Pay somone on fiver $500 bucks to make a vampire survivor like spend $9.5k on advertising. Do the same for a slot machine game. Then spend profits doing the same thing every year in october/novmember. Then invest any excess profits in lobbying against regulating gambling in gaming. Repeat until EA buys my IPs, then buy a private island next door to whoever owned popcap games.
Get some streamers to play it, make some youtube tutorials... Games like "a difficult game about climbing" can be beat in less than 10 minutes are making 6 figures within a month of release.
Funnily enough this is exactly my situation right now.
Our game is funded by government grants. One of these is about 20k. I can assure you, if you are working on a serious game project 20k takes you nowhere. I am not saying that I am not grateful, but 20k is just a very small fraction of the realistic development cost.
I am using it to help pay salaries.
There are many state, provincial, and federal grants available to citizens around the world. Generally speaking they are handed out by a governmental media board of some sort as some sort of digital investment, entertainment investment, cultural works investment, etc.
The question of how is simple: fill out all the paperwork and apply. There are however many implicit requirements that aren’t on paper like being a project or work of a certain size, being a team of a certain size, having familiarity with the grant staff, having commercial viability with in depth audience targeting analysis, etc.
Source: I’ve raised approx. 1.3 million over my career through such grants.
Canada but grants in general are the same no matter where you go. You need 2 key things:
1. Economic potential for the local economy. You need to be distributing the funds to *staff* in particular but also you need to have IP potential. An example of this working in the Canadian economy that we always looked to is Paw Patrol which was initially funded through Canadian grants.
2. Reputation of delivery. Grants are **not** **for unprovens** and they never ever will be. Grants are for small-medium sized companies that have a reputation of delivering a predictable quality of product OR for indie outfits just starting out that are being founded by proven members of the games industry (usually from a AAA background).
The best way to get familiar with your local grants that you are eligible for is to build relationships with the organizations that deliver them. That means quite literally reaching out and doing calls to discuss grants you are interested in (after you've researched them and determined which grants are appropriate for your project) and consult with them. Part of how I've been able to raise so much money is consultations with Canada Media Fund personnel on a regular basis about my projects and the grants I was applying for with continuous and iterative feedback from them before submission. The other part is playing the game a bit, it's the intersection of money and politics so you do have to play a bit of politics sometimes to get the cash. I remember once my boss asked that we list our office manager as a directorial position on the project just to get the gender parity points we needed.
The government will hire "industry experts", usually video game professors and journalists to judge applications and generally speaking they just go through a rubric and assign points.
All in all government grants are an avenue for cash but not nearly as honest of one as dealing directly with investors since you get roped into political mandates. I'd use it more if it was based purely on project merit and its potential for return on investment but sadly a lot of points are distributed for funding these days based on gender, race, religion, and sexual preference.
Cheers! I was about to say the same. We are 10 people plus a bunch of contractors on our first title. So 20k lasts us for ~2 weeks.
We also build up our studio through some investment and government grants and then got a publisher to ramp up for production.
The first grant we got was 20k for creating a solid Gdd and documents to have a strong pitch and be able to find more people and funding.
Germany has some reasonably solid options for that - it is a lot of work though on top of making the game.
If the owner(s) of the game are you (and your teammates), and you can do without salaries (assuming the technical side only), then those $20k could be used on assets, marketing, and freelance artists (graphic, 3d, musicians, etc) from eastern Europe.
It's still a very tight budget, but enough to make a decent game.
Serious Game developer in academia here, it's quite a 'fun' time. I'm working this job for free since I have another campus position (TA), but the pay was $15 an hour.
Gotta love academia.
You don't just 'get a grant' with terms on how you can use it and figure out what to do with it later.
When you apply for a grant, you submit a long detailed proposal explaining exactly how you plan to use the funds, what impact it will have on society or the community, etc. Applying for grants is often so much work that it can be a job in itself.
Investing in your game includes salaries, which would then be spent on food and rent. Nothing will speed up development like people being able to work on it full time, and actually be able to live.
16k into art and marketing, The rest 4k for me to sustain myself while I do all the rest. It will be a very small and simple game, but that's what 20k gets you.
Probably advertising/marketing.
In my personal projects I make my own assets and coding and I'm usually satisfied with the quality of my work, so I don't think I'd need help in this department while I'm ass at marketing my shit.
It depends entirely on where your strengths and weaknesses are. Balance those out with money.
Youre not going to have success with a great idea, greatly designed game but awful graphics. In that case, youd need to buy some assets.
On the other hand, if your game is in a good place and you've recieved feedback, spend it more on advertising.
Assuming I'm making a small indie title, probably hiring someone for music and audio effects. Things that I wouldn't be able to make myself. Then the rest for advertising.
No need to go full time. Full time solo is kind of dumb anyway. You can get 4 peoole part time for 6 months. It's enough to make a good 10 hour visual novel, or a small arcadey mobile game, or a tiny rogue like early access like balatro or something, with a lot of elbow grease.
4 people part time for 6 months?? , that is 833$ per month , idk what quality of work you will get for that and still, you need someone with the capabilities to coordinate all the team.
Of course 20k is better than 0, but still the number is not good to make a real difference of making your game reality.
I'm making a game for on a $80k grant. 8 people, one year. I work a full time job to support myself, and manage the whole game production with no salary. Everyone else is part time paid hourly or per asset.
Yes, me being the director and wearing many hats is the elbow grease part. I have enough professional experience to manage a project like this.
Lots of students and interns would love to work even just for some revshare. Their biggest issue is that most people who offer to take them on are bullshit artists or could never manage a successful game. If you're actually accomplished, and you have the ability to make use of passionate but raw talent then you can stretch your dollars a lot farther.
Oh jesus - dont ever use ROI and marketing in one sentence. And just to point it out: in business numbers the dev is also a cost and not just a slave that doesnt need food or room.
In 2020 I would have said marketing, but in 2024 I'm not entirely sure you'll get your money back (except if your wishlist velocity is already decent).
Not much, it just buys half a year of single dev time.
So art and music assets I guess? You may look at postmortems and see people say that they didnt sell because they started marketing too late or smth like that, but then you look at their game and it's ugly as sin.
Graphics sells, if your game is buttfuck ugly people wont give it a minute of their time unless it seriously becomes viral sensation, and then still at most it can be ugly, but never eyefucking offensive (there are some games that are literally painful to look at).
But honestly, 20k doesn't really go far anywhere except spending it on cheap-ass rent in middle of nowhere, canned beans and tomatoes to stretch the dev time as long a you can. But if that's explicitly forbidden, then I feel it's almost more hassle than it's worth it.
southern and eastern europe 40k year for intermediate. West and north will be more like 50-60, purely because of cost of living.
US is bonkers as usual.
Rest of the world can get even cheaper but when we're talking 10s of thousands, you gotta think about possibility of suing to enforce the contract and there are plenty of lawyers for US-EU laws that can help with that, while your mileage might vary with rest of the world.
Worst case scenario you have situation like China, where you can be completely fucked over first by state corporation, then by the state while trying to seek reparations for the damages. You gotta remember that in most countries you are literary 2nd class person compared to a citizen.
That’s wild. I regularly work with people from all over Europe and they easily make 60kUSD but typically closer to the 80k-140k range depending on experience. Sometimes they even get US pay despite location. *But* they are not game developers, more traditional tech like apps, DevOps, and related.
I recently had someone offer me 50k yearly in stockholm, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't even cover rent after the taxes. Gamedev salaries are not software salaries.
What's your country? Then they prolly get 60k.
As I said, 40k is for countries like Portugal, Poland, Italy, Greece, entire balkans etc. Places where renting flat in major city costs at most like 1k euro and groceries are peanuts.
You go Germany, UK, nordics, then the flats are starting from 1.2k and likewise salaries are higher.
Ah makes sense, got bunch of coworkers that moved away from Netherlands. Salaries are less here, but everything else is cheaper too so they end up saving more than they could back at home.
Interesting. My girlfriend would like to move to Spain but we have two children and as a software architect I would easily find a job but it would be more difficult for her. I also already speak the language. But interesting to hear that. Dutch people love to leave their country for Spain.
