Good Money in Gaming?

#161 @Colton Godsy
WOW. i have never seen someone ask a question like that. A lot of game developers are not in it for money. sure its a perk. but most indie, or new start up game companies really only started, because they had a passion for video games, and the development side. I've worked on several professional game titles, and i'll tell you one thing. i didnt care how much money i was making. i was hoping for at least 20~30k a year. but i got 50~80k a year doing it (as a coder, contract base). No offence, but by the way you sound, you seem like a highschool student trying to make an easy buck. I may be wrong. But listen:

$100, is not much money, espicially for such a fantastic game engine. I myself have bought several content packs, but i'm really only using them for prototypes. or to see how they do it.

The Reason people go buy this engine, is because the engine is a private engine, hence making the code very solid, and stable(after 1.0+). If they do decide to go market there product, they dont have to worry of paying half a mill to license the engine. The problem with Unreals or even HL2 free SDK, is that you dont get any of the code. and if you do, its only the game code, none of the rendering, or engine code. Hence your really only making a mod. But if you want to go for something completely free, then you can use something like irrlicht or ogre3d, but the down fall with those engines is that you dont have the advantage of a scripting system, or even the tools. (ogre3d is just a rendering engine for example).

I've worked with many game engines out there, such as the Unreal ed, Quake 2/3/Qfusion, Ogre3d, irrlicht, HL/2, Torque, and even wrote my own (for the psp homebrew). Out of all of them, i found that Torque was the best(beside unreal). mainly because its comes with all the tools needed, full source code and affordable.

Theres a lot to game development, and also a lot to into the marketing side too. Go check out gamedev.net and read a few of the articles. But in short. if you want to make money, create a good idea, a complete GDD, and bring it to a publisher and if they really like it, they will fund your project. maybe even help pay for your car :P

Remember this, To make a little money, you got to spend a little money. Making a game project, or even a project in general is all about taking risk. If you think that your project is well off, and you actually have something, then you shouldnt be worried about spending money. If you truly got something awesome up your sleeves, someone will find you.

#162 Yeah, by now I've gotton the fact that theres not really any good money in indie dev. But, my hole perspective has changed since I was last on here. I realized that it was a hobby to people who love this stuff. I didn't know that before this forum started. Which is why I started it. And yeah, I think its a great hobby. But, I know I've said that its a waist of time if its not making money and I kinda sounded like a hustler in a way but I see now that its just for fun and its cool knowing your making games aswell as other people. But, there things about game dev. that I love and is why I choose to do it, like a hobby. Cause it beats the hell out of collecting stamps. And as for the 3d content packs, I've been thinking about those for months now and I'm getting ready to start on them. There supposed to have there own website. But, were going to have several premade environments like city blocks, jungles, ect. but they will be dirt cheap price wise. I didn't want to tell just yet but were gearing up for a graphic engine like ogre-right now being called Focus. But, it might be mid 2007 before its done. I'm not telling everyone to get ready for it like its GTA 4 but watch for it in the next few months or whatever.

#163 I did not realize that it was so difficult to break into the business.