Back in November 2011 I wrote a post about how my casual games seem to have a very long tail in terms of sales. I followed this up with a 5 minute speech/slideshow at Full Indie in December 2011 called “Holiday Bonus Postmortem”.

Here’s the video:

Stay tuned to this blog for a follow up on my December 2012 sales (hint: it was my best month ever!) and how the mobile versions performed.

image by DrJohnBullas

Sorry about that, there are proper graphs further down.

I recently ran a Thanksgiving sale on my site offering up to 70% of my casual games and I’d like to share the results with you.

Deals

The basic deal was that I was offering 50% off my 5x match-3 games (not Fairway Solitaire and Unwell Mel because Big Fish Games own those) via a coupon code.

Then I had 3 bundles:

2x Christmas-themed games for 60% off (PC only)
3x match-3s for 65% off (PC and Mac)
5x match-3s for 70% off (PC only)

Payment Provider

I use BMT Micro as my payment provider. They have various discount schemes that I was able to use for this sale. When I create a bundle, all the games are listed individually so that keys and download links can be send out for each one. I highly recommend BMT Micro for their customer service, and ability to deliver.

Promotion

- The sale started on Tuesday 22nd November and ran for 9 days until Wednesday 30th November.

Day 1:
- I put a coloured banner about the sale on the top of my page and showed some fancy bundle images.
- I emailed Gamezebo (a site that reviews casual games) and they mentioned the sale on day 4 which was my best day for sales.
- I tweeted about it twice on the first day (got 10 RTs, thanks everyone); made a Facebook post on my Grey Alien Games Facebook page; posted on the BlitzBasic and IndieGamer forums; and wrote a blog post about it.
- I emailed my mailing list of newsletter subscribers. An email was sent to 384 people and got 137 opens (35.68%) and 83 clicks (18.75%). It was text only and maybe could have benefited from a picture. I got a few bounces and a couple of unsubscribes, not many.

Day 3:
- I tweeted about it again on day 3 (got 6 RTs). Had about 1250 followers, so my best RT % on day 1 was about 0.8%, which isn’t exactly stellar.
- I also told indiegamer about it on day 3 via Twitter and got a retweet a couple of days later and also posted a comment on their blog post about sales but it got held up for a few days before appearing.

Day 6:
- I tweeted about 3 days being left (got 4 RTs)

Day 9
- I tweeted about it being the last day (got a few RTs)

I didn’t do these things:

- Contact Jay is Games, and I probably should have.
- Send out a press release or contact any other press/bloggers.
- Post on any other forums. I only post on ones I’m an active member on so it doesn’t feel like spam.
- Advertising. Probably should have used up a free Google Adwords $100 credit if I could be arsed.

Results

And now for the bit you’ve all been waiting for…drumroll…

29 units sold. Total revenue $55. Not exactly impressive, but hey it’s more than zero!

Because most of those sales were bundles, there were only 10 actual customers, 2 of which were existing customers (presumably from my newsletter, meaning it had a 0.5% success rate, which I’m quite disappointed by). Still at least that’s 8 new customers who signed up to my newsletter so I can inform them of future deals and the soon-to-be-released Holiday Bonus for iPhone/iPad/Android/WP7.

Also, weirdly, no one used the 50% discount coupon code, even though two customers bought single games (at full price)!

Traffic

- I checked my site’s monthly bandwidth usage before and after the sale and it went from about 3GB to 5.65GB, which wasn’t much out of the ordinary.
- I also tracked the number of hits on my site via my primitive visit counter and I got about 3000 hits on the first day and 2000 hits on each subsequent day. Again not much our of the ordinary.

There certainly wasn’t any kind of server meltdown.

Conclusion

For me this sale was an experiment because I’ve never done one before. I wanted to learn how to sell game bundles using BMT Micro, and I wanted to see how effective my Twitter followers are at spreading the word and how effective some other channels are (like my newsletter).

I’m crazy busy with several main projects right now, so I didn’t have any spare time to spend on better marketing or anything; I just wanted to see what I could do with a sort of basic minimum. The answer seems to be, not very well (take heed other indies!)

Part of the problem is that I’m selling casual games and I only really got one mention in the casual gaming press, and most of my Twitter followers are indie game devs, so they aren’t that interested. I thought that I’d have made more sales from my newsletter (which contains lots of existing customers), especially as a 70% discount is a pretty strong offering, but it wasn’t to be. Also of course I was competing against TONS of other sales and indie bundles.

I’ll probably try again at Christmas though and see what happens. Wish me luck!

Hope you enjoyed reading this post.

If you have any advice or thoughts, please leave a comment. Thanks!

Since starting Grey Alien Games I have sold over 100,000 units online. I’m very proud of that figure. When you see an number like that it’s: a) a good indicator that you are successful at what you do, and b) fairly easy to imagine it being 1,000,000 instead.

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.

Last night I logged another payment on my accounts and I was overjoyed to see that I have finally hit the awesome milestone of making £100,000+ ($160,000+ at today’s exchange rate) from selling games. This revenue excludes my salary at Big Fish Games Vancouver.

My first game was sold in December 2005 so I’ve made £100,000 in 3.5 years. That’s about £28500 salary a year which is OK. Of course in the first few years I didn’t make much money, most of the money is in the last couple of years since I hooked up with BFG as a contractor. The money comes from 7 products which includes 6 casual games and 1 game framework.

It’s worth noting that, based on last year’s revenue, this year’s revenue (including BFG salary) will probably be close to or higher than the £100,000 mark (depending on if I can get some more passive income streams on the go that I’ve been planning – watch this space). So the moral is keep working hard and get really good at what you do, and it’ll pay off. Oh and also “Think Positive” of course!

Now my next game sales target is to reach 100,000 units sold and I’m very close to that. I’ll post again when it happens.

I recently posted sales stats for my Xmas Bonus game and now it’s time for some Easter Bonus sales stats!

Easter Bonus was my second game and it was launched early in 2006 on several portals. It was based on the Xmas Bonus code base but with some minor improvements, plus it had better graphics and music.

Initially the game was published by Indiepath (but I negotiated a higher cut than for Xmas Bonus and this made a good difference to my revenue) and then later on I took back the publishing control and launched it via Oberon which gave a good sales spike during Easter 2007 (see graph below).

Sales Stats

Sales stats are in US Dollars for easy comparison.

- Direct Sales: 14 (same as Xmas Bonus at time of writing)
- Portal Sales: 444 (similar to Xmas Bonus but a bit higher)
- Total Sales: 459 (similar to Xmas Bonus but a bit higher)

- Direct Revenue: $219.00 (approx.) (This is double Xmas Bonus because the price was double!)
- Portal Revenue: $2011.42 (approx.) (This is quite a lot higher than Xmas Bonus)
- Total Revenue: $2230.43 (approx.) (This is quite a lot higher than Xmas Bonus)

Note: This is the net revenue, so the value of sales minus transaction fees and publisher/portals commissions. Gross revenue would have been a lot higher, maybe $9000+

Note: The game was originally launched at $19.95 and I kept it at that price instead of dropping it to $9.95 like I did with Xmas Bonus in its second year. This is why its revenue is a lot higher than Xmas Bonus.

Check out this graph of sales over the last 3 years. You can see peaks for the first two Easters but then it pretty much fizzles out. The first two peaks are big because they correspond to the initial launch and “re-launch” where I asked the portals to re-promote it again because it was a seasonal game. After that I didn’t bother to re-launch it because I was focussed on my newer more successful games. Note that it still sells a few copies every month, it’s slightly more consistent than Xmas Bonus.

Expenses

- Artist, Stock Art, Music, Shareware Submission Service: $736.12

- Total profit: $1494.31

- Profit per unit: $3.26

The main spend here was art. The game has great pixel art by Jason Faramus, who I made contact with on the Blitz forums. The stock art was used for the title screen and options menu. Some of the music was free from http://incompetech.com/ and some was composed by Damien Sturdy (also from the Blitz forums).

Almost everything in Xmas Bonus was stock art or programmer art and the music was free low quality stuff (but OK). However I wanted to up the stakes with Easter Bonus and have properly customised art and music so that the game was more cohesive and I think it worked well. But in hindsight, the pixel art look may not have helped sales (awesome and cute as it is). Other games at the time were coming out with great pre-rendered 3D shapes and fancy backgrounds so mine didn’t quite live up to them in the eye candy department. This is why I switched to BlitzMax for Oz (to do more fancy special effects with scaling, rotation and alphablending) and why the producer of that game paid for pre-rendered 3D shapes and painted backgrounds.

Still, I’m fond of this game and it has made a little bit more profit than Xmas Bonus and will probably continue to slightly outpace it over time.

Effective Hourly Wage

I kept a detailed time log of working on Easter Bonus and the total hours were 184 – this includes marketing and portal contracts etc at the end. It took less time to make than Xmas Bonus because I already had a code base to work with, but I still added in some improvements. A lot of the time was getting the new look and feel right and there was also a certain overhead in designing and testing some new levels (although a few are actually the same as Xmas Bonus!). I basically “re-skinned” Xmas Bonus, as some people scornfully put it, but note that it was not a simple quick task at all as the total hours worked shows.

Anyway, this gives an effective hourly wage of $8.12. Not a huge wage at all, but it’s $3.00 more than for Xmas Bonus, so it showed progress! My other games seriously blast this out of the water though (some add a zero to the hourly wage!)

Keep an eye out for my Holiday Bonus sales stats coming soon. They are pretty rad.

Once again, I hope that you enjoyed this post and that you found it useful (either as inspiration or as a warning, lol). Thanks for reading!

Jeff Vogel, founder of Spiderweb Software and creator of the excellent Geneforge and Avernum series of Indie RPG games, has posted some sales stats for Geneforge 4 in two parts: part 1, part 2.

It’s pretty interesting reading. Geneforge 4 has *almost* made a profit ($120K cost, $117 sakes). He includes salaries for everyone in his expenses so at least we know everyone got paid. The game will go on to make pure bottom line profit in a few months and will continue to profit for years.

One particularly striking phrase is:

“Don’t underestimate the value of owning your own intellectual property.”

I think that’s so true. If you can build a brand (like he has) and leverage your IP for years it’s an excellent path to big passive income. Well done Jeff. I’m keen to meet Jeff one day as he appears to be based in Seattle and I’m not far away in Vancouver, plus I visit Seattle often for meetings at BFG.

Quick warning: I bought Avernum 5 a year ago and I’m still playing it. It’s HUGE, excellent value for money and doesn’t get boring. Ignore the old school graphics and sound, the game is solid and has a really interesting plot that is somewhat out of the norm.

A year ago I made this post which details the effective hourly wages I’ve earned from 5 of my products. The fantastic thing about games (and other digital products) is that once the work is done you can keep on selling them and making money (you still need to do some/lots marketing of course depending on the product). So that post is now *way* out of date because the effective hourly wages for some of my products have more than quadrupled since then!

The effective hourly wage for Xmas Bonus has not quadrupled though. It was my first game (launched in December 2005) and it looks pretty primitive now. It’s not sold in very many locations and I haven’t bothered to “relaunch” it on any portals. However I still believe that it’s a good game and the customers who buy it seem to enjoy it. For me it’ll always be special as my first commercial game that was the launchpad for my career as a casual game developer.

Sales Stats

I’ve kept the sales stats in dollars because that seems to be the “universal” currency these days when discussing games, mainly because most of the big portals are based in the US and that is currently where most of the customers live too.

- Direct Sales: 14
- Portal Sales: 411
- Total Sales: 425

- Direct Revenue: $111.00 (approx.)
- Portal Revenue: $1362.66 (approx.)
- Total Revenue: $1473.66 (approx.)

Note: This is the net revenue, so the value of sales minus transaction fees and publisher/portals commissions. Gross revenue would have been a lot higher, maybe $8000+

Note: The game was originally launched at $19.95 but when I relaunched it again the year after I dropped the price to $9.95 at a few places. However, the most sales were made in the first year anyway.

Check out this graph of sales over the last 3 years. You can see peaks each Christmas season. The first two peaks are big because they correspond to the initial launch and “re-launch” where I asked the portals to re-promote it again because it was a seasonal game. After that I didn’t bother to re-launch it because I was focussed on my newer more successful games.

Expenses

- Blitz Plus: $52
- Protean IDE: $45
- IStockPhoto: $20
- greyaliengames domains: $38
- Web hosting: $27

- Total expenses: $182

- Total profit: $1291.66

- Profit per unit: $3.04

Of course almost all of these expenses were for reusable things such as the programming language and the website. The only one-off expense was some artwork from IStockPhoto costing $20 (gone are the days when you can make a game with cheap stock art if you expect it to sell any decent numbers).

