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Indie Dev Marketing Research, June 2020 - Part 1
4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago8,027 words
I'm doing research into how to make money from indie games! Here's a loooong look (a big chunk of which is quotes) at a couple of postmortems which help shed light on where money can come from, and how similar indie devs' stories often are.

I'm set on developing Divine Dreams in some form, but I'm still in the process of deciding what exactly that form should be. Three episodically-released 'Seasons'? All 18 episodes in one big RPG for which people pay only once? Maybe I compress the story to be more manageable for a single RPG? I very much could streamline some bits. Or do I just release the main game then two separate 'sequels'? And do I release a small 'prologue' episode cheaply, which I could finish by the end of the year quite easily, or would that be a worse option than just making the first chapter of Episode 1 a free demo? There are lots of options and I'm still not sure.

I've given myself a couple of weeks 'off' actual development (I still ended up doing a bunch of concept stuff these past few days anyway though) so then I can focus on researching how other indie devs make their money. I know we've been here a bunch of times before, but I do seem to be making some progress with each return to this. I certainly know a ton more now than when I released Sindrel Song, that's for sure!

Like I said in a previous post, it helps to 'verbally process' information by writing it out in a blog post. Plus I'll have it here for reference in future if I need it, and those of you who are interested in reading about this will hopefully better understand how making money from indie games works too.

There are a few subreddits where indie devs post about their marketing woes, yays, and ways, so I'll mostly be looking through those and posting about what I find. I've already found a handful of things over the past few days that I'll write about here!

I checked r/gamedev first since that seems to have the highest number of subscribers.



I've been dragging my feet about posting about MARDEK on Reddit for a bunch of reasons. I'm afraid of breaking some rule, or getting ignored completely, which would be deflating, and entirely unsurprising based on the attention I see other posts getting. I'm also worried about having my ideas torn to shreds by an audience far less supportive than the one I have here.

Here's a relatively popular (for this subreddit) post I saw, for example: ∞ Pitched 30+ game publishers, none of them wants the game. What's wrong with my game? ∞

Many of the comments on that are supportive and encouraging, but many are also absolutely brutal. They talk about this being a 'shovelware'-looking clone of an outdated game, which makes me wonder if they'd dismiss MARDEK or Divine Dreams as being similarly an outdated genre. I'd say that (J)RPGs continue to be appealing at a more fanatical level than those more throwaway mobile-game-like things ever were, but I also wonder whether that's just wishful thinking. I mean, obviously this developer was passionate and confident enough about his idea to make and then push it, but it didn't mean that thinking was accurate.

I'd been wondering whether to seek out a publisher, whether that'd help immensely with earnings, but this person talked about being rejected by so many, which I don't know if I could psychologically cope with myself! Several people also said that it's not even worth getting a publisher, though I wonder if that's more of an "in this case" here or a more universal truth about indie games publishing.



It seems that 'postmortems' are common enough on this subreddit for me to have encountered a couple in as many days. Here's an extremely long one that I (mostly) read: ∞ Starcom: Nexus, An Indie Dev Story ∞

I'll go through it again, picking out the bits I feel were most interesting to me and/or relevant to my situation:

I spent most of my professional life as a web developer ... It wasn't until I was in my mid-thirties that I decided to try my hand at game development.


Interesting.

I decided to start small with a fairly basic "tower-defense" game called PlanetDefender. I built it with Adobe Flash


He was apparently a Flash dev too, though I haven't heard of any of his games. They don't really seem to be my sort of genre, though.

He talks about his primary inspiration for his 'dream game' that he'd like to create being games from before even the console era; impersonal space exploration things. I suppose we're all motivated to create things we grew up with, which can clash with the wants of the world we've grown up into. Someone aged 30 is likely to want to make games they enjoyed when they were 15, but the 15-year-olds of the time want something else. Hmm.

[His second game, called Starcom] was fairly popular among the Flash gaming community.


I've never heard of that either. Have you? I wonder what kind of stats it got. His press page mentions making three 'popular' Flash games with a collective total of 6 million plays. Maybe it was around MARDEK's level of 'fame'? Or more?

Since the dominant form of making money from Flash games was ads and sponsorships, which usually paid pennies per thousand plays, neither of these first two games made a substantial amount of money relative to how long they took me to develop.


A common story which should be familiar to you if you've been following me for a while.

