paid game, I thought this was a paid game and couldn’t believe my ass, till I realized it was a free game A paid game seeking at the hundred K’s would make the dev a ton of money
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention.. But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is. The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
This is why, when I make a game, it's gotta be for fun. I stopped working on a mobile game I was making. I'm still gonna finish it eventually just to get the experience and learn
Honestly I wouldn't be mad if we slowed down on the f2p/microtransaction/dlc model. These AAA devs seem to think they're entitled to whales and design their games around sucking as much money as possible out of well-off parents with obsessive/hyperfixated/autistic children.
If you have an attention span bigger than a goldfish and you can use your tiny ADHD brain, you'll see that the game was NOT free for the first year and he made no money either
@@kaykmartins7335 game looks boring, and honestly looks kinda like shovelware. Sometimes those pop off, but that’s rare. still don’t know what he expected.
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention.. But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is. The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
When I first published to steam I thought if I made a half decent game with good gameplay I would make decent amount of money, I was dead wrong. Your game needs to not just be good but look good and be advertised well, I’m still trying to get there. Anyone wanting to get into games needs to do their research and know the realities of the industry, there’s a lot of competition out there.
@@erc3338They are “The Silicon Shadow” and “Lazer Rush Reloaded” with a third on the way “What Happens After Midnight”. As I stated with the initial comment they don’t look very good aesthetically but they play well, I think my new one looks decent and I have more hope for it.
@@erc3338The games are “The Silicon Shadow” and “Lazer Rush Reloaded” their flawed especially aesthetically but I’m getting better and am hopeful for my next game “What Happens After Midnight”.
The most important thing is to be unique. This guy made a free to play shooter, he's competing with valorant, csgo 2 etc. You're not gonna win that battle. Make your own space, set your own genre or revive a dormant one, that's the path to success
@@Ashton_Cats You don't really gotta be super unique just different enough and play into a niche and harbour a community around it along with advertising which you can do for free on sites like reddit, discords, youtube which a lot of devs are doing now and is a growing community sending cold emails and keys to youtubers asking them to try out the game which can work as well once it's in pre release you also need to price your game right not too cheap but not too expensive
I learnt game development in college, i saw how bad it is, especially the amount of people have mental break downs in the field, i chose to walk away and go on a different road
definitely better to get a degree in something that can translate to game dev but not necessarily focused on game dev. Just so you have that flexibility!
you know what else is shockingly low Charlie? an all-time peak of 73 players, 6 reviews for the game... in 4 years. Making a little over 500 bucks a year for an absolute FLOP of a game that almost no one has played ? doesn't seem that bad when you actually look at the stats
Yeah, I read in other comments that the average playtime is 13 minutes. Which is absolutely abysmal if true for a multiplayer game. Honestly, I don't even know why you'd make a multiplayer game as an indie dev considering how oversaturated with the titans that space is (even F2P with Mtx) vs. how there's an absolutely bustling indie scene for singleplayer games.
I mean, It’s because he made a F2P game as a indie, As a game dev, I will tell you, This was a bad idea, You as an indie dev usually want to sell your game for around $5-$20 Not free it won’t work as well as you think. If your game has $750,000 sales and your charging $15 You’re making bank that way.
I want to challenge that opinion of yours, if it's your first game you should be building your audience, you should be trying to get loads of people playing it, if people weren't really buying it before, then he needed to reevaluate, and if making it F2P so he gets a bigger audience then yeah that's quite fine to do, going off install metrics is what's bad, what he needs to do is go by metrics of played time, then see if people put in a few hours. Flat out saying F2P is a bad idea is very ignorant, you should be selling cheap and building an audience, then, that audience is there for the next game to make sales, or, monetize the game a little better. I would've made the game 0.99c, and done free in game items rather than DLC, but none of us know what the reasoning of things were, all of this is assumptions.
@@DRJuicyBear I mean yes, But no, If your making a free game you need to assure your making money somehow unless your not taking it seriously. If you are, Make a paid game and advertise, F2P is very unreliable when you don’t have an audience to begin with. I can see where your coming with but it’s not very feasible if you want to make money, Great to start build a small following or get some quick cash but you really need something big to truly get started for free. Hense why most developers that make really good indies usually charge that $5-$20 range, It’s quality and enough effort you want money in return
I have huge respect for game devs. I’m a programmer in a different field and i chose money over game dev. I would do game dev in a heartbeat if it paid. The same people making these games are also the ones that could be making bank with their skills somewhere else but choose to follow their passion instead. That takes determination , willpower , and a willingness to put your heart into something.
I wouldn't consider this game "popular" is the conventional sense. As someone else pointed out the game never broke 73 concurrent players. It was out 4 years as a free 2 play and made barely $4,000. A very small percentage of people bought the in-game microtransactions. This is a bad example to use for discussing how much money a steam game makes, even for an Indie Dev.
it makes total sense that this game made that much money. only a small portion of that download population played it for more than 10 minutes (or even opened it), and of the few that did, another smaller portion paid for microtransactions. half my steam games that i've PAID for, i've never actually opened.
As a game developer myself of 5 years (Not a solo dev but I've worked on fun projects alone) there is absolutely no way he spent well over 3k hours on this, $1000 on assets is practically a finished game, it'd probably take a few weeks to set it all up perhaps even a few months, another note that this is a really simple game, low-poly shooters come out almost monthly at this point, shit even Roblox has games like this. Originality is key, doing a project like this is bound to not go anywhere 700k owned copies is a big throw off too, game never got past 100 active players meaning most of these people never even download the game, they just leave it idle in their steam library. yes game development is no joke especially as a solo dev, but these numbers might have been slightly boosted - supposedly he's been doing game development for 8 years, I don't know if I believe that either I highly respect him for being honest about his earnings though I'm also not hating or anything I just wish this was more clear in his video I'm really glad this project helped him learn more about this side of it all! - Pro-tip to indie game devs, please don't make projects free :D Loved that part LOL
"even Roblox has games like this" Phantom Forces is an actual honest to god good Battlefield/CoD esque shooter that blows this project out of the water.
As an aspiring/rookie dev, think the business/financial side can be the biggest challenge along marketing, the stuff outside of the game can be just as difficult
This game has never broken 73 concurrent players.
Almost all those downloads are just people adding it to their library, and never touching it.
Yeah cause it's on the ''free to play'' tab and it looked interesting enough to want to check out
Which is a good thing for the dev
@@RobotronSage Yeah, it says the average play time is 13 minutes.
@@RobotronSageIn what way is it a good thing for the dev? He’s literally showing how it has barely made money.
Freebie hoarders and paying customers are completely seperate audiences.
Exactly. 750k downloads for a free to play game isn't all that and it definitely doesn't equal to a lot of money (which is shown in the video.) It's one of those games that is fun to play for maybe an hour and then you get bored of it.
i fucking knew that there was info we werent being given, fucking snake ass dev
Couple game devs here, we recommend not making your game F2P if you're an indie studio. It is not worth it, and it will turn you money hungry, looking to monetize any feature you add in the game.
The best way is to make a paid game, and shamelessly beg Charlie to play it for that overnight success.😅
Pls play it already Charlie, we sent you keys!
