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Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

Except that it turns out that artists and game programmers are too cheap to pay for tools, even if you can present them with a clear benefit in terms of productivity gain vs. sales price. To make matters worse, big companies that could afford those tools will generally only buy exceptionally well established tools and rebuild the rest from scratch in-house.

The only way to make money with games is to sell games.

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They're absolutely not "too cheap" for that - it's just a saturated market. Don't start a new company, look for a job working at Autodesk or Havok or Unity or Crytek or one of the dozen other companies that makes bank off of selling professional tools to professional game developers

I can tell you right here and right now that I know that some of the companies you name do not make a bank off of their products. And it's probably not the companies you would expect and not for the reasons you would expect. I have sources for this, but unfortunately I cannot name them.

Can you tell us which companies and the reasons? Otherwise, it’s hard to learn from your comment.

Autodesk has laid off about a quarter of its workforce in the past two years. Crytek has had employees regularly complaining about paychecks bouncing; they're clearly inches from bankruptcy. Havok is owned by Microsoft; I'm not sure how they're doing. Unity is probably doing well enough, as they're incredibly popular, but I suspect popularity among hobbyists translates mostly into a lot of people on the free tier.

The tooling market is hard.

I'm pretty sure that Crytek has nearly gone under a few year ago, so they're not exactly making a bank with their engine. Rgarding their engine I've heard it's more difficult to use compared to other engines, which has slowed down adoption.

You may be surprised where unity makes the majority of their money... it's not from sales to the general public. The parent post is correct, the majority of users are cheap, it's a race to the bottom, where a £50 plugin is considered expensive.

There's different framing needed here though - hobbyist developers aren't really buying "tools" in the same way a studio is. You need to think of it as a B2C sale more than a B2B one - you're selling something that will enable them to realise their dreams, not cut 5% off their build times.

When you're committing 1000 hours of your free time to building a game from scratch, spending 30-40 building your own (hacky, not that great) animation pipeline for the learning experience is worth it over a £90 plugin. You don't really win this on cost/benefit over and above getting someone excited by the possibilities of your tool. Worth checking out Buildbox[0] for example.

Obviously studios are a different beast and it make sense for parts of their workflows to be custom. If you want to get a start in the goldrush, sell pickaxes, not JCBs.

[0] https://www.buildbox.com/

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/044-stephanie-hurlburt-...

From Fledgling Founder to 7-Figure Deals with Stephanie Hurlburt of Binomial

Stephanie Hurlburt (@sehurlburt) shares the story of how she went from being an employee to being half of a 2-person startup that sells software to gaming companies, and all the steps in between. Learn how she quit her job, met her cofounder, landed lucrative contracting gigs, built a product, learned about sales, and stayed sane while doing it.

I might be abnormal, but I've bought Asesprite, Tayasui Sketches and Ableton Live just to get better at making games for free for Ludum Dare.

Lots of people make decent money on the Unity asset store.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/

RAD Game Tools has people with ferraris

Anybody else except the owner?

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