Effective Hourly Wage

For my other products I’ve kept a detailed time log and so I can very accurately calculate the effectively hourly wage by dividing the profit by the number of hours worked. However, I did not keep a proper log for Xmas Bonus, and also a lot of the time was spent just figuring out how to program some technical stuff that commercial games need like an icon, windowed mode etc.

Anyway, based on the logs of my other games I estimated that Xmas Bonus took approximately 250 hours. This gives an effective hourly wage of $5.17. Not exactly an impressive figure, but it’s more than none! Every other game I’ve made since has made more money (a lot more money). The fact that my first game sold any copies at all and made any money is an achievement in itself. It encouraged me to keep going and to move onto bigger and better things.

Keep an eye out for more sales stats soon including Easter Bonus and Holiday Bonus (the stats for this game are pretty exciting).

I hope that you enjoyed this post, thanks for reading.

Recently I posted some Fantastic Indie Sales Stats which I collated from a lengthy post on Indiegamer. Then I asked if anyone else on Indiegamer had any sales stats they’d like to post. I got some pretty interesting ones which I’ve summarised below.

Big thanks go to all the forum members for openly sharing their sales. Many people have told me how much they appreciate seeing these sales stats and how motivating they’ve been.

$2.50

Meds’ Games started the ball rolling with a report of 1 game sold for a net profit of $2.50 minus whatever fees Plimus (the payment provider) charged. Well it’s a start, congrats! I wonder if the sale was from a family member (my mum bought my first few games )

$250,000 (well nearly)

In direct contrast to the first sales stat, Scharloposted some great information about a Casual game called Home Sweet Home that they released in December 2007:

$217,000 development cost (actually about 18% less because of Ontario tax credit)
Sales for 1st year : approx $240,000 (not including retail)
Direct sales: <3% of revenues
Mac version: <3% of revenues
Flash version: <0.05% of revenues

The sales are fantastic but the costs are also very high, but that's because they include salaries. So presumeably everyone got paid a decent amount and a profit has been made. Furthermore the game will probably keep on selling for a while yet and now it's all profit.

Note how poorly the flash version did, perhaps the target market doesn't play that many flash games or maybe the revenue model was messed up.

They've also released two sequels including a Christmas themed one which had a very short development period. These are bound to rake in money and are a good solid base for the company. Congrats to all involved!

Casual Games Direct Sales

A friend of mine, Roman, from www.Anawiki.com posted his direct sales stats for his casual games sold in 2008:

$21,650.09 and 1152 units

These are VERY good for direct sales even though they are a 10th of sales of Home Sweet Home (but I bet his games cost less to make as well). I know that he has a mailing list and does lots to promote his site, and I’m sure it’ll keep on growing. He also sells on portals and via retail, and sells affiliate games. He has probably made some pretty good money via those other sales channels. Congrats Roman!

Mobile Games

EnigmaCEO posted some average MONTHLY sales for their mobile device games…

Partner Sites(Handango, Mobihand, ClickGamer):
Blackberry: 300
Windows Mobile: 100

Company Site:
Blackberry: 1
Windows Mobile: 2
PC: 0
Mac: 5

They remarked that they obviously need to increase their direct sales. But their non-direct sales look pretty good to me. I don’t know how much each unit sells for, but 400 units a month is 4800 units a year which seems a very decent number. As the business grows this will get a lot better. Congrats!

Lessons learned: priceless

TimS reported these stats about his game launched in November 2008:

Total sales: 10

Total income: $199.50

Rough income per man-month: $8.31

Lessons learned: priceless

I particularly like the last line. Well as long as they can use those lessons for the next game (and the next game and so on) then hopefully they’ll do OK. Contrats on learning some lessons (and on just releasing a game).

A quick calculation shows that the game took 24 man-months to make. Wow that’s quite a long time for an Indie game. Hopefully they can also improve their marketing and make some more return on the game, but it may just be worth starting a new game soon that they try to finish in 6 months or so – oh and doing some market research too to find out what sells (and even asking people why their last game did not sell so those mistakes can be avoided next time).

