This guy makes $13K/month from a game he built himself

This guy makes $13K/month from a game he built himself and honestly, the part that surprised me wasn't even the money.

I just watched an interview with Ken, who left Meta after years in big tech and started building his own stuff.
He ended up making a mobile text-based RPG called Harpagia.

The game now does around $13K/month and reportedly made about $155K in its first year.

But what caught my attention was how he got there.
No big marketing budget.
No huge team.

He was basically posting on Reddit, talking to people, taking criticism, improving the game and doing it over and over again.

At one point he said some of the posts that helped him the most weren't even universally positive. People were actually discussing and criticizing the game.

That part is easy to overlook.

Everyone loves the screenshot of "$13K/month."

Nobody wants to talk about making the same small improvements for months when hardly anyone is watching.
He also used Cursor and ChatGPT to help build the game after not writing much code for several years.
So you have a former Meta engineer, building a weirdly specific game, using AI to speed himself up, and growing it without paid marketing.

And the numbers are pretty wild.

A few thousand active users.

Around 6% conversion.

About $500/month in operating costs.
That is a very different picture from needing hundreds of thousands of users to build a real business.
The biggest thing I took from the interview wasn't even the AI part.

It was the consistency.

He launched before everything was perfect, listened to players, kept improving the game and stayed with the same thing long enough for it to compound.

I've been seeing so many founders looking for the next growth trick lately.

Sometimes I think the boring answer is still the one that works.

Build something specific.

Put it in front of people.
Listen.
Improve it.

Repeat it for a very long time.
The full interview is worth watching if you're building solo: