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 So that post is now *way* out of date because the effective hourly wages for some of my products have more than quadrupled since then!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