talking about numbers and how much a dev should earn.
Actually, I am talking about how much devs can and do earn in the game dev industry where 50K$/year is the bottom bracket.
The more you hew to the game dev hobbyist approach where it is basically not actually a product management and business project the closer you tend towards vanity publishing standards or just fucking around at your own expense. Best case, you're looking at 10K$/year income. That isn't "what you should make" that is the average that you can expect if your game happens to be in the 3% to 7% of games which successfully market (do your due dilligence and make something that a sufficient niche of people will actually pay to buy and play). Average case is you're out several thousand dollars or hundreds of hours of your life.
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In the industry, they refer to this as being "non-viable". This means the game doesn't even break even or pay enough in particular to afford to start another game project to continue in the game industry. A significant number of the detractors in this thread are not even relevant in what I am talking about here. They're not even interested in publishing on Steam or an equivalent market place; they aren't talking about publishing marketable games; they're not talking about getting into the game industry to stay there.
Something which I think perhaps needs to be explicitly said because people can't read between the lines or simply won't is that for the vast majority of games that can be made almost none of them are marketable. For a vast number of people, this means that if you're in it for the money then quit. There are bunch of game designs and narratives circulated on this site and in the forums that are simply not viable; many of which either have been abandoned, banned, or altered beyond recognition to avoid being abandoned or banned. Most game designs fail to pass basic prototyping playtests and are boring slogs and digital chores to earn scraps of badly made (or often stolen/derivative) lewd content.
Someone commented on my statements that I made about my own game designs. They interpreted what I said about not publishing my game designs as meaning they're not good or they are bad. Most of my games are tailor made for my friends and family. At their best, they are made to appeal to one and only one person. They aren't designed for marketing success. I have games which are intended for market in pre-production, but they will take some years to reach a playable state, and I may not pursue their development or may not pursue their publication; many of my designs are halted by the fact that I need to raise significant funds for their development and can not do that unless or until I have produced adequate fundamentals for starting and running a game development business. Most of my developments are for the state of the art and my education not as a means of income for myself.
It is common for people to think that if they make a game that they will be compensated for it eventually. A "if I build it they will come" kind of mentality. This is why 93% of the games on Steam fail to sell. Programmers in particular tend to have this view that whatever junk they turn out will be marketable in some way; most of the games people make are about learning to make a game at all and are not made for some market. It is entirely possible and in fact pretty common for people to spend more money, time, and effort in marketing something that is not marketable than they get from the efforts of marketing it.
This is another reason that team game developers tend to outperform solo developers 5 to 1 and why most commercially successful games are made by teams of 5 or more people. The appeal of a game design has to be wider automatically to get and keep the attention and efforts of more people in development. This means that the conditions of development are more conducive to accidentally coinciding with a viable market niche for team games or to drift away from the proclivities of a singular individual towards something of more general social interest.
What people "should" or "ought" to do depends entirely on what those people want. The people I have told to GTFO are not the audience that I am speaking to. The loudest people in a crowd are not necessarily who I am addressing and the fact that people speak up at all does not entitle them to response, consideration, rebuttal, or anything; loudness does not translate to relevance.
Also, I am perfectly comfortable with saying that most game projects should not make it out of pre-production. I don't necessarily think the community is benefited by some solo jack-off's project getting published in a worse-than-prototype state without any real support or interest from the community, and I don't shed tears over that jack-off anguishing about how difficult it is to get even a pittance for all their efforts.
No developer is entitled to success, support, or any other person's time or attention or efforts. I think there is merit in working to earn the support of worthwhile communities and part of earning that support is quid pro quo; I think there is merit in testing to see if communities are worthwhile.
most devs start from nothing
This is false. One of the particular points that I have made repeatedly in this thread is that game development isn't cheap. There are a lot of reasons that video game development has been concentrated into the hands of the relatively wealthy. Average game takes around 3 to 5 years to develop with a dedicated team of 5 or more people even when the scope of the game is relatively small; cheap, short, and very constrained games can take a few weeks to a few months to implement and polish, but you're not going to see 50K$/year for implementing yet another Tic Tac Toe clone. Though even at the 50K$/year rate, a game that takes 4 weeks to implement is valued at around 3800$. At the 10K$/year rate for a solo dev making say Tic Tac Toe in 4 weeks, we're still talking 770$ for the game.
Most devs start from loans or grants; loans require collateral which means significant assets of some kind such as a house or cars. Many devs start from foundations or trusts or by being adjacent to people who have foundations or trusts; a significant part of the development of media generally is rooted in
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; this is something that Patreon and Kickstarter attempt to replicate in corporate networks.
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.
if we start to think about money 99% will fail. I would fail 20 years ago.
if we follow his thoughts I would not be here and Im sure 99% of the other devs as well.
Yes. This site would not exist if people weren't thinking about the money. This site literally didn't exist 20 years ago. For the most part, no site like this existed 20 years ago. They couldn't. There wasn't ways for people to get their payments processed for adult game development; the situation is only what it is now because sex workers around the world have been doing hard work to make policy changes. And they are able to do that because they work the funding and develop organizational methods to get funding and facilitate transactions.
For me, none of this that you propose is hypothetical. It is most of my adult life. It was boring. It only changed when people started making a living doing it and when people saw that it was possible in principle for a person to make a living doing it. It's only been even partially like this for maybe 10 years now. Almost all the significant development is only in the last 6 years.
In a big over arching sense, the majority of the community did fail 20 years ago, and we didn't have forums like this or databases of thousands of adult games or have dozens to hundreds of games developed each year; almost all the archives of erotica from that time are no longer operational and most of what was produced from then is lost; the majority of porn media at the time was live action pornography produced on the fringes of Hollywood/Las Vegas or in backalley deals in the darkweb, and all that was only possible because pornographers and furries built the Internet. Closest thing that existed then that I can think of was Newgrounds; Newgrounds crawled so y'all can walk.
And none of this is an admonishment about "piracy" as a general concept or practice.
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; for games, this generally translates to a practice of fair use to try out the product before committing to materially supporting it and its developers/distributors; during the 90s, this often meant free access to tech demos.
