Making Money
The creator fund just launched 🥳 To celebrate the launch, all games will earn 5x for Nov-Dec 2024!
We're passionate about supporting indie game devs in making awesome multiplayer games. As part of that, we have created a creator fund that pays indie devs a bit of money based on their games' metrics. We provide optimized servers and a big audience so you don't need to deal with infrastructure costs or pay for ads.
You can focus entirely on what you do best — making great games!
We Don’t Show Ads or Charge Our Players​
Rune doesn’t show ads, charge players, or make any money from the games on our platform. As a startup, we’re focused on encouraging developers to build great indie games. We believe it’s only fair to compensate the hard work of game developers through the Creator Fund, which is funded directly by Rune—ensuring developers receive 100% of what's available.
As the platform grows, we plan to introduce more ways for developers to earn and for players to opt into enhancements. Payouts will increase, and we’ll continually review our approach to ensure developers are treated fairly.
Payouts based on Metrics​
You will earn money based on:
- players who come back the next day to play again
- players who share your game externally
- time players spent actively playing your game
The specific amount of money earned for each of these metrics depends on the player regions (more info below). With payouts based on these three metrics, the creator fund supports great games that players love coming back to and want to share with their friends!
Player Regions​
Games often have different localized prices by country and earn different amounts of money per player based on the geo. We incorporate this aspect into the creator fund by scaling the earnings for each metric depending on the player’s country.
The creator fund has four segments (T1, T2, T3, T4) determined by grouping the per-capita GDP of the world’s countries. For instance, United States is in T1, Estonia is in T2, Mexico is in T3, and Mozambique is in T4. Of course, to make the most money you should translate your games into the most popular non-English languages (Spanish, Russian, Portuguese) so that there’s more players enjoying your game!
Application and Monthly Payouts​
You can apply for the creator fund as soon as your games hit 100+ hours/month and a return rate of 5%. We'll do a quick review to check that there's nothing fishy going on and approve you within 5 business days. In the case that you have one popular game with a high return rate and other games with low return rates, you can apply using the return rate of your popular game.
Your games earn credits each day based on the metrics described earlier on this page. We use this credits system so that in the future you can choose to use some credits for optional extra services like AI-powered gameplay if you like. When paying out to you, credits are automatically converted to dollars at a rate of 1 USD = 10000 credits.
At the beginning of each month, you'll receive a $ payout for the accrued credits last month using our payments provider. We aggregate payouts in this way to minimize transaction fees so that each $ goes further. This is similar to how e.g. YouTube does it. If there's a month with accrued earnings below the $10 minimum payment threshold, then that month's earnings will roll over to the next month. Here's the terms of service for the creator fund with all the legalese.
Earnings per Metric​
Here's how many credits your game earns for each metric in each region:
| Region | Player plays again next day | Player shares your game | Player plays for 1 hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | 35 | 400 | 5 |
| T2 | 22.75 | 260 | 3.25 |
| T3 | 14 | 160 | 2 |
| T4 | 7 | 80 | 1 |
The playing again and playtime credits can accumulate for each player for each day, i.e. a dedicated player will keep earning credits on your game. The game share credits will only be awarded once per player to minimize risk of scammers. Of course, your game will also earn playtime credits if players play for less an hour, that'll be scaled accordingly.
To celebrate the launch of the creator fund, all games will earn 5x the credit amounts listed above for Nov-Dec 2024! 🚀
As you can tell from the numbers, the creator fund tries to prioritize high-quality games that players love coming back to and sharing with their friends.
See Stats and Earnings​
You can see stats for all your games on the Dev Dashboard. The dashboard helps you improve your game by showing you game errors and your games' metric relative to other games on Rune. For instance, if you see that your game has a low return rate, you might want to add more content to make it more replayable or improve the game's onboarding to make it easier for new players to understand.
The dashboard also has detailed info on how much each of your games has earned from the creator fund and the calculations behind those earnings. We hope this transparency helps you understand how the creator fund works and how you can improve your games to earn more money.
Actively Playing​
To make the creator fund payouts fair for everyone, we calculate the active playtime for all metrics. If someone doesn't interact with a game, then they don’t count as actively playing. More specifically, we don’t count minutes while having the Rune app minimized or after the player hasn’t interacted with the game for over 5 minutes.
We also want to avoid the creator fund from being gamed by scammers and bots. To combat this, we only count in-app playtime and we use advanced device tracking to prevent banned users from creating new accounts. The latter has been used for multiple years to help ensure the Rune community is nice and positive. To further combat anyone trying to game the system, we have a per-day 1 minute minimum playtime and 120 minute maximum playtime for each player. I.e. someone leaving their phone open for 24 hours with an auto-clicker will get much lower returns than they hoped for. Similarly, game shares are only counted once per player. And of course, we reserve the right to take action against cheating, scamming, etc.
It’s Your Game​
Rune is a gaming platform with 10m+ installs and an easy way to build multiplayer games. We’re not a publisher, i.e. you retain full control over your game and you're free to do what you want with your game regarding its development and distribution.
It’s also fine if you want to make a Rune multiplayer version of an existing singleplayer game that you’ve already made. Our community loves all kinds of games!
Future Plans​
Rune is a young platform and we don’t make revenue yet. While you should not expect to earn a full salary building games on Rune, we hope that earning a bit of money will help motivate you in your game dev journey. We've heard from many game devs that earning their first $ from their game was magical and that every $ they earn via itch.io and Ko-fi donations feels great. We hope that Rune can do the same for lots of indie game devs!
As Rune grows, we will add more ways for you to earn money. For instance, we're planning to build out support for you to add in-game purchases that can be bought with a shared currency across Rune. When your game starts making revenue using in-game purchases, we will take a small piece of it to cover our platform costs. In this way, we can grow together and build the best possible platform for multiplayer indie games!
