The Cost of a Development Team and The Price of a Video Game

[DaClown]

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Given how much resentment I see around here for paying for things and how much enthusiasm I see around here for people getting into game development, I thought I would talk a bit about what the price and costs of a video game are.

To start off, solo development projects are generally non-viable. A single person can start or launch a game development project, but they generally can not carry it to completion or even very far into the game development project. I am aware of "exceptions" like ConcernedApe and Stardew Valley or Andrew Hussie and Homestuck, but it is important to understand they are very much the exception.

As I outline elsewhere, a single game designer and developer running an entire project themselves needs around 3800$/month if they live in the US for the project to have a chance. They would generally be better off getting a job in a professional studio if they can at that level of income. If a solo dev's patreon for their single project is 3800$/month then they can live on that income and have enough to slowly advance the development of the project over several years to a decade of time. As a supporter or investor of the project expect the project to cost a minimum of 50,000$/year; 100,000$/year is far more reasonable.

Paired game development projects are far more stable but still quite violate. I think most people here are familiar with this pattern. A programmer and an Artist get together and start to make something. It grows at a nice pace and everything seems good. Then usually something happens. One of the two screws the other over and the whole project collapses or someone gets sick and suddenly the other can't compensate because they had different skill sets. There's no redundancy built into the duo game development team. They are most viable for very short lived and very simple game designs like linear visual novels with less than a dozen characters with an intended arch that is less than a standard novel length of around 300 pages. As a supporter or investor of the project expect the project to cost a minimum of 100,000$/year; 200,000$/year is far more reasonable. The money involved means that this is at the very least an implied business partnership; in the jurisdictions where I live this means that there exists multiple and unlimited liability which means that short of some form of incorporation like an LLC your partner can stick you with their Vegas trip bills and flee the country.

Trios can be very stable. There's a lot of reasons you see threes in nature, in media, in tropes, and in team organizations. This is for general practical purposes the minimum for a year long or longer game development project and a practical requirement for most indie-scale game developments. Trios are not self-sufficient though, so their success depends on their ability and willingness to delegate work to outside contractors and consultants; the trio generally is developers not business people though a somewhat common pattern can be {programmer, artist, investor/producer}. As a supporter or investor of the project expect the project to cost a minimum of 150,000$/year; 300,000$/year is far more reasonable.

Most small teams are 5 to 7 people. Around 7 people, the administrative overhead of the team starts to become too much for any one person to manage and it becomes prudent to split off into several small dedicated teams. As a supporter or investor of the project expect the project to cost a minimum of 250,000$/year to 350,000$/year; 500,000$/year to 700,000$/year is far more reasonable. This is what you should expect for most successful projects. This is where everyone involved should be working under explicit incorporation; it is generally bad practice for 7 professionals to be in an explicit or implied business partnership because far too much can go wrong with that.

Above 10 people, we start to get into serious corporate structures. The scales are quite a bit less linear because it is less talking about how much an individual laborer should be getting paid according to national economic standards and fair remuneration; it is more about talking about the operation and liability costs. The projects at these scales tend to be much more ambitious and IP management for everyone is absolutely non-trivial. Everyone should have contracts at this point stipulating in very clear legal terms the conditions of their involvement with the project. This is where game studios are formed, and it is important to note that like any business most game studios are insolvent within five years of starting. Any project started at this scope and scale is going to be a million dollar or more per year project; due to the costs and labor investments for incorporating, this isn't something you do for a linear visual novel that is going to be a one off project and done within a few months. Structures of incorporation at this scale are practical necessities to protect consumers of the goods and services of the business from predatory behaviors of the members of the incorporated structure, to protect the employees and contractors from the liabilities of the predatory behaviors of the owners, managers, and investors of the incorporated structure, and to protect the owners, managers, and investors from each other.

The numbers I choose here are based on how much professionals working in the domain get paid in what are considered standard wages. In the US, the national minimum wage is ostensibly 7.25$/hr. However, many cities have higher minimum wages because the 7.25$/hr rate doesn't pay the bills in pretty much any populated area in the US;

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. This still isn't a fair wage and is not a fair wage for something as complicated and risky as game development;

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.

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.

This puts the expected fair income of the average and typical game development professional pretty tightly between 20$/hr and 52$/hr. Less than 20$/hr and the game developers are making less than they could as the bottom bracket, quality assurance, in the game industry. And generally when we're talking about a game development's patreon we're talking about close to the entire budget of the game including the take-home wages of the people working on it and the costs of development for the entire game.

