Earning money with map making

Youll never be able to "sell" your map to a "consumer". The closest to this ive heard of is gaming communities and clans paying for custom maps built to specification for their servers. So youve got that, or Valve's "Community" business model of you throwing everything youve got at a map that you release for free in blind hope of them deciding its good enough to go in TF2 or CSGO (I, nor most people, know more than 1 or 2 people that have achieved this).

Or you do what most of us did. You do it for the passion of environment art and level design, then you bust your balls to turn your passion into a career. And then, if youre lucky, you get an industry job.

Check the game's EULA. I'm pretty sure most if not all Valve games have terms that prohibit selling things like maps and models, unless it's to/via Valve itself. That's why mods are free unless Valve sells them.

I've made a custom version of fy_iceworld for a LAN Party internet cafe before. You could go try to pitch to those places, you can sell it to them as excellent ways to promote their stuff. I've also had buddies make maps for musicians to help promote their levels. My buddy Yan (Method) did that with some Quake 3 levels years ago.

I spent half an hour adding a disco room to 2fort a while ago and got paid $60 for it. There are tons of TF2 servers looking for shitty trade maps. Their standards are low and their money is good.

As you are using software that are VALVe's property to make maps for their games, you can't legally earn money for this from a "customer".

That's why licenses exist.

Quote from Mapham

How is it possible to sell custom maps for clans like you described?

As you've probably gathered from the above responses, by doing it under the radar. There's no way for Valve to know about personal deals you've made with people. The question is whether or not you can find those willing to pay for what you can do, and whether you deem the time invested worth it rather than just doing passion projects.

Having been doing creative stuff professionally for years now, I can tell you that the stuff I enjoy most is the work I do for myself where I'm not having to do it as per someone else's instructions and having to deal with changing stuff because they just don't like it.

The only legal way I think there is to earn money for a map made for a Valve game, other than Valve selecting it for official release, is through contests. There are a lot of communities that run contests through the year.

By the way it's just maps that are a non-profitable good when working with Valve tech; you can make texture packs and models and sell them on the numerous marketplaces there are around.

Take a look into the Unity scene: the whole technology gravitates around their "workshop" were people can buy all kind of contents (from plugins to models or sounds). Maybe there's space for "prefabs" to use in maps, or something like that.

It was posted in this forum a plugin for Unity that allows you to work with Unity tech in an editor almost identical to Hammer.

Another route is to make something tubular and ask for donations.

There are games entirely made of ripped assets that get by with this.

Quote from blackdog

Take a look into the Unity scene: the whole technology gravitates around their "workshop" were people can buy all kind of contents (from plugins to models or sounds). Maybe there's space for "prefabs" to use in maps, or something like that.

It was posted in this forum a plugin for Unity that allows you to work with Unity tech in an editor almost identical to Hammer.

I'd say this was the best approach.