How I Made $6,249 from Gamedev as a Teenager

as you saw in the title i've made six thousand two hundred forty nine dollars from game development as a teenager i'm still a teenager and this number is going up every day so by the time you see this six thousand two hundred forty nine dollars will be an inaccurate number this amount was calculated on november 18th i've actually only released two commercial games one in 2018 and 2019 however i actually made more money from game dev in 2020 than i did in 2018 or 2019 i'll get into why in the categorical breakdown while these numbers are good and all i know that a lot of people are watching these types of videos because they're curious about how hard it is to make a living from game development so this number on its own isn't particularly important making 6249 in a week is completely different from making it in 10 years there's a lot of fuzzy stuff behind that number as well that i'd like to get into and this is the first as of now i've put a bit over 300 hours into commercial game development but most of my time i'm not working on projects that'll make money that said working on those projects got me to where i am skill wise when you add in those hours i've spent a bare minimum of 1 000 hours on game dev i have no clue what the actual number is though when you throw in all types of coding art etc easily goes over 2 000 hours it's also worth noting that about 600 of the money made from the 6349 comes from youtube which i don't consider commercial development i'll get into the categorical breakdown in a bit but there's one last thing i'd like to point out about the youtube situation many people making these types of videos fueled their earnings with their presence on youtube in my case most of my sales were made without the promotional power of the decent sized youtube channel i have now now for the categorical breakdown where things get really fuzzy depending on your definition of game div first up i'd like to talk about the sales themselves i've made money from traditional sales on both steam and h2io but i've also made money participating in bundles the sales are from a combination of donations for free games and payments for paid games the first paid game i released is super potato bra which sold over twice as well as my second game my second paid game is drawn down abyss while the sales weren't that great on their own it actually gave quite a big boost to super potato bro sales so i don't consider it a failure since i haven't released any games since 2019 i think it's worth noting that i'm significantly better at game development now and i think i could do better if i made another paid game i'm actually considering taking a break halfway through my big project that i have devlogs on to make another paid game in about 100 to 200 hours anyways onto the sales numbers on steam i've actually only made about 1 432 dollars in gross revenue a lot of people seem to break down how much they actually get out of the gross revenue but this actually violates the nda that the developers including me have with valve so i won't go into how much of that i actually got if you notice there are three big spikes for the revenue graph and four on the units graph there's also an absurdly high number of lifetime units total the three spikes are associated with specific events the first bike is the release of my commercial game on steam super potato bread the second spike is the release of my second steam game drawn down to miss the third spike is actually from when my channel experienced a ton of growth because the youtube algorithm took off with my how to code almost any feature video this spike was much shorter in duration than the others so even though the spike is tall i didn't get as much money as i did from the other two the extra spike in the units graph is from when i participated in a bundle i got paid a decent amount to put my game in a bundle and essentially give out the game for dirt cheap the bundle sales use keys so they don't count towards my steam revenue i'll get into the details of that in a bit on insta io i actually made quite a bit more than i did on steam i've made a grand total of 2193.49 of which 622 dollars and 14 cents were from donations on free games since i'm under no ndas here i can actually share the profit split as well the cool thing about this io is that you can choose how much you give to itch to io at first i had it at 15 but for the overwhelming majority of my sales i've had it at 10 which is what most people have it at there is the extra cost of passing money through paypal so i actually get less than 90 most money goes from consumers paypal accounts into h2io which i have to pay the fees for then i send it to my paypal account which is another fee normally those fees combined are about 10 so realistically i get a bit under 80 percent of the revenue from it to io one important thing to point out is that steam doesn't pay through paypal so i don't have to pay these fees for steam there's a lot to cover here and i'm trying to not make this video an hour long so next up is the bundle i participated in it was a bundle on indiegala and i ended up with 342.68 cents lots of keys were given out that time and i suspect it reduced my future sales a bit that's where that odd unit count in my steam analytics comes from overall i think it was a good move but