After my last web dev contract wrapped up, I set myself on the task of developing my third game: a multiplayer real-time roguelike dungeon crawler called Lost Crypts. It was loosely inspired by the standup arcade Gauntlet that had eaten hundreds of my quarters as a kid, but with rogue-like procedural dungeons.


Again, this game is unknown to me, but they have fairly generic-sounding titles so I might have seen it before and forgotten. And again, a translation of childlike wonder that's not necessarily relevant anymore.

It took a little over six months to develop and I spent $1000 on art and music. Players generally enjoyed it, but my attempts to make money from it failed utterly. At the time, my understanding of both game marketing and free to play monetization were quite limited. I told myself and others that it was successful as a learning project and portfolio piece, which is true, but privately I felt I was failing as an indie developer. My games had made a lot of people happy and I don't think people should be valued based on how much money they make, but realistically I couldn't afford to continue as an indie dev making less than minimum wage. And Lost Crypts didn't even recoup its external costs.


That's one of the most important bits. Familiar, right? (BUY SINDREL SONG)

So I returned to contract work to pay the bills. During that time a few players tracked me down to ask if I had any plans to make a sequel to my space RPG.


Perhaps my experiences of being tracked down by strangers asking for more isn't anything special. Over the years I've thought that represented a kind of 'fame' I once had, but now - especially considering MARDEK's total sales on Steam - I'm wondering if it's less impressive and unusual than I believed.

In the era of Flash gaming, a developer released a game and if it was popular it would end up being re-hosted on numerous websites. I had the foresight to have each game "ping" my webserver when a player started a new game so I could have a count of gameplays, but there was no way to connect with the many players who might be interested in my next game. Which was a mistake I would later regret, once I learned the importance of marketing in game development. This might seem obvious in hindsight, but since my first two Flash games reached hundreds of thousands of players with no marketing effort on my part, I sort of assumed that if you made a good fun game people would find out about it somehow.


This is why I never bothered to market either Sindrel Song or the MARDEK Steam port. Publishing in Flash meant the audience came to you; you never had to put any effort in. Things are different now, though, obviously.

Also he says 'hundreds of thousands' and not millions; maybe that's important to gauge the scale of his games' popularity.

Perhaps if I'm going to go with some kind of trilogy release for Divine Dreams, I should include something in-game which asks people to sign up for news of later installments being released? Hmm.

Better late than never, I set up a mailing list so players who visited my website could let me know they wanted a sequel and say what features they thought it should have. A few hundred interested players found the list, bringing with them the hope that there might actually be a market for an ambitious game like the one I'd originally envisioned.


I'm quoting more of this than I intended to because so much of it is an echo of my own situation. Hopefully that means my future might be similar to the one he goes on to describe...

He speaks of switching to Unity, and even having a task tracker, same as me.

After being rejected from showcasing the game at a game festival, I became discouraged. I went back to full-time freelancing and put the game on hold. I didn't touch it again for almost two years.


Rejection is a powerful demotivator. I've no intention of trying to showcase my games at any games festivals!

In 2016 during a lull of contract work, I started on it again. ... By March 2018 I'd made significant progress...


So he worked on it for a very long time.

...but was getting concerned about the fact that I'd spent several thousand hours and several thousand dollars with no clear sense as to when it would be done. With no roadmap, deadlines, or stakeholders it seemed like I could go on forever and never release the game.

I think this pattern was driven by a fear of failure. As long as I kept it in "experimental pre-alpha side project mode" I never had to confront the possibility of putting my hard work out there and failing completely. With the previous disappointment of Lost Crypts, I was afraid that another commercial dud would effectively be the market telling me: "You're so bad at this, you don't even know how bad you are."


It's hard not to fear failure when you don't exactly have (financial) successes behind you.

I like what I'm doing with Divine Dreams. But I'm also scared of putting it out there and finding out that the world doesn't share my enthusiasm for it - I don't even know how bad I am at it - as was the case with Sindrel Song.

I needed to commit to a decision: Either a) admit to myself that this was just a hobby and return to focusing primarily on contracting work, or b) approach it as a business with the potential to be something that players would love and provide a real return on its development cost.


This is a common sentiment I've been noticing among the indie dev communities in the snooping I've done so far. I feel I'm getting less reluctant about it myself too; now looking at Steam stats and graphs is almost enjoyable rather than absolutely dreadful. Forging 'plans of attack' feels like an interesting challenge rather than an anxiety-inducing mountain to climb. Or rather, I'm beginning to lean in that direction, but it's a process, and it's hard to go from completely avoiding something to completely embracing it!

