The Realities of Selling Independently Developed PC Games 120
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.'"
Some games just don't make a profit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Indie $ vs big name $ (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd personally rather see figures for indie games more along the lines of Droid Assault [puppygames.net] or Robokill [rocksolidarcade.com] (check these out if you haven't - maybe a shameless plug, but I'm not involved with either, just a fan!), both of which have the kind of immediate traction with a player that an RPG with graphics that were getting stale a decade ago just can't pull off.
I'm not saying you can't have quality without graphical flair, but come on - you've got to look like your making an effort if you really want to move product!
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:5, Insightful)
Says he. Of course, Indie games have a lower piracy rate than big titles.
Citation needed.
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm skeptical also, and I'm a big fan of indie games (that and retro games are almost exclusively what I play), and am acquainted with a number of developers. The number one biggest problem for an indie developer is getting noticed at all. Most people will not know you exist, and if they vaguely know you exist, will not remember to check back to see you released a game.
From that perspective, if your game is good enough to be betting pirated, you might actually benefit. It's hard to say what the net effect is, but there's been a bit more study of it done in music, and it seems small/underground/indie musicians come out ahead from piracy relatively often, compared to the big-studio types, because they get some publicity out of it which leads to additional sales (while the big-name kinds don't need the publicity, so just lose sales).
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [spiderwebsoftware.com]
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.
Somewhat invalidated through non-disclosure. (Score:1, Insightful)
Although the data about income from game sales welcome, his failure to give even ballpark figures with respect to salary somewhat invalidate any information you could get from this.
For example.
He's said "I pay myself a salary"
So if his Salary is $75k and he has costs of $120k then he's personally doing just fine even though he's supposedly "making a small loss" as a company.
Now I understand the privacy issues of not wanting to disclose what others earn.... but saying that the "salary costs were XYZ" across 3 people while I was able to pay myself a salary of "XYZ2"
As it stands, somewhat interesting, but still unhelpful.
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:3, Insightful)
Economies of scale are the major issue in game development that indies need to take into consideration to temper their 'furor' at piracy or whatever else they think causes their 'lack of success', lets face it, you should be doing proper market research and targetting your markets appropriately, like Stardock did with Sins of a solar empire (500K+ units sold, for what is mostly a very "indie" game).
Make stuff a paying populace of people want and they will buy it. Many oldschool PC game developers got trapped in listening to internet fans when developing games (descent 3 and Planescape torment come to mind) and when they sold poorly some team members blamed the fans for not buying their product that they thought was "so awesome", lets face it here. This was a painful lesson in lack of market research for those PC developers who moved onto other games with wider appeal.
To develop a game up to "AAA" expectations one needs a hell of a lot of development talent and money in terms of art, programming and everyone else on the team. Not only that, real game development talent is scarce. Then add in the fact that games depreciate in value awful fast because they are competing against games both old and new, as well as piracy, and also because most games don't have any kind of solid replayability where you keep coming back to it.
To be honest it's a bloody miracle anyone pays for software at all, since it isn't a scarce and it is easily duplicated. Developers need to learn to live in reality and develop games people want to buy, or move to consoles to publish their crapware, most games aren't anything special now-a-days if you've been gaming since the NES or pre-NES era.
The problem with indie development is that we've moved past the era where expectations were lower in some respects, I could see indie's thriving in the time before 3D acceeleration, in fact many "indie" games were shareware lets not forget.
Doom and duke nukem were both SHAREWARE if anyone old enough here remembers. I first came into contact with doom through BBS's in 'yeee old days' and there was piracy back then through BBS's, lets not say that piracy has not been there all along. The "warez scene" started out on BBS's. Many popular games shareware games (like doom, doom 2, duke nukem) were pirated.
Developers should focus on making games that make money, and either fund their personal pet projects on their own dime and stop complaining when no body but them and a small cultish group of people likes it.
This is exactly why certain genre's died out on the PC and console, certain developers didn't know where to take a genre or the market for that kind of game was shrinking and they ended up dying.
