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.