What Can an Average Indie Game Dev Expect to Gross

#1 Here's the best answer you can get.

#2 None or a lot, depending on the market and your game. And that's just a ballpark.

#3 @David Blake: I always think of answer like that to this kind of question, but technically as he's asking for an average there must be an actual figure.

Unfortunatly I guess the actual figure will be close to zero due to the large numbers of projects that don't get finished, sell poorly or don't sell at all.

My advice (not experienced advice by any means) would be to make a good game, make sure it has Mac Support, market it well and hope for the best.

Thats where I'm heading,

Once I get a Mac to test things on :D

Nick

#4 Actually, the correct answer is 0 - infinity. You can spend a lot of your time and make a game that will have just 1 purchase in 6-7 months (and no matter how quality is your marketing), or you can spend a few weeks and make a hit. For me it is like a lottery.

#5 @Kostya
Yes, but a calculated lottery. You have to undrstand the flow of the market, how your game fits into that market, and the channels available to you to reach that market. PopCap was lucky with Bejeweled in that the casual games market was largely untapped in the sense that it is being milked today. But just because they were lucky doesn't mean that they did not calculate their target. They targeted a nebulous arena and noticed that the casual game market emerged (it had long been there with people who purchase the 100 games packs or 50 shareware games or such, but it had been a low-intention target among companies other than residual "we have a bunch of games to slap on a disc and sell on the cheap racks" side of many distributors/publishers minds.

@Nick
There be some impossible to reach average when it comes to finished games, but since most studios and independent indie developers never release their sales numbers, often target different or emerging markets, and such, it is pretty much impossible to gauge. The best thing to do is to look at portal sales and revenue of low-selling portal games, find out how hard it is to get on a portal, and then calculate your low-end potential in terms of a portal scenario. Trying to figure out potential sales online is dependent on so many variables that there is no general answer. You can search and find success stories (such as PopCap or MBU) and failure stories (Pyrogon; look up Brian Hook's article on what went wrong. It's a good read), but ultimately these are only hints at what your potential revenue might be.

I wish there was a solid way to estimate indie game sales for people just starting out, without the networking contacts that many successful indie developers have, but I haven't found it.

EDIT:
And I have to emphatically agree about the Mac support!

#6 I'll offer the profit numbers of two projects I did a few years ago:

1- I did an unofficial expansion pack to Total Annihilation in 1999. It took about $300 to get all the royalty free content, buy the CDs/cases/lables, pay for the google ads; an extra $100 for web-hosting for the year; $35 for the domain I used. It was a hobby for about 9 months and then I took an additional 6 months to make it sales-worthy and entirely legal. In terms of gross sales, I probably got ~$550. But after shipping and those costs above, plus the royalties to the musician (which were WAY too high), I think I lost $40 net. I averaged 1-2 sales a week, primarily on eBay.

2- For about 1.5 years of development (Summer 2004 - Fall 2005), I got online a beta of an online space-game. Web-based, fairly complex, and was supposed to support itself off of ad revenue. Free to join --and I got around 30 people to join. But only 7 or so consistently played. Webhosting plus domain costs added to basically $200 for the 1.5 years. Ad revenue got me about $50 (from google ads). It flopped because I was burned out with the project and decided the Web-route was a poor one. (On a side note, I am taking the artwork for this game and using it in my Torque project, which is going pretty smooth!)

So in summary:

1- Project 1: $40 net loss (finished project)
2- Project 2: $150 net loss (unfinished project)

I should also note that I've wasted lots of money on programming books and a few smaller projects. I did launch a successful robot catalog site for someone. But that was a free contract. I hear he makes $30 a month or so off of google ads from it.

At this point, I'd be thrilled to break even with my first Torque project. I humbly hope I can get $100 out of it!

#7 This has been a huge education.
All this time, I thought that someone who spends 6 months to 3 years creating a 3D or 2D game and struggling with C++ etc would have the expectation of making at least $100,000 dollars on a game.

From what I've been reading it appears to me that many of the game developers doing it as a hobby or just for fun. With no expectation to make significant revenue on the game.

I like make one or 2 maybe and use David Blake's advice and see what I can make out of it.

#8 Not that it's terribly relevant to today's market, but I made a shareware game for the Mac back around 1994-5. It took about two years to make in my spare time, and I basically didn't spend much at all on it out-of-pocket. Back then, distribution was a big problem since the Net was still young, so a lot of the early distro was on places like AOL, CompuServe, and local boards. I did get some decent press from MacUser magazine, as well. I sold it for $20, and my net per copy was $17 with a $3 cut going to the sales agent software I used.

The game brought in money for a couple of years after its initial release, usually in a trickle. I don't know the exact figures, but I'd say the game brought in a total of around $5000. I was in graduate school at the time, so I was damn happy with that.

The experience was awesome. I had registrations from all over the world, which blew me away. And I got a registration from Steve Wozniak, which really rocked.

#9 Hi all,

Why don't you ask for help with garage games?
It always say that he/she will help us to distibute game and have high profit rate, does it?
(Please point it out if I was wrong.)

:)

#10 @Sammy: That assumes that (a) the game is good enough to sell, and (b) GG is interested in marketing it.

@Suddysud: You're right, the prospects for profits are not good. Even if you survive the burnout, disillusionment, personality clashes, and technical challenges inherent in a serious game project, there's no guarantee of success.

The experience, however, is absolutely priceless.

