What Were They Expecting? (Indie Game Sales Numbers) Thread

There is something I've wanted to ask about for a while, but never asked because it's a quick way to lose friends. Plus, he who lives in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and all that. As the title suggests, I want to ask about indie sales figures, and how people seem to have unrealistic expectations.

The story is likely a familiar one to those on these forums. An indie game will come out, sell 10-20 thousand copies, but then the developers say the game was a failure. I look at those stories and wonder how that's the case, and what they were expecting sales wise.

To explain what I mean, let's look at The New York Times best seller list. Without looking it up, I want you to take a guess how many books you would have to sell to make it onto the list. Got a number in mind? Ok. The answer? From what I read online, the number varies between 5-8 ...thousand. At this point, some people get incredulous. Harry Potty or Game of Thrones sells more than that, and you'd be right. But once you move outside of household names like 50 Shades of Grey or The Martian, the numbers fall off dramatically. How many of you have read "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah, which is on the list at time of writing? Hell, who's even heard of it? I don't mean to knock the book, I'm sure it's great, and I don't have the raw sales numbers, but that's what I read about best sellers.

Maybe you want game specific examples. Ok. I occationally play what some would call "weeb games", Senran Kagura, Gal Gun, stuff like that. Again, I don't have the hard numbers, but it's not unusual to hear of these games having print runs as small as 50,000 to 10,000. This idea is backed up by Steam sale numbers for the PC ports selling around that many. Speaking of which, the Dark Souls esc game The Surge has 70,000 sales on Steam. Remember, these are games made by professional teams with publisher backing. The idea that 2 guys in their bedrooms can make a game that will surpass those in terms of sales is ...optimistic at best.

Which brings me to one last point. Where are they spending the money? Let's say a game costs 20 USD on Steam. It sells 10,000 copies, that's 200,000. Steam takes a 30% cut, but lets say you've got taxes and other stuff to pay, and say that you only get 50% of that money. That's still $100,000. I rarely see what it is indie games are spending the money on, because they are rarely graphically or technically impressive.

Look, I'm not a professional business man, but it takes all of 5 minutes to open up SteamSpy and look at some sales figures. It also doesn't take that long take those numbers and figure out how much money you can reasonably spend while still making a profit.

So, what am I missing? What do these indie game devs really expect sales wise, and why? The closest I can think of is that they are all expecting to be the next Five Nights at Freddy's, or Undertale, but even that seems foolish given how few games get that popular. Again, even mid level publishers with all their resources don't expect that.

An indie game will come out, sell 10-20 thousand copies, but then the developers say the game was a failure

Exactly, how many developers who says that? and where did you get this news? Internet is filled with hoax so I have to ask to confirm

DarkBloodbane wrote:

An indie game will come out, sell 10-20 thousand copies, but then the developers say the game was a failure

Exactly, how many developers who says that? and where did you get this news? Internet is filled with hoax so I have to ask to confirm

I'm not quite sure what you're asking. I haven't counted every single instance of this happening if that's what you're asking. As for where, it varies. News sites, blogs, lectures, interviews, social media posts, it depends.

But if you want a couple of examples, one is Brigador, which was apparently a failure for the dev, despite the game selling over 100,000 at time of writing (assuming Steam Spy is accurate of course). A dev wrote a post about the game here-
Imgur.com

A famous example was Sunset. Steam Spy says they sold 12,000 at time of writing, but at the time of release, they claim they sold 4,000 in the first month and considered the game a failure. What makes this one famous is the developers (Tale of Tales) threw a big tantrum on Twitter that I'm sure google can help you find if you're interested.

But honestly, I can't remember the titles of most of the games. Finding the name of these games, let alone the original social media posts or interviews where they mention the game was a financial failure is more work than I'm willing to put in. However, give it 1-6 months and there might be another article or post doing the rounds about a struggling indie dev who considers his game a failure because in "only" sold 15,000 copies. Google will also give you some examples, but you'll have to check their sales, and why they consider the game a failure.

Just out of curiosity, what would any of you expect to be considered reasonably successful in terms of sales figures and price of game for a new turn-based fantasy RPG game maker's first game that's taken about a year to make? Also, I've been wondering whether it costs the developer money to release free demos on steam. Sorry if my questions might sound rather stupid. You can probably tell I'm a newbie. I'm considering releasing about 5-10% of my game as a free demo and then the full version for a cheap price. Does that sound like a reasonable idea?

