LifePath:

What game? What publisher? Enquiring minds want to know.

If it was good enough to make $80K / 6 months, I want to play it!

I have to agree. I mean it is possible to make 80K in royalties, but on a budget game and in six months, that means you can get near 200K in a year. This would mean you''re not only getting incredible royalties but also huge sales. In addition, if it''s part of a pack, this means all the other authors would be getting similar amounts, which would total up to over a million per year in royalties for just 5-6 games in such a pack. Hmmm.
Either you''ve mistakingly added a 0 to your amount or the publishers of your game give way too much in royalties, where do their profits come in?

Another thing which makes this sound odd is this:
you say you made 80K in six months and then you ask: what should I do? It''s like a guy winning the lottery and asking if he should continue being a factory worker.

Don''t get me wrong, it is possible to make good money with ''budget'' games but this sounds way over the top. I would have to agree that you should at least post a link to your game. To get 80K in 6 months this game should be near professional quality, and you should not have any problem showing it off, right?

Mark is the only one who thinks right.
The guy in this case didn't reply with a link.

Edited by - spikey on September 7, 2001 4:35:15 AM

What currency did you make the 80,000 in?

It''s real important.

I don''t see why some of you think it''s impossible for him to have made $80,000. Most computer games that do good sell about 100,000 - 200,000 copies. It was a budget game pack so it probably sold for around $20. Even if the games aren''t that good you get alot of custormers who will buy it because it''s only $20. So say the sold 100,000 copies that would mean $2,000,000. Say there was 5 games then thats 80,000 a game and that comes to $500,000. That still leaves $1.5 million to split between the publisher and the stores. So the publisher is probably making at least $750,000 for something they probably didn''t do too much work on.

Look anything is possible. If that pack sold 500K copies in those six months, he could be earning even more.

There are a few things wrong with those assumptions:

1. 200K units or even 100K units in 6 months, that would make it sell higher than 99% of full price games, and it would be in the top 10 of games sold, think about it: 400,000 copies in a year, most games sell less than 50K copies.

2. Budget publishers will in nearly all cases give you a flat fee or royalties in the region of a few cents per unit sold, not 5 USD per unit sold to the developers. If a budget developer asks you to develop a game from scratch, you may receive something like 20-50K in total.

3. Making 80K in 6 months for 3 months of work. Think about it. Even if you can only manage 6 months = 2 games per year. That means you''re getting 80K x 2 x 2 = 320,000 USD per year in royalties for just working half of the year, and that''s after work hours only! If you would be able to get this from a budget game in a compilation, three years of work = typical development for a full price game - would earn you much, much more than any programmer on Quake3, Doom 3 or whatever.

Anyone with half a brain would be doing this.

To sum up, yes it is possible, but highly, highly unlikely. The above posters are right in saying that they have yet to hear of any budget publisher giving a million dollar-a year royalties for a budget compilation.

In addition, like I mentioned before it is odd to ask if you should become a 50K per year game programmer if you''re already making 150-200K per year in royalties for three months after work hobby programming. Go figure.

Still, I would still like to know, (and I''m sure everybody else would), what kind of game sells like that. Could we have a link, or even some screenshots ?
r.

"The mere thought hadn''t even begun to speculate about the slightest possibility of traversing the eternal wasteland that is my mind..."

Hey,
First of all congrats. I would really really really really like to see this game. To the others: Back in 1997 I made a game called ''BrainTwister'' in 2 weeks! (when I was in high-school.) I did not make any changes after that. eGames recently published it in a collection "Galaxy of Games Green edition". First of all, I did not expect it to ever get published! It came out about 3 weeks back (I think), and they already send me a cheque (enough to buy some RAM and a new spanking video-card (GeForce 3)). Now thats 2 weeks of work 4 years back. This guy (or gal) says 3 months of work. Let''s give him/her the benifit of the doubt, shall we?

Ybox [its just a stupid nick for now, I''ll come up with something better soon ;-) ]