What's the value of your work?

All of us here are developers and know in one way or another the costs of developing games in time and effort. For professional reassons, i'm lately making myself a question and i would like to know what do you think cause i think is something that all of us will need to know at some point. To have a more accurate perspective of our reflection, lets try to answer the question from 2 different angles.

As Seller You have a game completed with a decent design, code, art and sound quality. Of course many people would be interested in have the source code (.capx) of the game cause as the way Construct 2 works, is easy to understand an already made project opened with the tool and is quite usefull to have it to build a different version, use it as reference or build a clone with different graphics for example. If we are supposing that the quality of the game is decent and it's a work of 1-3 months, what's the price you would try to sell the game to cover the effort letting others use the code? As Buyer Now let's suppose you want to make a game of an specific genre and it will make you save 1-2 months of work having the code of a game with a similar style and readapt it. It could be also the case of an artist that doesn't want to code the game from skratch. How much would you want to pay for a game source file like the one we are talking about?

THE ANSWERS

Now lets put the 2 angles together to try to get accurate answers of these 2 questions. What could be the selling price of the source code of a game like this one if:

A) The game is able to be bought from everyone that pays the price.

B) It would be available for just 1 exclusive developer don't letting another one to buy it.

What do you think?

There are so many subjective factors to this question, you will just get individual opinions. And your question is very simlar to web design 'templates' of which there are many out there to both buy 'exclusive' rights or just 'one copy' rights.

Let's assume a good profession dev can make $60K US per year. Two months of work is $10K ... who will pay $10K for a capx? Probably no one.

If you are after money, I would say work for someone. However, I would guess a huge reason most people are here because it's just something they really enjoy doing -- and part of that enjoyment is sharing your work and helping others. The value of that is priceless.

There are many sites that sell templates, ready to be reskinned. Not .capx ofcourse, but games made in other tools and sdks.

you can buy such projects from anything from $200 to $600

there are even "project managers" these days who hire programmers to do a game, not to earn $ by selling the game on the appstores, but sell the source as templates!!!!!

Thats a good reference.

You have to do some research to come to a price. If you are starting out, you can't ask as much as other experienced companies are asking.

I plan on making a few small games with Construct 2 soon when I get a break from my day job (also in game development) so I've been looking at the income side of things as well.

When I first started using Construct 2 I took a freelance job for some experience. It was re-making simple educational Flash games in HTML5 with all the art/sound provided. It paid $150 per game and took about 10-12 hours for the first game, spread out over a week as I had to wait for feedback and do some tweaks. On that basis I take $12 to $15 an hour as the minimum pay rate I should expect from people looking to hire for Construct 2/HTML5 game development.

I've also seen a few sites (e.g. FGL) offer $200 for completed games rather than templates.

These are usually non-exclusive deals but can sometimes require implementing their API or something like that.

Often the games don't have to be terribly complex - e.g. an endless runner or simple puzzle game will do most of the time, as long as it's polished, bug-free and mobile friendly. These sorts of games can probably be whipped up in less than a week working part-time.

If you have a more complex game you should be able to get more for it, but it could require some negotiating and might not be much more than $600 or so.

Of course these complex games will take longer to develop too. So you need to weigh up development time against expected income.

Anyway, let's say you spend a week coming up with a simple game, another week submitting to game sites that pay. If you're lucky and 5+ game sites accept the game you could get $1000+ for those two weeks of work. Although, from what I hear, there is usually a bit of a delay between submitting and payment.

Plus you can still submit it to the app stores and sites that do ad revenue sharing (e.g. Kongregate) for added income.

It's probably not enough money to quit your day job if you have bills to pay (at least not until you have several games out), but it could be a good side income.

I think the trick is being able to churn out lots of fun little games and save the big dream project for when you're more experienced and have the income to support yourself. Having templates that you re-use yourself rather than sell should help.

You also need to know to which sites you should submit your game. A few people sell that information about publishers/sites but others share it on the forums.

I know this doesn't exactly answer your questions but I hope it's at least a little bit useful.

A) $15-$50

B)$250+

I don't know exact values since it depends on the size of the game+scope including many other factors but these are the prices I would pay for a general template.

A lot of templates I've seen also require you to figure out the source code too first of all so that's a thing to think about.

My 2c:

I think the 'resale' value of any C2 project is limited. The elephant in the room is that C2 is a non-programming scenario (C2 project authors are not developers) to create games. Because of that, the game is restricted in areas (such as advertising banners of all kinds) and a somewhat finicky export process to the platform of your flavor. Using Cocoon to wrap the project in may be worthwhile to the original C2 project creator, but you really cant hand your project off and include a whole bunch of 'it kind of works' instructions for the end-user to follow to export to Android etc.

Because of the above points (and others), I don't see a market in selling C2 projects for profit. Kind of like selling Microsoft FrontPage websites in the 1990's and expecting similar cash rewards to a true website creation.

If you want to make 'real' money the old standards ring true; it takes time, skill, and experience in a coding environment of your choice. Even then your'e going up against thousands of developers looking to write the next Angry Birds.

Good luck!

PS - I live on the West Coast and don't know a single developer who would roll out of bed for $60k. A C/C++ developer can expect to earn six figures plus, and rightfully so. Its a tough, demanding, and constantly changing line of work.

C2 templates for mobile, not really, but c2 templates for HTML5 might work