I want to make a special note here because I see a lot of games which target art made by artists not on the team or porn stars who have been in no way contacted about the use of their likeness in the game project. If you're going to use someone's art in your project but you're not going to pay them a fair wage or otherwise recompensate them for that contribution then your project is exploitative, parasitical, and bad for the community in general. This goes doubly so if you effectively are drafting a porn star to star in your game but they are not seeing any material benefit for it. Expect to pay artists and sex workers in your porn development whether it be games, movies, graphic art, ASMR, voice acting, modeling, or photography.

If you're not supporting the people who the work depends upon then your project should be insolvent because you're abusing the very limited resources of the community.

 

[moskyx]

The point being?

 

[DaClown]

The point being?

For starters, the difference in income between a solo project and a minimal team project for an indie game is about 40K$/year. Solo indie projects make around 10K$/year. Indie teams make per member an average of about 50K$/year.

If you're a developer and if you're making under 50K$/year then you should consider taking your work and using it as a portfolio to get a job with the better established industry because you're under performing. Especially if you're a solo dev making less than poverty wages.

If you're an investor or a supporter then you should be aiming to get the devs up to the point where they're getting paid about 50K$/year minimum, and for the project to be maximally viable and minimally volatile, you should be aiming to get a proper team going for a project.

If all you care about is playing the game then you should understand that expecting to pay less than 60$ for a game in development is absurd and if you're unwilling to pay devs and scoff at the very notion of putting money into anything then your opinion doesn't mean shit and the devs should outright ignore you.

Games are expensive to make. Porn games are even more expensive to make. Pirates have to have something to pirate, so it is in the interest of everyone to make sure the community is well supported and to oppose gross exploitation that is destructive of the commons.

 

[moskyx]

For starters, the difference in income between a solo project and a minimal team project for an indie game is about 40K$/year. Solo indie projects make around 10K$/year. Indie teams make per member an average of about 50K$/year.

If you're a developer and if you're making under 50K$/year then you should consider taking your work and using it as a portfolio to get a job with the better established industry because you're under performing. Especially if you're a solo dev making less than poverty wages.

If you're an investor or a supporter then you should be aiming to get the devs up to the point where they're getting paid about 50K$/year minimum, and for the project to be maximally viable and minimally volatile, you should be aiming to get a proper team going for a project.

If all you care about is playing the game then you should understand that expecting to pay less than 60$ for a game in development is absurd and if you're unwilling to pay devs and scoff at the very notion of putting money into anything then your opinion doesn't mean shit and the devs should outright ignore you.

Games are expensive to make. Porn games are even more expensive to make. Pirates have to have something to pirate, so it is in the interest of everyone to make sure the community is well supported and to oppose gross exploitation that is destructive of the commons.

No place for old classic romanticism in you, I see. Just money, eficiency and all kind of measurable parameters. But where are the feelings, the emotions?

Just kidding, it's an interesting analysis. But almost nobody thinks that way when they start their lewd game project, no one do a basic SWOT analysis nor a market research. If someone wants to become a profesional videogame dev, like creating a small techy company and all, they just do that and try their luck with phone apps. Some of them even create porn games. But those people aren't here so I think there's no point in bringing them to the conversation. Usually people who start a project like the ones we see in this forum are just common people who have an idea for a plot, some artistic or writing talent (in the bests cases) and do this for fun with a basic goal of covering dev costs (assets, mainly) and receive some praise. Most of them realize after a few updates that creating a game, even a small, simple VN, is not that easy, it takes a lot of time and the turnover is almost none and don't compensate for the amount of time and resources invested. Then again, if they are good enough and player base like their games enough, a few of them reach a stable, reasonable (even decent) income and just a couple of outliers earn real money, yet not enough to take the step and fund a real company.

The same goes for us as patrons/customers. We like what we see and the utility we get supporting a trash game which would never be released in full makes us pledge. We don't see ourselves as investors, we're just paying a few bucks to some dude because he's creating cool stuff we like. Could be possible for us to create kind of a venture capital firm and fund promising projects made by talented and committed wannabe devs? No way, these games are just our dirty secret. So things stay the way they are.

Of course there are also some delusional people, teenagers mostly (I hope), that think they can put 4 renders together (or steal pics from porn companies and adult performers), wrap them with an overused incest story and wait for the big bucks. But we all have been naive youngsters some time ago

 

[DaClown]

But those people aren't here so I think there's no point in bringing them to the conversation.

And you accuse me of a lack of romanticism? Y'all pirate people's works and you have the audacity to think that the people that you pirate from aren't here?

