Hacker News Reader

Comment by ParksNet | Hacker News Reader

New game developers don't make any money. The gaming industry, both free and paid titles, is overwhelmingly hit-driven, and bigger professional teams can more consistently deliver high quality content.

The median title on Steam earns only $3,000 in sales over the first year: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/analyst-your-first-week-...

Considering cost of development and time, the average title most likely loses money. People were basically LARPing as game developers, and throwing money at Unity for the privilege. As economic conditions deteriorate, its reasonable to expect people to stop doing that.

View on HN

>> LARPing as game developers

That's harsh in my opinion. In entertainment and media there are always more people who want to do a thing than can be supported: musicians, actors, comedians, artists, etc.

Sometimes amateurs become pros. Sometimes people "LARPing" -- as you call it --make games I really enjoy. So I think its cool that people try their luck at game development even knowing most won't make a living at it.

Ya. Am I LARPing as a developer for creating OSS things that scratch and itch and not working at Oracle or some such.

Most of the people actually "LARPing" don't actually ever finish and publish their games, so you can't enjoy them.

So true! Sometimes to scratch my itches I have joined first timers- I guess me “LARPing” as a garage developer. It usually becomes clear they will never even finish a prototype.

Once I joined a team that was making a space ship combat game. All they worked on was 2d buttons, sliders, etc. Building a whole GUI from scratch for months. I stuck my head up to say maybe we could try some gameplay ideas? No it was important to get the menus right.

> People were basically LARPing as game developers, and throwing money at Unity for the privilege.

If you make a game, and it struggles due to very tough market conditions, you are not LARPing as a game dev. You are a game developer. There are countless gems on steam that have not gotten commercial success, but are well engineered and well designed titles.

Yeah, no one would say a skilled painter is LARPing just because their work isn’t commercially successful

But they're LARPing if they never finish or sell a painting.

I don't think that's a realistic definition. It all has to do with intention. LARPers, by definition, are role-playing and not actually intending to do the thing. A painter who never makes a sale or never finishes, but intended to, just failed at the task.

LARPing would mean they are pretending to paint or pretending to have made works.

I am technically a gamedev, but I am not a professional gamedev.

Van Gogh wasn’t a real painter?!

In terms of artist-as-a-profession during his lifetime? It's harsh, but yes.

The median title on Steam earns only $3,000 in sales over the first year

That number is probably way overstating the median revenue. It is based on a non-random sample (hey devs, send us your data for a survey) of 75 games. Looking at a larger dataset, a majority of developers make <$1,000 (average revenue: $294).

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/what-can-we-learn-from-t...

The median is meaningless anyway, with the bar to entry being so low. If enough people publish games that no-one buy the median will be $0.

Yes, that's basically what's happening as more and more games are getting published.

2013: 551

2014: 1,631

2015: 2,679

2016: 4,466

2017: 6,251

2018: 8,137

2019: 7,841

2020: 9,609

2021: 10,696

hey where's the data from? Its from Steam or the whole game industry included mobile? I would eager to read more details, thanks.

If your company (or personal LLC) is only making $3000/year in revenue, you can use Unity for free (the threshold where you need Unity Pro is $100K/year). So even if fewer people are doing those kinds of “nights and weekends passion project” games, it’s not likely that it’s affecting Unity’s overall revenue that much.

Right, but some of these passion projects in turn become breakout hits that breach the 100k barrier then presumably generate revenue for Unity - think of indie games that break out into mainstream built on Unity like Among Us or Valheim. If the reduction in passion project games is significant enough it might well have an impact - especially as fewer "AAA" style development houses pick Unity.

I agree Steam games are a difficult market to break into, but there are other ways to make money. Unity is also a nice platform if you want to produce interactive content for corporate or educational consulting projects.

Also consider the large number of places such as Hobby Lobby, Williams-Sonoma, or Home Depot that cater to hobbyist/amateurs rather than industry professionals.

As far as I know, there is exactly zero reason to give Unity money if you're a hobbyist.

Unity's asset store is a pretty cheap and convenient way to get assets if you're on a budget.

Steam is kind of irrelevant. If you look through Unity job postings, almost all of them are in the mobile market (where Unity dominates) with the rest being gambling or web3 vaporware

> throwing money at Unity for the privilege

Your company has to have over 100,000USD in gross annual revenue to pay for unity, at which point you are no longer "LARPing"...

Even if there are fewer amateur game devs in the next few years, the pool of people who've been doing that in the last few years is where the big pro teams will be recruiting from, and a lot of them are familiar with Unity and will want to keep using it (and even if you don't care about their preferences, they will be more productive more quickly in teams that do).

What is the median lifetime sales? Or over a 5 year window? I don't think first year is the end-all, be-all here given how being a gamedev actually works (e.g. what if I release 5 games in 5 years?) But it's possible first year sales are effectively lifetime sales on average as well.

There is a long, slowly accumulating tail but to get there you need to survive five years and five releases. And least some of those need to be more successful than the median to generate real revenue in the tail. It also comes with increased expense in terms of maintaining those games, both the codebase itself and the marketing around it. For all that you’ll probably pull in a mediocre salary for a single developer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com