There are two main ways to make a living making games. You can sign up with an existing game developer, earning a salary or freelance rate to provide some small part of the art, code, or design that goes into a larger product. Or you can go the indie route, creating a game by yourself (maybe with a few people to help) and selling it directly to the consumers (maybe with the help of a publisher).

Artist Bryan Shannon seems to have hit on a third path to a successful living making games, via his unique Patreon campaign. Right now, 233 members of the Cities: Skylines community are paying him to create new content for the game, to the tune of $735 per building created. He's not working for a developer, and he's not working for himself; instead, he's working for a small subset of devoted Cities: Skylines players that want to share his work with the world.

In a way, Shannon's situation isn't too different from other mod makers who have built their game development careers quite literally on top of existing games. To make a living, though, those modders have traditionally had to sell their efforts directly to interested players or use freely distributed mods to get noticed and hired by an established developer.

Shannon mixes both models, in a way, taking money from a few hundred patrons but distributing his work for free to the millions of people playing the game. There are a few other game developers using Patreon in a similar way, but they're all making their own titles, not working on content for an existing game. Shannon acts more like an artist-in-residence within Colossal Order's popular city-building game, supported by the largesse of some of its biggest fans.

Leaving the SimCubicle

Before finding Patreon success, Shannon's game development career was following a much more well-worn path. After studying at Florida's Ringling College of Art and Design, he got an internship and then a full-time job as an artist for SimCity maker Maxis Emeryville, designing buildings for the game's DLC expansions. As a big fan of city-building games, Shannon said landing that position right out of college was something of a dream for him.

"When the opportunity presented itself, it was amazing," Shannon told Ars in an interview. "It was like 'This is exactly what I want to do'... To me, I just treat everything like 'Who's going to pay me' and I'm here to get a job."

Shannon's dream job turned out to be a little less than idyllic, though, thanks to SimCity's inauspicious launch, which was plagued by server issues and some downright broken gameplay promises. "When I was there at my internship, I remember seeing the city size and thinking 'Oh this is a great start," he recalls. "I thought it was going to be more than that. Then the game got released, 'Oh, I didn't know this was going to be the final version.'"

When Shannon joined Maxis full time, just after the base game was released, he said he came to the company with the perspective of a somewhat disappointed fan. "I would go on the SimCity subreddit and I would try to be a liaison between the studio and the players. A lot of people had complaints, and I'd always try to take those, bring them back to the producers, to the creative director, whatever the case may be."

While he couldn't do much to help SimCity's design, in the end, Shannon says he's still proud of the artistic work he did shaping the game's look. "I think from my position, it was like 'I'm there to make the pixels look as good as they're gonna be... The art definitely stands the test of time in a way. They did a lot of cool things with the tech that was going on, a lot of the technology behind being very optimized, getting a lot of high quality content that was out there."

Further Reading EA closes SimCity studio Maxis Emeryville

An untapped market

Shannon ended up leaving his first position in the game industry as part of a round of layoffs, just months before Maxis Emeryville was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year . "In hindsight, I look back on it and say 'Well, it was a good run. Thanks for all the fish. I had fun while I was there and met a lot of good people," he said. "I was looking for more of a challenge in a way... I felt like I could probably produce at a higher quality and that's what I was really looking for."

In the wake of his layoff, Shannon said he fell into making new Cities: Skylines content not as a potential new career, but as a fun way to keep his skills sharp and add some new work to his portfolio. But after playing around with the in-game editor for a while, he figured there might be a market for the kind of content he was making, similar to the Dota Workshop that lets players create and sell in-game items.

Unlike Dota 2, though, where Shannon said he'd be competing with "15,000 other people making content," the newly released Cities: Skylines seemed like an untapped market full of players looking for much-needed variety in the look of their cities. "The same repetition that you normally wouldn't get in a real city I saw in the game [at launch], because I think they're definitely anticipating that modders will come along and make some more buildings. And that's where I'll step in. I don't mind."

"With Skylines, there's like me and a couple of others [making content]," he continued. "When I literally opened up the editor for the first time, I thought 'Oh, everybody's modding.' Then I make my mod and realize all the other mods being released are just skins or props being placed all over the place. That's not what I do."

More than just reskins, Shannon's Cities: Skylines creations are original, detailed 3D works, built from the ground up (though sometimes based on real world inspiration, like this "Down-N-Out burger" franchise). Besides crafting the aesthetics of the building, Shannon also crafts each building's in-game simulation statistics as a way to "take it one step further and give people a little more of an incentive to use it." Shannon says each of his buildings takes 15 to 20 hours to create, as shown in this time-lapse video.

While tinkering was fun, now there's added pressure to make each creation really special. "Now I'm charging people for this, so in my mind it has to really be worth it for people. I have to make stuff that's not a simple reskin. I could really ruin a good thing I have going on, so I'm trying not to do that. People have a certain expectation."

Making a living

While games like Dota 2 have a built-in market to sell user-generated content, Cities: Skylines doesn't have anything so integrated. So to turn his hobby into a business, Shannon turned to Patreon, which he knew through his girlfriend's experience as a Twitch streamer. The business model was built on the generosity of the public, since Shannon was releasing his buildings for free to the entire community, not just the people who donated (patrons can get bonuses like behind the scenes videos, developer's commentary, and modeling files, though).

"I thought it was kind of hokey at first, who would really go for this?" he said. "What are you really selling? You're selling a favor really. It's charity-based, and the charity is me... When I got my first dollar donation, I was super hyped about that. In the back of my mind, I was thinking 'OK, 80,000 more buildings to go to pay off my student loans,' and I was willing to do that, maybe!"

Things have grown well past that first dollar and well past the $600 per building goal Shannon initially said he'd need to make Cities: Skylines his "full-time" job (though Shannon said he'd have to make $825 per building to match what he was making at Maxis). The Patreon effort was buoyed by a lot of early media coverage, much of which played up Shannon's former role at the shuttered Maxis. He was also helped by the runaway popularity of Cities: Skylines, which garnered over 500,000 sales in its first few weeks.

"All of my predictions for the Patreon have been drastically underestimated," Shannon said. "I originally thought I'd be lucky if I hit over $100 per building, then I told myself there's no way I'll actually hit $600 per building, but I did and did it within a week. So it was surprising to say the least, and it still is every time I check it out."

Of course, working for a set of Patreon backers is a bit different from working for an established company, or even working for yourself by making and selling a product directly. Since his Patreon backers can withdraw future funding at any point, Shannon says he's not counting on the community's generosity to last forever.

"For now, I'm really considering this on about a three-week outlook," he said. "I have no clue where I'll be in three weeks, just as three weeks ago, I had no clue I'd have found this much success via Patreon... I'm getting a good feel for how the community interactions can go, and I'm definitely seeing what it takes to run a successful crowd-sourcing effort."

"I kind of come from a libertarian mindset, and I think that's part of the appeal of why I like city builder games," he continued. "If there's a market for it, I can try to do it. And if there's no demand for it, I wouldn't want to make it... You need mods, I need money, let's make something happen."