Nelson Sexton is a Canadian man, now 19, who has been programming and working on games since a young age. When he was 16, he began work on a game called Unturned, an open-world survival game set in a zombie apocalypse. The game is relatively simple and doesn’t boast photorealistic graphics, but t has still managed to attract nearly over 10,000 concurrent players almost around the clock, and peaking at over 60,000 player. Unturned spent three years as an early access game on Steam, the popular video game publishing platform, before being released early this year. It is also free to play; revenue is earned through the sale of gold memberships, $5 a pop, and keys to loot crates occasionally found in-game, which contain custom cosmetic items.
Mr. Sexton has been sole developer of Unturned until very recently, when he worked with community member on the most recent content updates. Virtually the entire game has been built from the ground up by this single individual, under the banner of Smartly Dressed Games, his personal studio. Certainly an impressive accomplishment, particularly for someone who started as a high school student!
The gaming industry is certainly one of the biggest. To create your own game that people are interested in playing is a great niche to have.
I am interested to know if Unturned struggles with revenue at all. One would think that they would since the gold membership is their only revenue source, but maybe not since they seem to be sustainable.
Well, gold memberships are one of two revenue sources. You can also buy loot crates and keys for loot crates. In addition, all of the tools used to create the game are open source, meaning Mr. Sexton has almost no costs to pay, beyond renting a few servers. With so many players, I imagine there haven’t been any real times when the game was threatened by low revenue.