Usually people who start a project like the ones we see in this forum are just common people who have an idea for a plot, some artistic or writing talent (in the bests cases) and do this for fun with a basic goal of covering dev costs (assets, mainly) and receive some praise.

There's two major ways that I can think to immediately argue against that premise. 1) either you're asserting that no one here will ever become those people or 2) people who are would somehow never come here.

You'd be wrong on both accounts.

I agree we're "common people", but I also believe that genius is common or at least stubborn creativity is. No need to be special for any of this to be relevant. I just think that people shouldn't be expected to only break-even on what they produce; people should benefit above and beyond the costs from what they produce; if there are profits to be made off of a given product then the people who produce that product should share in those profits. They should be the primary beneficiaries of the production.

Even leaving aside the devs, I decided to write this all up and go through the efforts that I am undertaking here because I believe it is in my interests and the interests of the general community to know what they're up against.

We all want our respective niche games and stories. Most of us I think would want our respective games and stories to not be underground things that we have to store and pirate on sovereign soil outside of the capitalist empire. Even if we ignore the overt or outright threats of the capitalist legal empire, we still have to contend with the real needs of the people who make the games and media that we want to have.

The reality is that someone capable of making a decent porn game can get a job getting paid a relatively decent amount making non-porn games. Many of them in fact do, and often, this means we never see them again. The people capable of development, production, or publication are at the cross-roads of offers and incentives. I do not blame them for taking the better of two or more offers.

Therefore, I appeal to their audience to make better offers. If not in terms of money then in terms of community and social support. They make great things that they give freely, so I want to make great things that I can give freely to them. We all should want to do this, I think.

 

[recreation]

No place for old classic romanticism in you, I see. Just money, eficiency and all kind of measurable parameters. But where are the feelings, the emotions?

Just kidding, it's an interesting analysis. But almost nobody thinks that way when they start their lewd game project, no one do a basic SWOT analysis nor a market research. If someone wants to become a profesional videogame dev, like creating a small techy company and all, they just do that and try their luck with phone apps. Some of them even create porn games. But those people aren't here so I think there's no point in bringing them to the conversation. Usually people who start a project like the ones we see in this forum are just common people who have an idea for a plot, some artistic or writing talent (in the bests cases) and do this for fun with a basic goal of covering dev costs (assets, mainly) and receive some praise. Most of them realize after a few updates that creating a game, even a small, simple VN, is not that easy, it takes a lot of time and the turnover is almost none and don't compensate for the amount of time and resources invested. Then again, if they are good enough and player base like their games enough, a few of them reach a stable, reasonable (even decent) income and just a couple of outliers earn real money, yet not enough to take the step and fund a real company.

The same goes for us as patrons/customers. We like what we see and the utility we get supporting a trash game which would never be released in full makes us pledge. We don't see ourselves as investors, we're just paying a few bucks to some dude because he's creating cool stuff we like. Could be possible for us to create kind of a venture capital firm and fund promising projects made by talented and committed wannabe devs? No way, these games are just our dirty secret. So things stay the way they are.

Of course there are also some delusional people, teenagers mostly (I hope), that think they can put 4 renders together (or steal pics from porn companies and adult performers), wrap them with an overused incest story and wait for the big bucks. But we all have been naive youngsters some time ago

You summed it up perfectly, I tried to explain it before, but without luck.
Regarding the delusional people, it's sadly not just teenagers.

 

[DaClown]

Let's now talk about price.

Often people equate price and cost. Use the terms in colloquial discussion interchangeably. They are not at all interchangeable.

For gross simplification, the cost of a thing is the amount of material, energy, and time put into the production of it. People need to eat. Need a place to sleep. Need a place to work. Need tools to work with. Need utilities to operate those tools. Need bathrooms. And so on. If I make say screws then I need materials of a certain quantity with certain qualities, and I need tools made of materials harder than the screws that I am making; it is generally absurd to expect that I am going to build the tools that I use to make the screws that I sell. No laborer, no tools, no material then no screws.

The price is a different kind of problem. The price is roughly speaking "whatever the market will bear". If I can charge 1000$ for a thing and there is a non-zero number of people who pay me 1000$ for the thing then the price of the thing is or can be 1000$.

Say the startup cost of making screws as a solo project is 25,000$. This gets me all the tools I need, a place to work, electricity for a while, and enough material stock of sufficient quality to make the screws I intend to sell. Immediately, the price of the total quantity of the screws I make has to be at a minimum the costs of the startup. I need to sell 25,000$ in screws to break even; if I make less than that then I have to pay money out of pocket to continue operation, so I am basically placing a negative evaluation on my screws which means I am paying people to take my products.

