How much can your first indie game make?
This question has been answered many times in the last year and we now know some important things about full or part-time independent as well as hobbyist iOS game developers:
- The majority (median 25 percent) of their games earn from $1,000 to $10,000.
- If you're lucky, you'll be in the next 20 percent above that, earning from $10k to 100k.
- But you're more likely in the quarter below, earning only $100 to $1,000.
Here's why: the median earnings are almost linearly dependent on the amount of games you've published previously. If this is your first game, it'll most likely bring in just 500 bucks. I really recommend you check out the numbers of this survey for yourself, so that they seep down into your expectations of what you can realistically make out of this business.
Thinking you're somehow going to outrun this is like planning to make a living by playing the lottery. Sure, it happens to someone, but it'll not be you.
Why not to give up
There's something more I can add to the above numbers, and it's the story of not giving up. It all starts with the game's initial appearance on the App Store, when no more than your friends and random strangers shuffling through new releases buy your app.
You're happy that your first game even made it through the App Store review process, and you spend the night drinking with your colleagues, collecting bets on how many sales you'll get on the first day. We got 52. We released on Thursday and the number stopped at 260 at the end of the first weekend.
Monkey Labour weekly sales (version 1.0)
The project lead sent about 30 emails to various websites, trying to get the game noticed. We got a couple of good reviews, and even a feature from Apple under new and noteworthy games. That's usually a big deal and can greatly drive your sales, but not in January 2011. That's when Apple took away the usual games link in the App Store in exchange for a Best of 2010 retrospective. So for the whole time we were supposed to be featured, there was no way to reach that list on an iPhone. Needless to say, those few that saw it through iTunes didn't help our release much. The sales reached 270 in the second week, and then halved with each following one.
By the end of first month we already reached the miserably low long tail with about 10 apps sold per week. Total first month sales: 790. With about two thirds of the $1.99 price coming into our pockets, you can imagine we weren't jumping up and down in excitement. It was before the above-mentioned earnings survey was published, and we were finding out the results the hard way.
I would have expected it today, but even back then we didn't resort to panic (right away). "People have only started to notice the game," we thought. "We'll push an update and get back on track."
I finished my semester of teaching in February, so it was perfect time to get back to coding, creating all the neat little things I didn't have time to squeeze in before Christmas. It was a lot of fun, even making viral videos in the process (if you count one Reddit post and 5,000 views on YouTube "viral", which I don't, but it's still the most watched video on my channel, at any rate).
After I spent the aforementioned 71 hours coding the update for the game, it took me 113 more (that's one month of effective creative work) to run the marketing campaign, including making a new trailer (which flopped) and a special webpage with a promotion to drive traffic to our Twitter and Facebook page. I spent the rest of my time sending dozens of review request emails, organizing promo code giveaways, and replying to review comments and forum threads. If you just want to focus on your art and code, forget about running an indie game business.
The promotion went well (ish) and with over 200 people on our social networks (you gotta start somewhere) we promised a price drop to $0.99 when the update hit. The re-launch day was full of meeting nice people on our livestream and again it was fun, fun, fun. Enjoy it! That's what it's all about. If you don't love what you're doing, you're going to give up. Especially when the numbers come in the next day:
Monkey Labour weekly sales (v1.0 plus the first two weeks of v1.1)
We sold 215 copies in the first week and only 24 the one after. I was like, "Shit, we're right back in the long tail."
I was ready to accept that Monkey Labour was a flop. No one, NO ONE, decided to write about us. With barely over 1,000 units sold, I would be happy if Dawn of Play ever wanted me to work on games again, let alone allow me to send another email to a review site. Below you can see what my PR effort looked like -- if you ever wondered what kind of email to send out (or not, judging from the nonexistent results.)
My press review request email template
It's much better than the first version I wrote (the one where you get the idea to re-imagine the way you communicate with the press by sending a very personal story about how this game will touch your heart and soul -- yeah, forget it). But obviously these guys get tons of normal to-the-point emails just like this one. Result: our retro handheld homage would be left undiscovered by the wider public.
