BecomeAPatron

Xmas Bonus Sales Stats

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 So that post is now *way* out of date because the effective hourly wages for some of my products have more than quadrupled since then!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

xmasbonussalesgraph

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.

4 Responses to “Xmas Bonus Sales Stats”

  1. Grey Alien Games: Xmas Bonus Sales Stats | Games For You Says:

    […] Grey Alien Games: Xmas Bonus Sales Stats Monday, March 9th, 2009 | Casual Games Source: Casual Games Blog […]

  2. coco Says:

    Thanks

  3. Grey Alien Games » Blog Archive » Easter Bonus Sales Stats Says:

    […] recently posted sales stats for my Xmas Bonus game and now it’s time for some Easter Bonus sales […]

  4. Grey Alien Games » Blog Archive » Budget for my games Says:

    […] couple of games had tiny budgets but that was years back. Check out these detailed sales stats for Xmas Bonus and Easter Bonus. Also check out the Sales Statistics category in general on my blog for some other […]