If I went with the second choice, I decided that it was not necessary that the project be 100% profitable in terms of recouping all external costs as well as the full opportunity cost. Instead I decided to analyze the chances that it could pay all external costs plus a living wage for the remaining development time, while ignoring sunk costs (a "bygones principle" analysis). This was an admittedly low bar, but perhaps not unreasonably low: If I reached it while simultaneously building a base of happy players, it increased the likelihood that I could continue with a sequel reaching true profitability.


I was so shaken a few days ago because I'd been hoping for something like this with Divine Dreams: while the first might not be very profitable (though I'd hope it would be!), ideally it'd help build reputation and good will among players who'd help invest in a more profitable sequel (or sequels, in my case).

As a starting point, I had a spreadsheet of games released in recent years that were in the same nameless genre as mine. Using established heuristics, I verified that there were a fair number of titles produced by solo devs and small teams that seem to have sales at least at the level I was targeting. But with caveats: Survivorship bias made it difficult to locate the games similar to mine that had launched and were never seen again. There was no "starflight-like" tag to easily identify the also-rans.


Something I really need to look into - and I'll definitely try over this week and the next - is essentially this: I need to see what other indie devs are or have been up to, and how much those who've finished games - RPGs in particular - have got. The success of things like Undertale give me hope, but obviously that's a huge exception, and I wonder whether there are a ton of Steam RPGs which flop completely. That one I linked to the store page of the other day - something like Crystal Story? - is a good example.

Also at this point the industry was well into the so-called "Indiepocalypse": every week a new story would appear on my radar of a developer who had spent years on a game only to sell a few hundred copies (or worse).


I've only heard a few stories like this myself, but they're enough for me to have serious fears about it.

To minimize the worst-case scenario risk, I committed to three things:

* Get a playable beta of the game in front of real, potential customers by mid-Summer 2018 to verify I wasn't way off course;

* Generate market proof by releasing a version for sale within 12 months (e.g., Early Access), which meant by early 2019;

* Make a serious effort to better understand how to market the game.


That's an important thing too, as these are essentially the kinds of things that I need to commit to with Divine Dreams. I've been aiming for the demo for a while, though now I'm unsure of what exactly that demo should be. Or maybe I should just see it as a beta for a select number of people/patrons?

Point three is what I'm currently looking into.

This article then talks a lot about the specifics of his game, which isn't relevant (or interesting, really) to me so I'll skip that.

Starcom: Nexus didn't start its first round of beta testing with actual players until early August 2018, after the equivalent of a fulltime year of development.

Beta testers were randomly selected from the game's mailing list which had been very gradually accumulating subscribers and were about as "in market" as I could expect. If a significant portion of them didn't like the core gameplay, I had a serious problem.

Initially, I started with small test rounds of a dozen or so players with the goal of identifying the big problems, gradually increasing as Early Access launch approached.


A dozen sounds like a lot to me! I'd choose people I trusted rather than truly random ones as he did - seems like too much risk to me - but I wonder how many of them actually got involved anyway.

For the closed beta tests I implemented an in-game system where players could submit [qualitative] feedback any time by pressing F8, which paused the game and brought up a dialogue where they could put in their thoughts along with a rating for how they were enjoying the game. This was an interface I copied from Subnautica. A reminder was subtly, but constantly visible in the lower corner of the screen throughout the closed beta and Early Access, as well as one of the possible tips that could appear during game loads.


I want to do this myself! If I forget, remind me!! He also kept it anonymous, so I should do the same as it might encourage honesty.

Over the next several months I repeated a loop: release a build, email a batch of fresh testers, gather feedback and analytics, implement the changes that players either asked for or I inferred were needed, create new content, and repeat. By late October things felt good enough that I could launch in 2018 before the Winter Sale, so I announced a release date of December 12.


This is more... impersonal, but perhaps more professional than what I had in mind. My 'builds' would be each new chapter added to the currently-testing episode, and I was planning on keeping the same testers throughout or giving patrons of a certain tier beta access. Perhaps having fresh faces along the way would be immensely valuable though.

I am probably not unique among indie devs in that marketing is not my favorite game dev activity. I'd much rather just spend my time working on the game than try to talk about it at all.


The type of personality traits that incline us towards spending days upon days privately creating, and the ones that motivate marketers to get in people's faces and boast about what they have to sell, are really as different as any traits can be!