Let's say that in a month I can make 10,000 screws. If I sell those screws at 2.50$ each then I would break even in one month and my initial investment in the startup would be paid back. As you might imagine very few people are going to buy screws that cost 2.50$ each unless they were very good screws made of exceptional materials; it is unlikely my first run of screws is going to be either exceptionally well made or made of exceptional materials. So I am likely going to need to lower my prices to actually sell any screws at all.

This is fine because obviously I am not going to be paying 25K$/month to continue operation. There are certain costs that were fixed in the start up and aren't going to repeat. I am going to have to pay rent, for more materials to make screws out of, repairs, tool replacements, upgrades, and possibly more education or safety equipment for myself. I don't necessarily need to pay back the investment within the first month of starting. If I know I can make 10K screws a month and it costs me say 2.5K$ each month to operate then it just becomes a question of how long I can tolerate operating without having paid back my initial investment. At a minimum to continue operating each month I am going to need to price the screws in such a way that "10K screws (price) = 2.5K$" Simple algebra tells us that the minimum price of the screws then needs to be 25 cents each. At 25 cents a screw, I would break even each month and would never pay back my initial investment.

This means that the initial price of my screws needs to be at a minimum between 25 cents and 2.50$. At this point, we haven't even turned a profit. We're just not losing most of our investment or getting kicked out of our shop.

At 26 cents a screw, we make (ignoring taxes and other realistic adjustments) 1 cent per screw each month or about 100$ a month. It would take us 250 months or more than 20 years to payback our initial investment. At 50 cents a screw, we make 2.5K$/month which would payback our initial investment in 10 months. At a 1$ per screw, we make 7.5K$/month which means we'd payback our initial investment within about 3 or 4 months and we'd start seeing a profit.

The problem is of course that pricing at 1$ a screw is that maybe we can't sell 10,000 screws per month or can't sustain that for 3 or 4 months. Maybe the demand for my screws depends on the prices and the supply of screws on the overall market. If I give away the screws then it is highly likely that someone would happily take all 10K screws I make per month. If I charge a penny then there'd still probably be some people who would happily take them off my hands, but I would be out of business within a month. Maybe 25 cents a screw seems kind of high and around that point I reach a maximum of the people that will buy my screws, so I can sell 10,000 screws indefinitely at 25 cents, but I'll never profit from doing so. But if I can only sell 9K screws at 30 cents a screw then I'd actually be in a pretty good place; it would just take a little bit longer to turn a profit. If demand decreased by 1K for every 10 cents I increased the price there after then there is an optimum point at which I minimize the payback period and maximize my profits even though I end up having surplus screws produced though I could reduce my costs in those cases by producing fewer screws to the higher price point.

Now, I've been talking about screws, but the formal model here remains valid for adult games. Not everyone needs or wants your screws. Maybe you can produce a huge number of lower quality screws in a given month and give them away. But what price you put on what you produce can vary a lot depending on your desired objectives and market demands.

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You can use these kinds of arguments to figure out how much support you need on patreon to make it worth your while to produce a game or a visual novel or how much effort you should put into it each month.

 

[Joshua Tree]

A LOT of indie/solo devs have a job that give a living wage and then work on their indie project on the side though. Take a game that got quite the following "Kenshi", it was primary worked by one guy over the course of 12 years. For five years Chris Hunt was doing a part time gig as a security guard to make ends meet. Once the game hit early access on steam in 2013, he was able to hire a small time to work on the project until its release in 2018.

"Stellar Tactics", by Don Wilkins is another one man marching band. He been putting out a tremendous number of updates to his game.

Saying solo projects is in general non-viable is wrong imho. A lot got to do with the dedication and work ethic of the creator. It's where passion for their project vs desire for money come into picture imho.

 

[DaClown]

A LOT of indie/solo devs have a job that give a living wage and then work on their indie project on the side though. Take a game that got quite the following "Kenshi", it was primary worked by one guy over the course of 12 years. For five years Chris Hunt was doing a part time gig as a security guard to make ends meet. Once the game hit early access on steam in 2013, he was able to hire a small time to work on the project until its release in 2018.

"Stellar Tactics", by Don Wilkins is another one man marching band. He been putting out a tremendous number of updates to his game.

Saying solo projects is in general non-viable is wrong imho. A lot got to do with the dedication and work ethic of the creator. It's where passion for their project vs desire for money come into picture imho.

I did not and am not claiming that solo projects can not work. They rarely work out for some people under some specific circumstances with permissive conditions.

