Passive Income For Game Developers - 5 Ways To Make It

what is going on guys my name is Timur awake and today we're gonna talk about passive income for game developers this was a request that I got from will Taylor will is one of our awesome underground elite members which by the way if you enjoyed underground elite there's a link in the description if lots of cool stuff like video requests like this that we can do will wants to know what are some passive income methods for game developers and he didn't ask this specifically but I know from talking to him and I know from interacting more than that he's looking to build a business and kind of generate some revenue on the side while he works on games and stuff so passive income makes total sense passive income is like the Holy Grail right it's like the it's like the thing that everybody wants like it and if you don't know what passive income is it's basically income that comes in passively you get chicks in the mail you get auto stuff in your bank you get you know notifications via PayPal whatever it is and you don't actually have to do anything you set it up once and then the money just keeps flowing in so I have something to say first and that is sorry to burst everybody's bubble but there's no such thing as passive income truly passive income right there's things that you can set up and do once and benefit for a long time there's things that could take a lot of work upfront and make you money you know every month there are things that you can do but it takes a lot of work so truly passive income where just you get free money in every month doesn't exist so I just want to get that out there but beyond that there are actually five ways that I think you can generate passive income and I've done a lot of these in various different forms and I want to share them with you because I feel like they're really important and they're really things that if you know about I think each person has their own preference and each person has their own you know assets and knowledge and understanding and all that stuff so picking one or two specific probably one if you you know if you want to really like hone in on it I think is a good idea because if you get good at something you can get really really good at and I've definitely honed in so number one I would say and this this only applies to people that already have money because the only the true form of like passive income I think our residuals or interest coming in from the bank so if you've got a lot of money in the bank you can put it into index funds you can put it into stock so you can put it into how your bank accounts you can do a lot of stuff with money basically you can have your money generate money and that is passive income but obviously if you have a whole bunch of money in the bank you're probably not looking for passive income you probably have figured out a way to generate income in a way that works for you maybe not maybe you got inherited or you won the lottery or something but I feel like that's the only no work way to generate money you know it is risky right there's always risk there's not there's not any no risk no work ways to generate passive income so that's one of those I think that's probably inaccessible for most of us though so number two I think is to sell your tools and a lot of you guys know that when I started game development one of the first things I started with the FPS creator engine and with that engine it was cool it was like drag-and-drop and you could create cool little FPS levels but there was no way to import my own models into the software and I got really bummed about that because yeah it was an FPS creator but there was no way for me to make my own FPS I had to make their FPS with their stuff so I wrote a tool a piece of software that basically allowed you to get your own models in if you've included a gun you could set the fire rate the projectile all that stuff if you imported a character it would you walk you through the animations and all that and I sold the tool online 29 bucks and I made a ton of money that's how I got into marketing I learned how to to do that over time I learned how to sell the product and people would buy it from PayPal the link we get always delivered to and that was beautiful man because I made a ton of money at a time where I really needed it and I used to joke because I had a PayPal debit card at the time and the thing would never run out of money like obviously I didn't run out and buy like a bunch of expensive I just used it for like food and and phone bill and stuff but because people kept buying it on the internet and the money would just go into the account and the software get auto delivered it didn't require any work on my part and the card was just it just had like it never ran out of money for like two and a half years and it was great and I think that's the closest I've ever come to passive income I saw selling tools like that can be really effective obviously you have to make sure that your tools are highly needed and wanted by the community right you have to do your vetting you have to understand the needs of your customer I couldn't have done that with any random tool it was a tool that was very needed for the FPS creator community people used it a lot people really appreciated it and you know something that was needed and I saw a need that was unfulfilled and I and I filled that and you know it didn't work out for - Elka's FPS creator went on to new versions and then you know other engines came in and unity and and my software wasn't compatible with the new versions and all that so it eventually kind of faded away but it's something to just take into consideration right if you build tools or you build something you could be online these days a lot of people build the web applications right not just like software I think that's where the future is going so if you build anything that's useful that there's a need for that's unfulfilled you can sell it online and generate passive income you could set up the whole system to where it just works automatically and automated so that's number two number three is to sell your assets a lot of us create things and and I don't just mean hard assets a lot of us create things that are byproducts of our game that we don't necessarily even think about like if you've wrote some cool functions that do some really interesting things you could sell those online if you have some cool source code from a little mobile game you built there are sites where you can sell your entire source code and game online someone's likely gonna buy it repackage your game and throw it up in the App Store something but you made money off of it and you likely made more money than they did because you can sell source code for you know 50 hundred couple hundred bucks sometimes and for like a mobile game at least it goes larger for bigger projects so selling assets like that or