A game developer has revealed the shocking amount of money he made from his free mobile game in just four weeks.
The YouTuber, who is known as Yannick, shared the financial outcome of his game with his 26,700 subscribers.
In the video description, he wrote: “I’m a GameDev, and in this video I show you my GameDev Revenue. You will see how much money I earned with my free mobile game SpiderDoll and if I made enough money to pay my bills.”
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Explaining his experience as a game developer, Yannick said: “Almost one year ago, I published my first app. DashArena is a small action game where you have to dash through your enemies to earn points but not only is the game play is superb, there’s also some advertisement so this was the first time I earned money with my game, a total of three cents.”
It’s not quite enough to retire on so Yannick set his sights on his next game, creating SpiderDoll.
He said: “I worked on this game for six months and over 350 hours. Will I finally make some money or is this going to be another flop?”
He added: “Now to be able to post the game in the App Store, I needed to buy an Apple developer account for $100 and an old Mac mini for $60.
“My goal was to earn at least $160 so I don’t have to go into debt.”
And the game proved to be pretty popular, with over 105,000 people downloading it.
The YouTuber continued: “I made money with two different ways, on the one hand there’s advertisement. I never forced the player to watch ads but you could watch an ad to revive yourself.
“On the other hand, there are in-purchases you can buy, the golden doll skin for $1 or get Spidey coins for $1 or $2 Spidey coins can be used to get new skins but you don't have to buy them.”
Breaking down exactly how he made money from it, Yannick added: “All in all people clicked on the rewarded ad 62,400 times. I get approximately $4.50 per a thousand clicks, this results in $285 for advertisement alone.
“On the best day I got about $20 but currently I get about $2 to $5 each day.
“That's an awesome result, I already achieved the goal of $160 with advertisement alone but we still have the in-app purchases on iOS.”
Since launching the app, Yannick earned himself a total of $3,302.
Viewers took to the YouTube comment section to share their reactions to the video.
One user wrote: “It's really bold of you to ditch the safety of your master's degree to pursue your indie dev career. Truly inspiring and thanks for sharing your stats. I hope more indie devs do their sales overview; it helps aspiring game devs like me to gauge what's realistic and what's not when it comes to running a one-man studio.”
Another said: “Dude, that's awesome. Also making a game every 3 months ain't so bad. You're officially in the business now.”
And a third person added: “I appreciate you explaining the logistics of game development. It simply is something done out of passion.”