What It's About
Game designer designs his own freedom in the form of YouTube tutorials.
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
It’s important to build your own assets (like Shane’s tutorials) so that you can handle whatever comes at you. Everyone needs options, everyone can benefit from the ability to choose for themselves how they spend their time and how they can do the work that’s important to them.
Fun Fact
Video games get more detailed and visually stunning every day. But one of the most basic is also one of the best selling. Tetris, the highly addictive tile-matching game, has sold over one hundred and seventy million copies since its release in 1984!
Notes from Chris
Episode 908
Shane Whittington, a digital art and game development lecturer in the United Kingdom, was looking for a way to help his students. They were mainly teens and young adults new to the college environment, and he wanted to help them refresh their memory of what they did in class. One day, he created a quick tutorial to show them how to get a student version of a popular design software at home, and he posted it on YouTube. When he checked back on the video, he saw that it had gotten thousands of views—which was a lot more than his class size. He was intrigued. He loved the fact that the video was so useful to his students, but he was also encouraged that it had also been discovered by others. He wanted to create more content and decided to officially launch his channel, now called Game Dev Academy. He didn’t waste time overthinking it … which is one of the things that he credits with his success. He made his first video tutorial course for Maya, another kind of design software, in August of that same year. The videos were basic, there was no editing whatsoever and Shane says that you can even see him pressing stop on the screen recorder at the end of each video. He used the computer and editing software that he had at school, and his only startup costs were about $2, which he used to buy a microphone. It was worth every penny—meaning that it was terrible—but it did the job and got him up and running. There was no business plan at this stage. Shane continued uploading periodic videos to support his lectures, but he was busy at work and didn’t pay much attention to the channel. This was back in 2012. Fast forward nearly three years to the Summer of 2015. Shane is on his Summer break, and he visits his channel—where he is surprised to see that he has 2,000 subscribers. He didn’t even know what YouTube subscribers were, but he thought that this seemed promising. He had been thinking about updating his Maya tutorial for the 2016 version of the software and wanted to reach a broader audience. Soon, he was regularly earning more than $350/month, and he saw a greater opportunity if he could produce content more consistently. To decide which tutorials to work on, Shane says that he thinks about his students. Most are absolute beginners who are completely new to game art and game development. If the videos are suitable for them then that they will be of interest to people wanting to learn these subjects anywhere in the world. So far Shane has earned over £20,000 ($25,000) and he’s on track to earn over £15,000 ($19,000) this year alone. In fact, in the last couple of months, his side hustle has started making more than his teaching position. It’s allowed him to drop two days at work which helps with maintaining his sanity. It also means that he’s able to spend extra time with his kids. In addition to a Patreon campaign and Adsense revenue, Shane has recently started selling “assets” as paid add-ons in his tutorials for people who don’t want to make or find their own. Think of assets like digital versions of arts and craft supplies. With this new income source on the rise, he hopes that by the end of the year he’ll have the option of doing it full time. He doesn’t think he’ll ever give up teaching at the college but he’d like that flexibility. This game designer is well on his way to designing his freedom.MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- YouTube | Game Dev Academy: If you're interested in learning more about Shane's tutorials, head on over to his YouTube page and tune in!
- Patreon | Shane Whittington: Shane has a Patreon page that patrons can use to fund his videos—check it out here!
SEE ALSO:
- Adjunct Professor Puts Course on YouTube for $100k Profit: An adjunct community college professor uploads his final course to YouTube, then converts it to a Udemy course. In just sixteen months, he reaches almost 35,000 students and makes over $100,000 in profits
- Database Expert Helps Students Solve Real Problems: She wanted to influence the next generation in her field. But after first teaching at a local university, this database consultant decided to design her own curriculum in the form of a book and online course
- Former Construction Inspector Earns $200,000 Helping Students Pass Exams: A teacher-turned-construction inspector aces his exams and creates a series of courses to help others entering the field
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Resources
CREATE YOUR ONLINE STORE
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