Hourly Wage of $0

Chris P posted some comprehensive stats as follows:

Sales: 138 over 18 months
Profit per sale: about $18 (maybe slightly less because of a few %-off promotions)
Profit after e-commerce cut: $18 * 138 = ~$2,484
Expenses: ~$300 on art, ~$400 on audio, ~$200 on business registration, ~$150 wasted on advertising, average of ~$10/month hosting (total $180), about ~$200 on miscellaneous expenses
Net profit: ~$1,000
Net profit per month: ~$55
Equivalent hourly wage: Rounds to $0

Well 138 sales is certainly a start but probably not what they were hoping for. One thing I’ve noticed is that often (not always) the development costs are directly proportional to the profit. So when you spend more on art and music (and a decent programmer) you will probably generate more profit due to the game looking more polished and thus more customers buy it. I found this to be true with my own games for sure. Of course marketing and game quality plays a big part too. But it’s a good general guide – “Speculate to Accumulate” i.e. spend the money to get a bigger return. It’s a gamble but done right it’ll pay out.

Some good news from Chris P is that the game has just been released on Steam so hopefully this will boost the hourly wage somewhat. Congrats on getting on Steam! (I hear it’s not that easy)

Not Enough To Go Full-Time

Zulu Boy reported the following:

“With our first and only game released on PC/Mac we earned around $10K in 2008. That is nice pocket money, but it is clearly not enough for me to go fulltime.”

Agreed, but it’s still a good start in my opinion. My first game never made that much money and never will, nor did my second. Congrats on a great start, hope you keep going.

Donations

Acord reported $120 in donations for Blood Frontier which is pretty neat. Perhaps this is an indication that they should charge something for the game, or at least for add-ons or micro-transactions etc? Hopefully they get some ad revenue from the game too…

Tower Defense Game

RinkuHero reported that Immortal Defense has had 435 direct sales from June 1 2008 to the present (mid-Jan). This is 7.5 months roughly.

It’s actually a great game that I strongly recommend (when I first got it it kept me up until 2 or 3am or something). It has an odd vibe and strange graphics but is very addictive indeed. It’s a hardcore Tower Defense style game and I think that getting that many sales in the hardcore Indie downloadable market is pretty darn good going. Congrats!

More Sales Stats

You can find a whole bunch of sales stats on my friend Juuso’s site here.

Some of mine are on there (Xmas Bonus), but they are out of date. Also you can see my Holiday Bonus sales stats here but again they are out of date. Lots more sales have occurred this Christmas (and with the launch of the Mac version) and I’ll post an update once all the December and Jan royalty reports are in (so in March). Keep your eyes peeled I’ll also post about Wizard of Oz if I can get permission from the producer of that game (I was hired to program it), and I’ll post Xmas and Easter Bonus stats (as they have run their course).

You can also read about how much money I made from selling my Grey Alien BlitzMax Game Framework here. It did pretty well for me as a side project and of course I’ve used it for 4 games meanwhile. Opening it up for sale meant other people helped to test it, fix it and improve it, which was invaluable.

Big Thanks!

So once again, big thanks to everyone who posted sales stats. They are fascinating and I hope that more people will be encouraged to post stats because they provide some hard realism for people thinking of going Indie and also help to motivate people who’ve just started who maybe need to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Recently someone started a thread on Indiegamer called “The end of indie?” which has bizarrely ended up discussing whether Flash can be made to VSync.

But anyway, a short way into the thread, some of us were saying “Don’t be silly, of course download games aren’t dead!” and then a well-known Indie called Cliffski posted some sales stats which gave serious weight to the viewpoint that download games are not dead. Here’s my summary of what people posted (very interesting reading I’m sure you’ll agree):

Positech Games

Cliffski, of Positech Games, made $189,423 in 2008 from direct sales. That’s an extremely impressive figure! It was from 10,192 units sold, which is not a big number by portals standards, but for an Indie selling games at $20 or more each, with no discount schemes, it’s a fantastic figure and means a *lot* of revenue.

How has he done this? Well he has 10 different games listed (some clearly are making lots more money that others) and he has been in the business for years and is business savvy. He’s always trying out different marketing techniques, plus he insists on selling his games direct first before going to any portals to maximise the revenue. He also has a large mailing list of loyal customers ready to buy the next game. Oh and his games, by all accounts, are pretty good. Interestingly though, I happen to know that he made EVEN MORE MONEY in 2007, lol Nice one Cliffski!

