How indie game developers actually make money

Games are the one category where in-app purchases genuinely work, so most of this article is going to point you at them and away from the cleverer-sounding alternatives. That is the honest order. The interesting part is the end, where none of the standard three fit and you still have players.

So here are the models, ranked by how many indie games they are actually the right answer for, and then what is left over.

In-app purchases, and the one thing they require

For a game with real engagement, selling things inside it is the default because it is the only model whose revenue scales with how much people enjoy playing. A player who loves your game can spend far more than a fixed price would ever have let you charge, and most players spend nothing, which is fine.

The requirement people skip: the purchase has to be for something the game was already making them want. Cosmetics work because players already care how they look to other players. A second currency works because the game already has a first one that runs out at an interesting moment. Bolt a store onto a game that generated no desire and you get a store nobody visits.

The uncomfortable number is that in a typical free-to-play game only a low single-digit percentage of players ever pay, and a small fraction of those pay most of the money. That is not a flaw to fix. It is the shape of the model, and designing as though the median player will spend produces a game the median player resents.

Rewarded video, the ad that players opt into

If you are going to run ads in a game, run the kind the player chooses to watch. A rewarded video — watch 30 seconds, get a continue or some currency — pays far more than a banner because the advertiser is buying a completed, attentive view rather than a pixel the player learned to ignore. It also does the opposite of what most ads do to a game: it hands the player a lever instead of taking one away.

Banners and forced interstitials are the trap. They earn little, they make the game feel cheap, and on mobile they are the fastest way to a one-star review about "too many ads". If you would not put it in front of a player you respect, it is costing you retention faster than it earns.

For the wider case against banners across app types, why ads pay so little and what pays better covers the arithmetic outside games too.

Selling the game outright

On desktop — Steam, itch.io, a direct download — a premium price still works, and for a certain kind of game it works better than anything else. A finished, single-player, crafted experience is something people will pay for once and feel good about, precisely because there is no store nagging them afterwards.

Premium buys you a simpler life: no live economy to balance, no ad mediation to maintain, no whales to design around. It costs you the upside. A game that could have earned ten times its price from its most engaged players earns the price, once, from everyone. Whether that trade is right depends on whether your game has the kind of depth that produces spenders, and most narrative and puzzle games honestly do not.

What is left when none of those fit

Some games have players and no path to any of the above. A free, ad-free game with a small devoted audience that will never make in-app purchases work. A desktop game that sits open for hours while someone plays at their own pace. A passion project you refuse to stuff with a store.

For those, bandwidth sharing is a revenue floor rather than a revenue plan. The player opts in to relaying a capped slice of their unused connection while your game runs, and you earn from that participation without gating a single feature or showing a single ad. It pays up to $0.50 per user per month, and it only counts a user on a day once their device has been sharing for 60 minutes that day, so a game people leave open earns more from it than one they dip into for two minutes. How the sharing actually works is the page to read before you decide whether it fits your players, because the thing that makes it acceptable is that you can explain it to them in one honest sentence.

It will never out-earn a good in-app economy. If your game can support one, build that. Bandwidth sharing is for the games that cannot, and for those it is the difference between a hosting bill and a small monthly cheque.

A worked example

Say a puzzle game has 4,000 daily players, a genre where almost nobody buys, and a mood that rewarded video would spoil.

• Premium at $3, converting 2% of 60,000 monthly uniques: about $3,600 a month, front-loaded around launch and decaying after.
• Rewarded video the players mostly decline: a few hundred dollars, bought at the cost of some of the calm the game is selling.
• Bandwidth sharing, if the game stays open while people play: a steady monthly figure that depends entirely on how long sessions run.

The point of the example is not the exact dollars, which depend on your game. It is that the ranking flips by genre. For this game the ad model is the worst option despite being the one every tutorial reaches for first.

What to try first

1. Ask whether your game produces desire. If players already want something the game withholds, in-app purchases are your answer and the rest of this list is a distraction.
2. If it does not, ask whether it is finished and self-contained. If so, sell it once, on desktop, and stop.
3. If it is free, ongoing, and quiet, rewarded video only if it fits the mood, and bandwidth sharing as the floor underneath it.
4. Whatever you pick, put a real number on it before you build it. What apps make per download has the comparison figures, and a model that cannot clear your hosting cost on paper will not clear it in production.

Most games monetize best on the model the developer was avoiding because it felt too commercial. The players already decided how they want to pay you. The job is to notice.