March 2025 Newsletter (Patreon)

Welcome to the second monthly Indie Game Clinic newsletter, which is mostly about the jam coming up in April, and about how this channel makes money.

CollabJam25 is scheduled to run for all of April, and now has an itch.io community page. This is a month-long game jam where you’re invited to make a game with other people! Over the next few weeks I’ll be putting out numerous videos encouraging people to join. So far it looks like we mostly have solo devs and maybe not enough artists, so I’m likely to target artists seeking devs next.

I’ll continue to put out content about collaboration and working together - even if its not a very popular topic for YouTube - and I’ve even started putting all of the content about collaborations and team-work together into a Road to CollabJam25 Playlist. On the community Discord, I’ll also be putting forward possible game themes or restrictions for members to vote on. The jam will be a public jam that anyone can join, but I see the Discord as a sort of “steering committee” for what I do on the channel, so it’ll be Discord where we decide the theme(s).

Speaking of Discord, I have had a few folks in video and stream comments ask why it costs anything in the first place. You’ve probably heard me explain this before, but I may as well use the newsletter to clarify, for those of you who are new to Indie Game Clinic.

YouTube AdSense doesn’t make enough money for me to live on, especially as a niche channel which is aimed at an intermediate-professional level developer audience and (mostly) staying away from “hot topics” in favour of what I find personally interesting or educationally useful.

I’m going to divulge some business figures to help you understand my situation. The most popular videos I’ve made so far were the GDD instructional from September last year, and January’s “3 Projects for Beginners”. These videos have 60k and 30k views - not major leagues numbers, but respectable.

In AdSense terms these two videos combined have made £230.39.

Since initial monetization back in October, the channel as a whole has made £638.42.

This number is nothing to scoff at, but my rent is £950 per month (and this is not an expensive place by UK standards; I live in a pretty crappy area with a lot of economic deprivation and crime).

It takes me a day or more to plan and edit a more thought out, higher quality video. I’ve made nearly 100 videos in the last year, and while some of them were quicker to produce, the return on my time is definitely more about building something long-term than something which is immediately beneficial to me. But there is a balance I have to strike all the while the Patreon is still small.

Having been a senior designer in a couple of quite prestigious places, the rate I can command as a freelancer is around £600 per day. I finished my most recent contract (at King on one of the Candy Crush titles) in mid January and my first month-and-a-bit of being totally self-employed has gone reasonably well, but largely due to the freelance contracts which I continue to take on. I’m in a very lucky position of getting to work with several teams at once, but my ideal world is one where I can be more selective about the games I work on, and devote more time to building and maintaining IGC, both in terms of the Discord community and the free content on YouTube.

I know a lot of the last few paragraphs will read like a big ol’ pile of me moaning, but I want to flip that around. I am so grateful to everyone who has already subscribed and donated to help to support the channel - which clearly cannot live on AdSense alone! Platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter are absolutely crucial to more niche content like Indie Game Clinic, and your monthly donations are slowly helping me to convince my accountant that what I’m doing is actually a business and not begging.

I’m really glad that there are so many of you who already appreciate what is on offer here. I want to keep trying to add value to our Discord community as we go, but its fundamental that everyone who is donating does so because they care about the Indie Game Clinic channel and want to support it. I don’t want to fall into the trap of promising additional exclusive videos or podcasts for subscribers, because - as I’ve said - the video output is already operating at a bit of a loss.

I’ve also noticed that when YouTubers are selling additional paywalled material, it then creates a perverse incentive for them to, gradually decrease the relative value of the content that they put out for free.

For the sake of not letting this newsletter run long, I’ll spare you updates on the new podcast [The Game Devs Library] and talk about that next month instead.

Thank you for all of your support so far, and good luck with your games (or whatever else you’re doing) this March!