TLDR: How do I build a game and earn money?
People buy games they like. So your game must be complete and fun. Stay focused.
- Stay Employed
- Invest your free time
- Get your product to market asap
So you want to make a game but reality is setting in that somehow you have to deal with your daily life, paying for food, shelter and the occasional tiddy game on Steam.
You ask yourself, how the hell do indie developers do it? Fear not, I'm here to give you some guidance.
This article is assuming you are broke as heck and the chances of you getting funding from the government or an investor is 0. No Y Combinator. No publisher advance. No rich uncle. Just you, a laptop, and a dream that costs money you don't have yet.
How to Make Money While Making a Game (Without Quitting Your Job)
The first and most important thing I can tell you is: do not quit your job. I know that's not what you want to hear. Every YouTube thumbnail is some guy in a hoodie going "I QUIT MY $180K JOB AT GOOGLE TO MAKE GAMES." Don't be that guy. Or at least, don't be that guy yet.
Unless you're living off your family's goodwill, paying for your daily life is what keeps your mind stable, your fridge non-empty, and your ability to actually finish the thing intact. You will also need a starting fund for your game, whether that's buying a Godot plugin, commissioning a sound designer on Fiverr, or paying for a Steam developer account ($100, by the way). None of that is free.
I'm working on P For Pistol right now, and I haven't burned my income to the ground to do it. Every hour I put in on weekends or evenings is essentially free labour compounding on itself. Every month you hold down your job and make progress on your game is a month you've invested hundreds of dollars worth of your own time into the project without touching your savings.
So whatever you're going through at work, keep the job. At least until you have a released product that earns actual money. Then we can talk.
While you're learning Godot, Unity, or Unreal, you'll also want to decide early whether you're going the free-to-play route or releasing a paid product. This matters because it changes how you build your following and what you optimise for. Free-to-play lives and dies on daily active users and retention loops. Paid is a one-time pitch that has to land. Pick one and build your game around that decision from day one.
Find a Job That Leaves You With Weekends
Not all jobs are created equal for the side-hustle game dev. What I'm looking for in a day job, if I had to design one around this, is something that doesn't follow me home. No "just check your email real quick" at 9pm. No Sunday anxiety spirals about Monday meetings. Your weeknights and weekends are your real working hours for the game.
My game plan has always been to spend evenings learning the craft of whatever I need next, and weekends going heads-down on actual development. If your job eats into that, you will resent it and eventually half-ass both. That's the worst outcome.
Every month you sustain the full-time job and keep making progress is a month you've successfully invested your labour into the game without taking on debt or burning runway. Think of it like compound interest, except the asset is a game that might actually sell someday.
During this phase I also recommend getting your marketing strategy sorted early. Not after launch. Now.
Market While You Build (Not After)
This is the single biggest mistake I see first-time indie devs make. They spend a year building, then upload to the Google Play Store or Steam and wait for the money to come in. Those days are over. They were probably over in 2015. Steam alone gets something like 10,000 new titles a year. Itch.io is even more of a flood.
While you are making your game, get the word out. Use Reddit, Twitter (or X, or whatever it's called by the time you read this), Discord servers relevant to your genre, TikTok if you can stomach it. Share your progress, share your failures, share that weird bug where the character's head clips through the ceiling. People love that stuff.
I wrote more about why building an early audience matters in my piece on whether indie developers should bother with SEO — the short version is that word of mouth and a page you actually control beats chasing algorithms every time.
This is how you build a following. And more importantly, it's how you build confidence. You'll get feedback that tells you whether your idea is good before you've sunk 18 months into it. That's incredibly valuable and it costs you nothing except the time to post.
When You Ship, Use What You've Already Built
It's been a few months. You took my advice (hopefully), finished your game within 90 days or so, and at this point you should have a small following on Reddit or Twitter or Discord. You've used it to test your ideas in public and filter out the bad ones.
Now you take those posts you've been making for months, tidy them up a bit, and repost them on the same platforms in the same week you release the game. You're not starting from zero. You already have an audience that watched it get made. That's your launch window.
If the game makes millions or goes viral as a free-to-play, great, your dream came true. The more realistic scenario is that your first game gets mixed reviews or worse, total silence. I want to be honest with you about that because most "how to make money from games" content is not.
But here's the thing: as a developer, that outcome is still a 100% success. You did what most aspiring game developers never do when they dream of how to make money while making a game. You released the game. You shipped. That is genuinely rare.
If the market hates your idea or someone already released something similar and better, that's a blow to the ego. I won't lie, it stings. But you kept your job the whole time, so your bank account is at least stable. You now have the experience of a shipped title, which is worth more than another year of development on a game nobody has played.
Use what you learned and make a better game. That's the whole model.
The "I Quit My Six-Figure Job" Story Is Mostly Fiction
I do not advise doing the "I Quit My $180K Job at Google to Make Games" arc. It's unrealistic for most people and financially stupid for almost everyone. More than that, I genuinely think the majority of those stories are either exaggerated or straight-up lies designed to sell courses. We can go deeper on that in another article, but just know I'm sceptical every time I see one.
The path that actually works, the one I'm on with P For Pistol and everything else I'm building here, is slower and less dramatic. Day job sustains you. Free time builds the game. A small community grows while you work. You ship. You iterate. Maybe the second or third game is the one that earns real money.
That's what making money while making a game actually looks like. Boring? A bit. But boring keeps the lights on.
Conclusion
Keep the job. Build in the margins. Ship something real. The overnight success stories are mostly marketing.
If you want to see what the slow, honest version of this process looks like, follow along with P For Pistol as it actually gets made.
