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I've track a lot of data about my indie business in a giant spreadsheet and recently I did an analysis of 3 games to see the breakdown in sales per platform. I had a gut feeling that PC way outperformed Mac and mobile but I wanted to 100% confirm that.
Just in case it's not clear from the image here's the percentage split:
- PC 91%
- Mac 6%
- Mobile 3%
- Console 0%
3 games = $160,800
I analysed the sales of the following 3 games:
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Released Nov 2006 Total revenue = $55,800
- Holiday Bonus. Released Dec 2006. Total revenue = $54,000
- Spring Bonus: Released April 2011. Total revenue = $51,000
Distribution Methods
Those three games have been released in the following places:
- Direct sales via my site on PC/Mac
- Mac App Store
- Numerous casual portals including Big Fish Games, iWin, Real, Oberon, Amazon etc. Mostly PC but some have taken Mac versions.
- iOS
- Google Play/Kindle/Nook
- XBLIG (only for Holiday Bonus)
It should be noted that the Mac versions of Holiday Bonus and Oz came out about 1 year after the PC version, so they have not has as long to catch up with PC sales.
Also it should be noted that Holiday Bonus mobile was released in Dec 2011, and Spring Bonus mobile was released in April 2012. There is currently no mobile version of Oz.
So yes, obviously my pie chart is skewed in favour of PC, although Mac has had a pretty good chance to compete.
Only one game was released on XBLIG as an experiment and clearly that market isn't interested in casual games judging by the poor revenue, which is fair enough. Conversion rate is actually pretty good (>20%), so many people who play it do actually buy it, but downloads are just super-low.
Mobile
Of course my mobile games haven't been on sale for as long as the PC/Mac versions, so haven't had a fair shot. However comparing the launch of my mobile games to the PC version, there is still a huge difference in revenue.
I've self-published one mobile game and used a publisher for another one. The published game definitely did better, so that's useful information. Even though it's nice to self-publish and track your own sales stats and have complete control etc, I believe you are more likely to make money by using a good publisher - unless you have a great game that can garner tons of press attention. My games are "just" casual games and so the press is basically not interested.
I do have an Oz mobile port on the way and Holiday Bonus GOLD was just self-published on mobile (it was a last minute thing so not enough time to get a publisher), plus I've got something in the pipeline for Spring Bonus. So I've not given up on mobile yet and I expect my mobile revenue to grow, but still I don't think it'll touch the PC revenue.
Spring Bonus (last 19 months)
I produced a revenue by platform pie chart just for Spring Bonus because it's a much more recent game than the other two so presents a more accurate picture. Here it is:
You can see that mobile revenue is higher than Mac but still less than 10%.
Conclusion
Well the article title says it all: PC is not dead and mobile is shit.
Of course I make a certain type of game and the market is more geared up to sell PC copies of those, and indies releasing PC games on Steam certainly find they can do pretty well on there too compared to other platforms. Other developers are having great success on mobile - good for them. But I would urge caution in the mobile market. It's HUGELY over-saturated and hard to get noticed. I got my existing games ported to mobile as a low-risk approach, but there are teams of developers out there spending 6-12 months on mobile games and I personally think that's a recipe for disaster in most cases.
Looking at my numbers, perhaps I'd be best sticking to PC only? Putting all my energy into that and not buying expensive Macs (and constantly upgrading the OS and Xcode, and farting around with provisioning profiles and certificates) and not buying an ever growing army of mobile devices to test on. Most devs have a PC anyway, even if they just play games on it! For me anyway, PC is the clear winner.
If you are a cross-platform dev and want to share your numbers in the comments, that would be awesome. Thanks!
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Care to share your data on how you marketed your game to the mobile space, as well, so that we can see what steps you took to avoid some of the common pitfalls that come with that market (App Store placement, price point valuation, et al)?
Thanks!
Thanks Gord. The title is a bit sensationalist I admit as it is early days for me and the mobile market. I do expect to see the % of revenue increase in that space for me though, but I'm not convinced it'll be massive unless I "get lucky". As for marketing of the two iOS titles:
- One of them (Holiday Bonus) was self-published and I used social media, a newsletter to existing customers, press release, blog and forums posts to promote it, contacted a few press (to no avail). The game had Lite and full versions.
- The other (Spring Bonus) was published by Hothead (so they promoted it to users of their other games and did other stuff). The game was a Universal binary with IAP to unlock level packs. They managed to get it featured by Apple which was cool and got it on Nook and Kindle, and it definitely made more money than the self-published title, but it still wasn't that much unfortunately for us all.
I'm releasing a third port soon, hopefully to be published by Big Fish Games, but that's not certain by any means.
The issue with the mobile market is finding your consumer. It's difficult, but not impossible, and with this being the first 5 years of 'serious' life for the platform, it's not like improvements aren't on the rise.
With 2013 being the Year of the Crazy Hardware (OUYA, Project Shield, Gamestick, etc... etc...), the impending hype wagons are liable to setup, catch fire and breakdown before mobile goes the way of the dodo.
Mobile is a platform that exists with gaming as a secondary consideration - never forget that. Finding your users in that market may be impossible, depending on the type of users you're targeting.
You can't just design for your userbase, you have to design for them where they exist, as well.
One billion plus devices and a lot of them are virtually different thanks to Google's inability to keep hardware manufacturers from diddling inside the OS. This makes Android cost more to develop for than it actually should, since publishers/developers have to keep in mind that a Samsung Galaxy S3 is inherently different from, say, a Motorola Droid Razr. This is also the main hurdle of things like Ouya and Project Shield. It's hard to develop for mobile with a particular user base in mind since your user base might be made up of so many different devices that should run the same, but they're don't.
