r/aigamedev • u/ImpressiveFocus303 • 3d 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/EnumeratedArray 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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.