image by yomanimus

Woot! I finally reached an awesome milestone which is that my games have grossed over $1,000,000. I have made 6 games and one game framework, and I store all the sales figures and royalty report information in a *big* spreadsheet. Of course I only receive Net revenue, but based on the various deals that I have with the portals I have been able to work backwards to an approximate gross revenue for each game.

It’s pretty awesome to think that people have spent over $1,000,000 on games that I made. That’s a good feeling and an indicator that I’m doing something right Also last December I hit a milestone of over 100,000 units sold online and this figure has gone up a lot since then too.

Anyway, I’ve been looking forward to hitting this milestone for a little while. I’ll report back when I hit $2,000,000. Wish me luck!

How is your gross revenue doing? I really want to hear some 8 figure numbers!

Woo, my site has finally had 1,000,000 hits! By hits I mean page views that increment the crappy little counter thing I have at the bottom of each page. The counter has been running since November 2005 so that’s 4 years and 9 months (57 months) – an average of 17.5K hits per month.

I previously noted that I’d hit 800,000 hits in January 2010, so that means there have been 200,000 hits in the last 7 months, which is an average of 28.5K hits per month which is my best average yet!

Now of course these figures are pretty lame in the scheme of things when compared to some other sites, but I’m proud nonetheless. It’s always worth celebrating these milestones and then setting your sights on the next one. So what is my next one? 1.5 Million by end of 2011 or sooner. See you there!

The other day I ran a complete sales history report on BMT Micro, the payment provider I use for my games on Grey Alien Games, and noted that the total revenue had just gone over $1000. I first set up my website for direct sales in mid-December 2006 and it’s now 43 months later. So that’s an average of $23-something a month.

So you must be thinking, “wow that’s a really crap amount of money to have made from direct sales”. And you’d be right! That’s because almost all of my sales and money as an Indie has come from portals (well over $100,000). I don’t actively market my own website or use my newsletter email list etc. but I still make a few random sales a month, which is nice. The portals are powerful sales vehicles for certain types of games – casual games – which is of course the type of games that I made.

The point I’m making is that direct sales are not necessarily the holy grail. In fact I’ve made nearly $1000 from Google Adsense on my website, and I’ve made $4400 from selling advertising on my website, and I made nearly $2000 from affiliate sales (and this would have been more if I didn’t have to shut it down due to a non-compete clause.) I’ve even made 100 Euros for writing a blog post. There are many ways to gain an income once you have an established website/blog with traffic.

If I started making non-casual downloadable games, then for sure I’d really go all out to make direct sales work. But if I made iphone, Flash or console games, then my site would merely be a marketing vehicle for such games – in fact these days I’d say that social media probably has more of a marketing impact than an plain website.

One last thing to consider: $1000 is more than $0. It shows that people do like to buy my games, and that I must have got something right. Many Indies struggle with even making $50 from their first game. But don’t give in, keep refining each game, and keep improving your marketing, and you’ll get there!

How are your direct sales doing?