But all my research has consistently pointed at one conclusion: the success of a game on Steam depends almost entirely on reaching its market before launch. Using Steam review counts as a proxy for sales, review score as a proxy for quality, and pre-launch followers as a proxy for market awareness, the rank correlation between quality and sales is 0.25 (weak) and the correlation between pre-launch awareness and sales is 0.86 (strong).


THIS IS PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING HERE! Promoting the game long before it's done is absolutely crucial to making money from it! Crucial!!

What this means is that as soon as I figure out what I'm doing with Divine Dreams, I should make a Steam page about it. Not when it's done, a couple of weeks from release! ASAP!

I'd do it now, but I'm not sure enough yet about what I'm doing. I'm getting more sure, and I am confident about the big picture ("an RPG starring Dayvha, Nytsky, etc"), but how I'll be structuring and releasing it is a decision yet to be firmly made.

As mentioned previously, when I decided to commit to Starcom: Nexus as a serious endeavor, I also committed to start taking marketing seriously.

I started a marketing journal. I made a list of games in the same "space" as mine, either released or upcoming, and read their reviews. I made a list of YouTube streamers and journalists who had covered those games. I tweeted often. I posted videos and images to relevant Reddit subs.


I'll need to do the same, and reading things like this - and something else I'll be talking about later - is helping me to know what path I should be taking. I already do the Twitter thing (when I have something to show, anyway) and I'm working towards the Reddit one. I feel that'll be smoother once I'm on the intended path, though; the next milestone will be having an updated video of the new characters and mechanics.

One aspect of the game that was a problem from a marketing perspective was the lack of clearly identifiable "hooks." As I mentioned earlier, the genre doesn't even really have a name. When prospective players asked in the discussion forum what other game it was like, there was no consistent answer.


By contrast, I feel that Divine Dreams might have an advantage by being "An RPG", or even "a solo-made JRPG of contrasts: deeply dark and comically lighthearted, with the options to fight or befriend your foes". Something like that.

In the aforementioned player survey, I also asked how people learned about the game. Here's what players said:

* 79% saw it on Steam
* 12% saw a YouTube or Twitch streamer play it
* 6% played the original Flash game
* 3% saw it somewhere else

Because I didn't post the survey until after full launch, it probably underestimates the number of players who learned about it from the original Flash game, since I think they were more likely to have been on the mailing list and bought it in Early Access. But it does underscore the importance of the Steam algorithm working as a multiplier of your marketing efforts.

Note that I say "multiplier": it has been consistently observed in data and anecdotes that 95% of games which launch with little to no public awareness vanish into obscurity, buried in the avalanche of other titles released that week. Games that achieve sufficient traction are shown more prominently by Steam's algorithm.


This is very much worth paying attention to!

He decided to take the Early Access approach:

Early Access (EA) is a program where players can buy a game they're interested in while it's still in development, like a paid beta. They know the game isn't complete, but are willing to take the risk for the opportunity to experience it first and to influence its development. Not every game that enters Early Access makes it out: some are abandoned soon after launch as developers realize that there was nowhere near as much demand for their vision as they had hoped. Others languish for years before enthusiasm flickers out. But contrary to reputation, quite a few games do use the program as it was intended and emerge with a better quality game as a result of a high intensity beta. Subnautica is probably the most well-known example, going on to be one of the best-selling games on Steam, but there are plenty of others: Rimworld, Dead Cells and Slay the Spire are a few examples.

From a sales and marketing standpoint, entry into Early Access needs to be taken seriously. For almost all games on Steam, EA or otherwise, their launch week shapes their entire return. Almost all games' first year sales are a single digit multiple of their first week, generally clustering around 3 to 6 times. E.g., a game that sells 100 copies in the first week could expect to sell 300 to 600 copies in the first year.


What I'm learning from all I read is that the launch week is absolutely everything. It's why I'm not even going to bother advertising MARDEK at this point, as that launch week has already passed.

The success he describes with his own EA is intriguing, but I don't think it'd work for a narrative game like Divine Dreams at all, unfortunately.

But my savings were not inexhaustible. By this point I'd spent 3800 hours over the equivalent of 16+ full time months and roughly $10,000 of my own money. This is excluding the larger cost of, you know, living. I'd been working 60 to 70 hours a week for several months. Combined with the uncertainty about how the game would fare, this was producing a large amount of stress.