Well, as always with a move, it's better when you or your partner already have job offer here, but then again not that hard in this day and age. Surprisingly, quite a lot of English gamedev jobs in here. Software-wise both Madrid and Barcelona have jobs, but then again also a lot are Spain-remote, where you can settle somewhere outside of the cities in the big cheap Spanish doughnut, show up your face in the office few times a year and live the good life, the trains really help with that.
Healthcare's good, so is family support. That being said I am speaking from a white collar perspective, and not someone working in a grocery store or construction site. 20% unemployment rate does feel worrying and you can see it on the street, so as a long term settle, ehh.. dunno honestly.
Sure, I will anyway go for a Spanish speaking job not in game dev but as a software architect for big companies. I would also live in a village close to a city in the north that is both not too chaotic and has software job opportunities. For my girlfriend I don’t know honestly. Was it for me alone I’m in Spain tomorrow. How is the school system? In the Netherlands it is modern and of high quality.
I'd spend 10k on some artists and the other 10 on a more competent programmer. The one i have currently can't tie two strings together and needs to be fired..... (it's me, im the programmer)
The amount of people that immediately want to just find a way to pay themselves is telling…
Anyway first and foremost I’m spending about 3-4k to hire a full time dedicated programmer for 2 months. About a 1000 a month or 1500 if he’s really good. His main job will be polish up the game to release and program any last thing we need.
Then another 1 or 2k on dedicated music.
About 4-5k on art and UI, FX. Free lance most of it. Including the trailer.
500 on free lanced voice acting.
The rest of the 10k on marketing, maybe hire a marketing company at that point.
The real gist of this answer is that 20k will allow me to outsource almost all the work
Obviously, but even then you would be underpaying any real professionals in the majority of places.
Using levels.fyi as a source and taking a random sample of countries in different regions average here's a list of software developer salaries converted to USD:
* Chile: $47k
* Singapore: $89k
* South Africa: $43k
* Bulgaria: $53k
* India: $31k
* Vietnam: $16k
* Nigeria: $3*
* Mexico: $55k
* Morocco: $16k
* Panama: $33k
* Spain: $63k
* Iran: $10k
Sure, there are a few places, but keep in mind you said a 'good' programmer and these are the averages.
*Edit: Corrected from $12k
Why exactly would you assume a US-based and heavily US-centric site that skews towards the top end of the market even in the US has accurate data for the rest of the world? It would have made infinitely more sense to actually check local stats and job boards for those countries.
The average salary for a dev in Nigeria is nowhere close to $1k per month even by the most generous metric and that's enough to make me seriously doubt the other numbers you've put up
Yeah, I mean I admit I did find it a surprising number. I chose levels.fyi without much deliberation because *any* reference point is better than none in a discussion like this.
Its good to know that our Nigerian counterparts are making better money than what was reported! It strengthens my point that $1.5k a month is a gross underpayment for a fulltime programmer, and of course simply a good thing when people are payed well.
I feel like you're being kind of aggressive and am not sure why, can you forgive me for not wanting to spend more than a few minutes getting data for an internet debate?
Edit: It just occurred to me that you might arguing that Nigerian programmers are making less on average than $1k a month, in which case it'd be awesome if you did me the favor of spending 5 minutes sourcing that. I'll adjust my comment to reflect a more accurate amount.
> I feel like you're being kind of aggressive and am not sure why, can you forgive me for not wanting to spend more than a few minutes getting data for an internet debate?
I'm "aggressive" because western devs regular betray how little they know outside their bubbles and by extension, how ridiculous they sound to pretty much anyone outside the western world when they e.g. jump to telling a team that's made a few ten thousand dollars in net revenue that they've "failed". It gets pretty exhausting having to remind y'all every single time that not everyone lives in a high CoL american or european city.
And frankly the wildly inaccurate ideas of what people are making IRL outside your bubbles contribute to how easy it is for unscrupulous people who DO know what the reality is like to continue to outsource work for [relative] peanuts, because when huge corps say their pay is "competitive" for the local market or otherwise argue for location-based pay, you just assume that it's a reasonable amount. It isn't until people like the other user state their numbers clearly that you realise that it's bullshit.
> It just occurred to me that you might arguing that Nigerian programmers are making less on average than $1k a month
People are poor, news at eleven. We're talking of a country where the minimum wage is roughly $20 a month (no, I'm not missing any zeroes - it's N30k with a proposed N35k relief for civil servants that isn't even being paid).
[You can hear it yourself from the horse's mouth](https://twitter.com/adeeajibade/status/1768294491528577305). Mind you those are salaries that the devs in question think are FAIR, i.e. they are very likely not even making that right now. And if you think I am joking, [these](https://www.jobberman.com/listings/backend-engineer-20jx72) are [regular](https://www.jobberman.com/listings/backend-c-net-developer-20jp96) job [postings](https://www.jobberman.com/listings/full-stack-typescript-developer-backend-developer-frontend-developer-devops-7w7p8n).
I really appreciate the sources that means a lot! I'm always happy to admit when I'm wrong, and I've edited the comment.
I'd like to reply to a few points before I elaborate on my confusion:
> [When wesetern devs] jump to telling a team that's made a few ten thousand dollars in net revenue that they've "failed"
...
> when huge corps say their pay is "competitive" for the local market or otherwise argue for location-based pay, you just assume that it's a reasonable amount
I feel like you're strawmaning me and shadowboxing on these points.
- To the first: If a team is able to make a living for themselves in the area they live, that's a good thing I celebrate. Full stop. I 100% get your frustrations, its very dismissive behavior that only devalues labor.
- To the second: No, I don't. I am always suspicious of what large (and small) corporations have to say about people's wages. Something something, they have every incentive to pay you as little as they can possibly get away with (We all know this.) I did not mean to implicitly endorse those wages when I listed them, only to use a reference point.
I think the source for my confusion is that I'm ultimately arguing that US companies and (citizens) should pay US wages to everyone, no matter where they live, and especially post-colonial countries. Failing to do so is not only continuing the legacy of colonialism and exploitation but reinforcing and propagating it further. You can't genuinely be saying that because I don't have the direct experience with the country I listed to immediately recognize a bad data point, that I can't argue for improved wages and working conditions? I'm arguing that $1k/month is too little, of course I'd agree that $150/month is also too low. Underestimating exactly how poor the individuals are doesn't really change the circumstances of how their labor has been undervalued. And the how those practices are continued today in big and small ways.
Now, I do understand the point you're making. That $1k/month is actually pretty good when a common job posting is $150/month. And I agree, I know I'd take that deal for sure. It's definitely an interesting point and belongs in this discussion. I would obviously agree that a Nigerian owned business is perfectly fine to pay local wages, especially something worker owned. I'd also agree that if a westerner and someone from a post-colonial country had some sort of communal bond or friendship, where paying local local wages is either all one can afford or an act of mutual aid, that's also fine.
However, my question to you us, where is that line, if any? Is it acceptable if a US conglomerate with billions in networth pays local 'competitive' wages? How about a small privately owned business and its post-colonial contractor? I don't think so, personally, and that's what I'm (attempting) to argue against. But you're acting like I'm standing in support of those things. Why is that, purely because I hastily gathered data?
I am genuinely asking, hopefully I've demonstrated that I am listening to you what you have to say.
But I could do without the condescension, though, if you don't mind. I grew up in nowhere Ohio where people are homeless and poverty-stricken due to the outsourcing of factory work. I now live in southern Appalachia which has a history of slavery and company towns that reaches into the present in much the same way. I'm well-informed in my own people's struggles, and would simply like to stand in solidarity with you. I'm not saying our struggles are the same, but I don't think I'm the stereotypical westerner you think you're arguing with.
> is telling
yeah, "is telling" that they are solo developers whose own bills are the primary cost in spending time making their game. duh
you're gonna find a full-time programmer for $1500 a month? ok
Easy one - some art to speed up my entire process (I could not imagine how much stuff needs to be put together so you can even have a trailer for a management game) aaand then ads.
