How Much I Made From My First Games — An Honest Breakdown (Spoiler: $0.02–$0.10)

When I started making games, I had a pretty simple expectation:

make a game → publish it → earn at least something

I wasn’t expecting to get rich overnight. But I did think that if I kept making games, the results would eventually improve.

That didn’t happen.

💸 The Reality: $0.02 to $0.10 Per Game

My first few games earned roughly:

$0.02
$0.05
at best around $0.10

And this pattern repeated itself again and again.

There’s also an ironic detail: the payout threshold is around $100.

So in practice:

all of that “revenue” is money I will never actually receive

📉 Downloads: Almost Nobody Played Them

Each game got fewer than 10 downloads.

And honestly, this mattered more than the money.

Because the real issue wasn’t monetization — it was this:

almost no one ever saw or played the games

🔁 The Biggest Mistake: I Kept Doing the Same Thing

What’s interesting is that even after seeing these results, I:

didn’t change my approach
didn’t analyze anything
didn’t try marketing

I just kept repeating the same cycle:

make a game → publish → earn a few cents → repeat

And I did this multiple times.

🤦 Why I Didn’t Question It

Looking back, it seems obvious. But at the time, my thinking was something like:

“the next game will do better”
“I just need to make more games”
“it’ll work eventually”

👉 Spoiler: it doesn’t work like that.

🚫 The Myth I Believed

“If you keep making games, eventually you’ll start making money.”

In reality, you can:

release 5 games
10 games
even 20 games

And still earn:

basically the price of a cup of coffee (or less)

🤔 What Was Actually Going On

If I break it down honestly:

1. I ignored marketing

Completely.

No promotion, no audience, no effort to get players.

2. I had zero visibility

The games were simply invisible among thousands of others.

3. I didn’t analyze results

I wasn’t asking:

Why are there no downloads?
Where would players even come from?
What should I improve?

4. I focused only on development

As if:

“a good game will sell itself”

🧠 The Turning Point

At some point, it became clear:

the problem wasn’t any single game the problem was my approach

I could have made 10 more games — and earned the same $0.02–$0.10.

💡 The Main Lesson

Making a game is not the same as making money from a game

Development is only half the work.

The other half is:

visibility
marketing
distribution

👍 Why This Was Still Valuable

Even with these results, I don’t see it as wasted time.

learned how to actually finish and publish games
saw how the market really works
understood what doesn’t work

And most importantly, I got rid of the illusion that “more games = more income”.

🚀 What I Would Do Differently Now

If I were starting over:

I’d think about marketing before development
I’d validate ideas earlier
I’d build some kind of audience
I’d focus less on quantity and more on learning

💬 Final Thoughts

My early experience looked like this:

multiple games released
$0.02–$0.10 earned per game
almost zero downloads

And one key takeaway:

If nothing changes, nothing improves

If you’re in a similar situation right now — that’s normal.

Just don’t stay in that loop as long as I did.