Avarage number of sold games ?

#1 42

-Tim aka Spock

#2 I thought that was the answer to the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything? Not the avg # of games? ;-)

-Eric

#3 Doesnt everything include the average # of games? ;)

#4 Tim

Yes 42, but im not a hitchiker, but a business guy...so, please give me usefull tips, instead of bunch of childish humour. I think you can to find better places to do it, like the wellknown go.to site at the the www.

Thanks

Gabor Forrai
Nagual Pictures

#5 Lol gabor email the guys directly as the only ones who would know this are the gg staff.

--KallDrexx

#6 How do you know its not 42? :P

Yeah you asked something they are not gonna tell you. at least not on here. Email them and they might, but I would not hold my breath.

Id say, just guessing, probably 5000 or less total copies sold from all the torque games (4 torque games) combined on GG.

#7 A buisness guy, eh? Well the best buisness advice I can give is to licence some good intelectual property, and make a FPS/Tactical game out of it, then spend a few million on advertising, and then, regardless of how bad the game is, you'll sell a lot of copies. If you need proof, look at: Enter the Matrix, Spider Man, Star Wars: Galaxys and just about any Star Trek game. (Bridge commander was pretty sweet, though)

If you want to do it the indy way, though, forget about buisness for a few seconds to appreciate some "childish humor."

Tim is correct in his under 5000 estimate. If you want more information, contact Jay Moore regarding exact numbers, platform sales breakdown (how many for mac/win/linux) and whatever else you need.

#8 If you are under the impression that you will sell thosands or even really crazy 10s of thousands your first few months then you are sadly mistaken. You'll be lucky to sell that many in the lifetime of the software. Online game publishing takes lots of time and hard work. I think it would be safe to say the only reason youll make more than $100 your first month or 2 is because GG is experienced in selling games online so they will advertise for you and get your game out there and they will not let you put up a crappy game or a non completed game. If you really want to see the business side of things for indie development take a read here:

www.dexterity.com/articles

-Tim aka Spock

#9 Wow, great site Tim. Thanks. Lots of good info for a hobbyist/ indie wannabe.

#10 I find it fascinating that people feel the need to imply hostility or disrespect towards someone asking a simple question. Gabor phrased the question perfectly. And it's a great question that very few developers are willing to answer directly, or even indirectly for that matter.

Gabor. As you can see people get pretty touchy when it comes to revealing sales figures. In my experience it's usually because the people are embarrassed or ashamed that their product is selling poorly. But due to the veil of secrecy around even approximate numbers many people don't realize that many excellent games sell just as bad as theirs, if not worse. Anyway, I apologize that I cannot reveal all the sales figures I've been given, but I can give a few examples.

Alien Flux - 14 Sales In June 2003. (Source, Dexterity Forums)
Save The Meeklits 25 sales after 1.5 months on market. (Source, Dexterity Forums)
Various titles from Positech "...around 1,700 copies of StarLines INC, maybe 100
of Asteroid Miner, around 100 of Planetary defense." (Source, Aug '03 DIY Games Monthly Newsletter)

#11 Um actually 21-6 and others have said they have been happy with how many sales they've gotten. It has nothing to do with being embarrassed that the game hasn't been sold thousands and thounsands of copies (most of the people who have completed games already finished thier game fully acknowledging this as it is the indy mentality). First of all he asked for the Average, which only garagegames would have the figures for that figuring that it is implying more then one software which would mean more hten one company involved. Thus they can't give an answer as they don't have all the data. Even if you ask a company it's still probably a bit fuzzy in how many exact sales are there because of lag of communication so therefore garagegames would still be the only ones to know.

--KallDrexx

#12 I wasn't assuming he thought he would sell thousands upon thousands.. I was just making sure he understood in case he was.

#13 Pat and others..