For a "turn-based fantasy RPG" I would certainly not put down a single dime... those games exist like sand on the beach and are equal to each other like sand on a beach. To be honest for a project to look for payment it has to offer something new or special. There's too much same-y-same soup indie games floating around. One reason people don't hit expectations I would say. Don't compete with AAA on the boring run-of-the-mill games... they outperform you there any day any time.

SabreXT wrote:

...Which brings me to one last point. Where are they spending the money? Let's say a game costs 20 USD on Steam. It sells 10,000 copies, that's 200,000. Steam takes a 30% cut, but lets say you've got taxes and other stuff to pay, and say that you only get 50% of that money. That's still $100,000. I rarely see what it is indie games are spending the money on, because they are rarely graphically or technically impressive.

Look, I'm not a professional business man, but it takes all of 5 minutes to open up SteamSpy and look at some sales figures. It also doesn't take that long take those numbers and figure out how much money you can reasonably spend while still making a profit.

So, what am I missing? What do these indie game devs really expect sales wise, and why? The closest I can think of is that they are all expecting to be the next Five Nights at Freddy's, or Undertale, but even that seems foolish given how few games get that popular. Again, even mid level publishers with all their resources don't expect that.

Let's do some quick maths:

I live in a relatively cheap area in midwest America. To be an indie developer, I have bills to pay. Namely: internet, rent, vehicle insurance + health insurance, electricity, food, etc. On top of that you will have fees that your team will require: Cloud storage, domain names, websites, replacement hardware, additional hardware for development (Mic, drawing tablet, decent camera...), paying other devs, etc.

Let's roughly add all this up and say pay about ~$1500 a month for everything. (Which is very little compared to the rest of the US, and made significantly cheaper being a one-man dev)

If I work on a game for a year, that is $18,000 I'm losing. Conversely, if I worked in fast food the whole time instead of developing a game, I would have a net gain of $15,000 (minimum wage of $7.25, 40 hours a week, for a year), which is honesty terrible money and wouldn't cover normal living costs, but I'll use it for an example.

If I wanted to justify pursuing game development, I would need a minimum ~$33,000 in revenue (After taxes, royalties, etc) to cover expenses and make up for potential lost if I didn't pursue something else. That's an absolute minimum and not including major unforeseen expenses, I would actually have lost money, I wouldn't save any money to start development of my next game, and my personal health would hate me for living on the bare minimum lifestyle.

Also in your sales figures, it isn't a straight sales. The game might be sold on discount or part of a humble bundle, or you may have had game keys pirated (But still shows up in SteamSpy for owners), and/or you might have royalties for musicians, artists, or the engine you're using.

So what are they expecting? Most devs I know are hoping, at a minimum, to break even. But more likely they are hoping to cover their expenses, and making enough money to justify diving into their savings to making another game. Otherwise they will drop game dev and pursue a cushy office job making double.

Edited by: JustDaveIsFine

Most devs I know are hoping, at a minimum, to break even.

Hope is a lot different from reasonable expectations. I can hope to become a millionaire for a game made over a weekend, but that's not realistic.

Getting into the messy details, like sales, bundles, unexpected debts, what have you, I was trying to keep things simple for the sake of explanation, but it's a legitimate criticism of what I said. However, it's a criticism that cuts both ways. Obviously, you can't plan for the unexpected, but you can try and save some money in case things don't go according to plan. It would seem that these devs haven't done that.

Then there's this line that stood out to me-

On top of that you will have fees that your team will require: Cloud storage, domain names, websites, replacement hardware, additional hardware for development (Mic, drawing tablet, decent camera...), paying other devs, etc.

The problem is you already established you're operating at a loss. $18.000 a year according to you. You have to keep costs to an absolute minimum. Why are you hiring people? Why do you need payed cloud storage? Why do you need a camera? Why not get affordable, consumer level tech before you quit your day job? I can understand, say, commissioning a soundtrack, but that should only be for stuff you absolutely can't do yourself. (eg. I have no musical talent and no music production tools.) Again, just to be clear, I'm no expert on the matter. My work is dumb hobby stuff that is nowhere near release worthy. However, I'm trying to learn to do 3D myself because I simply can't afford to pay people to make 3D assets for me. At least I have a better idea of where they are spending the money.