And then something amazing happened. I remember screaming and jumping around the university lab when I read the news: Monkey Labour got a great four-star review on the main iOS gaming site TouchArcade. Sales went boom:
Monkey Labour weekly sales (all versions)
The effect of a TouchArcade review proved the site's reputation. It's nothing like getting featured big-time by Apple or getting on the overall charts, but for a niche game such as ours it's been enough that I stopped feeling shitty about myself. I used the gained momentum and wrote a similar review request to other Metacritic-approved publications, landing a total of 11 critic reviews for the game. The final score of 75 made us the highest rated iOS app launched at that time (not that it mattered to sales, just to give you some perspective). My PR experience points poured in and I felt like I leveled up. I finally knew what I was doing.
Monkey Labour's combined press response on Metacritic
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Making the PC port was a fun technological challenge and it proved my Ba. thesis to have merit. Filming that stupid trailer in the attic was the most fun I had in that otherwise dreadful time (family stuff). I'm not sorry I put that time into it. There's much worse stuff I could have been doing.
for whats its worth, I liked the trailer, both of them. It was fun. I'm not one for copying what big boys do, do your own thing IMHO, isnt that why we went indie to begin with?
Anyway, I justed wanted to say I liked the attention to detail you gave the game. It oozes style, I think you should be very proud of what you created there, I really like the art design.
And, I'm still learning. Thanks for sharing this fantastic story!
Gigi.
I'm curious if you did anything more in the style of personal or guerrilla marketing (ha!). The sort of thing like Twitter, blogging, posting on forums, etc. One of the things that I notice with the indie community is that having a connection to the developer really helps. If you really put yourself out there, and as a human not a PR machine, it seems to help significantly in growing a fiercely loyal fan base that can really ratchet up your marketing efforts. Even articles like this drive interest to your game.
But it definitely does work as I've seen first hand later on with my personal projects. I've focused my marketing effort after hours into my illustration/gaming brand Retronator, keeping active on Facebook, forums, Twitter and it has paid off. My pixel art poster (http://www.retronator.com/tribute) was featured on Kotaku and Destructoid after being reblogged on Tumblr by it8bit, an influential site I kept networking with after they featured Monkey Labour. My posts then got featured on Tumblr radar and that lead to a massive increase in followers from what I was used to (in six hours from about 150 to 1500). That feels like a massive level up and your work exposure gets on the next step where each subsequent post gets 10x more attention. My Facebook page doesn't have that big amount but I keep putting content out, talking to people, appearing in all possible places and it has a slow, but constant growing in likes. Dawn of Play, where I'm not focusing my energy into marketing is sitting still at the amount of people we reached during the marketing of Monkey Labour.
So I am a firm believer in that marketing and developer-customer connection is something you can and must do constantly. That is provided you have a clear vision, unique values — basically something people will connect with strongly. I find that very easy to do with my personal brand, but much harder in a company where you have to bring everyone's values in sync first.
And there are games that people have to play to know they like it, and games that just mention gets everybody interested.
Sometimes I wonder, if I didn't had the chance to make games that I can at least somehow relate to, I'd rather quit programming altogether — get a job that deals with customers and then I think I'd be very happy to code in quiet in the evenings for a few hours every day. But I've never actually gone to testing this hypothesis out. :)
Always nice to hear the story of other indie developer who do it for the love of games. :)
Keep it up and thanks for the advice.
It's very awesome to see so much response actually. There is still hope for the written word after all. :D
I don't mean casual games aren't real games. I mean that if games ceased to exist, they wouldn't care. If game marketing ceased to exist, they wouldn't get any games anymore. If games aren't in their face, they won't search for it, because: they aren't looking for games.
The "make it and they'll come" is only valid for gamers. They'll only come if they are looking for it. If it's a niche, even better. If you're part of that niche, then it's perfect.
The casual audience is mostly passive. Make it for an active audience, and they'll come.
I was really nice to hear about your experience and how you went about learning from it. I've had a similar experience with my first game, but not been half as pro-active about promoting it! It's a great encouragement to hear that having your first game flop is perfectly normal. :)
Thanks for the great advice which I'm sure will come useful in future creations!
Your attitude and takeaways are also ones I'd absolutely say are correct, as someone who's been there. For people watching Indie Game: The Movie or hearing about the huge successes in the indie space, this is a great reality check for how hard it actually is to make a profit; how not every indie gem makes millions (or even enough to subsist) for its creator; and how in the end, games are a hit-driven business and the people who did succeed probably had a lot of luck as part of the equation.