Fr if he would’ve sold the game for only 5 bucks and only 50k people bought it he would’ve made 250k
I respect the honesty lmao, currently building a game right now because of how much distain I have towards the modern game market and how greedy it has gotten
Wanted to get into game dev but never got around to it, seems too time consuming for me. Game looks nice btw, will wishlist it. Good luck
@@AquazytI don’t think 50,000 people would have downloaded it. For every 100 people maybe only 1 would have purchased it. So about 7500 still a lot better though
@@JaronPalone at least that would be closer to min wage than 1200 bucks
Charlie will make more from this video than that entire game will.
Bots wtf
for bots, dont respond, and report them
probably
@@kevenweaver9266 probably... and kinda sadly.
also, dont respond to those bots, report them.
Correct 😂
TBF, releasing a one man developed f2p game with microtransactions is going to have very different results compared to a one man developed single player game sold for 10 or 20 bucks. F2P games are very dependent on whales to be profitable, and whales gravitate towards bigger games.
Not to mention the unethical behaviour you need to engage in to pray on the whale's FOMO. Even if you are successful, you are tarnishing your reputation doing so.
let it be 5$, don't make it expensive, make it "huh 5$, you can't do nothing wrong here", now imagine 30% of that max download count bought it, already 700.000$ (after SteamTakings). Get it on a Steamsale for 1.79$ after a year and you probably make another 200.000$. There you go, your 5k Hour Game almost made a million.
@@pairot01 adding transactions and dlc thats completely optional and not forced is unethical in a f2p game? how? you obviously have no idea what you're talking about and should probably stop commenting random d0gsh1t
@@pairot01that’s also a problem, the smaller you are the more unethical you have to be with your f2p monetization to make money. Bigger studios can afford to be less predatory, do they actually do that most of the time? No. But they have the option
Multiplayer games in general are just a bad idea for small developers to focus on. Even disregarding all of the technical issues (and there are a lot of those too), the problem with multiplayer games is that nobody likes playing a dead game - even if the gameplay was really good, if you can't drive a lot of traffic to your game then any multiplayer game will fail - if you aren't already an established developer, then multiplayer games should generally not even be considered as an option (of course, that's not to say you can't have any multiplayer components at all in it - but the game should feel like a complete experience even if you have to play it solo).
In regards to f2p games, the number of downloads is also not a very meaningful metric by itself, because f2p games have a lot of people that just try the game and then quit shortly afterwards. A lot of the downloads come from players that were never really invested in the game and never would've paid anything for it.
It feels like its hard to measure success on downloads alone when your game is free to play and paid cosmetics are 100% optional. Game dev is still very difficult and very risky but equating success on download numbers alone doesn't seem like an accurate way to measure success to me. Maybe I'm wrong?
my exact thoughts upon watching this lol
i agree with you and i think you're right. i'm just looking at steamstats right now and all time peak was 75 players for the game, i don't know about you but i wouldn't call that popular. no wonder it made only about 4k gross over 4 years.
Only if the game is free to play and multiplayer. Single player games that don't require servers are probably much more profitable using the downloads metric.
Defeat Project 2025, vote blue this November!
Free to play immediately turns your game into a crapshoot. unlike a full priced game you don’t get paid if people play, only if they get suckered by extras.
It’s a bad way to say anything about the industry as a whole.
A game that costs less: makes more money, a game that costs more = less money that seems about right
bots on their way to repeat n word with a mr breast pfp in every reply section:
aw cmon, nobody noticed mr breast?
im sorry that u had to get this much bots in ur comment. bots r so ass
@@TEMMlEyea, charlies comment section is just mr breast bots now.
@DONTREADMYBIO1901 all i understand is that ur parents don't love u man.
@@punishedgrimm Ignore them, it's a waste of time replying to and mocking them.
I learned a while ago that indies should not try to mimic big studios. No free to play, no microtransactions, avoid long-term costs like servers. Successful indies just make a good old school game that people can enjoy.
Yeah why did he even consider making that game.
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention..
But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is.
The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
As an indie myself, I made a lot of projects (for learning purpose only, never released one for now) over the years, I'm currently making one and I'm planning to release it at a relatively low price (max 5$), no microtransactions, focused on gameplay and physics, it's 100% multiplayer but no dedicated servers required since it's a Host Clients networking. (The guy hosting the game is the server and the client at the same time, and others clients can connect to him)
So yeah, tbh his project was doomed from the start, not only bcs of microtransactions & free to play, but bcs FPS/TPS scene is already flooded ! You can't just make a generic low poly shooter and expect to be popular with that.
Everyone has different dreams and goals, dont expect everyone to create side scroller story game. Being an indie doesn't mean you can't make online games with microtransaction. Yes the guy was unlucky but his monetization plan was poor and he probably sucked at marketing.
@@K3rhos
Yeah, despite being free, I'm still against microtransactions in general.
It just makes me think 'cashgrab mobile game', even if that's objectively not the truth.
I'm a game developer that makes exclusively only free to play games, as a child I lived in poverty and could never afford to buy games. So I hope to make content for those who are in a similar situation. I also try to focus on low-end machine compatibility since the majority of players in the world play on APUs. Passion projects are a joy to work on, and the reward of seeing others play it is incredible. But it's stressful to develop games with no financial reward for sure. I feel for this developer.
Slendytubbies got millions of downloads over the years, but with no financial benefit.
im glad you made your games free, they created so many memories for me, especially st 3 multiplayer
I believe that you can get more if you makes mobile game, I've seen a video of mobile game dev talking about how much he makes, he made $22k per month by putting ads into his games, the game name is pixel tribe
No way it's you ZeoWorks, you made my childhood 🙌🙌
When a game is free on Steam, many people add it to the library, but don't actually touch it. It's just for collection purposes. In truth the game itself only had a few hundred players at most on a free game and the ones who paid anything are also only a few hundred. You can see it better at 1:01. So the 750 thousand downloads are a deceiving number a more accurate number would be a few hundred downloads if we count downloads as potential revenue and true downloads with actual players.
This is exactly it. I knew that it wouldn't be an actually decent representation as soon as he said it's a free-to-play game 😂 he'd have almost a million dollars if he charged like 99 cents, but then his download rate would plummet cuz he's actually charging
adding to library and downloading are not the same thing.
@@DragoNate Most people will add to library and download a small F2P game. added to library just reflects as ownership on steam. But downloads also don't reflect how many people have it downloaded now just how many have and may have reinstalled or deleted it shortly after. It's still a bad metric to judge the game by when the concurrent players are low it's a bad reflection and F2P in general is a bad way to put out a game if you are small or solo dev and want to turn a profit. If it's a practice game then it's what it is and helps get some pocket money in the mean time but still is not a real reflection of a popular game as the game isn't popular and never was
@@MyNamesHunter75 yes, that's my point.
