How To Make Money As A Game Dev - Full Time Game Dev Podcast Ep. 019 

Thanks so much for having me on Thomas! I had a blast chatting about all things game dev with you.

I’m not sure Thomas has realized the amount of self harm he does to his brand. He comes off as very unlikable if you’re an outsider and was what kept me from watching for years before I subbed. If you can get past that, he’s good a lot of credibility and good content. However, like someone else mentioned, he has become almost too obsessed with his brand the last several months in off-putting ways. He is slowly turning into the things he wants to avoid.

It’s crazy how Thomas wants to gatekeep advice when he himself changes his views on game development constantly (even in the same podcast). Not to mention he’s on record for admitting his first play test for Twisted Towers was terrible with feedback being he missed the mark in a lot of areas. Remember to stay humble or life will do it for you.

It’s like finding a new niche market for core indies where smaller budgets and revenues can work. Brilliant

Eli is literally the best

I really admire the focus on building a catalogue of smaller games and understanding your audience. I'm almost certain the kind of gamers that finds his titles legendary probably already played his previous games or other games like it. These are the gamers that will give you a good review. After that it's the hook and good branding that will tie all these games together.

28:34 video start

Sometimes people need to follow bad advice to learn how to filter advice. Failure is life’s greatest teacher. Wherever there’s money there’s grift. I hope you focus on doing your thing, focusing on positivity and the results will sort themselves out.

The RU-vid gamedev point is really interesting. I recently got into RU-vid and I can see uncredible people being an issue recently. I'm a believer that if you want to deeply know a topic, you should teach it. This kind of goes to imposter syndrome and fake it till you make it mentality. I see the argument for both sides, people want credible information. But at the same time, gamedevs teaching are good growth to the developer. I don't think there really is a right answer besides the viewer learning how to filter it themselves.

How To Make Money As A Game Dev - sell a course

Game Devs like Marnix from BiteMe Games are the best. Dude developed a pizza game in a month and it sold well. People should watch that channel.

Interesting to hear the strategy by Tree Fall Studios about building several brands in parallel, keeping the games small, reusing stuff etc ... but it doesn't reflect in sales in Steam either (they are really tiny on all of the games).

Hey Thomas!! Commenting here on this video, because it's the most recent, one question that i ever had, i never heard you talking about it, could make a good video, how do you get your sound effects, or how do you make them? Because there is some sites like epidemic sound, but i don't know if their licensing works for games and things like that.

This is a such a weird discussion. Even more after hearing Thomas's promo on "how to make money before finishing your game". His channel and his program is one of the reasons why there are a lot of youtubers sharing their experiences. Everyone has the right to share what they know and their journey... is weird to flex at spends on those who know less, when you make money teaching others.

Interesting statistics in Gamalytic. This guy can make a living with these games and the whole studio has only sold 3k worth of games on steam. Something does not add up or does he get a lot of ad revenue? He needs to make like 30-100x more money on other platforms compared to steam. If that is true, there seems to be a great opportunity to sell games on consoles.

I personally dislike the game devs that release a new game every few months on console, AAA clocks and hidden object games by same 2 devs flood the eshop and makes me depressed. I have respect if all the assets are theres tho lots of games use AI for these shovel titles. On the note about inexperienced devs making how to videos is usually because they want to fund their long form game without commute of say a 9-5. So they use a fake it till you make it mentality. Games are very expensive and hard to do just part time. So if they can spend one day a week working on youtube it's a better monitary choice. Does suck how it can teach the wrong things tho

Man i just love ur podcasts

But except for the cases where nobody likes rhe game, all press is good press. Examples are plenty but it doesnt matter what press concord got because they made all the wrong decisions including not being f2p.

@9:20, I don't mind you guys spend a whole podcast talking about that😂 open a new episode how about that🎉

16:00 bitemesisters...

