Anybody earning a living out of using AGK

[Dabz]

Have a nice evening

Same to you fella!

Dabz

[Pfaber11]

Well I've decided to monetize my games by charging for them . Not much from 1.49 to 2.49 and that's in dollars . I think they're probably worth that . If I don't sell any then I've lost nothing as previously I was giving them away . It will be an interesting experiment  to see if it's harder to give them away or charge a small fee. Over the last year or so I've had about 50 downloads .
Not many but there you go better than nothing . It may be that over the next 12 months I sell nothing but I won't know until I test the water. Thinking of getting my stuff on play store but apparently there's an issue something to do with it needing to be 64bit and TGC needs to sort out AGK2 to do this . When it's sorted I'll take a serious look . I did have my stuff on game jolt but I was getting more traffic through Itch.io so that's what I'm using at the moment with my own site linking to Itch.io    . Have a nice day.

[Derron]

You could try the "name your own price" option at itch.io (and other platforms).

But... I doubt people like to pay for stuff. Non of my games at itch.io hat a single sale. Had a game in the amazon app shop and it got no sales too.

Yes all of them are mediocre, not as polished as others...but they did not look amateurish or like builds based on buyable game templates.

Sales come with downloads/interest/awareness of your products. If you assume that every 1000th download would be a willed-to-pay-a-dollar one, then you can estimate your yearly income.

Some people here might be able to tell you numbers (downloads, purchases... maybe even inapp-purchases/unlocks.


Hope I am wrong and time will tell but I am pretty sure that sales will be not worth the hassle of declaring the income in your tax report then. This counts for you...and this counts for me and plenty of other less lucky developers around the world.

But as you said: who does not try cannot win.


Bye
Ron

[Coder Apprentice]

Thinking of getting my stuff on play store but apparently there's an issue something to do with it needing to be 64bit and TGC needs to sort out AGK2 to do this. When it's sorted I'll take a serious look.

RickV on the TGC forums said: "This is a known issue and we'll have a fix for both Classic and Studio next week."

[Dabz]

I made roughly about £1200 with two iOS games in a year on the app store, ironically, the one I thought wouldn't do very well got the majority of the sales, which only took a month to build from start to finish.

So you can make a few beer tokens, but unless you put major effort into marketing (Thats a full time job as well), expect to get nothing or a little bit, you never know though until you try, you may hit lucky and end up building something people do want to pay to play.

Another route, and much better is finding what genres are popular to casual gamers, e.g. 40+ year old bored housewifes, build it to suit them then get sites like BigFishGames to sell it for you, but be warned, casual gamers can be very fickle, and publishers like BigFish are more picky on quality (looks and lack of bugs) then your average AAA publisher where they'll just release anything to get sales going.

Following that route you will make money!

I wish you luck!

Dabz

[Coder Apprentice]

Me too - I made a few decent months wages from Galaxix way way back ( 9 years ago I believe ). Not too shabby for my very 1st 3D game.

I guess this is the game...the pilot's name is QUBE.

I never used GLBasic and it's interesting how many people even from the Blitz community found it a very productive tool. How long have you worked on this? Did you release the game on multiple platforms? Where did you get the most sales?

[Qube]

I never used GLBasic and it's interesting how many people even from the Blitz community found it a very productive tool. How long have you worked on this? Did you release the game on multiple platforms? Where did you get the most sales?

I worked on it for about a year on and off as I'd never done a 3D game before so I kinda dived in and just hoped I would figure things out as I went along. Graphics / coding / sound effect / music were all done by me and the only thing which isn't is the background while docked at a space station which was rendered in Daz3D.

It was only ever released on the original iPad 1 era so getting all the textures to fit into the low memory of the iPad 1 was a pain, hence the low resolution textures. I think the iPad 2 had come out by the time the game was ready for release but as the iPad 1 was the most popular the game had to work on that.

I had planned to release on Android and then a higher resolution / texture version on PC. I'd also planned expanding the game for a story based mode and multiplayer but masses of real work piled in and things moved on over time that it needed a complete rewrite and all the model / graphics done again to a much higher standard.

Also GLBasic's 3D engine was no longer up to the task of creating the look I wanted and also there were bugs creeping in like alpha issues to which they added more alpha commands but never really worked the same in 3D and made all the particle effects in Galaxix look bloomin horrible.

So that's pretty much the story behind it

[Coder Apprentice]

Cool!!! What did you use for music...I can hear some nice orchestra samples. Were you thinking about re-work it using AGK? I think it would sell even without a much higher level graphics just needs a light rework. After re-releasing this one you could make a bigger investment in Galaxix II...



Anyway, great stuff!

[Qube]

Cool!!! What did you use for music...I can hear some nice orchestra samples. Were you thinking about re-work it using AGK? I think it would sell even without a much higher level graphics just needs a light rework. After re-releasing this one you could make a bigger investment in Galaxix II...

The music was done with a tracker style app called Renoise with VST plugin called Editol Orchestral which is really old now and no longer available.

If I ever fancied doing a more modern version then I wouldn't use AGK as it's 3D engine does not offer the features I'd need and would more likely use Unity which has a vastly superior render and options available.

[Derron]

Graphics / coding / sound effect / music were all done by me

Enemy ship destroyed - you have a nice and calm voice Qube ;-)


bye
Ron

[Qube]

Enemy ship destroyed - you have a nice and calm voice Qube ;-)

Yes, people think I'm male

[Derron]

This is why I speak out your nickname like "qjubie" ("q-bee") - has a way more female touch, doesn't it?

seriously: regarding your game above - how did sales develop? was there some initiative required to get it "running" or how was it that time?


bye
Ron

[Qube]

seriously: regarding your game above - how did sales develop? was there some initiative required to get it "running" or how was it that time?

Initially from day one sales were pretty good. A review site also covered it but didn't affect the sales. Sales continued for a few weeks then slowly dipped to a handful for the rest of the time it was available. Overall the first couple of weeks were the best before sales went down. As said, it made a couple of months worth of good wages but nothing to buy a house or anything.

I'd say back then it was easier to make money from the App Store than it is now. I've not put any personal games on the App Store in years although I do fancy dipping my toes back in again just to see what happens. I say personal games as I did do a few for others but just got paid to do them rather than any income from sales.

[Derron]

Ok, so just some luck to be amongst less games than today.

Thanks for the insight. And now back to the OP :-)


bye
Ron

[Qube]

Ok, so just some luck to be amongst less games than today.

Yes, I would say there was some luck involved + back then the store wasn't swelling of free to play with in-app purchases by big publishers. I would say that if I released the game today with up to date graphics I'd be lucky to sell 50 units without advertising everywhere. The mobile market is swamped and there are a lot of big players / publishers out there and any solo indie developer will need some major luck to get their game noticed.

Having said that, I will give it another shot someday just out of curiosity and fun.