Making money as a solo programmer with video games is not so easy, but one man made a lot of money with games for a very specific target audience with little effort.
Who is it about? A man named TJ Gardner taught himself how to program. According to his own statements, he watched YouTube and online tutorials to be able to develop games himself. Gardner knew exactly who he wanted to create games for, namely so-called “Trophy Hunters”.
These “Trophy Hunters” are players who specifically collect trophies on the PlayStation. The trophies on the PS5 can be found in a variety of games, and some try to collect as many of them as possible. The number of “Trophy Hunters” is actually not as small as one might infer from the sales figures of Gardner’s games.
Here you can see some games that are coming for you on the PS5 in 2024.
It was actually quite easy to pass quality assurance
What kind of games did he program? The programmer created probably the simplest type of game there is. In his games, players stroke animals. To stroke the animals, one has to press the X button on the controller. There is nothing more to do. For a certain number of strokes, there is a trophy.
He claims to have sourced the images of the animals from Wikipedia, and all the games are very similar in nature. Always in front of a background stands an animal that glows a little when stroked. The target audience for the games is clearly players who want the trophies only.
It is remarkable that the quality assurance measures of Sony, which are often considered strict, did not seem to pose a problem for the programmer.
Gardner says: “I took a look at Sony’s backend and found that it’s actually quite easy to get through their quality control.” Once his first game was listed, he began to create more titles. “So I tried a few more, of course with slightly different animals.”
Here you can check out one of his games
How did he make money from it? TJ Gardner stated in an interview that he offered his games for about €3 in the PlayStation Store. His game “Stroke the Hamster” was bought by 11,105 people. Only 10 returned the game.
Overall, he claims to have generated over $350,000, but Sony’s fees and taxes would be deducted from that.
How long did it take him to program? After initially taking about 8 hours for his first game, he quickly got the hang of it and was able to create a game in half an hour.
Even though he had success with the games, TJ Gardner now wants to focus on other projects and no longer release such games on the market. Another developer has created an AI girlfriend in his free time; you can read more about that here.