Never fails. Every video he has to make it about himself with something along the lines of "People are like Thomas isn't a game developer he's a RU-vidr". Then goes on a several minute speeches plugging himself with EVERYTHING. Like bro, I usually have no issues with your content and throw your videos up in the background while I do other stuff. But I hear you always pivot to the same talking points EVERY VIDEO. You are so market brained that you probably even aren't aware that YOU are creating this image of yourself as just a salesman. I get everyone has their own way of doing things and figuring out their own method to the madness of the game development career. I get it, you are completely focused on just networking with others and marketing your programs every time. But you are stretching yourself so far that there's a lack of substance. I keep up with the gamedev people on RU-vid just as a background filler. So what I say doesn't mean much and I'll just see how things turn out. Twisted Towers release is going to reveal a lot of the approach, so I am interested in the future content based off that.

Thomas here’s a tip: when interviewing, jot down what you want to bring up on a notepad so you don’t have to hold the idea in your head and half-listen to the guest (saying “yep” to it all 😂 and holding your breath) until they’re done talking, cuz you de-railed him a ton. Hope this helps!

Felt like the first half was about Thomas being self-centered and the second half Thomas being distracted and not contributing to the conversation.

Let your guests talk. Love the insights but it's a little painful to get through some times.

Hey Thomas First off, I love your videos. But Im sure you know that game dev is extremely hard to start off when trying to make money and some people will never be able to go full time off of it so its not fair to discredit them for sharing knowledge just because they dont make plenty of money. They still pour in hours of game dev and are just sharing what they learned from many good youtubers like you. Edit: Some more helpful critisicm to help with your podcasts is, try to stay more invested in what the other person is saying instead of just responding with yes and then wanting to say what you want, trust me I struggle with this too. Also why did you say that you don't ask for wishlists and this is just an education channel when you have asked multiple times in other devlogs from before.

Hey at least you won an award 😅😅 worst game award is still an award 💪

If a game dev perhaps make lets say 5-10k € first month and talking about that in videos and educating about the journey from a to b im gonna watch it if i like the channel overall or the ppl working on the channel or if i just want to follow along on their journey because its informational/educational even though they not making a fortune of revenue. Sometimes its useful just to see other who also struggle. I dont know if im "strange" or weird for thinking like this but thats my thoughts on this subject. If there are yt channels that claim things that arent true or get like 1-1000 € first month but talking like they know how to get way way more then i wouldnt follow them or even watch their content.

This video seems very arrogant, specifically calling people "disingenuous" just because they haven't sold as much as you have, or their path is different. Isn't one of the points of RU-vid is to remove the gatekeepers from publishing videos. Who cares if they want the "lifestyle" why do you guys get to determine that? Even if someone hasn't yet shipped, even if its unsuccessful, it's still interesting to see their journey... even if their journey is wrong, maybe they will find out. This video really, really, REALLY seems to be arrogant. AND in a way you are saying "listen to me and buy my stuff"... Some people's stuff isn't fake it's just aspirational. Of course there are scammers, but you guys don't come of as wanting to protect people, you come off as wanna be gatekeepers. 'you don't care about views'? Again doesn't sound like YOU are being truthful.

Im sure THomas knows a TON of valuable stuff but I can never finish his videos cause he kinda has a big ego..

Thomas, I love you and I love your content, and I want to tell you this so you can make better content. I watched your webinar, and you spent most of the video talking about how great you are and promising that you will give the greatest advice, without even reaching to the point or the actual advice, and all of that wasn't not skippable, so I couldn't even move past that. The problem is that all of us know you so you don't need to promise or prov anything or you will end up being the thing you actually fear

Wow, the ego really shines through at minute 16. I genuinely enjoy this space, but discrediting other devs just because you’ve made more income? That’s foul, Thomas. Knowing the strategy behind generating income through video games has nothing to do with whether you actually live off it. For example, most % of school or university teachers live off their university paycheck. Should we then understand that the equivalent percentage of teachers and professors who don’t apply their knowledge in real life are failures/scams? I am suspecting your answer revolves around a yes.. if so.. i imagine your course offer a higher probability of success because you’ve been so strategic and luck-free that publishers just happen to love your content and pay you handsomely-especially for the Apple Arcade port, right? It almost sounds like no luck played a part into your mild success! What a dissapointing high horse you're in.

