Who has made gmod a career?

My only source of income right now is gmodstore. It isn't the best paying thing I can get, typically only ~$100 a month for me but this is probably well under the average. Keep in mind that I'm a relatively small creator on the platform, some people on here I know of can earn up to $1000+ per month. If you play your cards right you'll be earning cash easily.

Ah, it's my time to shine! I'm more than happy to share with you some of my finances in regard to gmod and give you a little insight.

I've been "doing gmod" full time since I left college in 2018. Now gmodstore by itself doesn't net me in a liveable wage, from personal experience it seems to fluctuate an awful lot, and you need to be on top of releasing new content as older stuff obviously generates less income each month. But, I'm in the privileged position of not only having a pretty low overhead for cost of living (Still living with my parents (I pay board), no need for a car/transport as I work from home, little reason to go outside) but also running a community along side this. Now with the income of my community on-top, I live a pretty comfortable life.

I'll show you some figures.

Last tax year (Admittedly not my best), my income was as follows:

Gmodstore: $5,143.27

My Community: £8,471

Now this doesn't include expense. All my models are done on a % commission of the script (I give The One Free-Man 50% of both pVault and pCasino, mostly out of pure respect for his work and the obscene talent he has.), tho the income shown above is after Free-Man's cut. Along with my community having server costs. But it should give you an idea.

I also took last year pretty slow for a lot of reasons. Being in this privileged position of mostly passive income, I spent almost all of last year away with my partner and dealing with mental health stuff (Ooga booga, scary). So as a result I released nothing in 2019 for gmodstore (The year my above income covers) and my community didn't see the attention from me personally that it maybe should have. And the reflection in income shows. Having released pCasino recently, my income has started to see the growth of previous years. Across my near 4 years on gmodstore, my creator dashboard reports a total earning of $22,081.59 as of writing this. So you're looking at an average of $5.5K a year. Some nice pocket change if you're doing it on the side. I've also worked on a lot of commission work over that same period and not too long ago had a pretty comfortable developer position at Exhibition that paid nicely. I wish I could share with you my total income from my community but sadly since switching from Prometheus it's not too easy to get a hold of that previous data.

I've always been happily open with the income I make from gmod simply because it even still blows my mind that I'm able to do this full time while it lasts. I plan to continue to release content on here for as long as I can and then hopefully use a built up portfolio of both this and web projects to get an entry job in some development field without having a degree. Tho I'm a realist and have reasonable expectations, who know what'll happen. I hope this gives you some of what you're looking for, happy to answer any questions you may have.

Oh, and ye, trying to explain my job to literally anyone is a nightmare.

Thank you for such an in-depth insight, I’m glad you’re able to live your life doing something you enjoy. I remember seeing your first printer addon on garrysmod.org when I began coding in gmod.

I’m 21 at the moment and will be heading off to University next year after a big rethink and working full time since college, my aim is to freelance once again within the garrys mod community as a way to stay afloat with my studies.

seeing stories like yours and others is inspiring and I’m glad to know people have become better off whilst doing something they enjoy.

gary

When I was super active I was living off of gmod after quitting college and moving across the country to be with my girlfriend, without gms honestly I dont know what I wouldve done in a small poor town of 4k people. At my peak I was making more than the average person in that town. This probably isnt the most detailed answer but the main point im trying to make is if you want it you can have it, but you need to have the passion and determination to actually learn.

Thankfully I have been making enough off of gmodstore a month to maintain my month's split of the rent for about 2 years now, without releasing too many scripts. It has been able to be a temporary placeholder for a real job for some time. Being able to afford rent passively each month w/out much work has been a huge blessing in my life. With gmodstore addons alone I was able to bring in $11,430 between July of 2019 and July of 2020 before taxes.

Unfortunately since I have not released a new addon recently this is slowly no longer becoming the case, so I have started working on a new addon which I hope will bring things back to the way they were.

This will be a long one as I wanted to tell the full story of my Garry's Mod career (& a little beyond).

I used to run a Garry's Mod TTT community back in 2012-2014 (I think everyone did), I think we might've been one of the most popular EU based TTT communities at one point. This was before communities figured out how to monetize their userbase and the only purchasable things were premium trails and hats through the pointshop and a donator rank with some silly powers. I remember we got a €100 donation once and that was quite a lot of money to us back then.

Next to running a community I was tinkering with a lot of open source web development projects like DayZAdmin (https://github.com/R4Z0R49/DayZAdmin), mainly because we used it for our DayZ Mod server and there was a lot of room for improvement. Eventually they made me a contributor of the project and I was hooked. Web development was my thing.

A few years later I came across CoderHire and I was immediately interested in finding out what kind of web related projects I could work on. I noticed the most popular web products were loading screens, and you can bet your sweet ass I made my own loading screen. Next up I made a silly Garry's Mod TTT weapon, a bomb you could place on innocents and trigger strategically, when you wanted to. I don't think I made more than a couple hundred bucks a month at this point.

Then CoderHire shut down. I was waiting for a new store like everybody else, I read the FacePunch forum daily until I saw ScriptFodder was in development. This was the perfect moment to plan my next addon, I went on a holiday with my family and I think I wasn't much older than 15 at this point in time. As I was without access to a computer for over a week I decided to purchase a paper note book and a pen and jot down ideas for my next project. Prometheus, a donation system. When I came home I told Newjorciks about the project and he was willing to do the Lua part of the project. Half a year of development, one scrapped attempt and a lot of programming later and we were ready to release our first new product on ScriptFodder.