I really want to underline this. It's a harder job than you might think, and the uncertainty of it all is incredibly stressful. It's not just me being mentally ill (though maybe actually attempting this path through life is mental illness in itself).

I felt a worst-case scenario would be the game selling only 400 copies in the first week. Combined with a pessimistic tail model, that could be as low as $30,000 lifetime, and that's before Valve took their revenue share. If it did that poorly, my plan was to do an aggressive but abbreviated Early Access and start sending out my resume in a few months. I did not believe this was a likely outcome, but it was a possibility that had been magnified in my anxiety-wracked mind, which had begun contemplating "even worse than worst-case" scenarios.


I don't know how he was pricing the game, but a pessimistic estimate of 30k in total for 400 initial sales seems like a big jump to me? If it was $10, so $4000 from those 40 sales, and it sold 3 times that in its lifetime, that's still only $12000... Or maybe the lifetime is considered to be several years, based on something he's read but hasn't mentioned. Hmm.

It's valuable though to know that MARDEK will continue to be on sale from now on, so whatever it's made is only a fraction of what it'll continue to make over the next few years, maybe, even if the extra sales come in a trickle over a long period. Maybe the aim should be to build up many trickles from things like this, Patreon, etc.

A slightly more optimistic model was 800 copies the first week. With a reasonable tail and a moderate bump on graduation, this could justify the "bygones" decision I'd made, at least in the sense that I would have made more than a living wage from the time of that decision to the time of full graduation. Which is a very forgiving criteria, but also excludes the value of an established audience for future games. In this scenario my plan was to spend 6-9 months in EA and after launch evaluate the possibility of a sequel.

At the most optimistic end, I estimated as high as 2000 copies in the first week was possible based on wishlists and followers.


So much of this seems carefully, sensibly estimated, whereas when I put MARDEK on Steam I thought "sure, I'll just slap it on there, whatever! It'll probably earn $10k or something, I don't know! Oh? It didn't! I AM NOW DEVASTATED". Yes, uh, I wasn't really seeing it as I probably should have been.

After an incredibly stressful first day, it became clear that the worse-case scenario wasn't going to happen: the game sold over 500 copies in the first 24 hours. The sales rate dropped rapidly after the initial rush, but I had expected that. Like the first week making up a significant percentage of annual sales, the first 48 hours usually make up a majority of the first week sales.

One week after entering Early Access the game had sold over 1500 copies and grossed a little over $20,000.


Numbers! Better than MARDEK! But obviously he'd also put in a ton more effort, and he wasn't releasing a port of a 10-year-old game.

At this point, I'd like to draw attention to a convention in indie PC game development: when developers publicly talk about gross revenue, we are not usually referring to the money we receive before expenses, which is the standard accounting definition of gross revenue. We are referring to the money Valve (or another distributor) receives. Why? I don't know, probably because it sounds more impressive. But that amount never appears in my bank account. It's like including part of your boss's salary when someone asks how much you make. So when I say the game grossed $20,000, I mean that Valve collected $20,000. After various deductions like VAT, returns and Valve's revenue share, Wx3 Labs LLC (which is just me) grossed around $12,000. Which still sounds pretty good for one week, except that a) I had spent $10,000 in development and b) sales drop off a LOT after the first week.


Enlightening. Steam displays two values: MARDEK is currently at 894 sales, and has a "Lifetime Steam revenue (gross)" of $7,178 and a "Lifetime Steam revenue (net)" of $6,382. I'd been assuming that the latter was what I got after any deductions, but perhaps there are additional deductions like Steam's cut which mean I actually get a lot less? Hmm.

It does say "(gross revenue, includes VAT, DLC and any bundles)" next to the gross and "(gross revenues less returns, chargebacks, and taxes)" next to the net, but doesn't mention Steam taking their cut. It'd be useful to have that information, Valve!

The beta testing paid off in the sense that nothing went catastrophically wrong on launch. Players were in general very happy: the first few dozen player reviews were all positive, and after 100 reviews it had a score of 94% positive.


I suppose one of the values of this Early Access approach is that active beta testers can write reviews on the Steam page... That's a decent amount of reviews!

I tried my best to be accessible to the players via multiple channels: I checked the Steam discussion forums every day, was always logged into Discord and read the "F8" feedback logs regularly. And, as painful as it was, I read every single negative review on Steam.