Just out of curiosity, what would any of you expect to be considered reasonably successful in terms of sales figures and price of game for a new turn-based fantasy RPG game maker's first game that's taken about a year to make?

I don't know. I'm not the right person to ask. One place to start would be to go on steamspy (or any other service where you can see sales data) and look up other, similar games. Also, look up the developers and see if they have any previous work, and if they had a publisher. Also, look up the devs (and publsishers) to see if they have a history. Finally, even once you have sales numbers of those games, don't expect to get that high. But as said, I'm not the right person to ask.

SabreXT wrote:

The problem is you already established you're operating at a loss. $18.000 a year according to you. You have to keep costs to an absolute minimum. Why are you hiring people? ...

One reason certainly would be time. Doing all by yourself (assuming you can do all by yourself on a reasonable skill level) takes a lot of time. The longer it takes the more expenses accumulate. So hiring somebody helps cutting down development time. Or last but not least you simply lack the skill in one domain.

It wasnt easy back then, its not easy now.

Edited by: vfn4i83

Reasonable expectation is hard. There are people who spend decades in the AAA industry trying to crunch numbers to estimate reasonable sales. Indies are more uncertain.

Admittedly I'm using mostly consumer-grade stuff that I picked up for cheap when I had a normal day job. I've made several small games using the bare minimum for development. (Literally just a laptop) There were definitely quality sacrifices that had to be made. Some of the work I create even now feels like it could be made stronger if I used better equipment. Audio recording and video creation are easy examples of this.

It's definitely a trade-off.

It wasnt easy back then, its not easy now.

Great speech. I've been listening to a lot of Robert Rodriguez. Even though he talks about film, a lot of the stuff he mentions applies to games as well.

One reason certainly would be time. Doing all by yourself (assuming you can do all by yourself on a reasonable skill level) takes a lot of time. The longer it takes the more expenses accumulate. So hiring somebody helps cutting down development time. Or last but not least you simply lack the skill in one domain.

Then that implies you can't afford to work on games full time yet?

SabreXT wrote:

Then that implies you can't afford to work on games full time yet?

I know next to nobody in my country who can. Meddling through with some external help, yes, but not stand-alone. Something like an industry doesn't exist in this part of the world.

Edited by: Dragonlord

To start, a lot of people don't go into gamedev as a business, but for creative reasons, so they don't check the sales numbers or it doesn't deter them.

Second, the press shouts every day about underdog stories and how some newb became rich after spending a couple years or so making their first indie game.

Third, a game isn't physical you can sell it instantly to millions of people as if you sold it to ten.

Those things are driving entry into this "industry".

Selling 20,000 copies would make me jump for joy, and you are saying that's to be expected. You yourself don't even know the harsh reality of the business, it's harsher than you say! I think even reaching 10K is a success marker for indies right now, otherwise you are a nobody. Digital distribution means selling 10,000 copies isn't that hard to do, from a technical POV, but from a marketing/advertising POV, it's getting harder and harder for your product to be known by that many people.

Edited by: NaturallyIntelligent

Selling 20,000 copies would make me jump for joy, and you are saying that's to be expected.

No. I'm saying the exact opposite.

Selling 20,000 should make you jump for joy, but for some reason, these devs are selling more than that, and then writing their games off as failures.

i think thosw game devs have no sense of scale. they probably never seen anything that looks 10000 something.

i think if they would realize that 20000 people would fill up the bigest stadiums in the world and spend a lot more time in there while playing his game, he would be shocked and wouldnt belive that so many ppl liked it since we have fotage of such amount off ppl in a comprehensive scale.

How about 40k? that is the population of a middle tier city and a good avarage in europe. Imagine if you go into a city, that if you want to walk acroas it would take you 2-3 hours. And every single person you see on the streets, in the supermarkets, in trafic, all the lights in the 10+ story high buildings, everyone boght your game and likes it. You could call a random landline and they would be who gave you money, and telephone books are quite numerous

Some ppl just flat out have no sense of scale of any description.

For the record, you’re spot on. This echoes everything I’ve been thinking for years. The sales figures are often ridiculous and I usually have no sympathy. Even a hot 2000 copies in a month with a hard cliff is a blessing for even small companies that can put 5 figures into a game. I’ve been down that road.

