How much I get paid for my games and game dev tools on itchio

Tags: posts, itchio,

I felt like poking this again after my last post years ago and thought other people might find it useful.

The short answer is: I make about $100 a year, and generally less than 1% of downloads result in any payment. Which is vanishingly small compared to how much time I put in, especially since my stuff is fairly well received by the people who do check it out. But I'm a solo dev hobbyist, so my works have some rough edges, and I put very little effort into self promotion etc.

First, some context: Here's my itchio account, which includes complete and demo visual novels, little puzzle games, backgrounds, and other game making tools.

Everything is "Pay what you want" except "Visual Novel House Backgrounds: Complete Edition" which was an experiment in seeing if I could make much money from a paid-only extension of a free tool (nope)

My most popular work, in terms of both downloads and payments, is my only long and complete visual novel, "Northanger Abbey", which had a demo in 2017 and was fully released in 2019.

SOON and Perpixilled were my first two games. They are therefore very rough around the edges and unpopular, but got some disproportionately large purchases from friends and family Supporting My New Hobby.

I have joined two paid bundles over the years:

"The Shorter Games With Worse Graphics Bundle" happened to go viral after submissions closed, so a large amount of money was shared with a small number of other devs. A bit of a hard to replicate lucky break.

The "Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2024" was also a bit of a lucky break in that I just happened to have a new, theme-appropriate game demo ("A Hungry Heart") ready during the submission period. I don't know how hard it is to get into smaller or less specific bundles, or how much profit they tend to make, but I know this one made less money in 2024 than it has previously.

All numbers are in US dollars. I pay 30% tax on top of this as an Australian selling on a US site.

"Ratio" is payments/downloads, and I am guaranteed to have gotten some of those numbers wrong.

Categories which consistently don't get any payments: blender and unreal engine tools, backgrounds based purely on existing 3d models, browser games. Some of the browser games are actually pretty popular in terms of number of visitors, but all very short.

Note that the "Pay what you want" version of the house backgrounds earned more money than the paid one with extra features! And it has a THOUSAND downloads versus EIGHT. In future I'd just add this sort of extra as a download on the "pay what you want" version with a minimum purchase price, at least it's less hassle for everyone that way.

Also interesting to note that there's only two accounts who CAN download the paid version yet there's still 8 downloads and thus a less than 100% 'payment ratio'. Whether or not those two customers shared their account with multiple people (which wouldn't really bother me since the numbers are still small), it goes to show how unreliable the numbers can be, even on top of the small sample sizes skewing things.

Also notable that the $10 and $60 versions of the Halloween bundle (which contain the same content) made about the same amount of money: the extra money from the $60 bundle was perfectly matched by less people being willing to pay that much.

Note that being in a bundle caused a spike in A Hungry Heart's views and downloads but the associated payments are counted separately.

I'm not sure why Pride or Prejudice's demo is so popular yet has zero payments, while A Hungry Heart's is much less popular yet got one. Maybe that one person who paid for it is unusually generous and generally noone pays for demos, or people were put off by Pride or Prejudice being on official hiatus, idk. Gonna be honest, I never pay for demos, but that one generous person is much appreciated :)

None of these numbers affect how I approach things that much, since I'm not in it for the money (thankfully haha) and am mostly just happy if people get some use or enjoyment out of the things I make. But I do like money, and if I had made a larger profit from my backgrounds and tools I'd have considered putting more energy into figuring out what other people might want, instead of just uploading random things I make for my own projects.

Based on this data (which may not be indicative of wider trends) if you do want to make money on itchio you're better off making complete games, preferably with nice art. And try to get into bundles! Also, you know, promote yourself more than I do, or you will make... no money... haha...

I'll be curious to see how much of a bump A Hungry Heart gets in payments once I finish it (assuming I do >.>)

EDIT:

It occurs to me it might be worth unpacking just how low making money is for me on my list of game dev priorities, and why. So: I have severe mental and physical health problems which mean I had to retire from my job and need to be incredibly careful about burnout and stress. I am also lucky enough to have a partner who earns a moderately high wage and is happy to support me. And I earn VERY little from my games.

So the maths just doesn't add up on putting significant energy into making money as a game dev. I still put SOME effort in since there's always the chance I'll have a viral hit etc, but so far it's not resulted in enough extra money to inspire me to keep pushing.

Any attempt on my part to significantly increase my game dev income would cause me a bunch of stress and thus extra health problems, yet even if I manage to double or triple my current income it would only be a few hundred dollars a year. I recently saved us that much in a day by doing some research into cheap local plumbers when our taps needed fixing. I have been looking at getting back into maths tutoring, and even if I only manage that for a few hours a year it will quickly outpace game dev as an income source.

The fact that I earn so little is in some ways freeing. I feel no responsibility to work harder, because it will make so little difference either way. I just do what I find fun as a hobby, and any money I make feels nice more because of Capitalist Society's Pressure To Be An Earner than because it actually makes much difference financially.

Obviously my situation is not universal, but I do think a lot of other artists who rely on day jobs or supportive partners etc gloss over this fact, acting like their lifestyle is entirely supported by their art (and so either they are very successful as artists, or they are in need of more financial support) when their art income is basically negligible compared to that of their household. Being in this situation doesn't make us Not Real Artists, but it's not fair to the people who do rely on their art to survive to pretend we're in the same boat.

Now you might say: Sean, if you think trying to make money as a game dev is a waste of your energy, why did you bother going to the effort of analysing all these numbers in the first place? Well a) before I got sick I worked as a mathematician, I like playing with numbers and b) just because those numbers make it clear that I will likely never make much money at this doesn't mean I don't still get inspired to try sometimes. And maybe one of these days I'll find some approach that does make enough money that pushing at it harder is worth the effort. But if I don't, I'll just keep having fun.