I was doubting whether we'd even be able to compete with the existing donation systems, but we worked through that thought and we released Prometheus anyway. It went much better than we expected and at this point I was making around $1k to $1.5k every month from Prometheus and my other products. We later released NeutronAdmin as well, this product didn't affect my earnings too much as it never reached anywhere near the popularity of Prometheus. You could probably add a few hundred dollars a month to the tally for a few months.

At this point I still had nothing to do with development of the ScriptFodder marketplace itself, though Matt and Jamie eventually needed to onboard another web developer and they naturally looked inwards for web developers. My name was mentioned by other people several times. They brought me on and I got paid to work on the very same marketplace I was already selling products on. I think it might've been about $1k/month, that means I was making $1.5k to $2.5k in revenue every single month from Garry's Mod related activities. Prometheus and Neutron revenue eventually stabilized and I think the average was more like $2k/month, either way it's quite good at the age of 17/18.

Prior to being brought on the ScriptFodder team I was approached by a Prometheus customer asking for support through Steam, I noticed right away he was Norwegian so I decided to see how long it would take him to realize that I'm Norwegian too. I spoke to him in English for a while until I said: "You know I'm Norwegian too, right?". He had no idea. We spoke a bit more and we realized we live about 15 minutes away from each other. This customer was Kremjesus (https://www.gmodstore.com/users/krem). He introduced me to Henrikmeister (https://www.gmodstore.com/users/henrikmeister). Shortly before meeting me they had started a company together, Everyday, and they also needed another web developer for a project they were working on. For a while I was working on that project, and ScriptFodder at the same time. I was also studying to become an automatician. You can see how this makes for very little time to myself and time management quickly becomes a pain with Prometheus/Neutron support and updates, ScriptFodder updates, studying AND working on yet another project at the same time.

After I finished the second year of automation I decided to take a year off studying to work on all of the other aforementioned things. Following my year off I did a year of supplementary studies to prepare me for university if I ever want to continue studying later. We decided to take Everyday to the next level and focus on building the company that we want to work for, after all, when do you get a better chance at making your own company? I'd argue it's harder to make such a decision later in life.

We got an office space and got to work on external customer projects, this is no longer Garry's Mod related, until a year and half later when Matt indicated he didn't want to run the marketplace any more and would like for someone else to take over, so we started the process of doing exactly that. From February 2019, GmodStore was owned by Everyday. Since then we've continued maintaining GmodStore as well as working on external customer projects and contracts. Now our team consists of 4 employees and two contractors and it looks like we'll be rapidly growing in the coming years, not only because of GmodStore, but also because of the other half of our business :)

I didn't have to tell you all of this but it goes to show how life is full of coincidences and it's funny how things end up sometimes. I went from making crappy loading screens on CoderHire to being one of the owners of it's successor five years later. I've always said places like GmodStore are like stepping stones into the world of programming and business, and I still stick by that statement :)

Oh, and today is Prometheus' 6th birthday!

This is brilliant, the highlight for me is that you kept pushing yourself whilst having multiple roles & responsibilities at one time. You didn't give up and it's paid off, fair play my friend.

Marcuz you should write a book :P Inspirational story, despite not mentioning any pitfalls (I'm assuming there were *some*). Never knew you were this young all this time. Cheers to you man!

I feel like sharing my own story. Even though Gmod/Gmodstore is/was never my "career", it definitely shaped & started mine.

I currently work in digital media, as an allrounder for video/film/commercial production (about 60% of my work), the other part is digital media, as in CMS webdesign (wordpress), marketing and pretty much anything digital.

Some of you might remember my time as a freelancer here; I did some commission work for around a year, mostly "graphics design". It also involved video creation (product trailers etc). Occasionally some small lua jobs and a little bit of web work.

Looking back, my quality was never beyond "ok" but I knew that all along, that's why I did must stuff for free or really cheap (5€ / work). I think I didn't even make a 3 digit amount in a year.

Anyway, not only did I discover my interest in digital media, I also learned the base of all the knowledge that I have today.

Today I can proudly say that I'm a versatile allrounder and even tho I haven't specialized in anything yet (I currently don't plan to), I know I have the required skills to specialize on any of the above all by myself. I probably have on of the most diverse jobs imaginable, during film productions I get behind doors some people could never imagine, work with expensive high-tech equipment , many different & interesting people at many different locations. Since the pandemic, film production went back by 80% and that was my time to shine. The company I work in is quite small (5 people) and was specialized on film production. Since film production wasn't the way to go for 2020, I could fully use my web skills and make a whole new company branch. So now I'm responsible for a small "department" currently working a lot with freelancers. All that even though I'm just halfway through my apprenticeship (I started out full time in july 2019 right after finishing school).

Without Gmodstore, I would've worked in IT, im 95% sure of that.

I am a tech-savy guy and for many years I thought IT was the obvious choice. Gmodstore/Gmod or rather: The community, completely turned that around (for the better). I'm incredibly thankful for this. IT isn't a bad job either, but I doubt I would've been anywhere as happy as I am right now.

Even though I currently don't do most of the stuff I did back then (namely: graphics design, video post-production), but I still can.

I pretty much quit gmod in 2018, but I still enjoy working with lua or base logic (systems like Wiremod (but in other games)) and I'll always remember my freelancing time, which pretty much was the beginning of my career. And since I joined all the way back in the Coderhire times (must've been back in 2015), I've been a member for 1/4 of my life (not actively for most part, but still). This community shaped me.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for not only the good, but also the bad experiences. I've made mistakes, said stupid stuff and made bad business, but it's those mistakes I learned most efficiently from.

Stay healthy everyone and have a nice Christmas time.

Made 1500 dollars on my community, spent 906 dollars on gms and rest on developing and a few beers out when my card declinded. Founded a nerdy guy and paid him through paypal for real life money.

No career here, sorry mate.