OP basically equated the 750K "downloads" to just being added to library. it's not the same.
if this were a paid game, even $1, then 750K downloads would be great as that means $1 per download.
unless it also accounts for uninstalls/refunds/etc, then yes, it's definitely a terrible metric to judge a game by for anything besides the potential "reach" it got.
at 1:01 you can see lifetime unique players is ~560k people..... his oldest month with 0 players is like july of 2021 brother. If the game is so not worth it that they don't touch it, I wonder where these "player counts" are coming from, let alone the "lifetime unique players". It's more likely a bunch of people who are looking for a quick game with a friend. They find this in the store, download for free -> PLAY it for an hour, then uninstall without removing from library (because its free). If they enjoy they buy DLC, 1800 DLC units sold. If the game was legit 1$ or 0.90$ he could have made a fortune of money. Push harder for the game to be seen by real active players (like the ones that had bought the dlc) and the game would do better. he could've gotten ~300k people to play for 75 cents and could've made a ton of money. I stand by it too since bro has 500k unique players and 750k people adding to library lol.
remember just because we have brains doesn't mean timmy with moms credit card has one too. and even then, sometimes we want to shut our brains off and play a game like this for idk, some fun? lol.
Gamedev here (not for that game). Gamedev is for sure a risky business, and you rarely earn more than minimum wage, considering the time investment. But, this game isn't a good example. This game is free to play, has a median playtime of 13 minutes, only 6,916 wishlists, and only ~1,400 reviews. The large number of downloads are mostly bots, and/or people just downloading it because it is free. I don't think this game failed because gamedev is a tough industry, it also failed because it just wasn't that appealing to a lot of people. The average consumer doesn't care about how much time you invested into something, they only care about the final product. Hard work doesn't always pay off it the results aren't very good. He made a game that the market simply didn't want or need, that's why it failed.
its not downloads. its added to account. aka they used steamDB free packages.
i have like 3000 games on my account i have never downloaded only added them to the account. through steamDB.
He's also made a large multiplayer arena game, which isn't exactly the smartest to do without an existing audience. Building up a player base is very difficult, and it's probably full of empty lobbies.
I'm trying to get some skills so I can do my own projects eventually.Did you focus a lot on one particular thing like learning how to program or did you learn a engine or do a bit of everything?I had no delusions this wouldn't be really hard to get into but I feel like there's probably a better way to learn than I am doing
@@damonmlinaric9254 You should learn how to program first, or use an engine that allows you to write most of the code for the game yourself. You'll learn much more. Start off by trying to recreate simple games like Tic Tac Toe, Chess, Tetris. Add your own creative twists, and go from there.
100% true. The microtransaction formula also doesn't work for a game like this. He probably would've made a lot more if it was a $1.99 game or something like that. At the end of the day microtransactions are only successful in games with replayability and a multiplayer system with some level of longevity (clash of clans, csgo, cod, sport games etc). This game simply doesnt have any replayability and also very low interest in general aswell.
Reminder that Stardew Valley's dev didn't even have a proper desk until like a few years ago.
As someone with an unhealthy amount of hours in the game, I did not know this.
But he did LITERALLY EVERYTHING so he doesn’t have to pay anyone.
yeah, but thats kinda of his personality, concerned ape (stardew vallew dev) is literally a multi millionaire.
@@ferretyluvHis own time is still worth money. How many hours has he spent on developing? Multiply that by $20+ an hour.
It might sound nice to not have to pay anyone but often the math doesn't check out in the end anyway.
for bots, dont respond, and report them
bro should have made this on roblox. he would have like 100k+ over 4 years
EXACTLY WHAT I WAS SAYING
I have a free game on Steam. "Lifetime total units" is not download count. It's just how many have added the game to their library. For free games a more meaningful stat is "Lifetime users measured" which is how many people have loaded the game.
For comparison sake, at the time of writing, my free game's total license count is 28,850 where the measured players is 1,750.
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention..
But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is.
The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
what game? my pc is dead but ill play it once it's fixed.
@@anon2234 it's called "Playback Loop". A little puzzle game inspired by portal.
This should be top comment!
That concurrent playerbase? Damn made me look at my library
This is a terrible comparison.
A paid game on steam with 750k downloads will make you a millionaire.
The game didn't make money because it's free. The majority of money for indie devs comes from paid games, not cosmetics.
He had a terrible business strategy that is extremely uncommon with indie devs.
Comparing between triple A companies with investors and a small solo developer is also silly. They're on completely different universes in every term from marketing to monetization.
I'm saying this as a developer.
Yeah, I think we all understood that the lesson was to not make a game free
Did you watch the whole video? The game was pay to play at first. It made less during that time.
@@eric7591 Not every game will be a hit. He thought he could make more money by switching to F2P. He was wrong. Plain and simple.
@@cable7763 the simple fact of the matter is either the advertising was lackluster or people simply don't wanna play this game
pay to play with server running... basically a bad business plan@@eric7591 I know, we shouldn't measure all about profit but when we are talking about money to support your life.The we should be more strict about what he tries to do.
Having a operational cost without any fix revenues will destroy your profit margin for sure.
Making a free indie game is only slightly less lucrative than selling pocket lint on the street.
What the actual fuck are these bot replies
That sounds right.
If the game is free, how is it going to make money? Donations?
Also, making a game is hard. It takes a special kind of person to make a game by themselves. It will take you a LOT of time.
for bots, dont respond, and report them
Well yeah, it's hard to monetize free. It'll attract mostly kids without expendable income and they definitely won't pester their parents for micro transactions on super obscure games.
@@Xvladin Funnily enough, if you are going to make a free game and want to make money at the same time - the adult market is your friend. A lot of games make 2-3k a month in patreon/ko-fi subs due to early releases on there.
I would like to remind people.
This game has 10 people playing, 35 at 24 hour peak, and 93 all-time peak.
I actually think he made quite a lot of money with so little players.
The all time peak for this game is 75 players. On average there are about 10-20 players playing it at the same time. It's also free to play. So yeah these numbers aren't as surprising as charlie is making it sound. The original video is more likely a publicity move for the game.
The key here is that game devs should make a game that can stand out. If you're a solo developer making a multiplayer fps is probably not the best option. There are tons of games out there that are free and have bilion dollar corporations behind them and you cannot compete with that.
Make a game
Make a game.
Yeah, that kind of eats away that dev's entire point.
Braindead take
If you’re an indie dev, make single player games. Finish one and move on and make another, better game. No F2P, no server
This is the way
I agree. Making online games is too much
Definitely. You should only make F2P / Multiplayer games once you're financially stable and can afford to pay for servers, anti-cheat, live service, etc... Otherwise, you'll most likely fail
100%, charging $5 for that game with no micros and just let people earn cosmetics and it would make way more profit.
If you're an indie dev do whatever the fuck you want
Honestly this feels like a really bad example of how much a "popular" steam game makes, since I would hardly call this game popular. It has never broken 100 concurrent players despite the 700k downloads. And it's a FTP game, which makes the 700k downloads moot. The only thing that matters is, is it a game people want to play? And this is definitely not that.
That's what the video said..
As an indie dev who will potentially be homeless if my game doesn't pop off on Steam when I release it, I can tell you the pressures of a release you've sunken everything into, is utter hell.
hey man, im gonna embark on a c# + unity journey i have some experience in java upto OOP ,my first project in c#+unity will be a simple 2d platformer, i think ill learn alot while building this, but can i have some tips kindly if you dont mind? Things i should know that i probably dont and might regret later, things to lookout for, etc? Thank you !
