Indie game dev Jason Rohrer (Passage/The Castle Doctrine/Cordial Minuet) recently had a forum post about his income. I'd link to it but he's requested people not link to the Cordial Minuet forums:
We made $140K from The Castle Doctrine (and other games) in 2014. We made a bit more from TCD in 2013 as well, with the grand total somewhere up near $180K.
The TOTAL tribute received from all Cordial Minuet games so far is $683.4939. Of course, I also paid out $420 in prize money for the first tournament. Thus, the total income is only $263.49.
I've been actively working on Cordial Minuet since June 19, 2014.
Cordial Minuet is my 18th game. I made 12 games that made nothing or close to nothing. My 13th game brought in a few thousand dollars. My 14th game brought in about $100K. At that point, I had been making games for about 5 years, and trying to make a living from independent software for about 7 years.
While I'm a big fan, Rohrer might be a bad example. He's simultaneously well known (your average dev is not) and yet lives a very austere life style and puts artistic goals ahead of profit. For instance, his latest game won't provide a livable salary unless it's supporting millions of dollars being gambled per year.
However, I'll say Cordial Minuet is a great game: exhilarating and pretty deep. Doesn't hurt that I've won over $1,000 (results not typical).
This is the sort of future I have expected for awhile now. Fewer multi-million-dollar celebrity-making hits but far more people being able to make a comfortable living off of serving a niche audience. Now that distribution is worthless, creators don't have to chain themselves to "publishers" who skim almost every penny the creator creates. Back in the Bad Ole Days before the Internet, distribution was such a titanically difficult problem to solve, they earned that skim... but they really have no call to it now. That opens things up dramatically.
This is what I have found. I started indie game dev a back in 2009, and I'm finally to the point where I'm making a very comfortable living, but by no means a millionaire. However, having a small company with some fellow devs is now in the realm of possibility, which is a long-time dream of mine.
Edit:
My games are mostly mobile. I am really excited about the figures he posted for Steam. I just got one of my games greenlit on Steam (SimpleRockets) and I hope I can sustain further development on it.
Distribution is easy but marketing certainly is not. That is why people still turn to big name distributors since they come with a built in marketing and promotion machine.
That is absolutely true. Distribution is by far not the only important factor to consider. It's just that distribution so totally dominated everything for over a century that its commoditization radically changes everything. Most companies offered other services (marketing, logistics, team management, etc) and made some money on them but distribution was an order of magnitude more important and where they made their real money. Now with distribution being essentially solved, those other things become much more important.... but those things can also be more easily and efficiently solved by independent contractors and people not hampered by the giant distribution networks and existing distribution agreements that the big publishers are saddled with. Those things were absolute GOLD for a century. Now they are a noose. What interests me now is the value of aggregation. It was mostly taken for granted when distribution was a much larger problem, but now aggregating things together and making it easier for customers to find things is far more important. When you've got millions of products available to you, learning about the products you are interested in and being able to find them all in one place becomes more important. It's a far easier (in terms of material cost, not intellectual challenge) problem to solve than distribution, though. So these companies are really going to have to radically shrink their profit margins in any case.... and modern businesses can't even deal well with slowing growth, let alone actual shrinking...
There's a difference between a value-add, and a gatekeeper. And a gatekeeper can get away with skimming an asymptotically high percentage of the profit. A value-add like Steam is nice, but it's not essential the way that BnM distributors were, so that keeps their cut and control at reasonable levels.
Just out of curiosity...anyone here actually play the OP's game? I bought it awhile ago because it is one of the few "Overwhelmingly Positive" games on Steam for the Mac (which no doubt helps the OP's sales there)...it's one of the dumbest games I've ever enjoyed...And I mean "dumb" in a good way...it's absurd to think that, after a long day of real work, I can get entertainment out of frantically flipping burgers in your shoddy shack of a cafe for virtual customers from 6AM to 10PM...but it's a testament to the game's solid design and polish. Props to the OP for good work, and also, making something that shouldn't be fun, fun.
Worth noting, there's quite a pedigree of this sort of game in the Japanese gaming market. There were all sorts of games on the Saturn, Playstation, PC Engine, and others that has the player make burgers, cook fries, make ramen, rice bowls, etc. A recent example is the Yoshinoya game for PS2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt_sZwVoQv0
In a similar vein to the "dumb" or mundane games are things like truck driving simulators (Euro Truck Simulator), train driving simulators (Densha de Go!), and passport control (Papers, Please).
Yes, I have played it. I think it's a good game. It has good controls, good music, nice "flow" to the game. It's not very deep game, but fun to play nevertheless. I heard someone describe it as the best restaurant simulator game available.
