Quote: "*OH, cool!!!
How much money do you get for "one"-game?? "
It depends on the contract and arrangements. At times it's 60-50% of the price it's been sold for. not of the retail price, but of the price the publishers sells it to a store. If it's sold for $19.99 in a store, then the publishers gets $10.00 from that amount and I do get $5-$6 from that per game.
Other contracts have a one time payment deal. I get a set certain amount from a publishers and then he distributes it as he wants.
Another way games are sold is by batches. The publishers sells a batch of games to a chain of retail stores and divides the batch money under the developers. For example a publishers sells 5 games to a retail chain and gets $5000 for the batch. The publishers gets $2500 from this amount and the remaining $2500 gets divided equally between the 5 developers.
Other publishers only publish games online and give the developer 50-75% of the online retail price. So, if the games sell online for $20, then the publishers gets $10-$5 and the developer gets $10-$15 per game.
The best thing is that you can have contracts with different publishers for the same game. Most of my games are under contract with 3-4 publishers.
But before you get your hopes up to high... marketing fps games is though at the moment. The gaming scene is oversaturated with fps games at the moment and if I'm honest, most of the fps games being sold at the moment are better then we can create with fpsc. The games that truly earn me money are games like DragonMania and Botz which you can find at my website. Catching gfx, cool gameplay, small download-size, useable on many systems (not only XP), diverse gameplay and so on. Those are the games publishers want and people will buy. A fps game will only earn you a little money, compared to a casual game.
The trick is to create games that do sell well in stores (as boxed games) and can be sold online (small download size), but yet take hours and hours to complete.
I guess your next question will be how much I do earn..... sorry not going to tell you, but I'll give you some hints.
I recently purchased a new car, a new playstation (including 14 games), an application called Vue d'Esprit, upgraded my desktop publishing suite (proffesional bussiness suite), mp3 player, a new remote controlled pro-helicopter and a new maksutov-cassegrain telescope. Some of the money I donated to a charity (got to do something good with the money also) and a good amount I did invest into my comic creation company and some of it into my game development purschases. The rest of it my wife is going to use for re-decorating our house. This only reflects the income made over the last 6 months.
You can make some handsome money from game creation, but you need to develop skill, expertise, time and contacts in the business. Most of all... don't spent to much time online, it kills game development
and consumes much time that could be spent on game creation. Also you need to have the right engines and tools that allow you the freedom you want and don't hold you back.
All I can say (to all of you) is good luck in your game creation endeavours!