From what I've seen and experienced, hard work, perseverance, and patience for that moment of success is the only formula for real success in this space... And doing it because you love it more than doing anything else is the only formula for staying sane during the ups and downs.
p.s. Haha, my brother has a similar dedication in his Ph.D. thesis :D
I might suggest a simpler trailer. You don't see AAA publishers filling the first 30 seconds of their trailers with unrelated nonsense. Just show the game.
The initial trailer for the iOS game was done by someone more competent as you can see here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9guRU8gIWBI
So we actually had a focused by-the-book app store trailer for part 1 of this story.
That said, if XNI is a good framework for porting XNA games to mac and iOS, that is probably a market in and of itself. You could probably make a small chunk as a middleware provider for any modestly successful XBLIGs or WP7s.
That said, XNI is free and open source which is something I do randomly sometimes to keep my karma points up I guess. I did package up the automatic translation from Obj-C to C#, called Automagical, and that has had a couple dozen developers paying for it so far. Even more interestingly, Zynga has spent an hour on the phone with me, trying to evaluate if Automagical would be a useful tool for moving their large codebase of Cocos2D games to WP7. One of their employees actually bought a license to give it a go, which led to that phone call. I'm a nice guy and there's no DRM and you can get the whole thing for $15 at the moment (beta). Keeping things indie-developer friendly was my guideline. Imagine how I'd feel if Zynga translated 10 games with it, saving millions in gained opportunity. So yeah, middleware is one way, but I guess I could write a separate article about that — or maybe one day a funny anecdote. :D
That being said, we are preparing an even more concise, fun and inaccurate version of the article. Stay tuned ... (on Facebook too if you want: http://www.facebook.com/dawnofplay)
I know this was your first game and you learned as you went, but I'd like to know more about the following:
- Did you try to sign with a publisher to help you with the promotion and distribution? A more mobile-focused one like Chillingo? If not, do you plan to do so in the future?
- Looking back, do you think the price should have been lower? Taking a look at the game's App Store page, I'm not seeing enough bang for you buck. Also, "endless hours of fun" and "uniquely designed achievements" don't seem like proper differentiating factors to me. Just my view which could be shared by other users and could be one of the reasons users weren't convinced to make the purchase.
- Did you every consider trying out a different business model? Like, for example, having the game free of charge and then selling additional modes/features for 0.79 EUR apiece.
- What about releasing the game as a Playstation Mini or Xbox Live Indie Game? Would it require too much effort to port the game to those platforms?
Thanks in advance for the answers :)
- No, no and no. But we are open to hearing anyone's proposals. This is not speaking necessarily for our company, but for me the charm of Indie development was the premise that you can do it on your own without any gatekeepers that publishers have turned out to be in the past.
- The price was $0.99 for most of the game's time and sales. You can't go lower than that, other than free. The thinking behind pricing it at $1.99 initially was in that it's an universal app which usually had higher price. As said we dropped that to $0.99 for the update and it remained such until sales have dropped to about 1 per day. After that my reasoning was that this is such a niche game that if someone wants a game&watch game, paying 1 or 2 bucks won't make a difference. I agree on the differentiators with you.
- We didn't try it, no. We joked that it should be free and have an in-app purchase to stock new batteries. :) But we did discuss having 3 different games in there. My thoughts were that you have all this overhead with just making all the infrastructure for the game, it would be very big bang/buck to add two or three extra games in there. Somehow like pinball games have one table free that you can try and 2 extras to buy. But this was only my thinking afterwards and has somehow influenced how we're approaching our next game.
- The game would easily be release on Xbox Live Indie Games. I was an XNA developer from the very first beta and love the platform - obviously, since I created XNI which is a copy of XNA for Objective-C. Our windows version runs on XNA so it could easily run on an xbox. But XBLIG has unfortunately lost all my hope of being a good distribution channel. Unless Microsoft brings all games, disc, downloadable, live arcade and indie games into a combined games channel where all have to compete for attention and pricing in the same arena, I just don't see it becoming as important for small developers as the App Store turned out to be.
Hope this gives some insight. :)
I had a couple questions I'd like to ask:
1. Why did you decide to make the transisition from iOs to PC/Mac? To me this game doesn't seem the best fit on those platforms so I'm a little confused why you made that decision.