What is your game called?
@@RG36c It's gonna be called Fever Meme. It's a cross between The Stanley Parable, Undertale, and rage games from 2007-2010 like I wanna be the Guy. It's really not quite like anything that currently exists. I'm currently working on the ending right now. It's on Steam, but no public store page is done yet. Been working tirelessly on it and the nerves are honestly setting in... but I have faith that it will at least have a bit of a cult following.
Seven cents 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🎷🦤
My favorite rapper
@Ksksissh-n8k tf is wrong with you.
The bots are gonna raid me now why did so many people like this comment 😭
The fuck is this reply section
@@Mari-Bio bro for real wtf
As a game developer I can expand this a little more. I have made 2 commercial games on steam. The 1st was a 3D roguelike that took me 1 year and the 1st month I got 2000 dollars. My 2nd game was basically a puzzle game focusing on putting together 2D models (gunplas) that took me only 4 months and gave me 82,000 dollars in the 1st month alone. I come from a Latin American country where the minimum wage is only approximately 400 dollars. Also I made all 100% alone.
What I want to say is that there is no correlation between the complexity of the game with the money it can make, its just offer and demand.
what are the names of the games you made?
Defeat Project 2025, vote blue this November!
ARE YOU THE DEV FOR MECH BUILDER??? VERY COOL GAME!
Wait, you made a plamo puzzle game???
This seems like it. Online FPS games are one of the harder genres. Tackling the casual audience seems like a much better idea to 'make money'. Simulator games, cosmetic collector games, card games, puzzle games, idle games
Having both a free version of my game on mobile and paid version on Steam I can confirm that the paid version on Steam made significantly more in two weeks than the free mobile version did in the past two years. Even though mobile games make up +/- 60% of the global gaming market revenue, it's really the top 1% doing all the heavy lifting there, with extremely large playerbases being required to come remotely close to being profitable (to the point where scummy monetization tactics don't seem that scummy anymore (in few cases))
I love your videos, keep up the great work!
a
So happy to see you, DualWielded. Bought your game (Incaved Runner)
W gamedev in the comments
good luck bro
As a developer myself, I will say there is some missing context here. This project was more about building up the resume than it is about making money. The returns on what this will do for a devs career are immeasurable. If you ask me, this was massively successful. Maybe not in a monetary way immediately, but for the future of his career down the road. Big kuddos. Very well done.
Paid games make a whole lot more money, even if they are $5
Game was paid to play for 5$ for first year and he only made 600$ from that year
yeah, im not familiar with the free to play model but for regular games you can make a lot of money if done correct. the choo choo charles dev made the game in 4 months and priced it at $20 and it sold really really well. indie is hard but indie free to play while also making money is brutal. if he priced the game like among us, just really cheap, he wouldve made way way more. if he had priced his game at $1.50 his gross revenue would've been above 1 mill, which obviously isnt totally accurate, cause refunds and people who only downloaded cause it was free but again, still significantly better if he just got a fraction of the downloads
Defeat Project 2025, vote blue this November!
@@Laiminoi I mean the ultimate sin was making a multiplayer game alone, either it's free to play and he makes no money, or it's pay to play and noone'll pay for it and noone will want to because there'd be no playerbase
exactly if bro had 700k download on a 10$ game he would've been filthy rich. His monetization method was trash and his numbers reflect that, i don't think it's a "game dev doesn't pay" type of situation
he could have sold the whole game for 1dollar to a 10th of the audience and made 70k more than he did.
Right? Something went really really wrong here?
Defeat Project 2025, vote blue this November!
Yeah Im thinking the same rn, these numbers seem so low because its a ftp game and most people prolly didnt bother with microtransactions since its not a cs or cod its just a fun little game they play time to time if it was even half a dollar he would make way more money off of that game.
That's what I thought too. Free to play games barely make any money and the number of people doesn't indicate money made.
@@ironmanlxixI support democrats but commenting like a bot would only dissuade people and send a opposite message.
8:49 I think if he had made the game $0.99, at least 5,000 people would've bought it. And at that price point, leaving in the microtransactions still seems ethical.
At 7:57 Charlie asks if it would have been better to keep the game "pay to play" and take fewer sales
The issue is that a multiplayer game like this can't support a small player base... Even if you have 100 people online, you can't just match someone in Australia against someone in North America. It needed to be free to make it playable.
Hey AIA
Judging off other comments it only peaked at 75 players anyways
@@Jan66600 heya Jan :D
Bro got his bro's back
Only a few minutes in and this is what I think of it so far.
• Passion project
• free to play
• (maybe inexpensive) micro transactions.
• didn't intend game to become a steady source of income for himself.
The fact that one guy created a game by himself, spending thousands of hours, developing it, testing it, and eventually releasing it and made over 2,000 dollars from it is really cool. It sounds like he has the skill sets and knowledge to make a bigger project. Hopefully with more people and maybe make a little more money. Just as long as it's not a cash grab or his last straw to make ends meet.
Defeat Project 2025, vote blue this November!
I immediately searched it up, this game apparently on steam has a height of 75 players max. No one in their right mind would've assumed this game would've made bank just by the downloads alone. I don't even think people look at downloads, they look at concurrent players
@@jaymerka5875 Also who tf is buying microtransactions on a paintball shooter
the microtransactions from what i saw went from around 1.70£-5£ roughly so not that bad
2000 dollars from thousands of hours of work is not really cool you dork wtf. That's like .50c an hour if not less
I completely forgot about paying for your own servers. Being multiplayer is a massive disadvantage I'd think financially.
Steam let's you just use their servers for multiplayer games and I assume that's what this person did
Depends on the choices the developer makes. If it's self hosted, chances are he's using steam transport, which is entirely free to use. For games that use dedicated servers, indies will often allow users to host their own servers to delegate costs. Then there's the poor few that use private dedicated servers, which come out of their pocket entirely and are often not cheap because server performance optimizations require a lot of dev time. These will hit the market for a quick cash grab then become unplayable once it costs too much to maintain
This is more about how a free game with micro transactions doesn't always make bank, but you can run the math on something like a 5 dollar game, if its a fun popular game, it will make bank. Simple.
Yeah but the problem is that if it was pay to play almost nobody would buy it and then it would immediately die since it's a multiplayer pvp game without a playerbase. Making the game free to play is the easiest way of getting people to play the game.
@@rallvegd Yeah multiplayer is a bad idea but for a singleplayer game you should release a polished demo.
@@rallvegd Yes, and no. Yes to the extent its a competitive space so you need to be really good to break out. No, to the extent games such as HLL, R6, Squad, PS, or Battle Bit all are paid shooters that made bank. Issue is its harder to go super indie and break out it seems, but then you have to have foresight to just pick a different genre.
@@rallvegd Thats where you go with a limited free play model. Or have free play weekends.
@@rallvegd if you dont know this on pc paying for indie games is very very common to the point where it is the norm 2-5 for a indie game is something i would rather pay for a good game over some ad infested hell
If only had chosen to sell the title for 99 cents per download instead of relying on microtransactions.