The profit on my first few projects have been nil, but the things I've learned along the way have helped me in every venture I've undertaken since. I have a fantastic job in the insurance industry -- I never thought I'd say that! -- and I owe my successes entirely to the lessons I learned in my game development "hobby".

My balance sheets may show a loss on those projects, but if you look at the big picture, I'm way ahead, and I don't regret the time and effort spent on them. As Edison said, "I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process."

#11

Quote:would have the expectation of making at least $100,000 dollars on a game.

I think everyone has that expectation at the beginning. In just the same way that some people think creating the next WoW or EQ is a 2 month job sat in their bedrooms with a learn C++ in 24 hours book...

#12 I'm going to try it.
However I see that I have much higher initial expenses than everyone else who has responded so far.
My game is supposed to take maybe 1-2 months max to make. It's extremely simple.
But the graphic design is going to cost me $2600 dollars. plus about 100 for the engine. So if priced at 25 dollars a game, I would have to sell over 200 to get my money back.
I'll let you all know how it goes. I'll come back to this thread before the year is up.

But I am curio0us to know how you guys managed to get the graphics for your game without paying for it.

#13 1. Create it yourself (if you are an artist).
2. Team up with an artist and share the (hopeful) wealth.
3. Pay for it. Artists need to eat, too.

#14 4. Beg

#15 Pffft! There's a reason why the words "starving" and "artist" are often consecutive. =)

Suddy, I'm very curious about what kind of game you're planning on producing in just 2 months... Have you developed in Torque / C++ before?

#16 I am looking for the Pyrogon postmortem.

I can't find it when I click the website link.

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5598

But when I read the comments I get the sense that the points are:

a. make your personal and living expenses extremely low because it takes a while.
b. sell directly to the customer and own their information so that you can follow up with additional titles directly to them .

c. create products that you like instead of following the market.
d. make products that you can keep selling year after year.

I'm curious to read the postmortem incase someone knows where it is on the web as well as the follow up article about that postmortem by Thomas Warfield, creator of Pretty Good Solitaire.

#17 I'd say the average completed indie game should expect to make 0 dollars in profits, and not much more in sales :)
the average game can have relative success with the right positioning, marketing, etc.
Only the above average and excellent indie games can have slightly higher expectations, and even then, there is no guarantee at all : lots of competition, and finishing the game is only part of the work for an indie, as you then have to get it to market, promote it, support it, and update it.
Jeff Tunnell's blogs are full of insight on that, as well as many other posts, blogs and articles from various members of the community.
Being an against the grain entrepreneur is hard, and doing it in indie games is in all likelyhood harder.
The thing you have going for you is that you can potentially sell it for much longer than through the regular mainstream vidgames retail channel, were games fall into oblivion within months if not weeks from release.
Plus, you won't be out a few millions if you fail :)

#18 My advice is to set a realistic dev schedule. Two months, even at full-time hours, is an awful tight squeeze to fit something in. My attempts at an online web-based space strategy game took about 2 years combined. And I stopped because, despite my best intentions, I could never get rid of all the bugs, never could get the gameplay tweaked enough to maintain player interest, etc...

In fact, the experience taught me to really plan a tightly-focused, small game and hope that after 6 months it will be ready. REALLY watch out for feature creep. If you listen to your beta testers too much, that one will kill you. Whoever said that if your core gameplay is solid you won't need lots of extra features was absolutely correct. I just hope my mistakes from my past projects will make my mistakes this time around less major.

EDIT: I did my own graphics this time around, to answer the question, since I've always been a hobbyist artist. Then I just try to get advice from better artists than myself.

#19

Quote:
All this time, I thought that someone who spends 6 months to 3 years creating a 3D or 2D game and struggling with C++ etc would have the expectation of making at least $100,000 dollars on a game.

From what I've been reading it appears to me that many of the game developers doing it as a hobby or just for fun. With no expectation to make significant revenue on the game.

Many do. The "Average" indie developer probably goes in with a similar expectation, and they get a rude awakening. I think the reason the "Average" is so low is that after these people get the unhappy results of their labors from their initial stab at game development, they give up.

If you look at the most successful indies out there, they've been at it for a WHILE. Even PopCap's "Overnight Success" with Bejewelled took a huge amount of effort and some failed business plans early on before they stumbled across a great idea (and they were EXPERIENCED game devs when they started the company, IIRC). Curiously enough, I think their original game is still outselling its sequel... a good game in the indie space (unless you relinquish your marketing and sales to the portals) can keep selling for a long time, unlike the retail "AAA" game business where they try to front-load sales as much as possible with blitzkrieg marketing tactics. Many indies have reported better sales in their third year of a game's life than the first two years combined. I dunno if that is still the case or not, but it's one of the many things to bear in mind.

The winning strategy seems to be DIVERSIFICATION across multiple titles, multiple distribution streams, over the long haul. It sure doesn't sound as sexy as striking it rich with your first title and making the cover of Forbes with your rags-to-riches story, but unless you have some magical way of loading the dice of the universe in your favor, I'd not plan on it.

Jay Barnson
Rampant Games
Tales of the Rampant Coyote

#20

Quote:a good game in the indie space (unless you relinquish your marketing and sales to the portals) can keep selling for a long time

This is one of the reasons I am an indie game developer. I was really sick of watching my games have a 3 month shelf life. It also pushes you to patch and improve your game. We increase visibility and sales whenever we release a patch with fixes, features, and new content.

Quote:hat Can an Average Indie Game Dev Expect to Gross

An indie game that ships and makes $$$ is the exception and not an average.

-Josh Ritter
Prairie Games, Inc
http://www.prairiegames.com