Conversely you have or had modders for Half-Life 1 for example, that had few people, but were not only making some of the best mods out there for HL1 or any moddable game, but even surpassing some store shelf games and all these mods when they came out were completely free and most still are. Sure they used the HL game engine and tools like Hammer and what not. Maybe they had permission to use basic assets from one game to another. Perhaps most were FPSs that were just simply easier to make because HL1 was obviously a FPS game. Possibly people just liked to make maps and new textures and shared them with the community.

But online games like Natural Selection, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, Sven Co-op, Hostile Intent, The Battlegrounds, Brain Bread, etc. could basically not be found any where else. Now you have triple A titles that use those same formulas. Heck it is my firm opinion that Left 4 Dead had borrowed ideas from Brain Bread. If these talented modders who were not getting paid a single cent, (Although I am sure there were donations generously given.) was before any crowd funding program that I am aware of, could both do what they did and still live a reasonable life, why can not indie game makers?

Perhaps there are just too many games out there saturating the market and not enough fresh ideas. Or the concept of just making something you want to make and have fun doing it has been replaced with a deadline and the want to get paid for it.

What Indies today are lacking is the original Indie Spirit. And with that lacking you make shovel-ware and copy-paste material with changed graphics. Hardly interesting material. In the midst you will find the few and far in between that still live that spirit but 99.9% are not like this. Too much bloat and too little substance. That's the biggest issue (but not the only one... others had been named already).

Sorry for taking so long to reply, but not logged in for a while.

Anyway, Dragonlord. That's almost an entire other topic, but for a while I think indie devs reluctance to call a spade a spade hurts it in the long run. When I see articles or GDC talks about how "games aren't selling on Steam any more", I wonder about their standard of what a game is. I think the asset flip "problem" is overblown, but even so there's a glut of happy bird clones, asset flips, and games that 10 years ago would have been free flash games or games that would have existed on someones hard drive as learning projects.

As for modders. I think they were doing as a side project while in college or working a full time job, with the added benefit of having a base to work off of. Crowdfunding now allows pro-modders which is great imo.

SabreXT wrote:

When I see articles or GDC talks about how "games aren't selling on Steam any more", I wonder about their standard of what a game is. I think the asset flip "problem" is overblown, but even so there's a glut of happy bird clones, asset flips, and games that 10 years ago would have been free flash games or games that would have existed on someones hard drive as learning projects.

There are a ton of games on Steam that could of very well been on a flash website and done great being free, but sell poorly simply because in the minds of most people, it should of been or stayed free to begin with. Nothing new and exciting was done. Just the same rehash we have seen before. That and they expect people to not only pay for it, but to pay quite a bit for it, considering what it is and that for all intensive purposes, should be free. I know people want a little money for their hard work. I get that. But don't over charge for it. Over charging never made me think, "Oh that game MUST be worth it!!!" I just move on.

If you're still in high school like me and you'd like to make money off of your games one day, then I'd suggest to start RIGHT NOW. Maybe you can make a game in one year and a half - two years maybe - and actually make reasonable profit. Even more if you do most of the things yourself like me (programming, art, sfx, maybe music too). That may take more time, but it won't translate to more expenses since you likely live with your parents. Maybe I can give you some basic "advices" (in quotes because they didn't actually lead me to succes since I'm only at the beginning of the development of my game)

Choose the right engine. This may seem obvious, but if you are blindly going with Unity, then reconsider. If you want to make a pixel art platformer for example, I'd use Monogame instead of Unity. You can implement tile collision detection and entity component pretty easily (in 2 hours, I had a good base, with ECS, scene management, tile map...). Tile collision detection is way easier to implement, debug and maintain than the Rigidbody2D or raycast controller usually implemented in Unity for 2D. Basically, be sure that it's not too complex for your game. For a 2D game, I recommend Godot or Monogame, maybe Unity if it's not a pixel art game.

(btw, here a two good articles on tile collision detection: Jonathanwhiting.com, Higherorderfun.com)

Get organized. Create a Google Doc; every week, you write down what have to be done. After 3-4 weeks, you start being better at estimating how much time it will take for things to be done. This is crucial (and maybe obvious too) and can get you motivated easier: instead of getting motivated for finishing the game, for which there are countless obstacles to overcome and basically means that you get easily discouraged, you get motivated for finishing specific parts of the game and mathematically, there are way less obstacles.