However, I am not speaking to the special cases. Otherwise, I would be far more focused on talking about what you can do if your parents will give you a 250,000$ loan for your online logistic business or the Operating System and Software corporation you're starting with the Disk Operating System you bought from that dude next door.

Most businesses fail within a few years. Almost all small businesses that are started in fact. That's statistical fact. In the game industry, it is a statistical fact that solo developers fail more often than not. This combines with general business statistics, so a small business started by and ran by one solo developer will fail almost every time over a few months to a few years usually without significant product. Most people don't have any recognition of this or commentary on it because you've literally never heard of them because they failed to launch entirely. You're probably familiar with this kind of thing on forums like this where some one pops in says they're going to make a game then is never heard from again.

A single person can certainly start a game project. A single person can certainly start a game studio. If you have a 250,000$ loan from your parents or you inherited 65 million dollars from your parents then you can absolutely do what the fuck ever because you don't really have a fail condition, now do you?

Assuming you're not some upper class wannabe princeling, most people can't effectively run or manage an entire game project and game business on their own. As I mention somewhere else, the people who start a company are rarely the people who run the company. People in relative poverty aren't going to have the resources to float on the initial investment or capital. They have to hit the ground running.

The examples you cite involve influx of cash from relatively stable economic situations. Let's talk about Chris Hunt. 12 years of development. If he made 10K$/year for that 12 year span then he was practically impoverished the entire time and only made 120K$ in that time. If he had been working at a game studio for that same span of time in an indie game dev team then he would make something around 600K$ in the same span of time. Game peaked at 10K players; it sells on Steam for 30$; I'll bet it sold no more than about 100K copies based on the

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, so it grossed less than 3 million dollars. That's a respectable 250,000$/year, but it is important to note that most of the success of the project is from 2013 to 2018 which is precisely when he had a team working, so it is like 250,000$/year split into however members of the team exist, so it is probably something like 5 team members getting 50K$/year each.

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is not a great example for your argument. A cult following maybe, but it has sold no more than about 10K copies at around 20$, so it likely has grossed less than 200K$ over its 4 year lifetime on Steam. Or about 50K$/year.

In the video I linked by the IGN from 2013, it talks about indie developer incomes. The difference between a solo project and a team project is 40K$/year. If you start a project alone and it is an average success then you pull in something like 10K$/year; don't quit your day job. If you start that same project alone but you start building a team and it is an average success then you pull in something like 50K$/year for each team member; you can live on that income and your team can dedicate themselves to the project on that kind of income especially if your team members live in some of the cheaper areas in the world. A team is way more valueable than a solo dev in general, and it is a kind of particular ignorance or greed that makes a person hostile to sharing. There's a lot of articles in the tech development world on precisely these patterns and anti-patterns; people who can't or won't work well with others end up failing or destroying the projects they're attached to.

As a general business and industrial process, the person who starts a project should not retain control over the finished production. There are exceptions to this. But the skill sets for starting a project or a business are not the same as the skill sets for running the project or finishing the production or managing the business. You see this with a lot of successful

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and corporations.

This is also analogous to housing development. The people who build the house are not necessarily the people who live in the house. The people who sell the house are generally neither the people who build the house nor the people who live in the house. A person who builds a house for themselves is very different from a collection of people who build housing for other people. There's a lot of things that someone might tolerate in a house built for themselves which would not pass inspection in housing built for other people and might not pass inspection anyway.

 

[DaClown]

I want to step away from the "indie" statistics for a moment. The opening post is based on indie game development rather than on the more standard corporate game studio. In corporate game studios, the pay is generally higher because the profit margins are generally better; this has actually less to do with the content involved and more to do with economies of scale.

A brief detour. Let's talk about

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. A long time ago there was a company called

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. It was started by a four person team. Two programmers, a game designer, and an artist. They designed relatively open source games including Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake. They developed tools and software developer kits for some the first 3D game engines used in the industry. They ended up selling licensing rights to the Quake Engine (QuakeSrc) to a little known newly started LLC called

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in 1996.

Valve published their first game, Half-life, in 1998. The game was highly moddable due to the legacy of the QuakeSrc engine being built by and for modders connected to the free open source software movement. Many people enjoyed the game and made literally hundreds of thousands of mods for it some of which so completely transformed the original game as to make it unrecognizable; some of them were interested in commercializing the mods they made, and it turned out that Valve saw the value in those modding teams and their products, so they hired them on. Valve acquired Team Fortress and Counterstrike in this way as well as the development teams for them.

