[RMMV] SHOULD I MAKE MY GAME COMMERTIAL?

Right now, I am working on Noel and the Tower of Doom, a shorter project. However, once I finish that I will be back to working on Chronicles Meteorfall, an extremely ambitious game that has been in development hell since 2019. I have been working on this game constantly, and it's history has been rough to say the least. However, once I'm done with this massive undertaking, I'm afraid it would be a massive waste to just release the game for free and let 5 years of development go completely unpaid.

I'm no longer a kid, I'm an adult and I need to make money. I have a stable job, but it doesn't pay me enough to sustain myself on my own and right now 99% of my financial support (housing, bills, food, clothes, etc) comes through my parents. That needs to change. Game design is my passion, it's always been. However, I've never been able to monetize it much to my father's chagrin. (he's a big economics/business guy) In my view, this is for two reasons:

1: My use of copyrighted material. I have gotten better with not spamming references and blatant copyright infringement in my games since 2020 when the original version of Meteo Chronicles failed. I used to spam non-stop pop culture references like it was Pokemon Snakewood, extremely cringe. And it wouldn't count for parody to get away with it, since my games were SUPPOSTED to be taken seriously but with "silly moments" which I couldn't grasp correctly because I relied too much on pop culture reference humor. But there was a lot bigger of a problem than merely mentioning various copyrighted series, characters, etc, it was the use of ripped graphics and music for my games. Of course, this site unlike many others tolerates rips, but this obviously cannot stand in a commercial game and I would get sued into oblivion, and I don't want that.

I have gotten better with not including copyrighted images in my games as both Chronicles: The Lost Page and Noel and the Tower of Doom do not contain any copyrighted images, (only royalty free stock images and AI generated stuff, all with credit) unlike the original Chronicles Meteorfall which contained portraits from Fire Emblem Heroes and Xenoblade Chronicles and enemies from Brave Frontier. The games before that were even worse. Luckily, with the expansion of Aekashics's pool of battlers via his patreon, who I am a long-time subscriber to in spite of my earlier childish complaints back in the day, I have mitigated most of the issues in not having the right battlers to use. I have also dramatically improved my pixel art skills so if I REALLY need a battler on short notice, I can just make it myself. However, what I have no mitigated is my use of copyrighted music, which I rely on HEAVILY as a crutch. There's a lot of moments in my game where I think a copyrighted song from some game would fit PERFECTLY, often even better to how the original song was used, and I'm able to do so because my games to this point are freeware and aren't subject to copyright. But that won't work in a commercial project, meaning I'll either have to learn how to compose myself, pay for expensive music commissions for a 50+ song OST per game to get a bunch of songs I imagine and sound alikes, or suck it up and just use the RTP songs, which while really high quality, (at least before MZ) are extremely overused and would tank my game's rep. As for the other thing...

2: I have little confidence that my game would do well, like, at all. Of course, RPG Maker games, even generic ones solely using RTP, have a market. However, RPG Maker games are easily identifiable even from onlookers outside of the community, and most people tend to avoid games that look "too RPG Maker-ish," aka using the default assets and UI. If you look at all the RPG Maker games that reached a wide audience, you notice two things.

1a: That the majority of the "mainstream" RPG Maker games are either horror games (Id, Dreaming Mary, Ao Oni, Witches House, etc) or at least have heavy horror elements. (Yume Nikki and it's clones, Omori, OFF, Lisa, etc) and 2b: All have a unique, very un-rpg maker look to them. Omori's entire world is like a sketchy pencil drawing. OFF is surreal, monotone with a lot of flat colors and shapes, has horrifically grotesque faces and monsters, and is just OFF. (get it?) Space Funeral is a bizarre eldritch mess visually. (which is part of it's charm) And finally Lisa is a side scroller using entirely earthbound/mother 3 inspired custom assets.

My game has a tiny bit of horror, but is primarily a sci-fi/fantasy epic giving similar vibes to Final Fantasy 6, Breath of Fire 4, or whatever other 16/32 bit RPG you can think of visually. In an ideal world, my game would look like the new Star Ocean 2 remake, detailed 2D sprites on beautiful HD 3D backgrounds with HD special effects, but obviously RPG Maker can't really handle that sort of thing to look like that. (minus the newly released Unite with heavy tinkering) So I need to scale it back as that kind of visual style is way out of my league, and I would have to start over for the 4th (forth)time on a new engine I'm unfamiliar with (Unity/RMU) to even come close to accomplishing that sort of look. The next step below that is HD2D, which I'm also incapable of doing in-engine.

The next step below that is parallax mapping, which in my experience is VERY hard to do and get all the tiles lined up right. And of course, if I want my game to stand out, I'll need to use entirely custom assets. Problem is that I'm terrible at doing tilesets and if I did make something it would look terrible. Like, I can probably do custom character and battler sprites, as those are relatively easy to do with my current skillset. I'm just not sure if people would want to even touch my game if I used default RTP graphics and they have to paid for such a product. I'll probably use shading overlays, which I've seen from videos helps graphical quality and atmosphere tremendously, but other than that I'll probably have to use the RTP or some sort of asset pack and that will naturally drive people away.