So if you are in any doubt that you can make money as an Indie hopefully his figures will convince you otherwise. However, and this is important, he is in a very small minority of Indies that do make money – most barely scrape by as we shall see. He got there by working hard and building up a business over many years – he has not used some kind of magic formula to get rich quick…

Puppygames

Next up Princec of Puppygames posted his direct sales figures and they told a very different story. He has made $11993 from 1073 units sold in 2008. This is a real shame because his games are great – a personal favourite of mine in fact. His sales figures came as a real shock to some forum members who thought he must be doing great due to the quality of his games and website. Just goes to show, book/cover and all that.

He has tried all sorts of marketing techniques and been in the business for years too, but not had the same success as Cliffski. Is this because of the type of games he’s selling and the market he’s aiming at, or because he needs to try something else on the marketing front? Well he may have the answer, because he’s just launched his first game on XBox360 Live Arcade and I’m sure that it’s the perfect platform for his games, so good luck!

Take note though that $11,993 is not a failure, far from it. It shows that he is onto something because people DO buy his games, he just needs MORE people to buy his games, maybe 5-10 times more for a start would be nice…Also the price per unit is only just over $10 instead of the usual $20, so he must have been selling his games cheaply (although I notice that the price is now $20 each). Princec doesn’t give in, unlike many that would have quit a long time ago, and this may well lead to success in the near future. I hope so.

New Star Games

Siread of New Star Games posted his Direct Sales stats of $43246 and 2545 units. This is pretty good. Note that the price per unit is around $20. Also note that he sells only Soccer games and his current flagship product is New Star Soccer 4. This means he has specialised and probably built up a great mailing list of people eager for the next sequel. I bet each game improves upon the last one too judging by the fact that NSS4 won a sports game of the year award by Game Tunnel.

Blue Tea Games

SteveZ of Blue Tea Games shared his direct sales figures for 2008 of $1299 and 72 units sold. This made Puppygames’s sales figures look positively stellar. Although I pointed out that SteveZ’s direct sales were actually better than mine, mainly because most of my sales came from portals. I then talked about how much money my company has made this financial year from portals, which you can read further down in this post…

This then prompted a surprise turnaround from SteveZ who posted his Big Fish Games royalty report from November 2008. It showed $20837 in royalties in just a single month!! Wow what a month. As developers get paid 40% royalties from BFG, it actually means that gross revenue from his games was about $52,000 in a single month. In a later post I clarified that he did launch a new game in that month which no doubt skewed the figures favourably, but nevertheless a great month.

Interestingly Blue Tea Games started off with an Indie game called Cactus Bruce and the Corporate Monkeys which is fairly obscure (but was well received), but they then made a business decision to move into casual games, including two Hidden Object games, and since then business has boomed. Their sales figures show that if you choose to make games to sell via portals you can do just as well as successful Indies selling games directly.

Grey Alien Games

I didn’t post an actual revenue figure from selling games, nor units sold due to contractual obligations with Big Fish Games (although I may post sales figures for my own games in a month or two once I get January’s royalty reports in – be sure to check back soon). But what I did do was post a summary of my company’s turnover this financial year as follows:

I thought I’d present some info from “the other side of the fence” i.e. portals…

My Direct Sales figures are crapper than any of those I’ve seen so far, but my portal sales are another matter…

I’m at work right now and don’t have my balance sheets handy, so you’ll have to trust me on this. Since the start of the UK financial year (April 2008) my UK Ltd. company has turned over well over £50,000 (I had to use Alt+0156 to type that darn Pound Sign), with practically zero costs – and that’s without even releasing a game in that period! Plus I’ve earned 1.5 month’s salary here at BFG in Vancouver (cannot post amount) and been paid a rather large relocation package – those figures are in addition to the 50+K.

The money is from royalties, contract programmer fees, direct sales, affiliate schemes, advertising, framework sales, IP sale, and some other stuff. When the UK to US currency conversion rate was 1:2 that would have been over $100,000 but it’s not now…Also there’s 3 more months to go and I’m just about to release a hot game Hopefully that’ll see the turnover rocket up some more, plus I’ll have been paid 3 more months’ salary.

