Info
This post was originally intended for a Patreon audience.
2021 Finances
Happy new year, skeletons! I started tracking my finances with respect to being an independent creative and 2021 was an interesting year for me financially speaking. I’m going to use this post to share with you the specifics!
Last year, I had a revenue of 1,117.55 for a total profit of $495.43. That doesn’t seem like a ton of money, but it is certainly a lot more than I was expecting to make — in fact, for most of the year I expected to be well in the negatives. So, what happened?
Well, the reason I thought I would be in the red was because I hired voice actors to fully voice act Gender Dysphoria. It wasn’t a good move financially but I wanted to do it. However, by the same coin, I had submitted the game to the 2021 Queer Games Bundle, and that made enough money to cover the costs of hiring voice actors. I had also forgotten to account for the fact that I’m still making money from odd jobs and my quarterly royalty check for making that online learning video course for Pluralsight.
So, lets break it down in detail!
Revenue
I’ve made 50 every month from patron dues, but I made far less last year since I paused payments for half of the months due to my mental health.
Most of the income I made last year actually came from itch.io, and most of that money was as a result of Gender Dysphoria being part of the 2021 Queer Games Bundle. This is the first time I’ve ever earned a significant amount of money for any of the games I’ve made, and it’s very exciting and empowering to know that I’ve been able to receive such a revenue. In total, after itch.io’s cut, I’ve made 7.75 royalty check from Indiepocalypse for Gender Dysphoria in Indiepocalypse Issue 11. You can read more about Gender Dysphoria’s revenue breakdown here.
$552.91 came in the form of quarterly royalty checks from Pluralsight for the online course I produced for them a few years ago while trying to support myself when I was working on Access full time.
I’ve also made 20 from doing odd jobs for friends.
All of this money makes it possible for me to afford services to make the things I want to make and build this community. So, what did I spend it on?
Expenses
The biggest expense last year was for hiring four excellent voice actors to provide a full voice over for Gender Dysphoria at a cost of $521.80. Gender Dysphoria did actually manage to pay for this expense itself after being included in the 2021 Queer Games Bundle, as mentioned earlier.
I have several ongoing expenses related to providing the content and space for the community, as small as it is. The biggest in this category is Vimeo, where I host all the videos I upload. For the most part, it’s used to host Twitch stream recordings but I also use it to host videos for itch.io, game award submissions, and devlog updates. I paid 183.98 into buying Hooktheory to help me learn more about music theory so I can apply it to making better music.
On the less expensive-side of things, 23.88 for IFTTT, which is a service I use to automatically cross-post updates between different services to make it easier on me. In particular, this is primarily used to post updates in the appropriate Discord channel.
Lastly, I spent $75 to submit Gender Dysphoria to IGF 2022. There is a potential cash prize if I happen to win, which I think is incredibly unlikely, but at the very least this should help expose the game to more people.
All in all, I am pretty satisfied with how last year went. I’m still nowhere close to making enough money to do this independently full time, but it has made me more optimistic for the future and having more capital available will make it easier for me to invest into my next game or my next album. Thank you again for your support, and I hope you’ll look forward to what I have in store this year!