That along with my previous track record not being the best with a lot of glitchy, unpolished, and unplayable games, I'm really questioning if I should go through with making my game commercial or not. I don't want to spend 4-6 years on a massive project with no compensation, as I learned by growing up that money is extremely important and expecting everything for free is naïve and childish. Doing work for free is extremely taxing and in my opinion completely foolish, as now I have personal experience from working a job as well as doing art commissions online. I REALLY want to make my game commertial, but that would mean somehow finding a way to get custom music made so I'm not using copyrighted stuff and even then I'm not sure how many people would be willing to pay money for my game with my somewhat poor track record and most likely use of RTP assets. What should I do? Should I take the plunge and make my 5 year long work paid in spite of it's supposed "lack of effort?" Or should I stick to what I'm used to, make my project freeware, and be able to use copyrighted music without having to worry about breaking the law? I've seen far worse RM slop do well on steam, so as long as my game has pretty shaders and at least some custom assets it should do fine, right?

Thanks for the feedback. I do enjoy making games, but only for the writing/art aspects. I push through the aspects I don't like such as the the mapping, databasing, eventing, coding, balancing, and bugtesting in order to see the finished product through. In the end, I will not be making Chronicles Meteorfall commercial, and will not make any commercial games until I am fully prepared and even more experienced. Chronicles: The Last Dragon's Elegy will be my first commercial game. Also I do have a finished game available, Chronicles: The Lost Page, if you were wondering. My second finished game, "Noel and the Tower of Doom," launches next month and development is going incredibly smoothly.

author=Sgt M
There is also something of an enduring myth that you can make something online and if you believe in yourself and put forth enough effort into making something truly special and unique, that people will inevitably pick up on it, spread it through word of mouth, and recognize your talent organically.

Ten years ago, this might have been true. And my own attempt with commercial development taught me one of the most important life lessons that I've ever experienced:

That doesn't happen anymore.

Knowing this, however, there is a big difference between making games for a living, and making games as a hobby that you just happen to make a little bit of money off of. One of those two is absolute suicide and something you shouldn't quit your day job for if you don't have the right mindset for it. The other can be very rewarding and will impact your love for gamedev minimally while also having a nice extra incentive. I will let you decide which is which.

EDIT: There's also the possibility of making your game donation-based on a site like itch, or having a tip jar such as a Ko-fi or Patreon. It usually doesn't amount to much (About 0.05% of the downloads on my itch page donated) but it can net you something without feeling like you have to make the game fully commercial and risk severely limiting your potential audience.

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I should probably post more on itch anyways lol, try to get people to donate. So at least there's SOME incentive. I'm not trying to make a living off games, at least, not yet anyways. But a bit of extra money would be nice, similar to how I do commissions occasionally on DA.

Edit: I already have a plan for advertising my actual commercial game, Chronicles: The Last Dragon's elegy. I'll simply save up money to get some big YouTuber or streamer to talk about and play my game and get it advertised that way.

author=Marrend
I'd also tend toward no, but, my reasoning concerns your wiliness to perform your own debugging and quality control. Sure, you may be able to outsource it to some degree, and perhaps your outlook on this matter has changed. Still, I remember playing Meteo Chronicles. Whatever version I played initially had a fairly easily exploitable sequence break in the early game. Even if one ignores that, I also remember there being an incredible number of updates that happened in quick succession.

I honestly think you couldn't keep up with them, only fixed what was reported, not able to spare the time to see if there were other bugs to squash. But, consumers won't see that if that kind of behavior is done to a commercial game. At best, they will see a lazy dev, shrug their shoulders at the loss of "only $5", or whatever. At worst... maybe think it's a scam?

Yeah, Meteo Chronicles was a mess. I refused to playtest the game after a certain point due to burnout which caused the game to be very buggy. Luckily, I learned from my mistakes and now for my newer games I make sure to bug test them throughoutly and actually finish the game before releasing them. Now when I get burnout I just take a break for a month or two, not try to rush a project out without bugtesting so I could "move on" like I did for Meteo Chronicles.

My original release strategy starting with "Dragon Ascension" was releasing the game in "parts" with each update containing a new chapter until the game is complete and reaches it's 1.0 version which is the full game. I've now realized this release strategy is foolish and wastes too much time bugtesting for EVERY small, insignificant update which then causes burnout. It also causes update bloat which frustrates the people who play my game, who like me only want to play through the game once instead of starting over ever time there's an update. Instead, now I only release a game when it's actually fully finished, like I did for Chronicles: The Lost Page and now with Noel and the Tower of Doom and Chronicles Meteorfall, the completed build of Meteo Chronicles. Since then my quality control has improved massively. TLP was (almost) completely bug free due to thorough bugtesting and the same will go for NToD and CM.