During this time Valve had one of the most popular computer games in history with hundreds of thousands to millions of people playing online in any given day. This necessitated a lot of work to make it possible for people to distribute their works around and allow people to connect and play together. They put a lot of effort into making new mods and the next generation of their games. It turned out that so much work went into the Team Fortress 2 mod for Half-Life that they ended up creating an entire new branch of the game engine which became the Source Engine that launched with their flag ship game, Half-Life 2. But more significantly, the launch of Half-Life 2 heralded the launch of one of the first major digital market places and IP management libraries for consumers, Steam.

At this point, Valve was very large and began switching from being a developer of games to being a publisher of games. There's a fascinating history about Steam, but the long story short is that after a lot of resistance to selling adult games or content that might be branded as adult, Valve found that the revenue they would lose from marketing adult games was strictly less and much less than the revenue they could gain from publishing adult games, so

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.

In the

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, the indie devs all make less than the average professional at a standard game studio. Quality assurance professionals in corporate game development make around 54K$/year on average; these are the people who are professional play testers and trained statisticians; they are the bottom of the bracket. Artists are higher up at 74K$/year and Game Designers are around the same at 73K$/year. Producers make 82K$/year. Programmers and audio engineers make the most of the non-business and non-management positions at around 92 to 95K$/year. Business and management people make 100K$/year on average. The average income of corporate game developers compared to indie game developers is higher by 30K$/year. Indie game developers accept the lower income and the challenges that come with that form of development because they get intangible, social benefits that can not be gained from rigid corporate for-profit structures.

What I want everyone to take away from this thread is that what y'all are doing is worth a lot lot lot more than you might think or be led to believe it is worth. Persistently under valuing your labor or the products of your labor is a good way to burn out. There's a whole market opening up for people to publish on, and there is an international porn revolution and revolt underway if y'all didn't know. I can not begin to tell you how thirsty people are for sexy games.

If you want to try and be the exception then you need to learn what makes the exceptions exceptional. Most of the time the answer is simple. White dude in their 20s or 30s? Probably is getting cash influx from parents, family, friends, banks, or even employers; it is often as simple as someone gave them a roof over their head, food to eat, medical care, or didn't charge them rent. If not that then you can learn some lessons from people like

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or Andrew Hussie; their secrets mainly come down to copying successful projects and

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; both of them used their forums to crowdsource the writing and design work and in some cases the music production.

 

[Joshua Tree]

DaClown Remember, people like this is not just making a game, they also building their brand and make a name for themselves. Kenshi 2 is in the works, and would never been a thing if Chris hadn't stuck with it. And he would never been able to get a small team together if he hadn't put in the effort to get it onto steam early access in the first place. Imho this is where passion come into picture. Sure you could seek employment and climb the pay brackets, but that would part way with "create something of your own"...

As for 50k a year (whatever), that is a bit over the entry salary for a programmer (at least in the US from what I could google). I know some outsource or set up studios in like more low cost countries to push the wages down, but that's just life.

If you employed at like EA, Ubisoft etc, you would need some serious seniority to start get the serious cash. Over the past years the horror stories coming out of game studios regarding pay and working conditions haven't exactly been good to put it like that. Let's face it, the ones getting rich in the gaming industry today is the big wigs at top.

I played both Doom and Quake when it came out, I know what and who Id Software is -)

For the majority of the adult games we see pass through this site. They wouldn't be "edible" to be put through a publishing platform for adult games, because of specific fetish's and content. Heck, even the adult movie industry have a check list they need to go by with the likes of VISA to keep them as a payment processor. Holly Randal got a podcast on youtube (where the crazyness of this been brought up several times @

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).

Sure we had adult games here that did show up at steam, but then content made more "friendly" to pass the check box's.

 

[DaClown]

DaClown Remember, people like this is not just making a game, they also building their brand and make a name for themselves. Kenshi 2 is in the works, and would never been a thing if Chris hadn't stuck with it. And he would never been able to get a small team together if he hadn't put in the effort to get it onto steam early access in the first place. Imho this is where passion come into picture. Sure you could seek employment and climb the pay brackets, but that would part way with "create something of your own"...

As for 50k a year (whatever), that is a bit over the entry salary for a programmer (at least in the US from what I could google). I know some outsource or set up studios in like more low cost countries to push the wages down, but that's just life.

If you employed at like EA, Ubisoft etc, you would need some serious seniority to start get the serious cash. Over the past years the horror stories coming out of game studios regarding pay and working conditions haven't exactly been good to put it like that. Let's face it, the ones getting rich in the gaming industry today is the big wigs at top.