selling art assets you know if you're if you model you can sell your stuff if you make 2d images you can sell that stuff and you can look at like specifically on like the unity asset store but there are also a ton of places online where you can sell this stuff you just one Google search away and you'll find a bunch of stuff so selling assets is something that I think is kind of underutilized everybody thinks like okay artists can sell art but programmers can sell code musicians can sell music like whatever you create right and not even the stuff that you create not even the final product but the things that you use to create the final product so musicians for example if you're putting together a song and you record a bunch of sounds for your drums and for your kicks and for all that stuff you can sell audio packs with the all those sounds and people use FL Studio that want to just use all the different sounds to make their own beats they can buy from you so those are assets anything that you use to kind of create your final product number four you can sell your knowledge this is something that you see a lot of people do in online marketing because it's like it's a thing you you write an e-book you make a video course you whatever you sell you go on you to me you know a lot of people sell their knowledge and if you're an expert in the field especially if you're in game development you probably know a little bit about stuff right you could maybe teach how unity works you could teach how specific things in unity works you could teach a programming work so you can teach how a lot of stuff works and there is a lot of competition nowadays like obviously there's a lot of stuff out there but there's still a lot of money to be made by selling your knowledge and if you think you don't have knowledge I guarantee you have knowledge from somewhere or something that people are interested in and may not even be game development it may be something else but someone somewhere will pay for what you know if you can deliver in a package where it helps them and game dev underground was kind of founded on that idea that eventually I would build this community and I would eventually monetize some of my knowledge and that's what you know I'm working on a book I'm working on a series of different things that that's kind of what I'm doing right I'm monetizing my knowledge and I feel like that's a it's a really good way it's it's one of the quicker ways if you have an existing expertise in a field if you know a lot about a certain subject it's one of the quicker ways to get income up and running so number five you can sell other people's stuff so you I don't know if you know what affiliate marketing is but affiliate marketing is basically the act of taking other people's stuff and using a website where you can get a commission if people buy it so for example amazon has an affiliate program and you can take any product on amazon you can generate a link through their affiliate program and then if you post it somewhere and people click on that link and they buy that product you get a commission now Amazon's commission is kind of low compared to other places but I know there's a lot of places online that offer this sort of thing and you just google affiliate programs and if you look for some of the some of your favorite favorite services and stuff like that they probably have affiliate programs too it's really popular just look you scroll all the way down on the website and look at the bottom links or just search you know my favorite program affiliate program or whatever and you'll find it and affiliate marketing I think is is really it's one of those no barrier things like you can you can start literally right now but it requires a lot of marketing knowledge and it's not like you don't want to grab links and just start spamming them everywhere that's not going to work but you can combine it with some of these other methods to really you know add value to people's lives so for example I post a youtube video every day if I were to review a book on YouTube that'd be a great opportunity for me to use an affiliate link for that book right because people watch my review on the book on YouTube and they're like oh I want to buy the book and then they click my affiliate link and they go and they would see the the book and they would buy it and then I get a commission so that works really really well and it's called an affiliate program you could just google search it you can look around and find all the cool stuff it's it's one of the quicker ways to get started so those are the five ways I think you can make passive income as a game developer they're not all of them are applicable to everybody obviously we all have different places in life we have different assets we have different skills so though and those are the things besides selling your game right like I'm trying to think outside the box here and share things that you are not necessarily oh you you would think right away like hey I'm gonna sell my game like obviously you're probably gonna sell your game or if your games free maybe you got monetization in there like that's definitely a method and that's you know when you have a game up there that is on Steam or something like that it's pretty much passive at that point because if it's on Steam Steam delivers its team take care of everything they just send the money to your bank account so it takes a lot of work upfront but then it's passive after that so that definitely Falls I'd probably be number six right but I know as game developers sometimes game development takes a long time so it helps to kind of have something you know in the meantime to to go out for that and there's a lot of other ways to make income as well as a game developer a lot a lot of ways I have a video on how to make money in game development I probably will make more in the future but this specifically is just for the passive income and I really hate that term because even passive income requires a lot of work you know it's not just like hey I get free money every month no it requires a lot of stuff so but these are the things that I you know I've used in the past that have you know been somewhat passive so I hope you found it useful any comments about this or you getting questions or anything like that leave them down below because I'm here to answer them but once again my name is Tim Russ week and I'll see you again morrow

Channel: Tim Ruswick | Game Dev Underground

Views: 55,506

Keywords: passive income, game dev income, game development passive income, passive income game development, passive income ideas, Make Money From Game Development, How To Make Money From Game Development, game development make money, game developer tips, game developer tip, indie game development tips, indie game developer tips, Tim ruswick, #gamedevunderground

Id: Btxks1ze8Fk

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018