We had boxed releases in the past..so we arent newcomers in the game business, some guys at Nagual Pictures have more than 10 years in game developing.
We are AFTER the boxed releases, just becouse we are all the same. VERY disappointed of the mentality of this days retail publishers.
Our crew based on semi-retired members of Rage and Philos Labs, they was big developers, with big crews (rage most wellknown), and we know, what its means to developing and lost some million dollars on neverending projects, badly marketinged, or badly targeted developings.

We have extremely talented gfx people and game designers...most of the shareware stuff isnt good in those topics. We have a possibility to make at least ONE very good game (with a boxed game's quality) for the shareware market by using this TGE stuff, but if it selling only in a few 100 copies, thats NOT a way to make a business, thats enough only for a hobby things made by young school guys in their sparetime.

We need at least 4-5000++ copy in selling (per title) in the first 3-4 monthes for the beginning this developing and make a very good, good targeted, smart game.

Yes, some people say, its will depends on quality, and if our game is good
then its truly will to HIT the market. Ok, but im really interested about the exact numbers, becouse our investors arent the people of the words only. They need NUMBERS.

We are thinking about anyway to distribute the game(s) not only with GG site, but a few very strong bigger sw sites. If its not knocking on the doors of the 5K, then we must to search another piece of the business, like PDA or 3G developing, or whatever.

Best Wishes

Gabor Forrai
Nagual Pictures

#14 Pat and others..

We had boxed releases in the past..so we arent newcomers in the game business, some guys at Nagual Pictures have more than 10 years in game developing.
We are AFTER the boxed releases, just becouse we are all the same. VERY disappointed of the mentality of this days retail publishers.
Our crew based on semi-retired members of Rage and Philos Labs, they was big developers, with big crews (rage most wellknown), and we know, what its means to developing and lost some million dollars on neverending projects, badly marketinged, or badly targeted developings.

We have extremely talented gfx people and game designers...most of the shareware stuff isnt good in those topics. We have a possibility to make at least ONE very good game (with a boxed game's quality) for the shareware market by using this TGE stuff, but if it selling only in a few 100 copies, thats NOT a way to make a business, thats enough only for a hobby things made by young school guys in their sparetime.

We need at least 4-5000++ copy in selling (per title) in the first 3-4 monthes for the beginning this developing and make a very good, good targeted, smart game.

Yes, some people say, its will depends on quality, and if our game is good
then its truly will to HIT the market. Ok, but im really interested about the exact numbers, becouse our investors arent the people of the words only. They need NUMBERS.

We are thinking about anyway to distribute the game(s) not only with GG site, but a few very strong bigger sw sites. If its not knocking on the doors of the 5K, then we must to search another piece of the business, like PDA or 3G developing, or whatever.

Best Wishes

Gabor Forrai
Nagual Pictures

#15 I think the only way you'd hit 5k in anywhere close to 3-4 months is box distribution and you'll need some advertising. The demo conversion rates average around 2-3% I thought, so you'd need a LOT of face time to get near that many sales electronically.

#16 If you need 5000 copies sold that quick your looking at the wrong place. THere is money to be made in indie development but it takes time and work, your not gonna get rich over night. You would be lucky to sell that many in a year, in fact I'd probably guess that all of GGs games put together haven't sold that many copies yet. This is why we stress time and time again that people need to make smaller games. If you get a few games out there and work on their sales.. you can be raking in more and more money to the point that youll get stable and can get an office, etc. Your not gonna sell that many copies even if your game is better than halflife 2 simply because advertising is what gets your game sold. People have to see it to buy it. Ive published 2 soon to be 3 PDA titles. My results were EXACTLY like those dexterity articles, I thought too that maybe getting a good game out would make us enough money the first few months to survive, but like most amatuers to the indie business I was wrong. Now once you release and make 100 bucks your first month. Then where you take it shows wether you are a Pro or an Amateur. A pro will increase that intake to where in a year he is making 10 grand a month off the game he wrote last year.

Sadly the fact is you need a day job in the indie development until your making enough money to survive.

-Tim aka Spock

#17 Another thing worth repeating is that in addition to releasing a quality game you should make sure you hit the right market segment.

