So Here's How Many Games I Sell - Indie Game Developer Story

Covering a salary for yourself is no mean feat, particularly for selling games.<p>In general, when folks with no business experience tell me they want to start selling games, I tell them "It is a black hole of time and talent". There are exceptions towards the top end (and $100k+ of sales is, if not stratospheric, probably still in the top 1% of indie developers), but more typical games either are never completed or end up profiting less than $1k per man month invested (i.e. not covering reasonable imputed salaries of founders).<p>You can see a whole bunch of case studies here:<p><a href="http://www.gameproducer.net/category/sales-statistics/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gameproducer.net/category/sales-statistics/</a>

&#62; Some of you might ask, "Why would anyone pay money for a game that looks like that?" The answer is, "I don't know, but they do."<p>Some people really enjoy gameplay a lot more than pretty pictures. We've built a webgame (a tennis manager game: <a href="http://rockingrackets.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rockingrackets.com/</a>) where our website didn't even had a decent layout for the first six months after making the website public, but a lot of people were playing it because of the game play.<p>We're not breaking even on the time part yet, but our other costs were covered after only two months. Currently we're close to being feature complete, after which we'll fix bugs and refactor some code for a short period. After that, we'll be moving the game into a maintenance mode and we'll start developing a new game.<p>Rocking Rackets' expected shelve life is long enough to cover our time investment quite well even at the current rate of making money. The game is still growing though...

Geneforge, and Avernum servies of games are extremely good. If you are an RPG fan and havent played them, you are missing something. (though I am pretty sure if Jeff did not make these games, my GPA in college would have been much higher)

It's really cool that he's able to make a successful living making indie games, but it definitely is a labor of love. So far, he hasn't broken even on it, and it's a two year old game. He spent around 120k, and made around 116k.<p>It really looks like it needs some more promotion though. He said that the original game sold a lot of copies on other sites. But this one was just released on his site, and mainly marketed by word of mouth.

Costs for this particular kind of game are mostly content costs: Writing, gameplay scripting, art. The engineering effort doesn't carry over a great deal from one game to another. As well, downloadables get lower market penetration than browser-based games. All those factors go a long way to explain why he's only breaking even.<p>If you want a hope of success in games, either do a low-asset kind of game, do a game where big assets are matched with big marketing, or involve the users in creating content. I think there's still lots and lots of room for the third.

Interesting read - I was wondering myself [1] how to get into that field, it seems so unlikely that one can make money in that space (even only enough to make a modest living out of it).<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521475" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521475</a>

Can someone explain to me --- and I never even play games (Hacker News is my computer game), let alone write them --- why any indie game developer would sink $120k into a title and not design it so they could collect recurring revenue from online multiplayer subscriptions?

It looks quite good if you view it as returning somewhere between 35-50% per year on invested capital. However, it's hard to guess what shelf life of the product will be.

I'd love to see sub and renewal data like this for "indie" or small shops making an MMO or other on-going, recurring revenue games.

Would love to see sales numbers broken down by platform for a cross-platform game that's available for GNU/Linux.