750k (ignoring the steam bloat) for a free indie arcade game is MUCH different from 750k on a 5$ indie story game or something. i personally didnt expect this thing to have made even as much as it had. Also if he was an experienced dev at the time of starting, this wouldve gone down from 3000 hours to maybe 200 hours. He was new but he got the skillset from it to get a better job or do this again
Yeah. People also don't realize that downloads doesn't mean that much (for money) if not a lot of people are playing it.
Someone said that this game hadn't even broken 73 concurrent players, and that was at its peak. And that's for a game that's free too.
750K downloads is very impressive, and the dev should be proud. But it's not weird that he didn't earn a lot from it.
PS. Big companies are still scummy for using so many micro transactions since they earn a ton from those games anyway since the playerbase for those games are huge. Indie games can use micro transactions though.
@@BlazeMaestroit’s not even that many downloads, only added to library. There is a different metric for how many have even opened the game.
@@BlazeMaestro yep its just steamDB auto adding stuff to your account its not downloads
game dev and charlie either dont know how to read stats. or its a publicity move
@@BlazeMaestro game has been on steam for like 4 years brother. We'll say consistent players for 3 years and an avg of 8 (counting for days with 2 and days of peak) 8k players.... so where is the 750k added to library? what about the 560k unique players? concurrent players is a bad way to judge because its only counting whats always happening at the current moment. Its not sharing player analytics or anything, its simply counting the amount of players at one time. You could have 50 people play in 2 hours and a concurrent view for every hour could show 25 on each hour if the players in the first hour got off and the players in the second hour got on, if that makes sense.
bro had 39 players at 1 pm yesterday, do you really think those are the same people playing at 1 am yesterday? LOL do you think these people are continually playing for almost every hour of the day??? bro hasnt had a consistent low month since 2021 (meaning avg 0 player a month)......
To be fair, this it's why when you start to develop indie games on your own, it's recommended to make smaller games and learn from them rather than directly making a bigger game and then learning from the mistakes.
Yeah, I watched this video a few days ago, this video is trending among new game developers like me. The key takeaway is don't make an F2P game if you're an Indie dev.
He definitely would've made a lot of money if his game wasn't F2P. While Steam takes 30%, Steam makes your game discoverable to more people than any other platform atm.
discoverability on Steam is funny
The key takeaway should be don't make micro transaction filled free to play 💩 at all.. it's killing the gaming industry
@@figgyfox8465 you are the type of gamer we need
Maybe the only reason that people bothered with it in the first place was being F2P?
Oh it's a free to play game where he relied on MTX?
lol
8:24 it’s so true. Big companies like Roblox or Fortnite have really made a fortune off of dlc or cosmetics. Just because their player count is higher, smaller free to play games don’t really make a whole lot off of cosmetics unless it’s tied to a brand
isn't roblox burning money rn though
@@NameUnknownzwait really? why?
@@sadtimesalwayshigh player count of kids that don’t constantly spend 20$ to buy something like adults do. Also to run an app as big as Roblox with as many users that it has as well with all the crossplay and fees from google play and AppStore and that’s before they even got to pay their employees and they have to pay for the servers as well I believe that they are yet to turn a profit
The player count being higher is something that scales the revenue more than linearly too - the problem small multiplayer games face is that nobody likes playing a dead game. Not only do you gain revenue from fewer people, but the amount of money you gain per person is also smaller too because people aren't as invested into your game (it's impossible to do any kind of skill based matchmaking because you don't have enough players for it, and even the people that are interested in playing the game will quickly lose interest if they can't regularly find matches etc.).
I'd you recommend reading "Blood Sweat and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Mad" by Jason Schreier published in 2016 also having a sequel, but that sequel is about games that got a Restart. This book as the title suggests talks about the hell that companies go through to bring us those video games, I wholeheartedly recommend this book, it will really open your minds.
that quote about the bible is amazing
Freemium games are bad mkay I rather just pay for the game
@DONTREADMYBIO1901🤖🤖🤖🤖
@@doctorstrange7768except this one isn’t a freemium game, the pay is purely cosmetic…. So it’s just a free game, as long as you aren’t a 8 year old with no self control and a parents credit card, it’s just a free game
@@doctorstrange7768 you obviously never heard of warframe
Exactly
Solo indie dev here.
When it comes to online free to play games like this, you always have to take concurrent players into account. It is VERY HARD as a solo developer to make a game that is engaging enough to keep people coming back in the thousands. So many games just get added to people’s Steam library and they never end up touching it. Because of this, a solo developer can make a passion project like this, but still end up making actual pennies a *month* because they don’t end up keeping players engaged long enough to play it for longer than a day or two. This is why developers often look for publishers and backers for their projects.
How is this surprising? It's a small one-person project with 0 marketing
Free-to-play games with microtransactions are cancer. The developer should now release a 'DLC' that permanently unlocks access to all the DLCs/in-store items for the price of what the game would be if it hadn't been made free-to-play. This way he gets another chance at making it work.
i dont see how any of this is shocking. the game has never had more than 73 players playing at one time. and its free, and it doesnt force you to buy anything.
I'm confused. What's the problem here? Just because someone spends a lot of time on something doesn't necessitate compensation for it. How is this Steams problem? The guy spent his time developing a game no one cares about. That's just a bad business decision.
Yea lol, it’s basically just concord in that no one plays it. But in this case it’s somehow sad because it’s one person who failed as opposed to a whole team of devs?
@@100StepProgramwell the concord devs don’t need the game to perform well to feed their families. They’re taking home the same amount of money either way. Indie devs don’t have that guarantee. I think that makes indie failures sadder.
Yep and he made it free to play
Yeah I don't get it either. The game doesn't seem to attract players, so of course there's no money to be made. And I'm not trying to be mean, but 3000 hours is a lot of time for something that looks like an engine demo from 2010.
@@argo8028they could always get a real job
Bro spent 4 years on this game and still had 75 players peak. Where's all the 700k downloads?!
It's probably just the same people redownloading the game after their friends had nothing to do
by the looks of it its the kinda game people downloaded, played for an hour and never touched again
@@tango_cathal2029 True, but even the slop like Dustborn had 83 players peak. Mostly due to the Twitch streamers, but this game has like 5k - 10k downloads or something, so this can't possibly be that the free to play title with 70 times more downloads has slightly less peak players than a sloppy $30 title
@@TermoPlays bro was ahead of the bots 🚬
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention..
But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is.
The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
As a game developer myself his results are not an issue with the industry but rather his game. His game lacks any uniqueness and it is quite low quality.
stop talking nonesense
what quality bro he is indie game ? bet u cant even create ur own art xD talking like making unique art and mechanics is easy.
@@xoomzera2830 why should a consumer care how difficult it is. His criticisms are fair and he didn't say it was easy.
@@AmonTerrible its called indie for a reason we dont play indie game cuz of their art and quality content.
@@xoomzera2830 most people don't differentiate games based on if it's indie or not. It's based on if it's a fun and unique experience. So your take on this doesn't seem to be in sync with reality.
@@ananyaig they do actually most of the educated people out there at least.
