In January of this year, I had made some calculations about the rate at which I was improving, my expenses, and the rate that my income from game design was increasing, and figured that I had at least a decent chance of being somewhat successful by the middle of the year. I was motivated to crunch some code, and start making my dream of being a full time game developer a reality. I even went ahead and put down the money to get Stencyl Pro so I could try out Stencyl 3.0 which boasted a massive reduction to the lag many of my games suffer from due to the engine. 

And almost immediately after, Stencyl 3.0 was released to the public, and then Mochi's parent company decided to pull the plug without warning and my income vanished in a puff of ninja smoke. It was like the universe had warped reality for the explicit purpose of punishing my attempt at climbing the ladder.

I tried out the Newgrounds ads, but it has such poor analytics, it seems its impossible to tell what kind of CPM it makes without having a major hit. The couple small game jam games I've done obviously did not get enough views to really test that. I read an article earlier today, which is the reason I'm writing at all, which casually mentioned that most people don't get hits, and that the average designer is lucky to get about $1,000 per release.

So, I'm pretty far behind that goal, especially now. Not fully sure if it is because the average designer used in that measure is still much, much better than I am, or if I am just not doing something that i aught to be doing to monetize properly.