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:3, Insightful)
takes a snipe at pirates
Defensive much?
but doesn't really discuss/acknowledge the role of non-paying customers
Puhlease. Their role is to fuck up his shit. Oh, do they show their friends the title, thus garnering sales? Or do they show their friends the title and say, "here download the cracked version from this link".
Play your cracked games that some small developer barely eeks out a living on, download your free music from some schmuck who eats ramen because he doesn't have rockstar money, and copy indie movies whose publisher went out of business despite the quality of their films... but don't even get a glimmer in your eye that you're doing the world some sort of good by doing so. Have the sense of decency to just quietly stay in your hole and feel a little bad about ripping someone off.
Re:Piracy because indie product is too low value? (Score:1, Insightful)
Your argumentation doesn't make sense. You basically say the game deserves to be pirated because 1) it's a low value game 2) people have little money to spend on entertainment instead of food. yet, somehow it's good enough that it should be pirated?
This is a game that is sold in the 'long tail', i.e. it has a small enthusiast audience, that's willing to pay that price. It's not a 2$ iPhone game for casual gamers. Also, it's not something that people struggling to pay for food are going to buy.
There is no point in pirating this game. It has a long demo, and you don't have to pay 28$ to see how it is, no one is fooling you into it.
If it's not your type, move on, don't pirate it with that sense of "must have everything free" entitlement you have. if it's your type of game, it'll probablly cost you less than 1$ an hour of game play!
Re:Indie $ vs big name $ (Score:3, Insightful)
IAdvertising is incredibly expensive, so much so that only big companies can afford to do it
Why pay for advertising when you can get your game on slashdot and watch the hits come rolling in? He's certainly going to get some sales out of it which is not bad for a game that's a couple of years old and arguably vastly overpriced.
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:3, Insightful)
Your post, in a nutshell: "More Madden and less Ico, you lazy fuck!".
And as a gamer, allow me to say "Fuck you". The day indie devs start worrying about making marketable, "sellable" games instead of developing various, innovative ideas and see what sticks, is the day I stop buying indie games altogether.
Re:Hmm.. (Score:2, Insightful)
When you make money with it you can spend more time on it rather than squeezing it in the gaps left by your day job.
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who as been there and done that [meridian59.com], the answer is: he probably wouldn't do better. We worked on a major engine upgrade for Meridian 59; we upgraded the game to use 3D hardware acceleration instead of a software-based renderer, added dynamic lighting, and lots of other improvements to the engine. We didn't upgrade the art (I'll get to that in a moment), but the engine was a significant improvement, especially if you ran it at higher (read: modern) resolutions.
After a few years of work and a final big push, we saw pretty much no increase in interest after the upgrade. The problem is that while the presentation does improve, it still can't compete with the AAA level of quality. And the AAA games are what you will be compared to, no matter how much you improve your engine. The reality is that writing a more modern engine would probably cause the author to spend more time for very little return on investment.
"But, you should have improved your graphics, too!" We had to do some lovely hacks to get the 2D player art to work in the new 3D engine, so we had seriously discussed upgrading the art. The problem is that it was a huge amount of work. We'd have to replace a lot of artwork since the players (and all the variations of equipment we have) as well as monsters, items dropped on the ground, scenery, and lots of other things would all need to be upgraded. It's not something we could have done piecemeal and still have anything resembling a consistent look. And, inexpensive, quality 3D artists aren't as easy to find as a good engine programmer willing to work for free, unfortunately.
Ultimately, people play indie games because they like the gameplay. If you really enjoy old-school PC RPG type games, then the graphics shouldn't matter much. Heck, I still fire up Might&Magic 7 on an occasional basis because I enjoy the game, and that thing has graphics that are barely better than M59's old engine. Yes, there are going to be people that turn up their nose at the graphics but, to be honest, those people probably wouldn't be interested in the game anyway.
My thoughts,
Re:Interesting/Disappointing (Score:3, Insightful)
Playing shows can't be pirated? Uhh, have you ever heard of the term "bootleg recordings"? I imagine that some people that got the recordings would be less interested in seeing the band live. Plus, even if the band itself thinks its fine, if the band itself doesn't own the copyright to the songs themselves, that can involve other copyright infringement too.. (and get even more tangential if they are covering other bands' songs).