Last time i was talking with my friend he said something along with "Oh its an indie game, It would be full of bugs"
indie = low quality xD
for other maybe just cuz they don't know
I'm a game developer for 9 years, I still haven't commited to my OWN game.. instead i work for others. The financial risk for every project is harsh.... most games do between 0$-15k lifetime... Games i worked on average around 200k but these games still don't break even (paying all the devs/artists etc). Only top games survive and even those have a hard time scaling.
Most games never make £2000 I doubt most have ever made £1000
@@mrECisME thats factually incorrect. making unpopular games doesnt make money.
the guy in the video didnt have 700k downloads. he had 700k added to accounts. these are very very different. one can be automated by things like steamDB free packages
@@DeputyFish eh guy didn't make money cuz his monetization sucks... There are definitely lot of games that make just 2k. But most games are closer to that 15k.
More advanced teams can typically secure at least 200k but still pretty hard
One thing about game design and dev: Everyone thinks they have a great idea for a great game. Then they tried to make it, and slowly strip down their ideas to the barebones due to time, money, technical and skill limitations.
3:08 not a mental image I want
Biggest tip for indie devs is to not spend a ton of time on a game, polishing it and making it look pretty, and continuously dumping time and effort into it if it doesn’t pay off. Instead make something quick, but unique and fun, maybe it doesn’t look incredible, but it’s still fun. Games entire purpose is to be fun, not look good.
as per steam, this game had 90 players peak, and is around 30 players average even tho a lot of people "downloaded it" they did not get invested enough to care about it,
That Bible reference of nobody reading it but pretending to be experts on it was spot on lol
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention..
But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is.
The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
I was sorta shocked to hear that often developers will overprice their game by 20% and then have it at a 20% discount so that Steam sends emails out to those who have wishlisted it
That's a common tactic outside of steam or gameS
The price is the price.
Imagine your shock when you learn that that's how it is with every single retail item you ever buy, from underwear to appliances.
thats illegal to do. no joke look it up. you cant have something on permanent clearance like that
You also described Amazon's business model.
The video title should be: why you shouldn’t make a f2p game as an indie dev
2:16 you know what else is shockingly low Charlie? an all-time peak of 73 players, 6 reviews for the game... in 4 years. Making a little over 500 bucks a year for an absolute FLOP of a game that almost no one has played ? doesn't seem that bad when you actually look at the stats.
thats not the point, the point is that the game dev spent around 6k hours developing a game over the course of like 4 years that gave him a net gain of less than 2k dollars.
@@monkeybooger89 That's because he's a beginner, lol. Dude just made a random game in which most of those hours were spent learning the things he needed, not because he was being productive with the time.
The point is, there's good developers out there who've made a lot of money with not even half of this guy's effort. It's a skill issue, not a social / industry issue. The developer of the game in this video should expect to spent about 10 years making games over and over again, without seeing anything in return. That's how the life of a successful game developer looks like - makes 1,000 games throughout a decade of trial and error, and maybe he gets lucky with one of the projects.
@@Mitroiul bro said it is not a social/industry issue then states that a life of a successful game developer is to make 1,000 game to maybe get lucky with one. That is absurd bro and definitely sounds like an industry issue if developers are being paid less than minimum wage for a decade in the hopes to make profit eventually lmao. That sounds like a huge industry issue.
@@Solar-sx7kh It's like that with literally any creative job where you get to create what you want, I hope you're aware of that. If you want to be a singer, actor, painter, game developer, literally anything where you get to create whatever you want, then be prepared for the chance you'll do that your whole life without getting anything out of it.
If you want safety, then you get a normal job where you're told what to do.
It's not an industry problem because the game fails to have success because of its own shortcomings, not because it's not being payed back properly.
99.9% of game developers make retarded games and it's only them who thinks they're good. So yes, 99.9% of game developers will not make anything out of the "games" they make. It's a skill issue combined with a lack of business experience that creates this problem.
99% of game developers have no idea what to do with a game besides making it. Most game developers are shit when it comes to making games as a business instead of making games for the sake of making them for their own fun. And guess what, that will mean they won't be able to make a game that actually makes money.
Making a good game and making a good game that makes money are 2 completely different things and they require 2 completely different skill sets, which the majority of people do not posses.
@@Mitroiul there’s no point in arguing with you bro if your argument is made on baseless claims and opinionated. You say 99.99% of developers are independent creators and i doubt the majority of developers are independently creating and not connected to a group of developers or some studio like affiliation.
So indeed just like start up companies game developing comes with a high risk and one of the factors that determine the success is the need for the product, but to say the majority of game developers are “entrepreneurs” ( whatever term you would call independently creating your own game ) I think is absurd. The developers for bigger successful studios being underpaid is certainly more than a demand or supply issue and could be considered a social/industry issue.
I spend 1000+ hours on my top down game "Space Warden" and i made hold your horses guys (300 bucks!) but anyway now i am applying for gaming company and there is a big change i gonna get a job, me as self-tough to be a game dev in real AA company i am so happy ;)
The fact people are shocked that a free game didn’t make enough money is shocking to me. I had a game priced at 5 dollars that made me 1000 dollars in a week. What is even the point of this video
Whats it called?
Name?
What game you made?
Consider yourself successful as an indie dev then. 1000 in a week probably puts you in the 95th percentile of indie devs.
Yeah. "So, you are telling me that your niche free to play indie game that relies almost entirely on microtransactions that barely anyone is motivated to buy, makes only a handful of dollars? No way!!!"
It's crazy how this one video probably changes the life of this developer in a very positive way
To be fair, when making a free to play game with micro-transactions, downloads don't equate to people spending money. Especially now that the market is pretty oversaturated with the same model, people are becoming less willing to pay for in-game cosmetics.
So he made a cookie cutter FTP shooter with microtransactions in an overflooded genre...
... not sure what he expected
3 things:
- Free to play is a no go if you're indie and unpopular. Simply bcs ppls will never really spend money on microtransaction for a f2p indie game, unless it become really popular, but if it's not, ppls don't care about having a skin in a game with a player base of 75 ppls average !
- Tbh his game is very generic, there is already tons of low poly shooter around on Steam, so it's clearly not helping his case. You're better go with a niche community, like parkour game or something like that (this is just an example), the type of game you see less often (FPS/TPS scene is flooded)
- It was probably a project made for fun or learning game dev.
no one would pay for it if it wasn't free and he wouldn't be able to have an active playerbase which is important for a multiplayer game. I think f2p was definitely the right call for him as a starting developer with no backing.
@@Solar-sx7kh Yeah for sure, with the current state of his product he would never had anyone purchasing it, what I'm talking is instead of making a generic shooter and make it free to play and pray for your game to get some "success", make a paid game, but a good one, that ppls will want to buy !
as somebody who thought about game developing, ill stick to my totally non illegal practices
Just released my first game on steam. Around 20 people have downloaded it 150 wishlisted it and as an indie developer that is good enough for me and I am so happy people are playing it and having fun.
What's it called? I might check it out.
what is called
Bros advertising in the comment section😂 WHATS IT CALLED ILL BUY IT RIGHT NOW
Name ?
The game is called adrift for anyone that wants to know
Budget is pretty tough for game developers
ignore the bots, engagement is what they need to boost their channel.
Defeat Project 2025, vote blue this November!
