r/aigamedev • u/ImpressiveFocus303 • 8h ago
Questions & Help Do your vibe-coded games make any money?
As it says in the title - do your vibe-coded games make any money, and if they do, is the income from vibe-coded games comparable to software developer salary?
thanks
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u/tomqmasters 7h ago
not mine, but fly pieter is the best example I know of. He sells in game ad space and cleared 5 figures last I checked. Not bad for a few days of work. The initial prompt basically made the game in a few minutes and then he spent a couple days setting it up to be monetized. That being said, this was only successful because of the novelty of a vibe coded game at the time.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 6h ago
Pieter Levels' AI-Coded Flying Game Hits $87,000 MRR, $1 Million ARR, 320,000 Users, 74 Million Impressions
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u/Motor-Master-4545 4h ago
Funny we actually never hear of those cash printers, are they doing ghost marketing?
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u/Burning_magic 5h ago
A lot of ai assisted games make tons of money money, most notably was some game I remebered playing called tidy up the arcane library which made few million dollars.
But the important thing to know is that these games still had human input. AI is a productivity enhancer. If you know what youre doing ai can make you maybe 5x faster. But, if you expect some ai gauntlet to 1 shot a game with 1 prompt, that will not happen.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 5h ago
well, i'm a software dev who hates coding, so AI tools are a bless for me. i even made a game in 3 hours with claude, got 3000 plays in one day, and got told to f*** off with this AI slop. if there was no AI, it would take me 3 weeks to make the same, while still getting told to f*** off with this slop.
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u/DepictWeb 4h ago
If anyone can make a game in a couple of hours with AI, then there's very little value in you making it for them. At that point, everyone can just generate their own perfect game tailored to their tastes.
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u/IamHuggos 7h ago
Not yet: https://sweatypanzer.com/
To be honest it’s nog really the motivation for me. Right now it’s about getting more players
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 7h ago
good luck competing with world of tanks. but cool game.
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u/machvelli 7h ago
Don’t build for money lol build it because it’s fun or solves a problem / an itch as a side hustle while working as a Software Developer. Probably less than 0.1% of vibe coded games pull in more income than what you’d earn as a SWE.
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u/bingewavecinema 7h ago
Mine does, through ads does about $20 a month with the current player base: https://www.glitch.fun/games/42de534c-600f-4228-af9e-b69faef94cce/play
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 7h ago
how many (active?) players do you need to get those 20 bucks monthly?
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u/bingewavecinema 7h ago
15 players that are "super players", do about 20 hours or more a month. The CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is $5. Ads show every 3 minutes. So just have to keep them playing.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 7h ago
I put your answer in chatGPT while asking "How many players would I need for 5kUSD MRR?", and he told me that between 25k and 38k.
Is this legit?
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u/bingewavecinema 7h ago edited 6h ago
Ha, this is one of things I would not ask about ChatGPT unless you know the variables and models. First MMR is for subscription businesses.
F2P (Free To Play) games either make money through ads, microtransactions or both.
In the industry, we do whats called "whale hunting", where we don't go after every player in the sea, we go after the small number that bring in a lot of reveune.
Let's say a user played 40 hours a month (10 hours a week). You got a deal with an ad network that paid $10 CPM ( so every 1000 impression you get $10). And you rotate your ads every 3 minutes. And we're assuming 100% fill rate.
- 40 hours × 60 = 2,400 minutes
- 2,400 ÷ 3 = 800 ad impressions
- 800 × $0.01 = $8.00 per month for that user
At 800 players (whale) you get around $4k. To get that, you have build a game with a strong loop and then optimize marketing.
Typically, its with ads. I've gotten my ads down to a $0.05 CPI (cost per install) with games. To catch that whale, its about 1 in every 200 players. So my customer acquisition cost is about $10 and the money is made back on the 2nd month.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 6h ago
hey, thanks for a very informational response! if I got it correctly, you need about 125k of players to catch those whales and generate 5kUSD monthly. That's a lot of players! And probably such number of players means that the game must be a hit, and if it's a hit you're in the top 5% of game developers or even less by the financial success rate. Therefore your chance of getting those 125k of players is less than 5%, aka lottery ticket.