Releasing Marble Blast was a good move on GarageGame's part because it showed that Torque can do more than FPS games, but I'm not sure if the lesson there completely registered with many in the indie community who still seem to be focusing on FPS titles.

Now, if you just want to make an FPS title for the fun of it, go ahead, but it is completely unrealistic to expect to get any attention/sales for an indie FPS game in a market where you are competing with Half-Life 2 and Doom III. Just because you're an indie doesn't separate you from the big boys if you're focusing on the same genres they are.

So if you want to sell copies make sure that in addition to delivering a quality game you know the market and use that knowledge to your advantage. Target the casual gamers while you still can. The industry has historically ignored them, though The Sims sure made some people sit up and take notice.

Without huge marketing budgets and an extremely talented team, the chances of making a 'hit' (even by indie standards) FPS, traditional RTS or especially MMORPG are probably less than winning the lottery.

Luckily, those aren't the only game types out there.

#18 I didn't respond before because when you mentioned business plan, I thought that using out game (ThinkTanks) as a template for comparison would be like comparing apples and oranges. Our marketing budget was $0.00 and our development budget was $0.00.

I think 5K units is acheivable if the marketing was right and the game rocked, but it is by no means a sure thing.

Don't want to give out numbers yet as I personally would like to wait until sales stabilize and we get the game out on a few other channels. I am not ashamed of the number of sales for ThinkTanks, but I don't want to create false expectations either. We have only been out a little over two months and we thus far are only selling on GarageGames, which is just really starting to get rolling.

When we do release our sales, I would like to release all the data.. the number of downloads, the conversion rate, the conversion rate by platform, and the effect of marketing on downloads and sales, so that people have a clearer picture of what all the information means and how it interacts.

Our conversion rate fluctuates, from a high of 2.8% to a low of 1.7% (these are averages based on total activations of the demo and the number of sales, and it is different per platform). The daily conversion rate is an even broader range.

Since we are not paying to push TT, we didn't not get a super huge number of demo downloads (it is somewhere between 30-40K people).

So, if we could get the marketing machine rolling and get the ThinkTanks demo in front of 300K people, we would have a good chance of making those numbers in that time frame.

If you can make a good game and get a conversion rate of about 2.0%, it then becomes a matter of how many people you can get to play it.. and that is all about the marketing effort. For the numbers you are looking to make, I think it is doable, but I think that a little bit of money will have to be spent to grab the eyeballs.

#19 Joe
Thanks for your answer. I wish you good lick with Think Thanks, its cool game :)
As we are a company, (small but surely it is) we are in those lucky point that we have found on developing. Not a big one, but its enough to buy bubble gum for the weekend :o)
I will to look at your selling chart, i hope its knocks the number 10K at least soon ;)
Anyway..In most of the times we are working as a graphic company, and we are selling gfx for traditional game developers. Just becouse we are really developer addicted, we are looking back to the way of direct game making again.
Its sounds good that not an impossible way the 5K sold units as a target. :)

George
We have a few very good, original, and FUN idea. We arent thinking in a boring FPS or rts clone..forget it. We left the box office for this reason, that there are only
a few genres, and not any way to break through those rude barriers, were the publishers did on the road.
Anyway...i few ideas about the fps way, i think if you are making at least on the same level of game art, like as for example S.T.A.L.K.E.R., (the released pictures arent show more, than not exist as a feature in TGE.), you are release an epic background strory and make some hypes at the start, the net can make a selfbuilding hype system. I hope im understandable.. :) But you must to release something eye poppin' for that..

I think the good way isnt the common fps, but everything is possible, dont kill the cat before its show you, its how high can to jumpin'...

#20 There is a company here in town that has survived for over ten years selling shareware games. The concept there is to make many, many simple games so that you have a wide customer base, and make new versions fairly frequently that you can sell to the existing client list.
Right now the big sales are in the box market though. Luckily you can now get box distribution through GarageGames.