How much money will your FIRST INDIE GAME make?

hey guys my name is Thomas brush and the creator of a game called pinstripe I'm also working on a game called once upon a coma which will be released on consoles and steam later this summer I want to talk about your very first game a lot of you are thinking about starting your first game or maybe even finishing up your first game and thinking about how much money is this game actually going to make well I can't give you the exact figures right I'm not God I don't know what's gonna happen with your game but I can give you a philosophy to live by some rules of thumb about your very first game and how much money it's gonna make but before I tell you about how much money your first game is going to make I want to talk about Skillshare guys I'm really thankful for Skillshare not only because they sponsored this video but because they provide a ton of resources and courses available for you and you can get two months free and these courses are gonna help you learn how to make games and get financial freedom to be able to maybe quit your job or launch your very first game they have courses on 2d animation 2d design coding development marketing

storytelling audio design I mean you whatever you want to learn it's probably on Skillshare so guys please click below if you're interested in getting to three months of Skillshare thank you so much Skillshare and thank you for sponsoring this video [Music] all right let's start off with my first game okay my first game was called coma well that's what I've been telling you but really my very very very first game was a game called flash geometry Bors this game was a complete ripoff of geometry Wars but I wanted to make a flash version see if I could do it so I just sort of coated some really crappy if-then statements and and a little bit of trig and I put it together and I made flash geometry wars and this was my very very very very very first game and it made $0 and then I made coma wait nope

that's not true and then I made a game I think it was called pans apples and that game was a game about Peter Pan and you could fly around and collect apples I don't know why I decided to make a game about this but I just started working on it and it worked out and it was fun and I made a game called Pan's apples so after I made that game and made $0 I made coma now coma was my first real game even though it was a free flash game and that game ended up making about $20,000 but that wasn't from sales or even ad revenue that was from selling it everything the whole IP and that's intellectual property I sold the entire IP to a publisher eventually bought it back and I'm making the sequel right now but that's a long story but overall you can see that my first three games in terms of sales numbers and ad revenue was zero dollars I made a couple hundred dollars here and there

and I think with coma maybe I made a couple grand off of ads but overall when it comes to game sales was nothing right and I think this is a really important thing to remember I wasn't making games to make money I was making games because I wanted to and a lot of you right now have maybe been maybe it's my fault right maybe I've been telling you how you you could be successful as a game developer maybe it's the indie game documentary or maybe there's other developers out there who've made millions of dollars or even just six figures off of there games and you think that you could do it too now obviously you can do this too but I would say it's very important to remember that your first game the very first game that you release it probably won't make money it might make a couple hundred bucks maybe even two thousand dollars but probably won't make money there's a couple reasons for that mainly it's because games that you make the very first game you make is probably gonna be shorts probably gonna be small it's probably gonna be a prototype of some kind that you release the HIO or

gamejolt or just some free website now is it wrong that your game makes $0 is it in just well of course not I mean it's your first game and it's probably not gonna make money because you're new to this right the thing that you get out of your first game that the value that you get out of your very first game it's not money it is not money it is learning how to make a game how to release a game and learning what you did wrong and what you did right and then making the next one I think about this often but Edmund McMillen who made super meatboy and is wildly successful I actually looked up all the games that he made it's ridiculous how many games he made before he made Super Meat Boy so let's just go to Wikipedia here and take a look at what Edmund McMillan's career was oh well it looks like he made Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac and the end is nigh those are the first three games that show up on Wikipedia man this guy

is brilliant he's so successful I'm not like Edmund McMillen he's so smart well he is smart but let's keep going if you scroll down you see an entire list of games that he made that you probably don't know about and these were games he made before Super Meat Boy the backup files the lonely hermit dead baby dress-up twelve uses of dead bodies dead baby dress up to six more dead baby uses dead baby dress up three style man dress up WWF baby dress up eight more dead babies the list goes on and on and on lots of dead babies and when did he make Super Meat Boy when did he make Super Meat Boy I don't even he made it like 20 games after the rule of thumb that we can gather from this is if you want to be successful you need to release games so stop thinking of your first game as your baby it's not your baby I mean no games should be your baby I hate that line of or that philosophy of making games or making any creative work it's not your

baby it's just the project okay you're having fun it's your job or maybe it's not your job it's a hobby it's not your baby your baby should be a human being that's who your baby should be that's where you should invest all of your emotion and your depression and your anxiety and your happiness and your joy all of those emotions should be put on people not projects that said your very first game is not gonna be your baby especially your very first game is not gonna be your baby so what I would say is treat your first game not as some doorway to financial independence and wealth and quitting your job and starting a new career treat your first game like your first game it's a project that's gonna teach you a lot about making games it's gonna teach you how to make a game how to release a game and most importantly your very first game is going to teach you how to finish a game that is and I hate to say it so I feel

like I'm being a jerk right now but a lot of you don't know how to finish a game honestly a lot of you don't know how to finish a game how many games have you quit right how many games have you even thought about but you never even started your very first game should teach you how to finish a game it should teach you how to make games and and I don't know if I would ever gotten where I am now if I didn't release flash geometry wars or pans apples right I don't know if I where I would be if I didn't take the step to releasing those games and guys I didn't treat those games like they were super special I really didn't I just made him really quick and uploaded them online and forgot about him I think it was like three months later where I decided that I was gonna look at the reviews for flash geometry wars and they were pretty good some of them were crap but I didn't stress over it it wasn't a huge deal to me a lot of you think about your game right now whether it's even just an idea and you think about it with such anxiety

and stress and you're worried about what people will think you're worried about whether you can actually do it and I would say just get it done and release it just get it out there who cares what people think it's going to probably flop anyway so don't worry about it a lot of you might be mad right now hearing me say that it's probably going to flop anyway but I promise you if you embrace that mentality right now you'll be so much more grateful after you release your game then releasing your games thinking you're gonna make a million bucks or even just a hundred thousand dollars and realizing that the road is a little bit longer than that you can't just release one game and expect it to be successful thank you guys so much for watching this video if you like this video please hit subscribe hit the like button and consider supporting on patreon also you can wish lists once upon a coma which is coming to steam and console later this summer thanks guys I'll talk to you later bye

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