2. What were the reasons Steam etc. blocked you project from being released?
2. I guess it can't hurt to show the actual response: 'Thank you for submitting "Monkey Labour" for potential Steam distribution. We have taken a look at the information provided and determined that Steam is not a good fit for distribution. It is our company policy not to provide specific feedback on a submission but we would like you to consider Steam distribution for your future products.'
So no specifics, but I don't think it's a wrong decision. It was a long shot in my eyes. I replied that we love the platform and will definitely try again with our bigger projects in the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIaqWl7eLDw
game_is_a_flop/
Lots of bashing there, but I'm bringing it up to illustrate the naive perspective - which I disagree with - which is "no True Scotsman would make this game." Needless to say, /r/gamedev is full of people who have never shipped a game(amongst a few who have).
Average revenue increasing with more games made is really indicative of the learning curve involved in making a game that markets well. It seems like there's no substitute for experience in getting past the curve - pretty much every success story has some footnote of "after a few years learning" to it.
EDIT: after going through ALL of them they raise some interesting points after all, but boy it is exhausting. Awesome to get so much feedback anyway, lots to learn, especially for me.
It's also great that hardly anyone here has told you what you did wrong or what you might have done better. So many wannabe indie developers think there is a magic bullet for success and see these articles as an opportunity to offer advice on things they really have no experience of. Sure you could have done something's differently but would it have made that big a difference? Frankly I doubt it. Indie success is a bit of a crap shoot at the end of the day :)
Thanks for taking the time to comment, really appreciated.
I was initially surprised and sad that you couldn't get your game on Steam, since a 100,000 sales at $1 each even with the Valve cut is still substantial - but on second thought the appish quick play, which is a positive on mobile, is a liability for Steam. It's not the sort of game I'd expect to find there. I'm not sure what you can learn from that except what you already learned - games targeted for mobile might not be well suited for PC.
This:
"But if you love doing it, that won't be a problem. You'll keep your day job, you'll still be doing websites for business clients, and you'll still be creating games after hours, because this is what you want to do.
Your first game will probably be a flop in business terms, but it's an epic win for you."
That's me, except my day job is actually making browser-based Flash games for clients.
It's also interesting that you mentioned the $500 value for a first game, because that's EXACTLY the amount that my first Flash game made. (:
Nice article. Thanks for sharing.
___________________________
- Ziro out.
"Plan your marketing as much as you plan your game."
So much of this article is about marketing. Even at the end of this story, you still seem to think that if you'd just marketed it differently -- entered more competitions, made friends with gamers online, etc -- then you could have done better. But it seems like it's really a story of how marketing can't make an uninteresting product sell. You seem very proud of the 75 metacritic, and the few critics who really liked that game. That's ok. But these aren't really signs of a 'great' product -- just a solid, reasonable one. In the sea of apps, I wouldn't naturally expect a solid product with niche appeal to rise very high, no matter how good the creator is at 'reddit mastery' and press releases.
"Make a better game" is, of course, not very useful advice! But I wish some of the lessons you learned were more about game design, and less about marketing and business plans. Could you recognize failure faster? Could you change your process to lead you to ideas that really capture the broader public's imagination?
I could be wrong but I think the article would have been focused on game design if that was what was most important. If I received a 75 I would know that the game creation effort must be improved - and possibly making some marketing and 'business' adjustments.
Thanks for your feedback. It confirms my general takeaway from reddit. I'm still glad I wrote this, as without readers' feedback I would lack this better perspective.
My thoughts: Change the name of the game to something that sounds like fun! And make sure to ask your target audience what names they like. Then re-launch the game. Obviously the people who got past the name (and maybe cover art) understood what a gem you created. The best part about being an indie is that you can experiment in ways that the big companies can't. :)
Surely, you changed my life, at least for now!
This don't have a price.
Really, thanks.
I'm glad I have a day job. While I have not done much in the last year, I hope to make something again soon, but it will be because I find the process fun, not for profit.
Now I wonder about something. Gamasutra is quite specific, and usually for people following closely the industry news, it's not exactly the place to touch a large public of random gamers.
My point is, it would be interesting to know the impact of a (semi) post-mortem Gamasutra article such as this one, on your sales. I assume it gets you at least to a double-digit number of sales, but maybe something more? I know it's not the purpose of the article, but it is still somehow a part of talking about the game.
It would be nice to see how it influences when you address such public with an article describing all your process.
I think it's a lot easier to make some money on a Flash game, but the ceiling is also pretty low.