I played both Doom and Quake when it came out, I know what and who Id Software is -)

For the majority of the adult games we see pass through this site. They wouldn't be "edible" to be put through a publishing platform for adult games, because of specific fetish's and content. Heck, even the adult movie industry have a check list they need to go by with the likes of VISA to keep them as a payment processor. Holly Randal got a podcast on youtube (where the crazyness of this been brought up several times @

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).

Sure we had adult games here that did show up at steam, but then content made more "friendly" to pass the check box's.

You mistake what I am saying, I think. 50K$/year is the average income of INDIE devs in teams. We're not talking about a job with EA, Ubisoft, or whatever; they average 84K$/year. Game development generally pays better than comparable art, programming, or design work in software development or media development.

And 50K$/year is considerably more than 10K$/year. Solo game dev is a last resort kind of thing not what you should be doing as your first resort or even middle resort. Game dev is generally a team effort. All aspects of the game development suffer when it is reduced to a solo project. All I am saying is get yourself a team. Even if you're Eric Barone, you make more money and get better quality work done with a team. If you are doing a solo project and you get handed 40K$/month hire a fucking team.

Most of the adult games that I play (and I play test hundreds of games) do not have anything essential that prevents them from being marketed. Many adult games can be published through Steam, and it is worth the consideration of game devs for them to look at whether or not it is better for them to develop for a platform like Steam than for them to try to be a publisher as well as a game developer.

If your game project is about baby eating then I got nothing for you.

As for darker stuff?

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is on Steam. Fucking

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is 10$ on Steam.

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is 10$ on Steam.

 

[megaplayboy10k]

Based on graphtreon stats, devs make anywhere between 5k and 500k a year on Patreon. I think Summertime Saga comes closest to the model the original poster describes. Dark Cookie appears to have the equivalent of a whole development team working on his game, and he is pulling in up to 50k per month for it on Patreon. Some devs like icstor "farm out" some of their workload(writing, coding) to independent contractors on a (I'm assuming) per task payment basis.

To me, "milking" would involve bringing in enough funding to be well-compensated or even overcompensated, while releasing nothing for long periods of time, then the content of the releases being comparatively brief and underwhelming. But to my mind there's actually not that many devs who could be credibly accused of doing that.

 

[Joshua Tree]

You mistake what I am saying, I think. 50K$/year is the average income of INDIE devs in teams. We're not talking about a job with EA, Ubisoft, or whatever; they average 84K$/year. Game development generally pays better than comparable art, programming, or design work in software development or media development.

And 50K$/year is considerably more than 10K$/year. Solo game dev is a last resort kind of thing not what you should be doing as your first resort or even middle resort. Game dev is generally a team effort. All aspects of the game development suffer when it is reduced to a solo project. All I am saying is get yourself a team. Even if you're Eric Barone, you make more money and get better quality work done with a team. If you are doing a solo project and you get handed 40K$/month hire a fucking team.

If you a new scrub with nothing to show for, you don't get an average 84k job at Ubisoft, EA etc though. You need to have a portfolio of projects and completed games etc to show for to get paid that kind.

Remember, majority of the adult game creators on Patreon got this as a hobby. It's not their main source of living. Sure maybe some aspire to make it big and get success from their hobby but very few manage to do that. Get yourself a team turn that hobby into something else. You have a business, you need top pay salary to your team, you need to secure funding to do so. People got bills to pay and like food on the table. They don't work for goodwill and promise of maybe some payout later if it become a success. You could go crowdfunding on like kickstarter and see how far that bring you in startup cost. Pulling 1000 bucks a month on Patreon doesn't build a team....

And I doubt "Honey, I put a 2nd mortgage on the house so I can realize my dream about fund a adult games company" would sit very well either...

If you want to see what a team lead to in adult games at this level? Check out how "Breading Season" imploded...

 

[Joshua Tree]

Based on graphtreon stats, devs make anywhere between 5k and 500k a year on Patreon. I think Summertime Saga comes closest to the model the original poster describes. Dark Cookie appears to have the equivalent of a whole development team working on his game, and he is pulling in up to 50k per month for it on Patreon. Some devs like icstor "farm out" some of their workload(writing, coding) to independent contractors on a (I'm assuming) per task payment basis.

DarkCookie is kinda like the PewDiePie or Ninja of his niche. Many aspire to get to his level, but its a steep hill to climb and die on. From his "humble" beginnings, he have built himself up to be a brand not just the creator of Summertime. Eventually Summertime will come to and end and then "what come next" will be the real interesting thing, if he can keep it up. He turned his passion into a business, but very few able, or willing to do that.

