2022 will be THE BEST YEAR for Indie Game Devs

hey guys thomas brush here i make indie games for a living i'm gonna make a bold prediction 2022 and beyond are the best years to make indie games it's just gonna get better and better and better i can't see a time when it's gonna stop now this video is actually spurred on by a buddy of mine daniel he did a video about why it's so easy to be a game developer before we talk about the three reasons why i think this just remember you can download my free 2d game kit below it's totally free it's my treat to you you can use it however you want for personal games or commercial games you can make a million bucks off this game kit i really don't care i used this game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days so click below open it in a new tab and be sure to download that 2d game kit all right so the first reason is because the revenue models to sell your indie games are a lot different than they used to be a lot of people say it's way too competitive for indie game developers right now right so you have to compete with all these thousands and thousands of games it's just too many games and when you sell a game for five bucks and

you only sell two thousand copies you've only made ten grand and then you gotta pay platform fees well the truth is is that the way to make money is a little bit different now it's basically yeah it's basically the netflix of gaming every every platform is becoming the netflix of gaming xbox game pass playstation now ea play nintendo switch online uplay humble choice apple arcade i actually partnered with apple arcade for never song which is my second commercial release uh google play pass amazon prime gaming i didn't know that was a thing why didn't i know that um so there's a ton of services here so what does this mean a lot of you probably think that just means they're gonna sell my game for free and i'm gonna make no money no that's not how it works the way that it works and and i know this because i partnered with apple arcade the way this works is they pay developers pretty good amount of money to put your game on their service and give it away for free to their subscribers right well it's not really free but you get the point so xbox or sony they're gonna give you a

paycheck a pretty good paycheck just pop it in your account and say hey we're gonna give away your game for free to our audience the only caveat to think about here is well think about your potential for revenue and think about am i going to lose money in the long run if i partner with like let's say humble choice let's say humble is willing to pay you 30 grand for your indie game well they're going to give away a lot of steam keys are you sure you want to do that for just 30 grand or let's say that you know epic games that's another one let's say epic game says hey for a month we want your game to be free in our service we'll pay you 60 grand that might be a great opportunity especially if you're just starting out because well you're making 60 grand but also it's only for a month right so maybe they'll give away you know a million copies of your game for epic games users well you could still access other platforms in their markets as well after the sale is up so it's just something to consider the second reason why is because of nfts

now i know this might be annoying to a lot of you because you've heard about nfts for a long time and it's a trendy thing to talk about but i do think that it's the future so for those of you who don't know though nfts are non-fungible tokens these tokens are linked to blockchain technology this is decentralized technology and basically it allows for a token a digital asset to not be replicated past the intended amount so an example of this in your indie game could be let's say you're making a fantasy adventure game you could sell 20 nft versions of a very specific sword super powerful sword but there's only 20 versions and you can sell these for a hundred dollars a pop or a thousand dollars a pop depending on the size and scale of your game's popularity you can sell those nfts for a very premium price so you could sell it for a thousand bucks plus easy so that's one nft is is actual items in

game and then there's also the ability to sell nft versions of your game and this is already happening in the triple a market you could say 200 copies of your game and they're selling for 300 a pop you could sell this version of your game maybe it's a different character that you can play as maybe it's uh playing the game in reverse or maybe the game has commentary or secret levels secret characters that's an nft version of your game it's basically like a dlc but it's a limited amount and again it's linked to blockchain technology so it can't be cheated that's what makes it so valuable you cannot give away more than your intended amount so that's a great way to make money and in fact i think this is one of the primary ways that indie game developers are gonna make money instead of selling individual copies of the game for five bucks they sell nft versions of their games and they sell them at premium prices not only can you make money the moment you decide to sell an nft but with unity maybe you could make

