Since I'm still kind of a starting developer, I'm trying to build a small community with my games instead of selling them. That means a lot of my games are free and playable in browser. To make some small income on the side, do you think it would be a good idea to sell the source code to each of the games for some extra income as I'm still growing? The cost would only be like $1-2 per project. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
It cannot hurt. Though honest opinion: You should reconsider the pricing. 1-2$ is drastically underselling what you have to offer. Look at it this way: How many hours did you put into your game? How many hours do others save by using your source code (I assume they are allowed to use it commercially)? Let's say you earn 10$ per hour in any job you could do instead. You work 8h on the game total. That would be an opportunity cost of 80$ on your part. Now how many people do you think will buy the source code? Let's say 10. Then you'd already be at a price of 8$ just to break even. And I deliberately used low estimates for everything.
With 1 or 2$ you'll not get an income on the side. At that price, you should consider making it open source. You'll get just as much money in my opinion and experience. Remember you are allowed to make sales and other kinds of promotions. With a price of 1$ there is basically no reason to ever do something like that for you. You lose one important marketing tool by choosing a price that's already too low.
That's just how I see it. I'm selling source code for game projects myself and still figuring out how to do this as well. Good luck with your side income :)
We're all competitors, and therefore you're asking a question that many would answer in doublespeak. But, I will tell you that people are selling assets (Menus, Particles, Sprites, Sounds, Voices), for 5-10x the price you suggested, on the Unity asset store, for example, which has Terms that you may be interested in because the asset can only be used on Unity projects for example. And as an example/tip, you could sell your Pooling (or Preloader) script, or SoundManager script, or Menu class script, etc. separately.
I love your idea of letting people play in browser and giving them the choice to see the game the way that developers do, and sending them the code.
A few things that I've learned on itch.io: majority of the audience are game collectors who appreciate the artist- reading dev logs, seeing updates, downloading sprites, looking at code etc, and people are willing to drop a few bucks on quality- I know I have and I'm working with a tight budget.
When you can bring every step of the process of a game into the view, people love to see how you did it. Sketches of background/characters, sprites and animations (run left, attack, etc) and the code and how it all comes together. Its a beautiful thing
Personally I dont like posting my art on public platforms like youtube/instagram/twitter, it can feel so fake. But if people are on itch.io and scrolling around they are in a different mind set than someone scrolling on insta/youtube and can see past the bologna posts/ buskers and see the real artists who put time and thought into their final products and want people to use them.
$2-3 is a great price, it covers fees and what not. In my opinion $1 causes more problems than it solves depending on that website. Bundling things together helps customers save too. you can make iframe widget to copy paste into post that you want to bundle (example in my signature)
Best of luck in your enDEaVors
Sarah
(you can make an iframe widget in your dashboard and copy paste into signature like this or in posts you want to bundle)
What do you mean with selling the source code? You should be very specific about things like that. Source code is governed by something called licenses and copyright.
Put in other words, there might be two or more scenarios.
1. You have a donation enabled project with pay what you want and there is a bonus tier for people that donated whatever threshold you set, like the 2 $ for example. There you make available the sourcecode for people to compile the game for personal use or to bask in the glory of your coding prowess.
2. You license the source code for commercial use. Basically people could buy license your source code and create their own project of it and make money from it.
Scenario 2 is more suited for parts of a game. Like mentioned above, similar to those assets.
I believe what you are actually looking for is a way to give incentives to pay for your games. Or pay more. Those bonus tiers are an easy configurable method to do so and the bonus content is usually something like wallpapers, artwork, soundtracks and so on. If your audience might be interested in the source code, why not.
Be prepared for lots of poor copies/variants of your game to appear shortly after you let your source code out. Script kiddies find it far easier to butcher something that works than to write their own thing from scratch.
You might want to anonymize your source code before you release it, so the crappy games don't come up with your name on them if the script kiddies haven't realized they should update it. Considering the stupid things some people may do with it, you could end up with a lot of the wrong sort of attention.