it didn't give me that big of a net benefit just last month i started a patreon account which has earned me 18.48 cents after patreon's cut for that first month there's a link to that in the description if you're interested in supporting me i suspect this will make up more of my revenue in the future but i just started it so it's not too much right now next up is youtube i just got monetized this year and i've made all of 626.63 with an average of a whopping 91 cents per thousand views out of all the things i do for money youtube pays the worst by far i put in around 20 hours per month and get about 80 dollars per month which is less than half the minimum wage where i am that said it has made me a bit extra since it leads to patrons and some game sales it's also worth noting that i'm getting some sponsorship offers so my income from youtube may go up significantly if i decide to accept one this final category is the source of the majority of my current income from game dev at the moment and it's the reason i've made more this year than any other year from game development it's freelancing i get a lot of offers for freelance development for both games and non-games i'm only talking about games right now so the income for this area excludes the non-game dev jobs that said non-game dev jobs tend to pay better most offers i get are for some pretty awful wages some of which are below minimum wage because the clients aren't from the us or europe one of which was supposedly a local government entity from a south american country personally i have no interest in working on projects for larger companies so i get pretty strict with the offers i accept i've taken two offers for game dev neither of which were small jobs i'm not entirely sure if i can just quote i'm not entirely sure if i can disclose what i was working on but here are the numbers i made one thousand four dollars and 78 cents from the first job i took and for the second i have made 631 dollars for 24 cents so far the way i got these jobs was rather interesting the first one was because the client was familiar with my work but i don't think it was at all related to my youtube channel i actually ran into the client in a discord server and we started talking there's a combination of luck in me running into the client and the fact that the client already knew who i was that got me the job the second one is a bit more like what i see most of the time nowadays i think the client knew me from my youtube channel and sent me an email that's it for the categorical breakdown that all adds up to 6249 just keep in mind that my revenue share is not included in that number for game sales with all that said i think the big lesson here is that improving skills in a specific area can open you up to all sorts of income if you're looking for them don't be strictly confined to a single channel of income indie game div is a difficult business to be in i've actually made an average of over 20 an hour working as a solo nd developer but that comes after many years of experience i've been making games for over seven years now mostly as a hobby i started when i was 12. you might still be wondering about that second part of the title and how i fit all this into my schedule if you remember what i said earlier i've put about 1 000 hours into activities relating to this at a minimum and i think it's much higher but i don't think it's above 3 000 hours there are people with 3 000 plus hours in cs go or league of legends at my age so it's not a huge deal to put that much time into this stuff up until 2018 i did programming and game development only when i felt like it which was fairly rarely recently i've been getting into more of a schedule since it's part of how i make money now i've been taking college classes since 2017 and this year i added in a job where i do software engineering work just putting in a few hours per week over seven years really does go a long way so it's not a huge deal if you've got a busy schedule as long as you're able to keep going at it for a long time i've managed to put in at least two thousand hours into gaming in the last three years as well a significant portion of which went into vr so i wouldn't consider myself particularly productive in an organized way the big tip for productivity in my opinion is to just make sure you don't spend 90 of your free time browsing the internet in your bed like you're probably doing right now there's stuff you can do after that which i'm still working on but you gotta make that first step twitter facebook instagram and reddit etc are massive wastes of time in my opinion youtube is a bit more of a mixed bag since there is educational content here like my tutorials but for the most part people are burning time one last note i'd like to end on is that if you're looking at this from a get rich quick perspective you're looking at it wrong work to improve yourself first and the money will naturally follow [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: DaFluffyPotato

Views: 142,362

Keywords: DaFluffyPotato, money, finance, earnings, game development, programming, computer science, steam, itch.io, freelancing, freelance, work, jobs, income, python

Id: cFxzkuXwV00

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SyDevas]

I saw this video already! Quite inspiring to see your strategies to make it as a success!