While it certainly exists solo developers or small teams out there that hit big with their first title, people tend to forget that Angry Birds was Rovio's 52 game, and that after they almost ran bankrupt.
We, for instance, have chosen to build up on some of our old IP we had success with on the Java ME platform many years ago, to build long term value. While the game is not a typical iOS or Android game (is an old fashion 2D platformer), and it is built upon very old technology designed for devices in a total different era (old java mobiles) and therefor far from well implemented and being a good game on the Android platform, we are slowly and steady gaining success on the Android platform, both through self-publishing and through external publishers. Not to mention that the game has opened completely new doors for us, allowing us to work with well-known IP from the TV and movie industry.
And thank you for sharing! :-)
@jake, I'm currently in a game dev program and have heard several people make claims to this end (people much younger, fresh out of high school, generally). That said, there are the "PC master race" bunch who refuse to acknowledge anything else as a valid platform.
I'm curious though (not being familiar with your stuff), are your games particularly suited to mobile? Beyond shovelware, a big problem in mobile is ports (whether or not they're skilfully done). Some just don't fit the platform well at all, no matter the level of polish (eg. the GTA games, most games with twin virtual sticks+ a host of onscreen buttons).
At the moment, I feel like it's almost better to just develop separate products for different platforms-porting might be easy, but in some cases it seems like it could hurt your personal brand.
My current project (/ first one I'll be releasing to the public) is designed around a simple mouse interface, but will nicely transition to touch...barring a single mechanic I still haven't cracked yet.
At the moment though, I'm mainly concerned with skill building, not trying to get too caught up in counting chickens.
I'm assuming that you sell a significant amount of copies through your web-store. How does your audience find your games? Do you have an established audience by selling through different portals? Are you running advertising?
I sell hardly any games direct from my site - that source is about 1% of my revenue.
The bulk of my revenue is from the casual download portals like Big Fish Games, iWin, Real and that's how the customers find them. I don't do advertising. I also use the Mac App Store which is OK, but not massive.
evenue_from_android_games.php
It's not cross platform, just android. And it makes me feel like a stupid indie dev not trying the PC market... To tell you the truth I tried to sell PC games on my own but it's so hard to sell something on internet when no one knows you... But I believe being on a portal makes the difference but so far I couldn't get my games on a portal, they weren't interested at that time. A question of quality but also the game engine I used. Maybe I should try again now?
As a relatively new developer making something for xbox live but considering a PC version too, this was a really interesting piece to me.
I wonder, have you done, or would you consider doing a similar piece on the pros and cons of various PC distribution methods?
Anyway, I'm only experienced in direct sales and sales via casual download portals as I don't have any indie games on Steam or other "indie" friendly portals yet. I'm considering a piece mentioning who I've found to be the best casual portals anyway.
My thought is that increased number of stores on PC (game portals/your own site/etc.) helped drive discovery of your apps. I would suspect that the number of impressions- people coming across your game- is much higher on PC because you can advertise much cheaper than the one store solution of iOS/Android/XBLA. I would also suspect that the conversion of impressions to sales would be consistent across platforms, and that the main reason for better sales on PC is coupled with the amount of impressions on that platform. Do you track impressions/conversion at all?
Don't get me wrong, I kind of think the same way, just wanted to point out you could give better arguments, because I'm sure you have tons of more data, and some of it could be shared. Besides, a little promotion on your games wouldn't hurt either :).
What is that market interested in? What is the basis for your statement here? Did you invest any energy into promoting your game on XBLIG, compared to other platforms?
That market appears to be mainly interested in zombie games, avatar games, minecraft clones etc. at least based on the various XBLIG sales figures/charts I've seen floating around over the years. Also, it's kind of a no-brainer that a casual game wouldn't do well on there based on the Xbox demographic compared to the typical casual gamer. Still we thought we'd put it on there for fun and just in case there was a hidden market for it, but sadly there wasn't.
Apart from the usual social media posting, forum postings, writing to a few websites, and newsletter to my customers, I didn't do any extra marketing for the game on XBLIG. Nor do I do any extra marketing for my PC/Mac games because I rely on the casual portals who distribute my games to do that. The casual portals normally only show a new game for a single day on their front page and that is enough to drive hundreds of thousands of downloads whereas a game on XBLIG gets exposure for several days in the New Games list. If I had that much exposure on a casual portal, my games would have sold 6 figures each instead of mid-5 figures.
Basically my game on XBLIG gets very low downloads compared to PC/Mac but is converting at 25%, which I believe is pretty good. So game quality is not an issue for the types of people who go looking for a game like that, but simply the number of downloads is low compared to most other games on there, and indeed compared to games on other platforms. (Similar problem exists with Windows Phone in my experience.)
Even the games that do "well" on there have poor revenue compared to lesser games on other platforms, such as the excellent XBLIG games by Radian Games for example. Indie games on XBLIG have frequently had trouble with exposure on the Xbox dashboard, often being tucked away somewhere hard to find in the menu system - so that doesn't help downloads, plus I think most people only bother to look at XBLA instead.
Hope this reply is somewhat helpful. I didn't go into much detail in the article because the main focus is Desktop vs mobile.
Where as the PC game market is all over the place, you have free games and $10 indie games and $60 triple A games, there is already a solid precedent for the price points at each level.