I made $2000 in 8 hours as a Game Developer!
And without writing any new code!
Web Games
I made ~12 web games in the past 8 months — I developed most of them by myself, and some projects I outsourced to freelancers!
I am a Game Developer and I build puzzle/arcade/sports games using Unity.
I work with web-platforms like GameDistribution, GamePix & Coolmath Games. I am expanding my games to new platforms, like Telegram, soon!
Web game platforms are the easiest way to get players to your game and earn revenue. I use ChatGPT to write most of the game code and upload my games on these platforms.
How I made $2,000
Now, an upcoming web games platform wanted some new games for its platform and asked us to license some of our previous games to them.
We decided together on 4 games (and more later) to ship to their platform, at a license fee of $500/game (less than our standard license fees).
The platform is in its early stages hence I did not negotiate on the price and rather focused on a long-term partnership!
They requested to remove the splashscreen logo and allow SiteLock (so you cannot play on other websites) for 2 domains.
With these changes and QA testing, I spent 2 hours/game (exporting from Unity took 30% of my time :( ) to make this happen.
So instead of working on a new project, I am still making money from my old games, without having to write new code!
But this is rare and not a recurring/repeatable source of revenue -> the golden rule for me is to focus on recurring sources of revenue instead of one offs!
My watermelon game still earns me about ~$300/month!
Making games using Unity is quite easy now for me. I heavily use ChatGPT for complex systems and algorithms, it has cut down my development time by more than 50%.
For the rest of 2024, my focus is on marketing them in the best, unconventional ways possible 🚀 Like using YouTube and promoting organic traffic for my games!
(If you have a platform and want some games for your players -> feel free to reach out!)
Conclusion
Making games and earning money is satisfying. You just have to keep identifying opportunities!
Stay tuned as I experiment more with gen-AI tools for game dev, share more unconventional ways to earn money by making games!
You can connect with me on LinkedIn where I talk about gen-AI tools and game industry trends.
You used the 1st person plural pronoun (us/we) several times in this article. Who else is on your team? Or is this the "royal we" where it's just you as a solo, but it sounds better to consider the different roles you examined the idea from / chat with the wife who said, "Whatever you decide"?
How are you making money from free web games?
Out of curiosity, do you generate all of your assets using midjourney?
Do you find that takes away from the experience of making games, or is drawing and 3D modeling just not something you enjoy?