Get a good environment. I started going at my mom's house everyday after high school to work and read. I realised that, without my brothers, alone in silence, I was way more productive (it can be difficult to concentrate when people are yelling because they are losing a game). I then decided to stay at my mom's every week and only be with my father on week ends. So, if you have a free room, or somewhere where your siblings can't bother you, then you know what to do.

Read. A lot. The time I do not spend coding, or in general developping my game or making my homeworks, I spend it reading. Books can be expensive though, so if you happen to find a pdf on the internet, don't hesitate at all. There are many people recommending good books on the internet. I can recommend some books that I read (or partially read):

• Game Programming Patterns (it's free, legaly at Gameprogrammingpatterns.com),
• Game Coding Complete - 4th edition (the first thing you find by googling that is the complete book as a PDF! 900 pages!! i personally bought it though because I had the money with my birthday)
• Game Engine Architecture - 3rd edition (if you really want to go deep into game engines; Game Coding Complete already does a good job for game architecture though)

Maybe, just maybe I've let my mind wander a little bit too much and this as little to do with the actual discussion. Maybe I said things that were a little bit obvious, I really don't know.

You may not be as intelligent or productive as me (and I may not be as intelligent and productive as you) so maybe the "making a game in 1-2 year" is a little bit exaggerated, I don't even really know if I can make it myself (I think I can though). This is why I suggest you to read and plan things out, reading can give you and idea of how complex it really can be to make a game and planning can help you get an ETA when you are confident with your productivity speed.

SabreXT wrote:

Selling 20,000 copies would make me jump for joy, and you are saying that's to be expected.

No. I'm saying the exact opposite.

Selling 20,000 should make you jump for joy, but for some reason, these devs are selling more than that, and then writing their games off as failures.

Because games cost money to make. Sure, you could cut costs but then you either have a decrease in quality or increase in dev time - realistically this only leaves you the option to make visual novels or pixelated 2d games.

For me, I have skills in almost every aspect of game dev (programming, level design, 3d art, animation, sound design, music etc), so while hypothetically it would be possible for me to do everything from scratch by myself, anything larger than a $2 shovelware title or asset flip will require hiring contractors and purchasing high quality assets online.

For example if I wanted to make grass textures by myself, this is what the process would entail:

- Go outside on an overcast day, take photos of grass (1 hour)

- Open in photoshop, clean up lighting, make it aligned and seamless as a albedo map (1-2 hours)

- Paint in roughness maps (0.5 hours)

- Sculpt normal map in Z-brush (1 hour)

(note that these are very expensive apps, I could use cheap/open source alternatives but this would make the process even slower).

This could take up to half a day of work.

Or, I could purchase grass textures online for about $5. Games usually have 1000+ textures, so if it's a choice between $5,000+ vs 500+ days to make textures, obviously the first one is a more realistic choice (the second option would be a false economy anyways, 500 days living costs would be much more than $5,000).

This applies to every other aspect of game dev, for example I could record my own footstep sounds, hand keyframe my own walk animations etc, code my own engine etc but this would literally extend the dev time from years to decades. For character models and art, you need to hire contractors to make unique assets (players will definitely notice if your hero character is a stock asset!), game contractor rates are usually around $10,000 a month.

Games already take years to make, cutting costs = longer dev time or crappy presentation, there's no way around that. A lot of beginner indies try really silly cost saving measures that either really hurt the quality of their game or are wasting tons of time to save a few dollars.

It's not unbelievable that a game can make $100,000 but not be enough. If you had a team of 3 people working for 3 years, $100k split evenly would be paying each person $925 a month, which wouldn't even cover their living costs, let alone dev expenses. That's totally different from a solo writer who only needs microsoft word.

I guess my game just wont have any god damn grass... o_O Ehhh… grass is over rated anyway. ^^!

Kinda like if you bought into Robocraft back in the day and then they decided to stop doing anything with it cause "it's a dead game". Although the newest updates that fixed the mess they made in the first was a step in the right direction. What is to stop Freejam from doing the same thing with this game? Ohh they made a mistake so it is best to just start over instead of fixing a game that people already paid into? Sounds like a great company to get behind... If they do something with the palyers that they are leaving behind in Robocraft.

Edited by: deadinlw