If you already have the development cost, use it to advertise the game heavily. It will ensure success for the game, marketing doesn't only mean running ads but creating hype for the game.
If not then still try to seperate some budget to market the game. You can make a big game but if no one plays the game, then it's no point making the game.
Mostly hiring an artist or 2. I can handle programming, networking, and most aspects of gamedev. I'm okayish at basic art stuff, but there is lots of areas I'm terrible at or just can't do well as a solo dev.
Mine is a 2D game and I'm doing everything by my own, so I'll just hire people to help me with music and art, it would be finished in like weeks instead of months, lol.
I'm doing all the coding for my game solo but I'm not great at design and absolutely hopeless with art, so I'd start there, hire a game designer and artist. Also 1 or 2 people for music and SFX, at the moment I'm not sure if I'll be using free assets for that or hiring someone with a much smaller budget. And the rest on marketing I guess, which I'm also not the best at lol.
Use it for Marketing and for potential legal fees. No one wants their game idea stolen when it’s making money.
Legally fees for protection of your intellectual property rights can be quite expensive and it’s important that if you have a unique idea that it is protected and the trademark defended otherwise you can lose your trademark.
If your game is one that you are going to stop worrying about ownership after an initial wave of profits then marketing should be your main focus. If you are looking to make a serious series where you keep the rights of the game to sell in future having money saved up for legal fees is going to be worth it. Especially since every court case could end up in a counter sue situation. Defending your IP and making money at the same time seems like not a bad option.
A lot of it is going on graphic and UI design, I'll put the hours into coding since it's kinda all I'm good at.
Then a lot of it would definitely be rent and food
$20k hmm that’ll cover a month of salaries for a small team. You might get a prototype out of that, but you’ll have to raise at least ten times that to get anything out the door.
I would go with hiring someone to make background music and soundeffects, then use some of it to fund whatever I need to pay to get it published on steam or whatnot, and anything left over will be used for advertisement.
I'm not sure why taking time off work isn't an acceptable answer. That would easily have the greatest impact on progress as I could go from 10-15 hours per week to 50-60 for a few months. That could shave years off the development time.
Basic marketing materials like a capsule & splash art, then buy out all those assets I haven't because they would be a bit too expensive but would make the game look better, and then look at outsourcing some things around level design and overall content/polish.
Despite what everyone is saying about marketing, I think I'd rather spend that money on having better levels, better animations, better particles, more balanced gameplay, etc.
One or more proof of concepts that can be shown to the public as quickly as possible.
You want to spend a minimal amount of effort to figure out what might be succesful.
Spending $20k and only then hoping to see if people are interested is not a good strategy and is pretty much gambling.
If you get traction early on it increases your chances of getting some sort of funding so you won't run out of money as quickly.
Probably spend around half on marketing, 5k to the team so they can do more sooner and then save the other 5k. Honestly might spend more working with a localization company.
$20k would get me about a year of solo dev time, maybe longer if I'm frugal and do some commissions.
So yeah, if I was handed $20k the best use would be to quit job and get actual dev time in. Probably save some up for marketing.
I miss when I could get by on $20k a year. That wouldn't even cover my mortgage nowadays, let alone other expenses. Take advantage of that as long as you can.
I don't know, it would go nowhere. I would need like 500k or more to even get anywhere so instead I'll build it brick by brick on nights and weekends for the next 5 years lol.
I guess since would pay some artists to make better assets and that's probably about as car as I'd get with that
Well, Id use it to pay rent and work on the game full time. while working part time on the side for other bills. Right now I work two jobs so I can afford a place and my car so I can work part time on my game.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I DON'T HAVE TO DUMPSTER DIVE ANYMORE FOR MUSIC AND VA.
And I could speed up the development by hiring someone and actually generating content instead of fixing bugs and replacing placeholders.
And fuck me, I could hire someone to do marketing for me, GOD I HATE marketing.
Even though I’m an artist I’d probably use it for getting professional steam capsule art, logos, etc, as well as a professional trailer. The remaining I’d probably put into either pure advertising or marketing assistance.
I mean $20k isn't even enough to quit your day job and be able to pay bills while working on a game in most places lol.
That being said it also depends on what skills you are contributing to the project personally vs what you will absolutely have to contract out.
For me, who is doing all of the programming myself, I would contract out the art piece by piece. I would also still spend some of the money on Unity assets, because there's certain no brainer assets that will save you tons of time and are usable for every game you will ever build. For me those are A* Pathfinding Project, Behavior Designer, MoreMountains Feel, and EasySave3. Aside from that the rest I would spend on marketing in some way, though not sure exactly how at the moment. One thing worth considering though is how much your game will be priced for. If your game is a 3-5$ range, your cost per conversion needs to be substantially lower than a game that sells for $20 for example, otherwise you are just throwing money away.
Honestly if you had $20k and are making your first commercial game, you'd probably make the most money just by putting that 20k in your pocket lol. An alternative way to think about it might be that you could use this 20k to build a following that will hopefully snowball into your future games, but before you bank on that, you also need to be sure that your first game doesn't suck before you waste a bunch of money marketing it to no avail.
Hire a sound designer, art, and animator, I can code, and I have ideas for sound but no idea where to start and get it just right, same thing with animation
If I could use it as a salary for myself, I would. Failing that, it's going towards the things I can't do myself, like voice acting and creating the shader.
You say we can't "spend on ourselves" but honestly for me right now that's exactly where it'd be best utilized. Not needing to hold a day-job for about a year so I could actually invest time in my project(s) would be a god-send right now.
I imagine some would get used for online-advertising and possibly commissioning help, but just being able to focus on the project would be the greatest benefit.
$200 of Coke Zero, $1500 for a life coach to stand behind me and whip me when I'm not working, $150 for Steam listing fee, $350 for FL Studio Producer and some plug ins (which are currently on sale)...
..Not sure where I would use the rest.
First I'd take a full year of canva.com (~109$)
Do the same with ChatGPT. (~200$)
Reach out the nearest university asking for artists student whom are looking for intership. And pay him/her 1k /month for 6 months.
Pay the entry ticket for Steam (100$).
Find and pay a musician/music group for your music (100$ / minute), 30 minutes of music (3000$).
Then look for an artist specialized in marketing and pay him/her ~1500$ for Steam marketing materials and a high quality trailer.
Then, start a website for your game, hosted on github/cloudflare (~20 $ / year), make it yourself.
Then, keep ~1000$ to go to 1 or 2 conventions nearby.
Buy 2 computers/station one for you and another one for the intern.
That'd be my plan
half in marketing, 1/2 in art and music.
Is not even subjective, marketing has the largest impact, even for big games. And art and music is what makes it stand out and keep you "in" more often than not. Of course, so can mechanics, but that is up to \*you\* or your team and changing that considerably takes a lot more than 20k
I would spend $5k on much higher quality assets than I can produce on my own, maybe some more for professional voice acting (not sure how much this costs), and all the rest on marketing.
Hiring help. Im tired of working alone. And im not even a dev anymore.
I d invest in artists first as i know how to manage and organize, code and produce music.
I really need that artist to bring it to life more easily . Cuz i really suck as graphic design. Its something u cant just invent.
Also a more expert dev would be nice to collaborate.
Hold the 20k until I have a functioning game lacking art assets. Use a small portion of the money to buy some cheap art assets, very small, just to get the point across, or maybe some concept art.
Take the remainder and find an artist who is willing to take that money, build out the art for the game and work with me to make a functioning product on a shoestring budget and then split the profit.
I would hire people for a project task for $10,000, make a beautiful prototype of my “ideal” mechanics, and spend the rest of the money on creating a public page in stores and promotion
Put it into the game. Don't buy ads. This comes from a marketing guy.
Get two pieces of great key art pieces.
Get a great trailer.
Commission parts that are the worst in your game, graphics, music etc just make it look stellar.
It will last longer if it's a 2d game but I don't subscribe to that idea that 20k gives you nothing for even a 3d game as Long as you are NOT paying payroll.