Octodad is a delightfully original and high quality game. The fact that it hasn't won any significant awards and has mediocre ratings is pretty damn funny. Good thing the market actually decides which games are successful and not idiot critics.
Yeah, market loves games that are f..ing people right in the brain: Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans and other 3 word combinations slapped on psychologically-tuned IAP "fun".
I've read all 5 previous parts and they are worth it.
But if you want the conclusion here it is. Keep in mind he was fairly experienced before making this game. And I'm sure the blog series helped with game sales.
>Just two and a half years ago, I questioned my decision to even make Cook, Serve, Delicious after that awful first weekend of release. Today, Cook, Serve, Delicious has grossed over $610,000 in sales across mobile, Steam, distro websites and my cut from the Humble Bundle, with over 100,000 copies sold. Steam accounts for 78% of that financial figure.
As someone who has written a similarly successful series of blog posts sharing game sales data, I can attest that does NOT help with game sales, at least not in any directly measurable way.
It's a misnomer to think that the stories you see in the headlines have arrived there organically. PG has a brilliant article on this topic. (1)
It does happen sometimes - you write great content and you're rewarded - but there are much more methodical / reliable way in honing your PR / growth hackery skills.
Simple tips:
1) There are PR guides written by some of the big blogs to explain how to get coverage without a PR agent (1)
2) Market to social communities like HN / Reddit where you can create relationships with people directly and - without being a "UPVOTE ME" scum-bag - get your content promoted because it's great and the community likes you.
3) There are multiple content-marketing services that you can use like Taboola.com or Outbrain.com (typically used for other industries but could work for you).
4) Hire a PR agent! The OP cleared $600k on his game and if your game is similarly good to his game and all that lacks is proper marketing then get serious about it. In my experience you can get a young / hungry PR person for $2 - 3k/mo to pay attention. More traditional $5 - 10k/mo. The best get $25k+ They get paid that much because there are typically clear returns.
I love HN because it's so cross discipline, just my two cents as a marketer.
1) Articles I've written have been on the front page of HN, Slashdot, and major subreddits multiple times.
2) My game has grossed more than the OP. We're doing just fine without a PR agent.
I'm not complaining about coverage, we've gotten about as much coverage and done as well or better (in a slightly longer timeframe). This feels a bit weird b/c my point is not to talk about my own game, but the context establishes my point.
My point is to provide data that contradicts the hypothesis "geez you wrote this article and people liked it! Bet it helped sales, huh?" I have seen many positive post-mortems by many high profile game devs, and every one I've seen share data on the "did your articles increase sales" has never shown correlated sales spikes of any significant size. My experience is exactly the same.
To further explain: positive written PRESS does not correlate to sales spikes all that much either, unless you attain simultaneous, saturation-level positive coverage across everything.
Ask the OP if his articles have moved the needle on sales. I bet you $100 they're tiny blips at best.
That's not to say these articles are not worth writing -- just that they DON'T lead to sales spikes.
To be clear, thanks for your 2 cents. Just trying to make it clear where I'm coming from.
Totally clear. I inferred the opposite "I wrote the same posts and it didn't matter". Thanks for the added context of you've done the same thing, had the same exposure level on posts and seen insignificant results. Appreciate you taking the time to respond -=
Just from a game consumer point of view, as opposed to a marketer (although, for the record, partly due to my childhood being largely devoid of regular advertising on cable/etc., I am, for better or worse, hard to market to):
An article like this is interesting to me, as a developer. I don't make games, although I have in the past, but I currently make software for a large company, occasionally feel less-than-enthused by it (Honestly, most of the time I'm fine/good/great and interested in my work, but sometimes I'm not), and seeing the numbers for people who don't work for a fortune 500 the way I do is interesting and valuable information. I'd gladly upvote it on this website, or Reddit if I ever read tech articles over there. If, in the future, I see this game on Steam, I'd click on the page, maybe read the reviews--that might lead to a sale.
The thing is, the article says nothing about the actual game. Nothing about this article (or other earnings related articles) is likely to make me go purchase the game, because there's nothing about the actual game in it, I've never heard of the game prior to this (it isn't something I already want), it isn't in a humble bundle with something I have heard of (it isn't associated with something I want), and I'm not presently reading or hearing positive reviews of the game from people I trust (I don't have a reason to start wanting it).
There's no reason this article (or those like it) would lead to a game sale from me. There's no reason for me to go immediately ignore all my better instincts and go purchase the game without reading the reviews--or even go and read the reviews. Actually, if anything, releasing successful sales figures makes me less intrinsically likely to go buy the game immediately after reading (as opposed to in the vague future), because it seems like the writer is doing well enough for him/her-self, and it isn't some genre or style or content that I think /really should definitely be rewarded/. (Even if it was--successful sales figures literally are the opposite of a call to action for me.)