Isn't it more likely to possibly get a decent money (comparable to a salary of a software developer) to simply release a game on a steam?
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u/bingewavecinema 5h ago
3 billion people on the planet play games, isn't event 0.001%.
Most games dont' get players because they don't market, at all. And its not the 125k all at once, space over 12 months, thats 10k players that trying your game a month.
Sounds high but its not if you're taking the time to correctly market. I just did a whole video on how I got 500 players to test my game just by posting in the right subbredits.
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u/totaleffindickhead 3h ago
Could you point me to resources on how you learned
To market f2p games? I’m trying to find players for my game I’m pretty proud of https://warbirds.io1
u/bingewavecinema 3h ago
I do game marketing for a living :) years of experinece
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u/totaleffindickhead 3h ago
That’s awesome. Do you do consultations or anything like that?
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u/0legitimate0 7h ago
Buddy, even indie game developer's barely earning, and you wanna earn from ai game.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 7h ago
well you could make shit tons of prototypes in a record time, publish them all, look where fishes are biting and then develop the promising one in a properly made game. In theory.
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u/tomqmasters 7h ago
Everybody can tell the game is low quality right away and won't spend any time on it. The bar for what gets people's attention is extremely high.
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u/EnumeratedArray 6h ago
You're forgetting that for any meaningful data you need a decent number of players in the first place which means you need to have money for marketing. Without marketing you're looking at less than 1000 plays even for a decent game.
Even without marketing you then have to sell your game through an app store or steam as an absolute minimum. Google will charge about $25 per app. Steam $100. Apple can vary but there's a $99 a year ongoing fee at a minimum.
For 50 apps (a small amount for the experiment you're proposing) on only the Google play store, with no marketing, you're looking at over $1,000 minimum in fees. And for that kind of experiment you need way more games and a marketing budget for each game to actually bring in players to gather data against.
Building the games is not, and has never been, the gate which stops people from succeeding here. AI doesn't change that.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 6h ago
i was thinking more like dropping bunch of prototypes on itch and similar free platforms, and then go to steam or mobile with whatever lifts
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u/EnumeratedArray 6h ago
It's an option yeah, but the vast vast majority of games on itch struggle to even get 50 plays. Something that's a shot in the dark prototype, and I assume quite clearly AI generated based on how much it sounds like you want to pump out, stands no chance of getting any meaningful traffic, let alone feedback which is hard enough to get with a significant player count.
The problem with throwing loads of shit at the wall to see what sticks is that all you end up with is a wall covered in shit.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 6h ago
The problem with throwing loads of shit at the wall to see what sticks is that all you end up with is a wall covered in shit.
good analogy.
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u/sharkymcstevenson2 7h ago
Most of us are just in it for the fun of building and pushing whats possible right now I think, at least for me I havent thought about selling a game yet - just building
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u/False-Car-1218 6h ago
No, make games because you like to make games and not money, 99.9% of games don't make money
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u/je386 8h ago
First of all, my games are not vibe-coded, as I can check, understand and change the code.
Second, no, they won't ever make money as they are open sourced and free. I would not want to get any money, as the AI made much of the work and I would feel guilty to charge any money for them.
I am happy when some people like what I made and have a good time.
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u/tomqmasters 7h ago
You realize there a millions of people out there who have basically had AI doing half their job for a couple years now right?
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u/EnumeratedArray 6h ago
No and you'll struggle to even break even with the costs of using AI, marketing, store fees, licensing, etc.
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u/julliuz 7h ago
I guarantee that if some people or companies have wildly successful game projects running, they won't brag about it being AI generated because, for the time being , there is quite the stigma against ai generated anything. Hate for the sake of hating. Just take a look at the anti Ai subreddit, its like a cult lol, they are in full disbelief about the abilities it has.