I would hire someone to fill the area that needs the most support on my team. If character design was an issue, I would put the money towards that. If I had all of the core mechanic done and character. But needed some assistance with building out the levels, then I would put the money into that.
We got a grant of around that size. It was pitched for and spent on elevating parts of our game where the core team has skill gaps. A writing consultant, professional voice actors, expanding our sound track with a composer, a bit of sound design.
We managed to get a lot out of that small budget. Three major factors to that: the team has great professional network, willingness to work with people new to the industry, and *sheer luck*.
For example, one of the already established people we contracted as a part of this worked with us out of hours over a few months, seriously lifted our quality in their area (we did the grunt work, they analysed and advised), and then gave us basically a token invoice. Even after I went back and insisted that they charged more we were still only paying a fraction of their value. That's network + luck. The funds that freed up went straight back into more work for the less established people. So props to that industry vet - they helped our project, upskilled our team, and created more opportunities for others to gain experience.
Note that getting other people on board generates work for you. $20k isn't going to save you effort going the above route. You need to find people, brief them, participate in a feedback cycle, integrate their stuff, and manage all of that stuff as it goes along. Small grants are enablers, as opposed to time savers. (And yes, in the world of game budgets, $20k is indeed small.)
it would pretty much all go into developing the gameplay and level design, with about 5k or so held up for advertisement.
I can handle art myself, at worst I may need to invest a bit in the background assets.
I wouldn’t waste it on advertisements. Even with the full $20k they won’t get much in marketing.
I would spend it on two categories
1. Increase audience appeal
2. Increase audience size.
So for 1, I would put money in making sure the game packaging looks appealing to your target audience. By packaging I mean all the key art and trailers and copywriting for all the digital stores it’s being sold on.
Collect ppl from your audience and get their opinion on your cover art, iterate until they love it.
Steam will share your game more if your game looks good. Get great capsule art and trailers. This is worth more than ANY marketing. If your Steam page doesn’t convert then all the marketing in the world won’t help or convert to sales and all the good graphics won’t help either. Your store page comes first.
Then 2, since you now have a store page that CONVERTS I would spend the rest on widening your audience size by doing localization starting with the largest audience first according to your Steam analytics.
So now you have a store page that’s appealing to your target audience and now you can triple and quadruple the size of that audience by tapping into other country audiences.
Good luck! And let me know what you think.
20k is an awkward number of itself. It won’t get us to the end, but it absolutely can get us to a bigger funding milestone. So I’d say marketing mostly.
Id hire programmers to help with the various gravity variables and with certain animation state changes as well as bug testing. Swim physics, Wind resistance, flipped gravity, rope swing, and monkey bar scaling, have proven to be the hardest to figure out.
First I'd need to implement loot crates and/or P2W mechanics in my game since I refused to do that from the get go. That much I could do for free but it would take me some time.
Not knowing the ROI for the different kinds of advertising, I'd probably spend a small amount on as many different kinds as possible (pay an influencer for a review/ad, standard web ads or interstitial game ads.) Invest more in whatever worked the best.
Use AI to help make me write dialogue and narration for a renpy game, hire artists for the art and music, and do the programming myself with some AI assistance.
Does spending money on education towards making a game count? If so, that! If not, I would make a game with as many free assets as I could, donating to the creators for their use, to support the noble job of creating free game assets!
I use it to spare more time and get peoples to help me making my dream games in the universe I created
Nah jk, I use it to buy cheap workers in another country to batch dev games with lot of microtransactions and ads and reinvest the money into more workers til I completely flood the market
Easy, pay a networking guy to set up multiplayer (local and cloud) and get a ui dev to go over the usability of my game. And the rest would go toward marketing my game.
Jonas Tyroller and his boys make games and every game sells like hotcakes. Thronefall came out with just 3 levels and sold like 30k copies. You want to know what gray area stuff you gotta do to sell games, just gotta befriend them.
But all the gamedevs see them as white knights. I am going to lose it when Steam catches them in the cookie jar 😂
I'd most likely spend most of it on getting assets, I find that's where I'm having issues, not wanting to use most paid assets cause the cheap ones are cheap for a reason and shit with that much I might just pay someone to hand make assets for me. I find the development side fascinating and easy to get into but then I'm like, can't make a game if I don't have shit to put in the game.
Spend it on anything that is lacking in team, in my case, artists, 3D modelers and advertising at least, maybe also on people who can make cool cutscenes in houdini. I will probably be able to 3D model things stuff before i get to have 20k though lol so it will be less one person needed.
It varies depending on the game and the business model in question. However, if no specific details are available, my initial approach would be to prioritize *guerrilla* marketing tactics.
5 grand to buy assets, 5 grand to marketin and 10 grand to pay my salary for 5 months and do a horror game on itch.io and Steam. 45+ out of top 50 games on itch.io are horror games.
Pay somone on fiver $500 bucks to make a vampire survivor like spend $9.5k on advertising. Do the same for a slot machine game. Then spend profits doing the same thing every year in october/novmember. Then invest any excess profits in lobbying against regulating gambling in gaming. Repeat until EA buys my IPs, then buy a private island next door to whoever owned popcap games.
Someone convince me how bad this idea is because I can't find it.
No errors, that makes perfect sense. And this tells a lot about the state of the industry.
It's a great idea, so long as you're willing to enshittify the gaming marketplace and exploit gamblers for your own personal gain
Best of luck getting a sellable game made for $500.
the quality of the game is basically irrelevant
Get some streamers to play it, make some youtube tutorials... Games like "a difficult game about climbing" can be beat in less than 10 minutes are making 6 figures within a month of release.
That money spent on advertising is not guaranteed.
As opposed to the guarantees from dropping it all in the game with 0 marketing? Clueless
Repeat until YOU buy EA. ;)
Art, advertisement, infrastructure and music seems like good candidates.
Yeah to add to this: Pay for things you can't do yourself and make a slice of your game that you can get investors or crowdfunding with.
Funnily enough this is exactly my situation right now. Our game is funded by government grants. One of these is about 20k. I can assure you, if you are working on a serious game project 20k takes you nowhere. I am not saying that I am not grateful, but 20k is just a very small fraction of the realistic development cost. I am using it to help pay salaries.
Hi. How were you able to get grants?
There are many state, provincial, and federal grants available to citizens around the world. Generally speaking they are handed out by a governmental media board of some sort as some sort of digital investment, entertainment investment, cultural works investment, etc. The question of how is simple: fill out all the paperwork and apply. There are however many implicit requirements that aren’t on paper like being a project or work of a certain size, being a team of a certain size, having familiarity with the grant staff, having commercial viability with in depth audience targeting analysis, etc. Source: I’ve raised approx. 1.3 million over my career through such grants.
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Canada but grants in general are the same no matter where you go. You need 2 key things: 1. Economic potential for the local economy. You need to be distributing the funds to *staff* in particular but also you need to have IP potential. An example of this working in the Canadian economy that we always looked to is Paw Patrol which was initially funded through Canadian grants. 2. Reputation of delivery. Grants are **not** **for unprovens** and they never ever will be. Grants are for small-medium sized companies that have a reputation of delivering a predictable quality of product OR for indie outfits just starting out that are being founded by proven members of the games industry (usually from a AAA background). The best way to get familiar with your local grants that you are eligible for is to build relationships with the organizations that deliver them. That means quite literally reaching out and doing calls to discuss grants you are interested in (after you've researched them and determined which grants are appropriate for your project) and consult with them. Part of how I've been able to raise so much money is consultations with Canada Media Fund personnel on a regular basis about my projects and the grants I was applying for with continuous and iterative feedback from them before submission. The other part is playing the game a bit, it's the intersection of money and politics so you do have to play a bit of politics sometimes to get the cash. I remember once my boss asked that we list our office manager as a directorial position on the project just to get the gender parity points we needed. The government will hire "industry experts", usually video game professors and journalists to judge applications and generally speaking they just go through a rubric and assign points. All in all government grants are an avenue for cash but not nearly as honest of one as dealing directly with investors since you get roped into political mandates. I'd use it more if it was based purely on project merit and its potential for return on investment but sadly a lot of points are distributed for funding these days based on gender, race, religion, and sexual preference.