I'd imagine the benefits of an article like this are much more long term. If, in the future, I'm searching through Steam for a new game, and I come across this game--I'm now much more likely to click through and read the reviews, and if they were largely positive and it was a genre I liked, consider buying. But it doesn't surprise me that you don't associate articles like this with a sales spike. They are literally the last thing that's likely to go get me to buy a game Right Now.
If your marketer is claiming that general good graces and articles are always good--publicity is pretty much always good. Indifference is likely to kill you, but I'll even go click through to the steam reviews on games I think are definitely bad, if only to read the reviews. I've even ended up purchasing a game I had thought was terrible because the reviews on Steam prompted me to read reviews elsewhere and I became convinced I was wrong. No matter how good (or bad) a game is, indifference is more likely to kill it with me than hatred. I think that's the main value of general marketers in the long term--they get the word out, if nothing else. (Good marketers would presumably lead me to want to buy, but I'm operating under the assumption that they're rare.)
What an insane number. I just can’t believe it. That income allows me to fund my next two games outright and continue pursuing my dream of being a top tier indie dev.
So it seems like it's profitable. One thing to keep in mind is that this game appears to have been produced by a single developer (it can be hard to tell because single indie developers still use we to seem more like official companies) working out of Texas. While the game probably wouldn't be profitable by Hacker News Silicon Valley engineer salary metrics, and might not be profitable if there are multiple team members, $610K is more than enough to sustain a single indie game developer living a normal life style for years. The game is also likely to have a longer tail, and will continue to make the developer non-trivial amounts of income during the development of his next two projects.
That was my thought.. figuring 1/3 went to apple/google/steam, that leaves 400k for the single developer for 2.5 years or so of work... around 160K/year .. and if it wasn't his only work during that time that's very good (unless you live in SF or NYC).
I've been building a mobile title for the last 6 months in my free time with a good buddy of mine. We've sunk about $10k into art/business, and have a small IOU list for the music, translation, etc. Very fun experience, but somewhat stressful not knowing if there will be any payoff or not in the end. The F2P market is also pretty hit and miss, and mobile discovery is of course horrible.
We're trying a Japanese crowd funding site at the moment, mostly for the advertising than the cash. We will be targeting Japanese and English on our first release.
Really awesome to read this, I've been reading his blog for years now and I still remember him making a few hundred dollars off of a game. Or making $4k in 1 year of sales of a game that he built with 3 people between November and June, while he worked as a barista to pay the bills.
It's absolutely wonderful then to see him generate $600k in two years of sales. He's obviously committed to game development long term and this will allow him to do just that without huge financial worries for a few years.
That having been said, his earlier experiences are the typical ones. (making $2500 in sales after spending 6 months on development and 12 months selling). It's a really though market.
I recently started a podcast about the financial side of the indie game business. On our debut episode Neven Mrgan (of Panic and co-creator of The Incident and Space Age) to open up about his sales figures. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidGalindo/20150129/235301/How_...
I'm attending indiecade.com next month, hoping that by showing my game to people willing to travel for an indie game conference, I'll get increased word-of-mouth & marketing>
I assume you mean Indiecade East (http://indiecade.com/east)?
Indiecade is a fantastic event, but I think of it as much more an event for indie devs to shoot the shit and have fun than a great place to find an audience.
You'll probably get to show your game to some appreciative fans, and you'll probably have a great time, but I wouldn't necessarily assume it'll be that great for your game. Might be slightly different if your game is being formally featured, but even then...
>Android managed to do fairly well with $9,605 in sales for 2014
This is pretty impressive. Usually the narrative is "don't bother with Android, no one will buy because they all pirate." His Android app made almost 70% of his iPad app.
I have a game I'm working on - a simple visual novel/point-n-click/hidden-object game. I see games of this type selling in the tens of thousands on Steam. There's a huge market of non-FPS gamers, mostly women, looking for fun and smart content. I personally love these games, they're relaxing and often have a decent story to tell.
My dream here is 10k sales at $10, which is doable with the right product that can be made by a very small team or even one person. I don't know if I will hit that, especially my first time around, but its fun to think that this is a practical goal for a one person dev. (I do coding, art, and music, but to be fair I might need to buy music as I pretty much suck at it even by video game standards.)
>Today, Cook, Serve, Delicious has grossed over $610,000 in sales across mobile, Steam, distro websites
This is really inspiring. I'm so happy for his success.
>Steam accounts for 78% of that financial figure.