I’ve made 5 games (6th due any day now), 3 of which could be said to sell well, + a framework which are all adding to the passive income. This is from building up over 4 years (first game released Dec 2005).

Running your own site, selling games via portals and working for portals does make good money (if you can deliver the goods of course). And I still view this as early days yet for me…

I hope that this info is useful for people who a) think that download games are dead and b) want to know what’s possible but also how long it takes to build up to that. You’ve got to have a business mindset to succeed + some creativity and determination helps of course

Holiday Bonus was a match-3 “reskin” with some new features and a meta game based on my earlier Wizard of Oz game (which I programmed for Injoy Games). So far I’ve logged 262 hours making that game (I keep a spreadsheet). That includes coding, graphics, testing etc + marketing, releasing to portals and stuff like that – basically everything. I did most of those hours in a super intense month, then spent a couple of weeks doing the marketing and contract signing with portals etc. It was all a bit last minute, but Christmas is a pretty non-negotiable deadline!

Marketing

I contacted portals well in advance of the release date and gave them some screenshots and talked about my previous game in order to “prime” them for the release.

When it was ready I sent it to them and we sorted out the contracts. I chose some big portals like BFG, Reflexive, Oberon and some smaller ones that didn’t perform as well. Real turned it down because it was seasonal.

I also put it on my own site, mentioned it on two forums and added it to my forum sig, then did a shareware submission and a download.com submission.

Also did a small email shot. Even printed some little flyers for my son to take to school.

A year after it’s initial release I pretty much repeated the process (because it’s seasonal).

Research

Well I already made 3 match-3s and this was my 4th so pretty much all the research was done. Basically it just consisted of playing all the other match-3s and top casual games for ideas and to see what sort of polish level I’d need.

Money

2578 sales so far (it still sells like 30 a month even in the summer). It’s main two big peaks were Christmas 2006 and 2007. Almost all of the sales were via portals, my direct sales are crap, 22, woo. This is a testament to the power of the portals and the crapness of my marketing/site.

Gross revenue: £5262 (>$10,000). Expenses (art and music, software passport, marketing): £1155. Net Profit £4106.

Therefore I earned £15.67 per hour making that game, and it goes up every day. That’s not great but it’s pretty good, you could maybe live off that if you banged one game out after the other without gaps. I used to earn £30 an hour as an IT consultant so it was a step down in earnings but a step up in fun.

I don’t know if I can be bothered to push it again this Christmas or not (and if the portals will bother), although I will probably send the portals a Mac version which I now have ready, and which they have expressed a keen interest in. Don’t know how many sales that will bring, but it’s all profit.

My primary money goal was to make back my expenses, which I did, and then make at least £10 per hour, which I did.

Another motivation for the game was simply to make another nice polished portfolio piece which ended up getting me hired for BFG, so that worked too (well actually they hired me as a result of my Oz game, but Holiday Bonus added extra credence). I always get several job offers after releasing my games, which is nice

Target Audience

Casual gamers, although a reasonable number of hardcore gamers have confessed to liking it.

I aimed the game at this market, but I also enjoyed making it because I like making pretty much any game (I’m not up my own arse like the “making it for art’s sake” crowd) + I liked Bejewelled when I first played it.

Additional Info

Don’t forget that a lot of the work for this game was actually done a) in my game framework which took a couple of hundred hours (I sell that and it makes good money) and b) my Oz game which also took hundreds of hours. It wasn’t as if I started from scratch, otherwise it would have taken a LOT longer and my hourly salary would have been awful.

I’ve made hardly any money from my first two games btw, my hourly wage for those is a joke, like £3 per hour. But I look upon them as “training” (before that I made some free games as training when I had another job, and I’ve also been making games as a hobby since I was 8). I think it’s the same with most Indies, their first few games aren’t that successful, but they gradually learn the ropes and build up the business over a couple of years. Making one killer first game is very unlikely I would say – yet a lot of people hinge their hopes on this, which I would say is unwise.

I would say that my 5th game, Fairway Solitaire, could be called a “hit” due to very large sales numbers and revenue, and extremely high Conversion Rate. However, I’m hoping to eclipse that with my 6th game which is in progress now and is due for a late summer release.