Listening to players' pain points gave me the best insight on where the game needed work. At the same time, I had to resist the temptation to pivot the overall design based on the strongly expressed opinion of a handful of players.


There are Steam discussion forums?

I meant to do Discord stuff on the weekend. WHOOPS. I didn't forget, I was procrastinating. I'm not exactly in the middle of a beta test though. I need to get better at this stuff for when that time comes. The last sentence there is something to take to heart.

Regarding his graduation from Early Access to full release:

I also spent a lot of time trying to guess what would happen when I pushed the "launch button" for the second and final time.


I appreciate these comments about his psychological states, as they do seem to be common for people on this path and not entirely a result of my mental illnesses in my case.

By this point, the game was doing "great" by indie game dev standards but just "okay" by the standards of someone trying to start a business:

After one year in early access it had sold 6500 copies and grossed $98,000. After Valve's cut, VAT, and other deductions that left $60,000.

During Early Access I had spent another $10,000 in external costs for a total of roughly $20,000. That left $40,000 in net revenue. Divided over the entire development lifecycle so far, that worked out to $16,000 per year. That's more than US minimum wage but just barely, and not even close to a living wage.


I'd be really happy with something like that! But it seems it's absolutely not the norm. Game dev certainly isn't a path to easy millions, as I once naively thought.

On top of the financial return, I had gained a lot of skills, both in technical and design areas, as well as a much better understanding of the business aspects. I had a base of several thousand players with a positive experience who might be interested in a sequel.


This is what I'd hope for from a trilogy of games: each one would do better than the last due to all I'd learned and acquired along the way.

He talks about the specifics of graduating from Early Access which I don't feel will be relevant to my situation: essentially, other games he monitored were variable in whether this 'second release' apparently increased sales or not, and he was worried he'd not see a spike himself. But then was pleasantly surprised when he got a huge spike of 2000 sales in the first couple of days following official release.

As of writing, a little under four months after entering full release, the lifetime results for the game so far are:

* Steam gross revenue: ~$400,000
* Copies sold: 24,000
* External development expenses (music, art, licenses, etc): $25,000
* Total development time: equivalent to 30 full time months

The net result has been that the game has so far earned me a bit over $7000 per month of development time after all expenses, before income tax. That result from creating the game I've always dreamed of making is a feeling I can't describe. I am tremendously fortunate to have had this opportunity.


This bit of info here is why I've quoted so much of this here! It really gave me a whole lot of hope, seeing that.

And his final note:

To aspiring indie devs reading this: I hope that it has some helpful guidance. I would like to caution that most developers who eventually find success do not do so with their first game (Remember, Starcom: Nexus was my second attempt at a commercial release, and fourth overall game).


Takes a few tries to get it right!

So... yes, that was long! I didn't mean to quote so much of it and feel bad that I did, but I really feel that I need to read and really absorb more things like this to form the right plan of action and get into the right mental state.

∞ Here is that game on Steam ∞. It currently has 859 reviews, Very Positive overall.

I think a few things are worth noting when comparing it to my (still largely potential) project:

* He was older than I am now when he started with Flash, so maybe he was in his late 30's or even early 40's when he made this? The professional and life experience he had would give him an edge over me, and definitely over a rookie just starting out.

* His games were somewhat popular in Flash, though I wonder if they were less popular than MARDEK. He mentioned 'hundreds of thousands' of plays, but also mentions 6 million plays between them somewhere. I wonder to what extent this helped though.

* His game seems to me like a very impersonal and perhaps outdated genre; he even said he wasn't sure what genre it was, exactly. Definitely a different kind of appeal to what I'm making. It also sounds like the game is one you can get lost in for dozens of hours, unlike the narrative experiences that Divine Dreams will be. Maybe that's a barrier to entry or a source of greater value.

* Early Access works well for that kind of game but wouldn't for Divine Dreams.

I don't know whether I'll be able to achieve that kind of success myself, but it's interesting seeing the actual figures. It doesn't take that many copies sold to generate some serious money (it's still more than 25x what MARDEK sold, but that's a ridiculous comparison since that was a port and I didn't market it).



That was really long, but there's one more thing I want to go over before I call it a day. This video (which, annoyingly, isn't on YouTube): ∞ How much MONEY my first game earned on Steam ∞

Like another video I linked to a few days ago, right off the bat he gives the figure: $7563

This is about the same amount as that other video (from a guy who spent four years on his game), and it's not too different to what I got from MARDEK with essentially no marketing (though I don't know if this is gross or net or what).

