The Realities of Selling Independently Developed PC Games

Not long ago, we discussed the realities of selling a game on the iPhone App Store. Now, spidweb sends in his experiences with a realistic level of success as an independent PC game developer. He writes "There is a lot of excitement about casual gaming and Indie game development these days, but there's also very little public information about how many games actually get sold, or the sort of income one can reasonably expect in this line of work. We've released full sales figures for a recent product to illustrate what sort of earnings can be generated by a quality niche product that isn't a massive hit. From the post: 'I am not the first Indie developer to reveal this sort of information. However, most public sales figures come from projects that were either blockbusters or disasters. Our games have never landed in either pool. I have been doing this for a living for almost fifteen years.'"

Comments

Re:Interesting/Disappointing

[MadKeithV]

I think the article has a double reality check:

1. He only sold around 4000 copies. At first glance that seems incredibly low with a big margin for improvement with a bit of advertising, a more reasonable price and some more polish in the game. Of course, the market works in mysterious ways so maybe this really is 100% of what he can expect to sell.
2. Those 4000 copies were enough to break even on the costs of a year of development. I.e. he's sustaining himself and two others (part-time at least) on this kind of stuff! That's pretty cool considering it was a adolescent dream of mine to be in professional game development and I'm sure it was for many programmers.

This "reality check" tells me that developing games for an average living is possible. Don't expect to be a millionaire, but you could be doing what you like for a living for a long time.

Re:Interesting/Disappointing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty cool considering it was a adolescent dream of mine to be in professional game development and I'm sure it was for many programmers.

Indeed. As a soon-to-be indie game developer, these kind of stories really give me hope.

That said, I can't help but see massive room for improvement in this guy's case.

Seems like most people that have commented so far here are really falling over the dated-looking graphics though. I wonder how much better he could do financially if he would put together a bit more modern game engine.

It seems that the outdated graphics, plus the relatively high price (most indie games go for between $5 and $20), are the main things holding him back. People that have commented on his site seem to actually really like the gameplay and extensive branching story lines, so that doesn't seem to be the issue. But if you simply ignore what the market wants or expects nowadays, I suppose you should be happy to even be able to recoup your costs.

It's really not all that difficult to NOT make your graphics look like ass. Just use something like Torque or Gamebryo or what not... there's a lot of cheap, pre-existing game engines out there that are very good quality. That would do the job just fine for indies like this guy.

I guess the dated 2d graphics are kind of like a "statement" though. It says: "This game is not about graphics! So please don't judge me on them!". But people WILL do that. On the other hand, I suppose if you would make things 3d and "modern" looking, people's expectations might rise. People will compare it to the latest high-budget commercial games' looks and will almost inevitably find it wanting.

Still, even keeping all that in mind, going for an outdated look on purpose is a bit cynical, IMHO. You can always compensate for lack of high budget or developement time with a stylized and original look (some form of cartoon-filter, or something along the lines of Defcon or Darwinia). That way, you can have nice graphics AND nice gameplay, and you might get more impulse buyers. But it his choice...