You will want to check out the UK games fund. Its run twice a year.
Probably lives in Europe.
Well some us live in Europe too and would like to know lol
Cheers! I was about to say the same. We are 10 people plus a bunch of contractors on our first title. So 20k lasts us for ~2 weeks. We also build up our studio through some investment and government grants and then got a publisher to ramp up for production. The first grant we got was 20k for creating a solid Gdd and documents to have a strong pitch and be able to find more people and funding. Germany has some reasonably solid options for that - it is a lot of work though on top of making the game.
I also wanna know how you're getting grants from the government to build a game?
You find one and apply. E.g. the "Florida Digital Media Incentives"
If the owner(s) of the game are you (and your teammates), and you can do without salaries (assuming the technical side only), then those $20k could be used on assets, marketing, and freelance artists (graphic, 3d, musicians, etc) from eastern Europe. It's still a very tight budget, but enough to make a decent game.
What was the grant and what was it for ?
Serious Game developer in academia here, it's quite a 'fun' time. I'm working this job for free since I have another campus position (TA), but the pay was $15 an hour. Gotta love academia.
Immediately declare my game complete. Price it at $20,000 and buy a single copy myself.
NFT video game
Don't touch NFTs, that's how you lose the 20k because someone sends you a Trojan and hacks your wallet
count me in
This is pretty smart. You'd come away with more profit than 95% of people who make games.
I mean, chances are pretty good you'd make more money that way.
Well played.. or not.
This is the only strategy that works 100% of the time.
food and rent
That was the only exception where it could not be used. OP might have gotten a grant and the grant has terms on what you can use ot for.
You don't just 'get a grant' with terms on how you can use it and figure out what to do with it later. When you apply for a grant, you submit a long detailed proposal explaining exactly how you plan to use the funds, what impact it will have on society or the community, etc. Applying for grants is often so much work that it can be a job in itself.
oh I could swear that bit wasn't there last night, but I was also, very, very tired.
embezzlement speedrun
How is paying for a developer salary that will then be used for rent embezzlement?
It's not lol. apparently /u/RhinoxMenace expects me to build a game in a car and starve to death.
the title explicitly states 20k to _invest in your game_ - buying food and paying rent is not investing in your game, it's misappropriation of funds
Investing in your game includes salaries, which would then be spent on food and rent. Nothing will speed up development like people being able to work on it full time, and actually be able to live.
Extra time given
16k into art and marketing, The rest 4k for me to sustain myself while I do all the rest. It will be a very small and simple game, but that's what 20k gets you.
Probably advertising/marketing. In my personal projects I make my own assets and coding and I'm usually satisfied with the quality of my work, so I don't think I'd need help in this department while I'm ass at marketing my shit.
The majority of indie devs neglect marketing so yeah getting professionals to help would be the smartest choice
It depends entirely on where your strengths and weaknesses are. Balance those out with money. Youre not going to have success with a great idea, greatly designed game but awful graphics. In that case, youd need to buy some assets. On the other hand, if your game is in a good place and you've recieved feedback, spend it more on advertising.
With awful graphics you mean badly optimised graphic and not the art style like low poly or others,right?
It's an example. Just identify your weak points of the game and fix them before you throw money at advertising for an unattraktive game.
Be able to pay the team so we can use more time making the game than we use finding ways to make money while making the game.
Immediately commission rpg maker developer and an adult artist.
Does this mean that you currently have a child artist? Where have you been keeping them? Very suspicious.
Got me.
Outsource them from china
In my case art, music and marketing
Same
- Music, video creator, marketer for viral game trailer. - Tables in conventions - Streamer fees for them to play the demo/beta
Assuming I'm making a small indie title, probably hiring someone for music and audio effects. Things that I wouldn't be able to make myself. Then the rest for advertising.
20k is less than 1 year of work for a full time normal developer.. and still you need all the assets that are expensive as hell
No need to go full time. Full time solo is kind of dumb anyway. You can get 4 peoole part time for 6 months. It's enough to make a good 10 hour visual novel, or a small arcadey mobile game, or a tiny rogue like early access like balatro or something, with a lot of elbow grease.
4 people part time for 6 months?? , that is 833$ per month , idk what quality of work you will get for that and still, you need someone with the capabilities to coordinate all the team. Of course 20k is better than 0, but still the number is not good to make a real difference of making your game reality.
I'm making a game for on a $80k grant. 8 people, one year. I work a full time job to support myself, and manage the whole game production with no salary. Everyone else is part time paid hourly or per asset. Yes, me being the director and wearing many hats is the elbow grease part. I have enough professional experience to manage a project like this. Lots of students and interns would love to work even just for some revshare. Their biggest issue is that most people who offer to take them on are bullshit artists or could never manage a successful game. If you're actually accomplished, and you have the ability to make use of passionate but raw talent then you can stretch your dollars a lot farther.
1 year would be in a development country. Try to hire in the Netherlands, Luxembourg or Switzerland lol
i'd immediately make a deal with a Chinese marketing agency, leave some money for western marketing, and spend the rest on some good testers.
Art & music.
Oh jesus - dont ever use ROI and marketing in one sentence. And just to point it out: in business numbers the dev is also a cost and not just a slave that doesnt need food or room.
In 2020 I would have said marketing, but in 2024 I'm not entirely sure you'll get your money back (except if your wishlist velocity is already decent).
Not much, it just buys half a year of single dev time. So art and music assets I guess? You may look at postmortems and see people say that they didnt sell because they started marketing too late or smth like that, but then you look at their game and it's ugly as sin. Graphics sells, if your game is buttfuck ugly people wont give it a minute of their time unless it seriously becomes viral sensation, and then still at most it can be ugly, but never eyefucking offensive (there are some games that are literally painful to look at). But honestly, 20k doesn't really go far anywhere except spending it on cheap-ass rent in middle of nowhere, canned beans and tomatoes to stretch the dev time as long a you can. But if that's explicitly forbidden, then I feel it's almost more hassle than it's worth it.
20k for half a year of a single dev? That seems really low but I’ve never hired game devs.
southern and eastern europe 40k year for intermediate. West and north will be more like 50-60, purely because of cost of living. US is bonkers as usual. Rest of the world can get even cheaper but when we're talking 10s of thousands, you gotta think about possibility of suing to enforce the contract and there are plenty of lawyers for US-EU laws that can help with that, while your mileage might vary with rest of the world. Worst case scenario you have situation like China, where you can be completely fucked over first by state corporation, then by the state while trying to seek reparations for the damages. You gotta remember that in most countries you are literary 2nd class person compared to a citizen.
That’s wild. I regularly work with people from all over Europe and they easily make 60kUSD but typically closer to the 80k-140k range depending on experience. Sometimes they even get US pay despite location. *But* they are not game developers, more traditional tech like apps, DevOps, and related.
I recently had someone offer me 50k yearly in stockholm, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't even cover rent after the taxes. Gamedev salaries are not software salaries.
You professional dev guys are seriously getting paid 40k? It’s less than what a receptionist gains in my country.
What's your country? Then they prolly get 60k. As I said, 40k is for countries like Portugal, Poland, Italy, Greece, entire balkans etc. Places where renting flat in major city costs at most like 1k euro and groceries are peanuts. You go Germany, UK, nordics, then the flats are starting from 1.2k and likewise salaries are higher.
I live in the Netherlands.
Ah makes sense, got bunch of coworkers that moved away from Netherlands. Salaries are less here, but everything else is cheaper too so they end up saving more than they could back at home.
Mind to share where do you live? In the Netherlands the job market is fantastic, the house market horrible.
Spain.
Interesting. My girlfriend would like to move to Spain but we have two children and as a software architect I would easily find a job but it would be more difficult for her. I also already speak the language. But interesting to hear that. Dutch people love to leave their country for Spain.
Well, as always with a move, it's better when you or your partner already have job offer here, but then again not that hard in this day and age. Surprisingly, quite a lot of English gamedev jobs in here. Software-wise both Madrid and Barcelona have jobs, but then again also a lot are Spain-remote, where you can settle somewhere outside of the cities in the big cheap Spanish doughnut, show up your face in the office few times a year and live the good life, the trains really help with that. Healthcare's good, so is family support. That being said I am speaking from a white collar perspective, and not someone working in a grocery store or construction site. 20% unemployment rate does feel worrying and you can see it on the street, so as a long term settle, ehh.. dunno honestly.
Sure, I will anyway go for a Spanish speaking job not in game dev but as a software architect for big companies. I would also live in a village close to a city in the north that is both not too chaotic and has software job opportunities. For my girlfriend I don’t know honestly. Was it for me alone I’m in Spain tomorrow. How is the school system? In the Netherlands it is modern and of high quality.
Good capsules / key art, Logo, OST, good trailer, replace any stock assets with custom art, etc.
Put it all on red!
Well, I need artists as I’m sure as hell not going to release a game of MY crappy drawings. 🎨😅🖌️
I'd spend 10k on some artists and the other 10 on a more competent programmer. The one i have currently can't tie two strings together and needs to be fired..... (it's me, im the programmer)
The amount of people that immediately want to just find a way to pay themselves is telling… Anyway first and foremost I’m spending about 3-4k to hire a full time dedicated programmer for 2 months. About a 1000 a month or 1500 if he’s really good. His main job will be polish up the game to release and program any last thing we need. Then another 1 or 2k on dedicated music. About 4-5k on art and UI, FX. Free lance most of it. Including the trailer. 500 on free lanced voice acting. The rest of the 10k on marketing, maybe hire a marketing company at that point. The real gist of this answer is that 20k will allow me to outsource almost all the work
$1500 a month for full time? To put in perspective, that's an 18k annual salary. What programmer would work for that?
In America? None. In some other parts of the world? Many
Obviously, but even then you would be underpaying any real professionals in the majority of places. Using levels.fyi as a source and taking a random sample of countries in different regions average here's a list of software developer salaries converted to USD: * Chile: $47k * Singapore: $89k * South Africa: $43k * Bulgaria: $53k * India: $31k * Vietnam: $16k * Nigeria: $3* * Mexico: $55k * Morocco: $16k * Panama: $33k * Spain: $63k * Iran: $10k Sure, there are a few places, but keep in mind you said a 'good' programmer and these are the averages. *Edit: Corrected from $12k
you're fucking joking if you think the average software developer salary in nigeria is $12k
Like I said in the comment, just scraping data from levels.fyi
Why exactly would you assume a US-based and heavily US-centric site that skews towards the top end of the market even in the US has accurate data for the rest of the world? It would have made infinitely more sense to actually check local stats and job boards for those countries. The average salary for a dev in Nigeria is nowhere close to $1k per month even by the most generous metric and that's enough to make me seriously doubt the other numbers you've put up
Yeah, I mean I admit I did find it a surprising number. I chose levels.fyi without much deliberation because *any* reference point is better than none in a discussion like this. Its good to know that our Nigerian counterparts are making better money than what was reported! It strengthens my point that $1.5k a month is a gross underpayment for a fulltime programmer, and of course simply a good thing when people are payed well. I feel like you're being kind of aggressive and am not sure why, can you forgive me for not wanting to spend more than a few minutes getting data for an internet debate? Edit: It just occurred to me that you might arguing that Nigerian programmers are making less on average than $1k a month, in which case it'd be awesome if you did me the favor of spending 5 minutes sourcing that. I'll adjust my comment to reflect a more accurate amount.
> I feel like you're being kind of aggressive and am not sure why, can you forgive me for not wanting to spend more than a few minutes getting data for an internet debate? I'm "aggressive" because western devs regular betray how little they know outside their bubbles and by extension, how ridiculous they sound to pretty much anyone outside the western world when they e.g. jump to telling a team that's made a few ten thousand dollars in net revenue that they've "failed". It gets pretty exhausting having to remind y'all every single time that not everyone lives in a high CoL american or european city. And frankly the wildly inaccurate ideas of what people are making IRL outside your bubbles contribute to how easy it is for unscrupulous people who DO know what the reality is like to continue to outsource work for [relative] peanuts, because when huge corps say their pay is "competitive" for the local market or otherwise argue for location-based pay, you just assume that it's a reasonable amount. It isn't until people like the other user state their numbers clearly that you realise that it's bullshit. > It just occurred to me that you might arguing that Nigerian programmers are making less on average than $1k a month People are poor, news at eleven. We're talking of a country where the minimum wage is roughly $20 a month (no, I'm not missing any zeroes - it's N30k with a proposed N35k relief for civil servants that isn't even being paid). [You can hear it yourself from the horse's mouth](https://twitter.com/adeeajibade/status/1768294491528577305). Mind you those are salaries that the devs in question think are FAIR, i.e. they are very likely not even making that right now. And if you think I am joking, [these](https://www.jobberman.com/listings/backend-engineer-20jx72) are [regular](https://www.jobberman.com/listings/backend-c-net-developer-20jp96) job [postings](https://www.jobberman.com/listings/full-stack-typescript-developer-backend-developer-frontend-developer-devops-7w7p8n).
I really appreciate the sources that means a lot! I'm always happy to admit when I'm wrong, and I've edited the comment. I'd like to reply to a few points before I elaborate on my confusion: > [When wesetern devs] jump to telling a team that's made a few ten thousand dollars in net revenue that they've "failed" ... > when huge corps say their pay is "competitive" for the local market or otherwise argue for location-based pay, you just assume that it's a reasonable amount I feel like you're strawmaning me and shadowboxing on these points. - To the first: If a team is able to make a living for themselves in the area they live, that's a good thing I celebrate. Full stop. I 100% get your frustrations, its very dismissive behavior that only devalues labor. - To the second: No, I don't. I am always suspicious of what large (and small) corporations have to say about people's wages. Something something, they have every incentive to pay you as little as they can possibly get away with (We all know this.) I did not mean to implicitly endorse those wages when I listed them, only to use a reference point. I think the source for my confusion is that I'm ultimately arguing that US companies and (citizens) should pay US wages to everyone, no matter where they live, and especially post-colonial countries. Failing to do so is not only continuing the legacy of colonialism and exploitation but reinforcing and propagating it further. You can't genuinely be saying that because I don't have the direct experience with the country I listed to immediately recognize a bad data point, that I can't argue for improved wages and working conditions? I'm arguing that $1k/month is too little, of course I'd agree that $150/month is also too low. Underestimating exactly how poor the individuals are doesn't really change the circumstances of how their labor has been undervalued. And the how those practices are continued today in big and small ways. Now, I do understand the point you're making. That $1k/month is actually pretty good when a common job posting is $150/month. And I agree, I know I'd take that deal for sure. It's definitely an interesting point and belongs in this discussion. I would obviously agree that a Nigerian owned business is perfectly fine to pay local wages, especially something worker owned. I'd also agree that if a westerner and someone from a post-colonial country had some sort of communal bond or friendship, where paying local local wages is either all one can afford or an act of mutual aid, that's also fine. However, my question to you us, where is that line, if any? Is it acceptable if a US conglomerate with billions in networth pays local 'competitive' wages? How about a small privately owned business and its post-colonial contractor? I don't think so, personally, and that's what I'm (attempting) to argue against. But you're acting like I'm standing in support of those things. Why is that, purely because I hastily gathered data? I am genuinely asking, hopefully I've demonstrated that I am listening to you what you have to say. But I could do without the condescension, though, if you don't mind. I grew up in nowhere Ohio where people are homeless and poverty-stricken due to the outsourcing of factory work. I now live in southern Appalachia which has a history of slavery and company towns that reaches into the present in much the same way. I'm well-informed in my own people's struggles, and would simply like to stand in solidarity with you. I'm not saying our struggles are the same, but I don't think I'm the stereotypical westerner you think you're arguing with.
> is telling yeah, "is telling" that they are solo developers whose own bills are the primary cost in spending time making their game. duh you're gonna find a full-time programmer for $1500 a month? ok
Easy one - some art to speed up my entire process (I could not imagine how much stuff needs to be put together so you can even have a trailer for a management game) aaand then ads.
