Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
A few indie game studios have been forthcoming with data, although as he points out not a lot apart from the real blockbusters or bankrupt ones. One I'm familiar with, though, Chronic Logic, has released some numbers.
One of their more high-profile games was the platformer Gish, since it won the 2005 IGF grand prize (an indie-game award); it sold 4,500 copies at $20 apiece, netting about $121,000 after expenses. Slightly under half of those were in the first year out, a bit over a quarter the second year, and the rest trailing in in subsequent years. The puzzle game Triptych (2002), sold 1,000 copies at $15 apiece, netting about $25,000 after expenses. Again about half were in the first year out, but sales straggled in more slowly but consistently after that, with about 15% of the total in each of the following 3 years.
I haven't been able to find sales stats for probably their best-known game, Bridge Builder, though; pointers would be interesting.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Says he. Of course, Indie games have a lower piracy rate than big titles.
Citation needed.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Yes I've seen it here before. Some indie developers aren't fussed but others seem to believe they have a god given right for their product to be immune from piracy.
I had a look at the article and saw he's selling the game for $28. When you bear in mind it's a game that looks around 15 years old in quality and style (something that's effectively admitted in the article albeit not quite so explicitly) one has to wonder why he thinks people would pay that amount for this:
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/images/geneforge4/Geneforge4SSThumb1large.gif
When you could pay the same, or in fact, probably even less nowadays, and get a few year old yet far superior game such as say Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion?
Sometimes I believe indie developers become a little deluded as to how good their product is and for every good indie title out there there's 100 crap ones. Still, the guy made just short of $112,000 from it (spread across 3 people) and didn't even push it out to 3rd party sales channels (Xbox live, RealArcade, MSN Games, Instant Action). Frankly, for what he's peddling and the amount he's peddling it for I think he should be happy and bitching about pirates is laughable when you consider how much he's asking for something so awful looking and compared to what you could get instead. It doesn't strike me as suprising that people would pirate something like that rather than pay $28 for it. He claims including salaries the cost to make the game was $120k (but doesn't reveal individual salaries- the two staff other than him are only part time) so is implying he's only broken even, but if he's taking a $100k salary out of that for example then of course he's doing much better than makes out. As he doesn't give any break down of figures we can't be sure whether his costs really are as high as he infers (I really can't see how they could be) or if he's actually making a fairly decent wage which seems more likely.
What should really be taken from this article is that even if you make a shite unoriginal game and sell it for much more than it's worth, don't bother marketing and selling through important channels, despite piracy, you can still make a decent buck off of it.
There's a lot of good indie titles out there, Popcap was always the prime example of how good titles sell (they made millions) but indies that are failing and blaming piracy need to look at why- if even this guy with such a poor product can make a decent amount then chances are, if your product is failing, you really do have a severely crap product. Even this guy seems to believe he deserved to make more even though it's amazing the amount he did make for what he's selling.
Perhaps another piece of advice to take from this article is that indie developers need to have realistic expectations and that whilst they'll still make a decent buck, they wont necessarily become the next Popcap. If they don't make much at all then they need to have a long hard look at whether they really have the skills to be making indie games that people want for the price it's offered at.
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.
That's such a flamebait of a post. Nowhere in the article/blog post does Jeff BLAME piracy for his games not selling. In fact he quite clearly says he's made a living at it for the past 15 years. He mentions piracy, yes, but it's a tiny part of the overall article.
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...