No the guy just made a bad business decision
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention..
But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is.
The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
@@jessemach5817 should have made this game on Roblox!
People commenting without watching 10 seconds is crazy
@Ksksissh-n8kthat’s not okay that’s not funny she just lost her dog you have to be as mentally insane as the joker to laugh at that
tf are these bots
You only need 10 seconds to understand a critikal video.
@TheCoolDude4 what is wrong with u
@sorceryvr-un6ns It’s another troll bot, ignore and move on
Game dev is legit probably one of the hardest professions available: volatile job stability, constant tech knowledge chasing, contract mercenary-like jobs, always behind and not knowing what youre doing even if you think you know.
Low pay for the most part when junior jobs in other industry sectors get paid the same amount as someone in games industry with 10+ years exp, wild gatekeeping and silo'ed circles, corporate takeovers squeezing fun out of games and product for dollars to feed their own pockets and not the devs. Etc.
my ass working on my game design degree rn: 🧍♂️
I could of told you that
3:03 42 cents per hour is less than Chinese sweatshop workers earn.
I guarantee you his living/human rights situation is far better than any sweatshop worker. Considering he had the time and means to be able to even dedicate so much time to this project.
As a developer, this is reasonable.
Programming takes a fuck ton of time, too much time even.
However, the amount of time his players actually spent playing the game is low af. Firstly, it'd a free to play game, most of the downloads are just that... downloads.
He probably has a fraction of them actually playing the game. And finally, if his game is super generic, I'm not surprised that they will only play once, twice, or a few times. And they certainly won't feel like it'd be worth their money to make an IAP.
Programming websites and games, is just like RUclips.
The process to create the content takes a fuck ton of time, but what matters financially isn't the time you put into that product, but the time that the users of that product will use it... And if they actually like using it.
Comparing game development to a chef or sandwich artist, is stupid as they're two completely different types of jobs in terms of payouts.
If anyone thinks Steam should give them more money or something is just straight up wrong.
You explained it perfectly
Solo dev here, one of my games currently earns me $20 a month, and it took about a year and a half to make. There's a lot of willpower and passion needed for someone who's working solo or in a small team to be able to create something they find meaningful, even though it takes so long and makes so little money. Obviously some games blow up, but that's usually not the case. I think it would go a long way if most people understood that. Sometimes I see small games that are just a few bucks getting chastised by players who think there's some collective of developers working on it with a salary when it's just some guy doing it for free. On the flipside, AAA companies will literally give you the bare minimum(for their caliber) and charge you $70 and there's always some people who will defend the game with their life despite being shown no respect by the company that produced the game. While this topic seems to be more oriented to how a developer can fare financially, I think some would be happy knowing the players understand how much love they've put into it, making a game is hard.
hey man, im gonna embark on a c# + unity journey i have some experience in java upto OOP ,my first project in c#+unity will be a simple 2d platformer, i think ill learn alot while building this, but can i have some tips kindly if you dont mind? Things i should know that i probably dont and might regret later, things to lookout for, etc? And what type of game did you make? Thank you !
and also what platform did you make your game for/released it on and what engine did you use ?
@Memeaic I use unity to make games. I've only done 3D so I don't have much advice on 2D, but from what other devs tell me you'll need to put a lot of effort into the movement controller of the character to avoid issues. You also should plan early on for certain movement related features such as the ability to move up slopes, and then stick to that plan. I've heard of people try to add slopes later on in developement and coming across lots of problems because a lot of their systems are not built for it. There's probably a few devlogs you can find specifically about slope-induced issues. Basically, know exactly what you're going for, and keep things as simple as possible. I'm not sure if people use different coding techniques for platformers but you should also look up state machines before you get too far into making your controller.
@@CodeRed0 Thank you, would u say making 3d games is easier than 2d? Also how long did it take for you to learn to make a game so well that it can be sold? And how did you learn? youtube tutorials? Any recommendations about how i approach or not approach this journey? thank you very much :D
@@Memeaic I already had a coding background since my childhood so I kinda had a head-start there, but if I ever got stuck I would check youtube tutorials or the documentation. The documentation is basically a big 'book' of every class in unity, what properties they have, and what functions they have, so there's pretty much nothing you can't find in it. For me, 2D seems a lot tougher but I'm not very traditionally artistic, and most 2D games require lots of art. 3D feels like it has a lot lower bar for entry so I was able to start with an ugly game and learn a lot about 3D art and slowly improve. That being said, it definitely depends on the individual, some people are extremely talented at pixel art, and they'd probably have no problem with the art side of making a game.
I met you when you came to my University to film something, so, it's refreshing to see a Gamer RUclipsr address and learn this kind of thing. I was studying Game Dev at the time, so, feels good to hear stuff is finally getting to some people in the RUclipsr community.
Man just develop Roblox tower defense games, they make hella bank for no reason 😂😂
Fr😂
Roblox is the way
This doesn't seem like a good enough representation for how much a game dev makes on steam. This game doesn't seem like it did well.
There's so much to consider with this. As an indie dev with a multiplayer game I'm currently working on, or trying to find more time to lmao, I calculated the server costs (for my game in it's current state) to be about $2 per year per player if that player were to be playing 24/7 for that entire year, or about $0.0003 per hour played per person.
It’s important to differentiate when you’re speaking about a free game or paid game, I thought this was a paid game and couldn’t believe my ass, till I realized it was a free game
A paid game seeking at the hundred K’s would make the dev a ton of money
am I missing something here? its a free to play game regardless of downloads, it isn't steams fault that people aren't buying microtransactions
It's worse because it wasn't even a good game. It flopped with a peak player count of 73.
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention..
But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is.
The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
The point is that making a profitable game as an indie developer is really really difficult.
@@rallvegd don't make it free to play then
@@Zeno617 It's still difficult.
damn i wonder if even charging just .50 would’ve made a big difference in his life
This is why, when I make a game, it's gotta be for fun. I stopped working on a mobile game I was making. I'm still gonna finish it eventually just to get the experience and learn
Honestly I wouldn't be mad if we slowed down on the f2p/microtransaction/dlc model. These AAA devs seem to think they're entitled to whales and design their games around sucking as much money as possible out of well-off parents with obsessive/hyperfixated/autistic children.
It’s free to play idk what the dev expected. The shop doesn’t look like anything I’de want to buy even if the game looks fun.
If you have an attention span bigger than a goldfish and you can use your tiny ADHD brain, you'll see that the game was NOT free for the first year and he made no money either
@@kaykmartins7335dude thought he ate with that 😂 ur a loser lol
@@kaykmartins7335 because the game sucks. it's player count is less than 100, he was never gonna make money
@@kaykmartins7335 game looks boring, and honestly looks kinda like shovelware. Sometimes those pop off, but that’s rare. still don’t know what he expected.
how dare youtube hide this from me for 39 seconds 😡
0:01
Kids will literally do whatever to get attention..
But it's hilarious how mf piss poor their Grammar, and English is.
The accounts they make, and the shit they spam is so mf pathetic.. At least we all can collectively agree, that they'll never amount to anything in their sad pathetic lives.
I imagine Charlie has a better influence on small Steam games than as advertised.