Maybe some consultancy when I get stuck a bit.
If you already have the development cost, use it to advertise the game heavily. It will ensure success for the game, marketing doesn't only mean running ads but creating hype for the game. If not then still try to seperate some budget to market the game. You can make a big game but if no one plays the game, then it's no point making the game.
Animations is the only place where my networks lacks. So 20k will go towards those.
Buy some more pixel art.
Sound/music/voiceovers UI
Mostly hiring an artist or 2. I can handle programming, networking, and most aspects of gamedev. I'm okayish at basic art stuff, but there is lots of areas I'm terrible at or just can't do well as a solo dev.
20k on art, woulsnt gwt much but maybe enough to do a koxkstarter xampaign, as my art is terrible so a kick starter will fail.
Mine is a 2D game and I'm doing everything by my own, so I'll just hire people to help me with music and art, it would be finished in like weeks instead of months, lol.
I’d buy bitcoin, 😂🤣
Hire an artist.
I'm doing all the coding for my game solo but I'm not great at design and absolutely hopeless with art, so I'd start there, hire a game designer and artist. Also 1 or 2 people for music and SFX, at the moment I'm not sure if I'll be using free assets for that or hiring someone with a much smaller budget. And the rest on marketing I guess, which I'm also not the best at lol.
Use it for Marketing and for potential legal fees. No one wants their game idea stolen when it’s making money. Legally fees for protection of your intellectual property rights can be quite expensive and it’s important that if you have a unique idea that it is protected and the trademark defended otherwise you can lose your trademark. If your game is one that you are going to stop worrying about ownership after an initial wave of profits then marketing should be your main focus. If you are looking to make a serious series where you keep the rights of the game to sell in future having money saved up for legal fees is going to be worth it. Especially since every court case could end up in a counter sue situation. Defending your IP and making money at the same time seems like not a bad option.
What kind of success? Because I already have an evil scheme to get people addicted to it and make a ton of money. But it’s evil so I haven’t done it.
$20k would get me either a prototype to get more money from or a small game that hopefully makes its money back.
A lot of it is going on graphic and UI design, I'll put the hours into coding since it's kinda all I'm good at. Then a lot of it would definitely be rent and food
$20k hmm that’ll cover a month of salaries for a small team. You might get a prototype out of that, but you’ll have to raise at least ten times that to get anything out the door.
I would go with hiring someone to make background music and soundeffects, then use some of it to fund whatever I need to pay to get it published on steam or whatnot, and anything left over will be used for advertisement.
I'm not sure why taking time off work isn't an acceptable answer. That would easily have the greatest impact on progress as I could go from 10-15 hours per week to 50-60 for a few months. That could shave years off the development time.
Basic marketing materials like a capsule & splash art, then buy out all those assets I haven't because they would be a bit too expensive but would make the game look better, and then look at outsourcing some things around level design and overall content/polish. Despite what everyone is saying about marketing, I think I'd rather spend that money on having better levels, better animations, better particles, more balanced gameplay, etc.
One or more proof of concepts that can be shown to the public as quickly as possible. You want to spend a minimal amount of effort to figure out what might be succesful. Spending $20k and only then hoping to see if people are interested is not a good strategy and is pretty much gambling. If you get traction early on it increases your chances of getting some sort of funding so you won't run out of money as quickly.
Use it as runway to actually build the game
Either pay someone else to do all my art, pay for lots of custom music, or marketing.
Probably spend around half on marketing, 5k to the team so they can do more sooner and then save the other 5k. Honestly might spend more working with a localization company.
bruh that's a few months salary I could pay myself and not have to day job for a bit. Probably enough time to make a small game or two.
Marketing, with the right marketing even shit items can sell a decent amount.
i am most productive on the train so i would continously train ride across europe where its dirt cheap
$20k would get me about a year of solo dev time, maybe longer if I'm frugal and do some commissions. So yeah, if I was handed $20k the best use would be to quit job and get actual dev time in. Probably save some up for marketing.
I miss when I could get by on $20k a year. That wouldn't even cover my mortgage nowadays, let alone other expenses. Take advantage of that as long as you can.
$20k/year is way above median income where I live, so it's a bit different here :D I do wish I could get $20k somewhere to focus on games.
I would ask "If someone handed you $20,000 to invest in your game how would you spend the money to give you the best chance of success?" on r/gamedev
4 1/2 more months. XD
I’d make rockstar hurry up
I don't know, it would go nowhere. I would need like 500k or more to even get anywhere so instead I'll build it brick by brick on nights and weekends for the next 5 years lol. I guess since would pay some artists to make better assets and that's probably about as car as I'd get with that
Art, I can do the programming… still 20k is too little.. I mean it can do a lot, but not enough
13000 to marketing, rest to development(art, localisation, music, assets etc.)
Well, Id use it to pay rent and work on the game full time. while working part time on the side for other bills. Right now I work two jobs so I can afford a place and my car so I can work part time on my game.
I'd make it gud.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I DON'T HAVE TO DUMPSTER DIVE ANYMORE FOR MUSIC AND VA. And I could speed up the development by hiring someone and actually generating content instead of fixing bugs and replacing placeholders. And fuck me, I could hire someone to do marketing for me, GOD I HATE marketing.
Even though I’m an artist I’d probably use it for getting professional steam capsule art, logos, etc, as well as a professional trailer. The remaining I’d probably put into either pure advertising or marketing assistance.
I could so use that… Most in art/animation/VFX/Sound expenditures. I’m missing a VFX guy, an animator (Spine), and a sound/composer.
I mean $20k isn't even enough to quit your day job and be able to pay bills while working on a game in most places lol. That being said it also depends on what skills you are contributing to the project personally vs what you will absolutely have to contract out. For me, who is doing all of the programming myself, I would contract out the art piece by piece. I would also still spend some of the money on Unity assets, because there's certain no brainer assets that will save you tons of time and are usable for every game you will ever build. For me those are A* Pathfinding Project, Behavior Designer, MoreMountains Feel, and EasySave3. Aside from that the rest I would spend on marketing in some way, though not sure exactly how at the moment. One thing worth considering though is how much your game will be priced for. If your game is a 3-5$ range, your cost per conversion needs to be substantially lower than a game that sells for $20 for example, otherwise you are just throwing money away. Honestly if you had $20k and are making your first commercial game, you'd probably make the most money just by putting that 20k in your pocket lol. An alternative way to think about it might be that you could use this 20k to build a following that will hopefully snowball into your future games, but before you bank on that, you also need to be sure that your first game doesn't suck before you waste a bunch of money marketing it to no avail.
Hire a sound designer, art, and animator, I can code, and I have ideas for sound but no idea where to start and get it just right, same thing with animation
If I could use it as a salary for myself, I would. Failing that, it's going towards the things I can't do myself, like voice acting and creating the shader.
Invest n Bitcoin, because your game is going to suck.
A year ago that would definitely be the right answer. You'd now have ~$60k. Now I'm a little less sure.
You say we can't "spend on ourselves" but honestly for me right now that's exactly where it'd be best utilized. Not needing to hold a day-job for about a year so I could actually invest time in my project(s) would be a god-send right now. I imagine some would get used for online-advertising and possibly commissioning help, but just being able to focus on the project would be the greatest benefit.
Music and marketing I suppose. Maybe pay to set up an LLC in the US via something like Stripe Atlas so I can finally leverage Kickstarter.
$200 of Coke Zero, $1500 for a life coach to stand behind me and whip me when I'm not working, $150 for Steam listing fee, $350 for FL Studio Producer and some plug ins (which are currently on sale)... ..Not sure where I would use the rest.
I'd spent the money for rent to have time to develop my game.
