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!

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!

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?

I also added a Most Popular section to the sidebar, which I’m very pleased with. At some point I want to add a recent posts list too (or popular recent posts). I could even add a Recommended section as the most popular aren’t necessarily the best ones (imho). However, this will just make the sidebar ultra long so maybe a smart way to do it would maybe be with some kind of tabbed control – although I’ve got no idea how to do that as HTML/php is not my forté (perhaps one of you has heard of a plugin for such a thing?)

Other changes are; I renamed Categories to Topics which is a tip I learned from Tim Feriss (excellent blog if you’ve never checked it out – also I recommend his book), and I moved my Twitter status down a bit so that people don’t click on it and exit the blog.

Now I’ve got to get used to the new Wordpress look and capabilities. Anything really cool I should know about?

In Feb 2009 it was at 500,000 hits so that’s 300,000 hits in the last 11 months, which = 27000+ hits a month.

These last 11 months have shown the most hits ever, despite me blogging slightly less than normal due to the fact that micro-blogging on Twitter is just so damn easy and fun! (If you would like to follow me on Twitter, check out the link over on the top right of the blog).

Back in Feb 2009 I thought I might hit 1,000,000 hits by now, but it seems like that figure is a few months off yet. Still that will be a great milestone to reach! And it seems so close now

The result was a really good amount of sales at an insanely high conversion rate (well into double figures). Needless to say, I’m very pleased with the result. It’s bolstered the total sales of Holiday Bonus nicely.

I love the fact that the game keeps on delivering year after year, especially as I was so passionate about making that game. I produced, designed, programmed and marketed that game by myself (with additional excellent feedback by the game’s artist) and I had no idea how well it was going to do, but it’s done good

So if you can get on the Big Fish Games Daily Deal, do it! If your game is good, and timed right (e.g. Christmas game at Christmas) you’ll do good too!

The sales are from the 6 games that I programmed and the Grey Alien BlitzMax Framework that I made, so 7 products in total (I cannot be more specific about which product sold what quantity due to contractual obligations). Most of the sales came from portals such as Big Fish Games, Oberon, and Reflexive, but I have also received a small amount of direct sales. I don’t really do any marketing for my site so any direct sales at all are a bonus.

The total revenue (after processing fees) from those sales is over £110,000 and it’s nearly 100% profit (97.6%), I’ve only spent a tiny amount on tools and game assets. The average earnings per hour is £34.88 (I kept detailed time logs of time spent making my products). Three games have earned me over £40 per hour.

The good thing about selling games online is that the figures above are not final! They will keep going up month after month, albeit dwindling over time.

Hopefully I’m proof that being successful as an Indie casual game developer is possible. You can do it too!

Happy New Year! Have a great 2010.

- Holiday Bonus
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Easter Bonus
- Xmas Bonus

A new game will be featured each day. My games are already ultra-low price and these discounts push them down to no brainer prices like $3.48. So please check out http://www.gamedujour.com/ and tell your friends and family. Thanks!