13 games, 700 yen total. Four years to reach the first 8,000-yen payout

Indie developer revenue posts usually get told from the month things went well. This case is the opposite. The star of the story is the nearly four-year stretch that was “basically zero.” Maruko Barreland is a former blue-collar company employee who started game development with zero prior experience at 38 and went independent as a solo game developer at 40. In November 2024, in a post titled “The road to earning 10,000 yen from game-making,” he published the full timeline with dollar figures attached, up through his very first payout from Google Play.

Because the amounts are so small, this case cleanly separates what generated revenue from what didn’t.

Four years of revenue timeline

From starting to learn Unity to his first payout: roughly four years and four months. Cumulative revenue of about 700 yen across 13 releases works out to an average of about 54 yen per title.

What he built, and what he didn’t monetize

Production splits into three broad phases.

Phase one was a mini-game production run starting in 2021, 7 titles released over roughly a year. Total revenue for that period: about 200 yen. Phase two started in July 2022, when he introduced the paid asset Corgi Engine and built 3 action games. Notably, none of these three included ads. The production difficulty went up, but there was no revenue path at all.

Phase three was an original RPG. Strong Quest, built over more than six months starting in May 2023, launched at the end of that November and reached over 4,500 combined downloads across Google Play and the App Store, a far bigger response than the combined total of the 7 mini-games. Still, revenue was 0 yen. This title also wasn’t monetized.

In other words, by the end of 2023, this developer had proven he could “build” and could “distribute”, but had never set up the mechanism to “collect.”

The tide turned when his attitude toward ads changed

The turning point came in July 2024, when he released his second RPG, Sudden Fantasy. In his own words, this title was monetized modestly, “just banner ads slapped on.” Even so, the numbers changed unmistakably.

• 100 yen a day on weekdays, 200 yen a day on weekends
• That level held for two months
• As a result, the payout crossed Google Play’s 8,000-yen threshold and his first payment was confirmed

Lining up the before and after makes the gap almost brutal: with a track record of 13 titles and 4,500 downloads, cumulative revenue was 700 yen. Adding a single banner ad to one title generated 8,000 yen in two months. What determined the size of the number was neither volume nor quality of output, but simply whether the monetization switch was flipped.

The developer sums this up plainly himself: he had little desire to earn money and was “just someone who wanted to make games,” and had been reluctant to run ads because he disliked them interfering with the player’s experience. Had he put ads on Strong Quest from the start, he says, he would have cleared 8,000 yen much sooner.

What the numbers reveal when broken down

Compounding 100–200 yen a day over 60 days lands between 6,000 and 12,000 yen, which matches the “held for two months, crossed 8,000 yen” account. Working backward, a title at this scale generates roughly 3,000–6,000 yen a month. That’s small as monthly revenue, but there’s a decisive difference between zero and a few thousand yen: zero doesn’t grow no matter how many times you multiply it, while a few thousand yen can be scaled by both volume and per-title price.

Breaking it down further, two factors stand out.

One is simply the decision to open a revenue path at all. The denominator, downloads, already existed. Cumulative exposure built up from the mini-games through the RPG existed regardless of whether it was monetized. The moment an ad slot was added, plays that had previously just passed through began converting into money.

The other is the shift in genre. Banner ad revenue is roughly proportional to how much time is spent viewing the play screen. Mini-games and RPGs differ by an order of magnitude in how long a player stays engaged per session. There’s no stated figure for per-view rates or impression counts in the original source, so this remains interpretation rather than fact, but it’s plausible that part of the gap between 200 yen across 7 mini-games and 8,000 yen from one RPG in two months is explained by this difference in engagement time. Even the same act of “adding ads” performs differently depending on what title it’s added to.

What didn’t work, and the risk that remains

This case also has concrete records of tactics that didn’t pay off.

• The 3 action games built with paid assets never carried ads, so revenue stayed at zero. Production costs rose while there was no path to recoup them
• Strong Quest, which drew 4,500 downloads, was also never monetized — the biggest response of the bunch translated to exactly zero yen
• Mass-producing mini-games (7 titles) added up to only about 200 yen in revenue. Simply increasing the number of releases wasn’t itself the fix

The risk side deserves an honest look too. Current revenue depends 100% on banner ads, and the per-unit rate is set by the platform and the ad market. A level of 100–200 yen a day can easily halve if the app’s ranking or distribution changes. Crossing the payout threshold is a milestone, but it’s not a self-sustaining level as a business. The fact that he chose independence and still sits at this amount means real financial instability.

What’s reproducible, and what isn’t

What’s easy to reproduce is a single point: front-loading the decision to monetize. “Ads hurt the player experience” is a sincere judgment, but that judgment can be revisited once revenue actually starts coming in. Start with a single banner. Pull it if it feels like it’s hurting the experience. Simply reordering these steps could have shortened this case’s four years considerably, and the original author says as much himself.

There’s also room to reproduce the idea of shifting toward titles with longer engagement time. Rather than mass-producing short-form content, polishing one title where per-user time-on-screen is longer pairs better with an ad-based monetization model.

On the other hand, some conditions can’t be copied. The biggest is simply being able to keep building for nearly four years with essentially zero revenue. Starting with no experience at 38, investing in paid assets along the way, and going independent at 40. These decisions rest heavily on financial footing and personal motivation. “I just wanted to make games” was both the reason monetization got delayed and the fuel that carried him through four years of zero yen. That contradiction can’t be transplanted separately from the motivation itself.

One more thing: the source material has no concrete details on how downloads were acquired. Without knowing how the 4,500 downloads accumulated, it’s not accurate to conclude “add ads and you’ll get 8,000 yen.” Building the denominator happens outside the scope of this article.

Related reading

• 24 Kindle books earning 50,000–70,000 yen a month in royalties — a volume-based content-sales case testing “revenue per unit”
• Photo AI, run solo by levels.io — the opposite approach: monetize from day one and run the numbers in public