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

[palegray.net]

Says he. Of course, Indie games have a lower piracy rate than big titles.

Citation needed.

Re:Interesting/Disappointing

[Xest]

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.

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.