I never would have guessed that. The tech press keeps telling me how hot mobile is and how lame PC's are. Sometimes I kick myself for missing the big mobile revolution. Steam is quite the juggernaut still, even with its 30% cut.
edit: when finished can i show it to HN or is that against the rules?
> I never would have guessed that. The tech press keeps telling me how hot mobile is and how lame PC's are. Sometimes I kick myself for missing the big mobile revolution. Steam is quite the juggernaut still, even with its 30% cut.
It may just be my personal prejudice based on my friend-group, but my impression is that there are a lot more people on PC willing to seek out, try, and talk about unusual/obscure games. More people on mobile tend to get their game recommendations from the "Top Paid" and "Top Free" lists, and if you're not Angry Birds or Minecraft Pocket you're not likely to have a lot of people notice you.
Not that PC gaming doesn't include a huge contingent of people mainly play the big releases (CoD etc), but even among my esports buddies who play DotA all the time there's still a lot of excitement about smaller studios.
EDIT: Speaking of, anybody want a copy of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons? I picked up a couple of extras during the last Steam sale to give away since it's not nearly as well known as it ought to be. Difficult to describe by genre, but I might call it an interactive fairytale? Requires a controller (each thumb stick controls a character).
> It may just be my personal prejudice based on my friend-group, but my impression is that there are a lot more people on PC willing to seek out, try, and talk about unusual/obscure games. More people on mobile tend to get their game recommendations from the "Top Paid" and "Top Free" lists, and if you're not Angry Birds or Minecraft Pocket you're not likely to have a lot of people notice you.
I want to add myself as a data point for you. I don't explore games (or apps) in the Play Store, because 99% is crap. Randomly picked app/game is something barely functional and evidently made for ad income. This makes me install only the reputable apps (like Dropbox, Acrobat Reader) or ones that were recommended by friends, on HN (I've bought an app just this month from a recomendation here), or somewhere else. As for games, I don't shop for those often on purpose, so unless someone suggests it to me, I probably won't find it. PC games tend to be easier to encounter, I have more avenues to check their quality before installing, and... there's this feeling that I have more control over what I install on PC than on my phone.
Echoing what the sibling comment said, I have almost 300 games on Steam (at least half of those are indies) while 4-5 on mobile. And my mobile games are Threes, Monument Valley etc. basically the super popular ones.
It's really sad to see some indie devs (or even, to go off on a bit of a tangent, projects like GNOME and Ubuntu Unity) killing themselves following the "PC is dead, mobile is the future" hype off a cliff instead of focusing on the much more stable and receptive PC userbase.
> I never would have guessed that. The tech press keeps telling me how hot mobile is and how lame PC's are.
I think part of it is the demographic. While I’m not much of a mobile gamer and biased towards PCs a bit, I believe the PC market is more accepting – both in terms of getting your work out there and people paying money for it – of indie titles (Steam Greenlight, Itch.io, indie publishers like Devolver that tend to stick with PC and consoles, etc.)
Mobile is hot for those that lucked out or had a lot of time and manpower to know how to work the markets on those platforms. For someone that wants to just get a game out there I think PC gives the best shot.
I have been building a app store/site for indie apps/games in the past few months, I am hoping that a smaller community would give indie developers greater outreach.
I'm in a similar boat. Not that I can't afford it--working in tech for a day job makes that much less of a problem--but more that actually finding the people to produce assets. Reliable art folks are really, really hard to come by. I've had artists disappear after doing a couple trials, before even getting paid for them. It's bizarre.
What strikes me is the way he missed the steam deadline.
It was actually painful in my stomach to read - all sorts of words like "unprofessional" or "cannot release it in that state". Yet the apparent support from the community (hey it's a beta, get some sleep) is amazing - and I think bespokes a new less Big Bang approach to releases that I am going to try and push at worl
To expand on this a little more, game development has an extremely long tail - perhaps <1% of games are Angry Birds or Minecraft, 2-3% may do decently, ~96% never make cost.
You're including all the zero-effort garbage that floods the app store in your speculative figures. And even those might break even because the budget was probably $12.
Look at the "real" indie games market (for the sake of argument, exclude anything not sold on Steam or GOG), and things look much more favorable.
Exactly. Every time I see a discussion about this someone brings up "There are 10,000 new games a month. Making money is pure luck."
When you remove all the student games, the angry birds clones, the board-game clones, and the just plain terrible games, you're left with a much smaller pool of competitors.
Being an indie developer is like being an actor. Everyone thinks that it's all about luck, but they forget that 99 out of a 100 people who move to California to make it in Hollywood, can't act their way out of a paper bag.
If you move to LA, and you have actual acting talent and the looks to match, chances are you can make money--maybe you won't be a huge star, but you've got a good chance at earning a living.