Es la primera vez que veo un video de este tipo. La verdad me parece un tóxico, como 20 minutos hablando mal de otros canales. Mejor aporta algo y deja a los demás que hagan lo suyo 🫠

Nice gate-keeping guys. Glad you two are the authorities on how to make money. Got it.

The Letter is a true classic

Love it. Would love to sometime be on your podcast. I’m making a Japanese learning game and even though it’s in early access and pretty small, I’m making enough money being married with 3 kids. It’s pretty insane how you can make money with a great vision, but you need to be able to convey that idea well. Best Light

Thanks for the interesting angle. I often wonder why Indies develop a game and then abandon their codebase alltogether. I intend to use the thigns I'm building for a looong time!

His nintendo comment made me think of how I am going about this journey. Cuz Mario, Pokemon, etc they are copies of copies. Same gameplay, different skins. Right? Every new game is the same as before with a few new things. The game I am making now is like a learning game. It is my first so I want to put enough in where I can copy, paste in the next game but not so much that this takes me forever to make. But even inside this game, I am copy, pasting. The first level I am making has most of the mechanics that the whole game will have. Just with different skins, blocks and whatever will be arranged differently to make the puzzle platforming harder etc but the core is the same. Like I am working on a turret enemy right right now that shoots acorns that hurts you. Well I could reskin it to be a spider that shoots web balls that slow you. 90% the same thing with the look and end result being tweaked. And if you think about what enemies are, they are just obstacles with animations. What is the difference between a boulder rolling around or an armadillo? A wall that pushes you or a big boy that pushes you? They are just traps with personalities. There is a lot of copy, pasting going on in video games. I hear a lot of advice whether to make a lot of small games or make one big game. But in the end, both give you the knowledge and editable example to work off of for your next game. 1 of Chad's platform games could equal 1 level of Timmy's platform game. The only difference is Chad is throwing it out there more often. But then again if Timmy is throwing out alphas and updates while using patreon or whatever then it is kinda the same thing. But also a problem with creating small games is people might not play them. I love indie games but there are a lot of indies I don't like the look of or it seems too short or whatever, I won't play them. Angry Penguin is a simple, rage inducing game. Where you go through a very unfair obstacle course. A extremely simple game that I bought cuz it was cheap but lost interest cuz I just got bored. First rule of platformers is make the character fun to play as. I didn't play Only Up cuz it looked boring but I did play the Only Up game with the characters chained together but with friends. So these small games can be easy and quick to make but if they aren't engaging enough then you'll waste as much time as if you made 1 big game. So really there is no guarantee of success with either route. But have their pros and cons. I guess in the end, the main factors determining which route you go is patience and money. I don't know, that is just what popped in my head at the 36 min marker.

This is such a frustrating part of game development, because the "games as business" and "games as high-functioning art and media" seem to mostly be mutually-exclusive markets, which is disappointing for someone who doesn't want to intentionally make shallow, watered-down slop just so it will sell.

So much value in this talk. Thank you, Eli and Thomas.

This was super interesting!

These are great videos I enjoy watching them.

Man it’s literally so amazing to see Eli on here, thanks for bringing him on Thomas!! What a legend!!!

it sums up as simple as look at the fruit and not the tree

You should talk to Adam C Younis, Creator of the Unity powered Pixel Action adventure game, Insignia. He's been working on his game for like 7 years and I think the conversation between you two would be fascinating!

Thomas Brush first We would like to say much love to you for what you doing in the Gaming community, this was a great Podcast I really enjoyed Like soo much

The very famous Thomas Brush's gaze dancing, the do i watch the screen or the camera 📷 😂

yeah, people must have and show their results if they want to be believable and want to gain trust from other people!

Thank you so much T! This conversation has truly opened my mind, i have done some very very useful notes guys wow! tytytyty

Thomas I appreciate all your concerns and love these videos.

Wishlist comes with creativity!!!!🎨

this the one…. Thank you

Dude!

You best podcast so far, hands down.

The guys who you think shouldn't be making educational content because of their numbers I imagine is bitme games?

15:46 bite me games for sure