 

[Felicityskye]

If you a new scrub with nothing to show for, you don't get an average 84k job at Ubisoft, EA etc though. You need to have a portfolio of projects and completed games etc to show for to get paid that kind.

Remember, majority of the adult game creators on Patreon got this as a hobby. It's not their main source of living. Sure maybe some aspire to make it big and get success from their hobby but very few manage to do that. Get yourself a team turn that hobby into something else. You have a business, you need top pay salary to your team, you need to secure funding to do so. People got bills to pay and like food on the table. They don't work for goodwill and promise of maybe some payout later if it become a success. You could go crowdfunding on like kickstarter and see how far that bring you in startup cost. Pulling 1000 bucks a month on Patreon doesn't build a team....

And I doubt "Honey, I put a 2nd mortgage on the house so I can realize my dream about fund a adult games company" would sit very well either...

If you want to see what a team lead to in adult games at this level? Check out how "Breading Season" imploded...

You are completely missing the point. If you are a solo dev and managed to build a following netting you 5-6k+ a month. You should be looking to hire a team if you're trying to actually make a name for yourself or create a game dev brand.

Yes, Breeding Season failed because of Dev team drama, but what was the point of bringing that up? You're making it sound like being in a team is bad, yet there are plenty of examples of successful teams.

 

[Joshua Tree]

You are completely missing the point. If you are a solo dev and managed to build a following netting you 5-6k+ a month. You should be looking to hire a team if you're trying to actually make a name for yourself or create a game dev brand.

Yes, Breeding Season failed because of Dev team drama, but what was the point of bringing that up? You're making it sound like being in a team is bad, yet there are plenty of examples of successful teams.

Let's be very modest and say each team member need 30k a year as salary... (and this would be SHIT PAY for what they could earn other places) Those 5-6k a month wont be enough. Someone like DarkCookie can do a team, because he got that level of support that cover the salaries needed. At 5-6k a month you at a level where you scan start outsource some contract work. Not start employ people fulltime.

Name successful teams creating adult games where each team member have a living wage of decent level from it then?

 

[DaClown]

You are completely missing the point. If you are a solo dev and managed to build a following netting you 5-6k+ a month. You should be looking to hire a team if you're trying to actually make a name for yourself or create a game dev brand.

Yes, Breeding Season failed because of Dev team drama, but what was the point of bringing that up? You're making it sound like being in a team is bad, yet there are plenty of examples of successful teams.

Important point to emphasize: there are somewhere between twice and ten times as many successful team game developments as compared to solo game developments.

There isn't just plenty of examples of successful teams. There are more examples of successful teams than solo dev projects. There are tons of examples of bad, abandoned, incomplete, drawn out solo game dev projects than there are of well made, completed, or finished in a timely manner solo game dev projects.

In my opening post, I even stated "If a solo dev's patreon for their single project is 3800$/month then they can live on that income and have enough to slowly advance the development of the project over several years to a decade of time."

Which comports with each example given by Joshua Tree

 

[Joshua Tree]

I was there when Breeding Season began. I am among the first people to voluntarily playtest for them and provide them with reports and suggestions. I am among the long time supporters and contributors of their Patreon. I know the ins and outs of what went right and what went wrong.

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; the game was ran basically as a solo project by a single person, HBomb; he retained control and management of the whole project. He eventually added other devs to his team as his patreon support grew, but he wasn't a savvy business person and from what I gather he was a bit of an asshole to work with, so he signed a contract that he basically came up with on his own rather than using a contract standard for the industry or consulting with a lawyer and paying the fee for that. This allowed SPurple to retain the entire ownership of his intellectual property that was used in the Breeding Season game and was substituted from version 0.6 onward; this removed the original lead artist's work; when it came to a dispute about the direction of the project and the demands of a loud minority of the patrons, SPurple withdrew consent to use his art which would require the art for the game to be completely redone from the ground up.

Vanilly had things to say about the managerial neglect and lack of autonomy and failure to delegate both power and responsibility. Despite there being a team the problem was that it was a solo project of someone in over their head trying to manage the business, learn the programming, do the design, and the law.

I used Breeding Season as an example for the very reason it was a good example of how to create a shit show. It was the lesson that did teach me don't have to high expectations when you support someone on Patreon ;p
Hbomb was stupid, and SPurple was a dick and everyone did suffer from it....

 

[Joshua Tree]

Important point to emphasize: there are somewhere between twice and ten times as many successful team game developments as compared to solo game developments.

You referring to gaming industry as whole now, or just "adult" games industry, because those two quite different. I know about several successful teams as well, but they are not making incest porn games (whatever)...