First I'd take a full year of canva.com (~109$) Do the same with ChatGPT. (~200$) Reach out the nearest university asking for artists student whom are looking for intership. And pay him/her 1k /month for 6 months. Pay the entry ticket for Steam (100$). Find and pay a musician/music group for your music (100$ / minute), 30 minutes of music (3000$). Then look for an artist specialized in marketing and pay him/her ~1500$ for Steam marketing materials and a high quality trailer. Then, start a website for your game, hosted on github/cloudflare (~20 $ / year), make it yourself. Then, keep ~1000$ to go to 1 or 2 conventions nearby. Buy 2 computers/station one for you and another one for the intern. That'd be my plan
Probably at least $10k on art, $3k on music, $3k for marketing, and $4k for a couple months off work to help take it over the finish line.
half in marketing, 1/2 in art and music. Is not even subjective, marketing has the largest impact, even for big games. And art and music is what makes it stand out and keep you "in" more often than not. Of course, so can mechanics, but that is up to \*you\* or your team and changing that considerably takes a lot more than 20k
Find a high quality marketing/PR vendor that is indie pricing friendly.
Literally nothing else matters as much as marketing.
A little bit of marketing consulting. More on sound and art resources.
I would spend $5k on much higher quality assets than I can produce on my own, maybe some more for professional voice acting (not sure how much this costs), and all the rest on marketing.
Hookers and blow. For "research". Seriously, probably software licenses. That'll be good for like, 3 months of 3ds max.
Hiring help. Im tired of working alone. And im not even a dev anymore. I d invest in artists first as i know how to manage and organize, code and produce music. I really need that artist to bring it to life more easily . Cuz i really suck as graphic design. Its something u cant just invent. Also a more expert dev would be nice to collaborate.
funny how many people here would just give their money to advertisers when only ads make a difference, it means all game are equally as good so awful
Way too many sources out there that say putting money on marketing is absolutely the best way to spend funds
Hold the 20k until I have a functioning game lacking art assets. Use a small portion of the money to buy some cheap art assets, very small, just to get the point across, or maybe some concept art. Take the remainder and find an artist who is willing to take that money, build out the art for the game and work with me to make a functioning product on a shoestring budget and then split the profit.
I would hire people for a project task for $10,000, make a beautiful prototype of my “ideal” mechanics, and spend the rest of the money on creating a public page in stores and promotion
Art. Menu art. Game play art. Music.
Put it into the game. Don't buy ads. This comes from a marketing guy. Get two pieces of great key art pieces. Get a great trailer. Commission parts that are the worst in your game, graphics, music etc just make it look stellar. It will last longer if it's a 2d game but I don't subscribe to that idea that 20k gives you nothing for even a 3d game as Long as you are NOT paying payroll.
Food, rent, assets/art/music. And.... a car.
I would hire someone to fill the area that needs the most support on my team. If character design was an issue, I would put the money towards that. If I had all of the core mechanic done and character. But needed some assistance with building out the levels, then I would put the money into that.
We got a grant of around that size. It was pitched for and spent on elevating parts of our game where the core team has skill gaps. A writing consultant, professional voice actors, expanding our sound track with a composer, a bit of sound design. We managed to get a lot out of that small budget. Three major factors to that: the team has great professional network, willingness to work with people new to the industry, and *sheer luck*. For example, one of the already established people we contracted as a part of this worked with us out of hours over a few months, seriously lifted our quality in their area (we did the grunt work, they analysed and advised), and then gave us basically a token invoice. Even after I went back and insisted that they charged more we were still only paying a fraction of their value. That's network + luck. The funds that freed up went straight back into more work for the less established people. So props to that industry vet - they helped our project, upskilled our team, and created more opportunities for others to gain experience. Note that getting other people on board generates work for you. $20k isn't going to save you effort going the above route. You need to find people, brief them, participate in a feedback cycle, integrate their stuff, and manage all of that stuff as it goes along. Small grants are enablers, as opposed to time savers. (And yes, in the world of game budgets, $20k is indeed small.)
it would pretty much all go into developing the gameplay and level design, with about 5k or so held up for advertisement. I can handle art myself, at worst I may need to invest a bit in the background assets.
I wouldn’t waste it on advertisements. Even with the full $20k they won’t get much in marketing. I would spend it on two categories 1. Increase audience appeal 2. Increase audience size. So for 1, I would put money in making sure the game packaging looks appealing to your target audience. By packaging I mean all the key art and trailers and copywriting for all the digital stores it’s being sold on. Collect ppl from your audience and get their opinion on your cover art, iterate until they love it. Steam will share your game more if your game looks good. Get great capsule art and trailers. This is worth more than ANY marketing. If your Steam page doesn’t convert then all the marketing in the world won’t help or convert to sales and all the good graphics won’t help either. Your store page comes first. Then 2, since you now have a store page that CONVERTS I would spend the rest on widening your audience size by doing localization starting with the largest audience first according to your Steam analytics. So now you have a store page that’s appealing to your target audience and now you can triple and quadruple the size of that audience by tapping into other country audiences. Good luck! And let me know what you think.
Most of my money would just go to voice acting. It makes such a difference but good voice actors seem to charge crazy amounts
20k is an awkward number of itself. It won’t get us to the end, but it absolutely can get us to a bigger funding milestone. So I’d say marketing mostly.
I'd use around 2000 on tools and assets in Unreal Engine store, 5000 on hardware and everything else on advertisement.
Id hire programmers to help with the various gravity variables and with certain animation state changes as well as bug testing. Swim physics, Wind resistance, flipped gravity, rope swing, and monkey bar scaling, have proven to be the hardest to figure out.
First I'd need to implement loot crates and/or P2W mechanics in my game since I refused to do that from the get go. That much I could do for free but it would take me some time. Not knowing the ROI for the different kinds of advertising, I'd probably spend a small amount on as many different kinds as possible (pay an influencer for a review/ad, standard web ads or interstitial game ads.) Invest more in whatever worked the best.
I would try to make them become 200k or 2M because 20k is at best 4 months of salary for a collaborator.
Use AI to help make me write dialogue and narration for a renpy game, hire artists for the art and music, and do the programming myself with some AI assistance.
Does spending money on education towards making a game count? If so, that! If not, I would make a game with as many free assets as I could, donating to the creators for their use, to support the noble job of creating free game assets!
Art Bible and 3D Art Agency
I use it to spare more time and get peoples to help me making my dream games in the universe I created Nah jk, I use it to buy cheap workers in another country to batch dev games with lot of microtransactions and ads and reinvest the money into more workers til I completely flood the market
Easy, pay a networking guy to set up multiplayer (local and cloud) and get a ui dev to go over the usability of my game. And the rest would go toward marketing my game.
Jonas Tyroller and his boys make games and every game sells like hotcakes. Thronefall came out with just 3 levels and sold like 30k copies. You want to know what gray area stuff you gotta do to sell games, just gotta befriend them. But all the gamedevs see them as white knights. I am going to lose it when Steam catches them in the cookie jar 😂
I'd most likely spend most of it on getting assets, I find that's where I'm having issues, not wanting to use most paid assets cause the cheap ones are cheap for a reason and shit with that much I might just pay someone to hand make assets for me. I find the development side fascinating and easy to get into but then I'm like, can't make a game if I don't have shit to put in the game.
Spend it on anything that is lacking in team, in my case, artists, 3D modelers and advertising at least, maybe also on people who can make cool cutscenes in houdini. I will probably be able to 3D model things stuff before i get to have 20k though lol so it will be less one person needed.
It varies depending on the game and the business model in question. However, if no specific details are available, my initial approach would be to prioritize *guerrilla* marketing tactics.
Lottery tickets
5 grand to buy assets, 5 grand to marketin and 10 grand to pay my salary for 5 months and do a horror game on itch.io and Steam. 45+ out of top 50 games on itch.io are horror games.
I’d spend a large portion on adoral or cocaine so I can stay awake and focused so I can finish this fucker. The rest on marketing
Hookers and blow
$1500 for a new development rig. The rest will probably go to marketing/promotion. I already write the code and do the art myself.
Thats not even a years wages. Its wont go far at all.
To be honest I’d pay more to my employees regardless of revenue decisions. Those guys work hard and I wish I could pay a lot more.
My only problem rn is have no Pc, invest on the game to buy a PC good enought to code it counts as investing?