When I first published to steam I thought if I made a half decent game with good gameplay I would make decent amount of money, I was dead wrong. Your game needs to not just be good but look good and be advertised well, I’m still trying to get there. Anyone wanting to get into games needs to do their research and know the realities of the industry, there’s a lot of competition out there.
Why not say what your game is?
@@erc3338They are “The Silicon Shadow” and “Lazer Rush Reloaded” with a third on the way “What Happens After Midnight”. As I stated with the initial comment they don’t look very good aesthetically but they play well, I think my new one looks decent and I have more hope for it.
@@erc3338The games are “The Silicon Shadow” and “Lazer Rush Reloaded” their flawed especially aesthetically but I’m getting better and am hopeful for my next game “What Happens After Midnight”.
The most important thing is to be unique. This guy made a free to play shooter, he's competing with valorant, csgo 2 etc. You're not gonna win that battle. Make your own space, set your own genre or revive a dormant one, that's the path to success
@@Ashton_Cats You don't really gotta be super unique just different enough and play into a niche and harbour a community around it along with advertising which you can do for free on sites like reddit, discords, youtube which a lot of devs are doing now and is a growing community sending cold emails and keys to youtubers asking them to try out the game which can work as well once it's in pre release you also need to price your game right not too cheap but not too expensive
0:32 I see you reading this
80% skill issue 20% luck
Why expect that a solo dev is skilled with engineering, art, marketing and game design
I learnt game development in college, i saw how bad it is, especially the amount of people have mental break downs in the field, i chose to walk away and go on a different road
definitely better to get a degree in something that can translate to game dev but not necessarily focused on game dev. Just so you have that flexibility!
Makes me respect indie devs even more. That they'd sacrifice their time for a passion project.
I thought he would’ve ATLEAST made 20k with the amount of downloads his game has
Ur werid @Ksksissh-n8k
@@Sukuna_da_Goatxx5dont reply to the bot. it gives them engagement, something you dont want.
Why do you think Steam pays people for downloads? They don't. It has peak 73 players on steam, and he's crying about not making money on it
@@bigsupernothing6082peak 73 players all time?
It's free to play, so his downloads don't matter. And when it was pay2play, he only got 600. So his game just isn't it.
you know what else is shockingly low Charlie? an all-time peak of 73 players, 6 reviews for the game... in 4 years. Making a little over 500 bucks a year for an absolute FLOP of a game that almost no one has played ? doesn't seem that bad when you actually look at the stats
Yeah, I read in other comments that the average playtime is 13 minutes. Which is absolutely abysmal if true for a multiplayer game. Honestly, I don't even know why you'd make a multiplayer game as an indie dev considering how oversaturated with the titans that space is (even F2P with Mtx) vs. how there's an absolutely bustling indie scene for singleplayer games.
It has 1500 reviews and having around 50 people always on your multiplayer servers is good for an indie dev
Bot stealing comments??
Reported
my game "Death Delivery" made only $200 in 1 weeks and its only $3 😢
Friendly reminder to put your shopping carts in the corrals 🛒
Or foreigners will cook off it
Never!!!!!!
This is either gonna be very interesting, very humbling, or very horrible.
Oddly abit of all 3 😂
I mean, It’s because he made a F2P game as a indie, As a game dev, I will tell you, This was a bad idea, You as an indie dev usually want to sell your game for around $5-$20
Not free it won’t work as well as you think.
If your game has $750,000 sales and your charging $15
You’re making bank that way.
I want to challenge that opinion of yours, if it's your first game you should be building your audience, you should be trying to get loads of people playing it, if people weren't really buying it before, then he needed to reevaluate, and if making it F2P so he gets a bigger audience then yeah that's quite fine to do, going off install metrics is what's bad, what he needs to do is go by metrics of played time, then see if people put in a few hours.
Flat out saying F2P is a bad idea is very ignorant, you should be selling cheap and building an audience, then, that audience is there for the next game to make sales, or, monetize the game a little better.
I would've made the game 0.99c, and done free in game items rather than DLC, but none of us know what the reasoning of things were, all of this is assumptions.
@@DRJuicyBear I mean yes, But no, If your making a free game you need to assure your making money somehow unless your not taking it seriously. If you are, Make a paid game and advertise, F2P is very unreliable when you don’t have an audience to begin with.
I can see where your coming with but it’s not very feasible if you want to make money, Great to start build a small following or get some quick cash but you really need something big to truly get started for free.
Hense why most developers that make really good indies usually charge that $5-$20 range, It’s quality and enough effort you want money in return
I have huge respect for game devs. I’m a programmer in a different field and i chose money over game dev. I would do game dev in a heartbeat if it paid. The same people making these games are also the ones that could be making bank with their skills somewhere else but choose to follow their passion instead. That takes determination , willpower , and a willingness to put your heart into something.
That minimum wage I wish as Canadian 3:42
Doesn’t everything cost more in Australia?
Minimum wage in Canada is $15 lol, and everything is expensive, America minimum wage is a lot less
I wouldn't consider this game "popular" is the conventional sense. As someone else pointed out the game never broke 73 concurrent players. It was out 4 years as a free 2 play and made barely $4,000. A very small percentage of people bought the in-game microtransactions. This is a bad example to use for discussing how much money a steam game makes, even for an Indie Dev.
Well it’s not like everyone has made a perfekt game, I think this example is good for a lot og diff developers
+ 750k downloads isnt really bad
@@gottcha0330 That's the amount of times it was added to libraries, not downloads.
45-50 average players is good tho
@@glovishly still 750k is pretty good
5:46 no Charles, vegetables are good for you
Not true,vegetables have anti nutrients so they are worse than meat items
it makes total sense that this game made that much money. only a small portion of that download population played it for more than 10 minutes (or even opened it), and of the few that did, another smaller portion paid for microtransactions. half my steam games that i've PAID for, i've never actually opened.
>free to play game
>"why hasn't this game made a lot of money🤔"
bruh
As Thor pointed out, one unicorn micro-transaction on WoW made more money than Starcraft 2: Wings of liberty.
As a game developer myself of 5 years (Not a solo dev but I've worked on fun projects alone) there is absolutely no way he spent well over 3k hours on this, $1000 on assets is practically a finished game, it'd probably take a few weeks to set it all up perhaps even a few months, another note that this is a really simple game, low-poly shooters come out almost monthly at this point, shit even Roblox has games like this. Originality is key, doing a project like this is bound to not go anywhere
700k owned copies is a big throw off too, game never got past 100 active players meaning most of these people never even download the game, they just leave it idle in their steam library.
yes game development is no joke especially as a solo dev, but these numbers might have been slightly boosted - supposedly he's been doing game development for 8 years, I don't know if I believe that either
I highly respect him for being honest about his earnings though
I'm also not hating or anything I just wish this was more clear in his video
I'm really glad this project helped him learn more about this side of it all!
- Pro-tip to indie game devs, please don't make projects free :D Loved that part LOL
"even Roblox has games like this" Phantom Forces is an actual honest to god good Battlefield/CoD esque shooter that blows this project out of the water.
As an aspiring/rookie dev, think the business/financial side can be the biggest challenge along marketing, the stuff outside of the game can be just as difficult