money with the transaction that occurs from nft owner to nft owner so let's say somebody buys a sword for two hundred dollars you get the money but then they sell it for ten thousand dollars depending on how popular your game is let's say they sell it for ten grand you could make money on the transaction fee now i'm not saying that you need to be an opportunistic game developer all the time you don't have to make money this way i'm just saying this is the future and we're probably going to see this happening and in fact it already is i'm looking at it right now matic and unity in the arcane network which is a blockchain network they've partnered up to create a unity plug-in that allows game developers to create nfts so the nft market is already integrating itself within unity so it's going to be the future how you want to capitalize on that is really up to you and this is why i'm a huge proponent of building audiences not only can an audience buy your game for five bucks once it's out but they can also buy nfts for premium prices and that's

totally okay it's okay to sell an nft to your audience because there's probably someone in that audience who really wants an nft from you and that's totally fine so be willing to not only build your game but also build up your audience slowly and as that audience grows you can market to that audience for any game you create in the future the third reason is another annoying trendy topic but we're going to talk about it and that is the metaverse the metaverse is going to make it very profitable to be an indie game developer but more importantly i guess an indie entrepreneur somebody that sells games right but also sells assets and tools and nfts and participates in the metaverse as a digital creator for those of you who don't know let's google search metaverse and take a look at what wikipedia says wikipedia says the metaverse is a hypoth hypoth what is that hypothesized iteration of the internet supporting persistent on online 3d virtual environments through

conventional personal computing as well as virtual and augmented reality headsets i read that and i sh leave a comment below let's talk about this i don't think that's the metaverse i think that the augmented reality in the virtual reality side of the metaverse has been hyped too much to try and get a point across to sort of lower information consumers i think ultimately the metaverse is a digital economy and it's a digital world where you get to flex your digital assets and participate in this digital economy with other people it's different than what we've got currently i mean we're definitely growing in that direction already but it's different than web 2.0 because web 2.0 you couldn't really take ownership of the big tech platforms well now with the metaverse because of blockchain technology and the ability to purchase non-fungible digital assets we can own portions of these digital economies so as an indie game developer you are taking one step even if you're

just dipping your toes you're taking one step into being an architect of digital assets within the metaverse the future generations including gen z and plenty of millennials that's gonna be the world they inhabit the the metaverse and again it's not just a virtual world it could be just an app on your phone it could be instagram and instagram for example you can flex your 3d nfts and rotate look at them in your profile picture or as a story or a post flexing your nfts is definitely going to be the future and gen z is going to embrace this faster than any generation obviously because they're already participating in worlds like this flexing on tick-tock flexing on social media it's way more valuable than flexing in real life so it's just going to expand into you know multiple dimensions into the third dimension and maybe beyond right so my whole point here is that as an indie game developer the metaverse is suddenly this man i don't know pandora's box just

exploding open with a ton of opportunity so right now you might want to make an indie game a 2d platformer that might not make a lot of money right now but because you now learned how to do it you can now step into the metaverse as kind of a mini god creating these worlds and owning those worlds and then selling them to an audience it's honestly pretty sinister like i i don't love it i'm not a huge fan of the metaverse i'm just telling you what's going to happen and if you want to participate in it go for it my recommendation and what i'm going to try and do is try and participate in it in a ethical way because there's ways that it can be not ethical every new technology can be problematic and it's up to the people who want to participate in that technology to do it ethically so be one of the people who joins the metaverse economy and as a creator do it right do it ethically and i don't know what that means see that's the thing is all these things that i'm talking about are so abstract and it's really hard to know

what an ethical product is in the metaverse until you start to do it and so we just need to take a look but you guys if you want to take a look at the metaverse you know just look at decentraland to look at sandbox uh obviously look at what facebook is doing and just start to study it the thing is is it doesn't really make sense yet there's just a lot that's confusing but the moment it's here and we're all in it and we're all participating in it it's gonna make sense and we'll look back and say how did we not know this was gonna happen there's a there's a gold rush but there's also people who make tools for the gold rush so consider being the person to make tools for the gold rush and the gold rush would be the metaverse anyway guys if you like this video be sure to subscribe leave a like leave a comment below there's plenty of reasons to leave spicy comments i'm happy to read them and maybe we can talk about it and discuss it in the comments