Question:
This is the question that I often hear - and also think by myself:

How to fund your game production? Are there ways to get funds for investing in expensive software, like 3DStudioMax and Photoshop?

This is the never-ending problem for all game developers: how to get money for your next game? There are several ways to fund your game development, and I try to the most doable ones available for indies here. Besides business angels, investors, loans, parents, part-time or full-time jobs, there are other witty tactics for funding your game development.

I’ll go through seven tactics that are:
#1 - Competitions
#2 - Selling Stuff via CafePress
#3 - Selling eBooks
#4 - Selling Books (CafePress or Lulu.com)
#5 - Donations
#6 - Text Link Ads (I expect to get $100 this month, and within coming months I’m confident to see this figure go to $200 or more)
#7 - Google AdSense. (For this income stream, I also expect to get around $100 this month and estimating the figure to double in the coming months)

#1 - Enter Competitions
If there’s business or gaming competitions around your neighbourhood try applying. There’s an ongoing business plan competition here in Finland, and I managed to get to the finals with my Morphlings game business plan. The prizes are 1000 euros and even more and I have crossed both my fingers and toes to see some success.

#2 - Selling Stuff via CafePress
If you have done nice art for your game, you can always set up a gift shop for free. I have set up a shop at cafepress. You can easily put mugs, t-shirts, postcards, books and other stuff in sale. Cafepress haves certain base price for their products and you can add some markup to generate revenue. Check out CafePress and create a store for you. Even if you don’t plan to sell your stuff to others, you may always want to order some nice apparel that contains your game logo…

#3 - Sell eBooks
If you have created some interesting material such as game design documents, business plans, or game guides you can create a PDF from it and put it on sale in electronic form. Payments can be done for example using PayPal and PDFs could be sent via email. If you are worried about how to prevent privacy, you might want to consider using Secure-eBook. Their system is very simple: every time you sale an copy, their servers generate a new activation key and send it to the client who just bought your book - and the number of authorized keys for that product is reduced from your account. Their prices are $0.50 - $1.00 per activated client.

#4 - Sell Books
If you prefer to sell your material in physical format (that would be a book), rather than digital then check out either CafePress or Lulu.com. Both services offer you to upload your book material, and they do the rest. Lulu might be bit cheaper solution for publishing books only. They handle printing, shipping, payments - everything after you have provided the material for them.

#5 - Donations
One simple way to get funding, is asking for donations. Adding donation buttons to website, and giving people reason to donate is a start. The donation links can also be added to the end of blog feeds or right after post entries. Some open source products rely purely on donations.
Edit #2: Due Finnish laws I would need a permission to ask for donations. Since I don’t have one, I need to block Finnish people from leaving donations. I simply check their IP and display different message for Finnish people. Everybody else can make donations.

#6 - Text links
I signed up with Text Link Ads. It took about 15 or 20 minutes to sign up & set the system working on my site. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50/50, and put my earnings directly into my PayPal account. The other way to generate revenue from Text Link Ads is to direct other people to sign-up for the program. Each referred person who gets accepted to the program earns you $25.

Week after my sign-up I got first order which gives me money $13.50 this month. For one link. When 5-7 more links come I expect to earn around $100 per month simply by selling links from my site. When the site grows, I expect the revenue climb to $200 and more in the future. And the best part is that the system is fully automated: the link appeared and money was generated when I was at sleep.

#7 - Google adsense
That’s the simplest way to start generating profit from your site. I started doing this about a week ago and within a week, it generated about $20 for me. With this rate, the monthly earnings are going to climb up to $100 and again as the traffic grows, I expect to get more money from the ads.

“But ads are bad, people won’t come to my site anymore if I place ads”

Rubbish. Do you watch television? How many hundreds of television ads you see every day? Yet, you keep watching television. People can bear less desirable things to get access to more desirable things. The same goes with ads. While they might annoy some people, if the content is good - people keep coming. They simply want to watch the television. GameProducer.net visitors have not decreased after putting the ads. Quite the opposite in fact: in this month I expect the visitor count to double. So, if somebody tells you ads will stop people from visiting their sites, that’s simply not true.

Go on, try different tactics and start generating some income to fund your game development.