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.