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

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 10:35 amand is filed under Sales Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.