Do you make or sell game assets or take coding commissions on other people's products?

jbskaggs

There is a saying "I can make more money of selling to gold miners, than I do mining gold."

I know on Gamemaker and Unity it used to be that people made more income selling assets or commissions than they did their own games.

I also know that many are interested in paid tutoring or classes.

So do you make and sell any of these?

TwistedTwigleg

I make an IK plugin that is free for non-commercial projects but is paid for commercial uses. I also tried, for a time, to make paid tutorials using Godot and Patreon, but it didn’t really work out. I also have a “pay what you want” game or two that sometimes makes a little. Of the three, I have made more money of the IK plugin, but it’s also the one I’ve spent the most time on in both development and marketing. That said though, I made much more at my job than I did of any of what I have made selling myself (games, plugins, tutorials, etc) so there’s that as well.

I personally do not think Godot is quite there yet to support creators with assets and tutorials just yet, with a few exceptions (like GDQuest). Hopefully with time though! Godot is getting more and more popular, and it has grown a lot in the recent years, so I think it will just be a matter of time before the structure is there to help support more Godot developers making tutorials and assets.

jbskaggs

What is an IK plugin?

cybereality

I'm working on a tutorial website that is going to launch in about a month. But it's going to be free. I want to help people learn, and I think that most people using Godot do not have a lot of money, and I don't want people to not see the content because of their financial status.

It's a little different with Unity, as most people there are selling games and (hopefully) making money, so they can afford to spend more money on assets. I buy a lot of assets. When I was using Unity it was not uncommon for me to spend $100 on a single level asset or character. So those people that make the assets can potentially make far more money than if they used that time to make a game. Just as an example, you can sell a AAA quality character for $100. But a game may have dozens of characters, plus cars, and a full world, and that sells for $60 bucks. Obviously there are more gamers than developers, but I think the economics make sense.

For Godot I agree with @TwistedTwigleg that we are not there yet. I think in a year or two we might be. Right now I don't think it would be a viable business. And people can still buy art from places like CGTrader, or port Unity code themselves (I've done this and it's not too hard). So, yeah, it would be better if it was drag and drop, but it's not exactly like people are blocked right now.

jbskaggs

Could it be that searches for assets showing unity but nothing for godot slow down Godot popularity?

on the other hand nothing is stopping anyone from building their own asset / code website dedicated to godot either I guess.

cybereality

There are some Godot asset sites.

https://godotmarketplace.com/ https://godotassetstore.org/ https://godotassets.io/ https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-godot

TwistedTwigleg

@jbskaggs said: What is an IK plugin?

IK is for “Inverse Kinematics”, which is a method of moving a series of bones so that the end of a bone chain (like the arm of a character) reaches a target position in a semi-natural way. It’s useful for procedural animation :)