I'll watch the video again, making comments here about bits I feel are relevant.

He mentions that he contacted Valve to ask if it was okay to share his sales data. Made me panic a bit at first because it didn't even occur to me that I might not be able to! But thankfully it's not an issue.

Ah, the $7k is the net; the gross is actually a bit higher than MARDEK at $9k vs $7k gross.

Some numbers that stand out to me: It's on 4276 wishlists; MARDEK's on fewer than half that (1816). However, his returns are much higher, at 8.6% of sales (101/1173) vs MARDEK's 3% of sales (27/894).

So Steam takes its share of 30% from the displayed net, meaning MARDEK's actual earnings are US$4467 currently. I'm not quite ready to buy a mansion just yet!

He got about $5000 from his game in 10 days, and Google says the average annual income in Russia (where he's from) is ~US$6500. So not too bad!

I also notice that his game had a demo; maybe that's the norm?

39 keys he sent out to other people were activated. MARDEK's stats show just 2 activated keys from a couple of testers (hello!). I actually did reply to some of the dodgy stock emails I got asking for free keys, with something like "what about my English language RPG would fit in with your Russian-language YouTube account that mostly features Minecraft videos?", which of course most didn't reply to. One did, though, and his supposed channel had something like 300,000 subscribers, so I asked him further what genre my game was. He sent an "I saw no need to mention the specifics of your own game to you" stock email, to which I replied that it was some impressive evasion and asked him what my game's main character's name was. He actually replied with Mardek's full first, middle, and last names, obviously from just googling it, which impressed me enough to at least give him three keys as an experiment. The next day, I got a message from someone on Twitter saying they'd seen MARDEK keys for resale, so I deactivated them. Oh well, at least I know now.

This guy in the video mentions that youtubers, streamers, and his patrons were the ones who got the keys. I wonder how many patrons he has!

He mentions in the video that his game got overwhelmingly positive reviews, but there are only 28 total and the word says "Positive" rather than "Very Positive" (MARDEK currently has 67 and is Very Positive; many are also quite long and heartfelt).

Ah, he mentions that the short length of the game might be largely responsible for the high percentage of refunds. Would this be the case if I made a prelude chapter which wasn't long enough?

He mentions paying US$235 for an advert on Russian social media. Interestingly, someone who works at Facebook (a behind-the-scenes employee who grew up with MARDEK, not some grinning marketing type) reached out to me and offered to set up an advert for MARDEK on my behalf. What a wonderful gesture, and of course I said yes! We both agreed that it might not amount to much though; it seems indie devs typically don't even bother with Facebook promotion because of the low return, which is a shame. This guy does mention getting 1000 subscribers to his Russian social media group from his advert though.

He also mentions running a Google ad - paid too? He doesn't say - but that it didn't produce any meaningful results.

There's apparently a site called Indieboost, which you pay $100 to to have them send out your game to a bunch of youtubers and twitch streamers. Shockingly, though, it doesn't amount to much, and he said that only 4 youtubers and 5 streamers picked up his keys, and none of them actually made content of his game with them.

Importantly, he mentions - and shows - a long spreadsheet of 90 youtubers he's personally found who cover content similar to what he's made. He mentions spending a month on this, and it's something I probably need to do myself. At some point there was a website set up like this, with a list of youtubers indie devs could contact, but everything changes so fast that it was obsolete quickly. Besides, I'd likely learn a lot by tracking them down myself. It's something I'm scared about in case I encounter a bunch of intimidating, demotivating stuff, but perhaps I'll get used to it over time...

I hate the thought of sending out mass emails to 90 people like that... but I suppose it's better at least to try, and some might bite even if most won't?

All this guy's efforts led to just over 2000 wishlists before release. By contrast, MARDEK had something like 400, I think? Marketing matters!

He mentions that some large and small youtubers played the demo of his game.

Huh, interesting; I'm actually aware of (and don't exactly like) Greystillplays, who actually played this game. I can see how it's in line with the sort of content he creates. His videos get millions of views, so it's interesting seeing how that translates to sales for the game (not much).

Divine Dreams, being a narrative experience, might be tougher for any youtubers to play, though, or if they did it might just spoil the whole thing for players?

He shows his sales graph, which is of course L-shaped, though more jagged than MARDEK's after the initial peak. MARDEK's peak was just above 60, while his was just below 60, but he's got a lot of days with 10-20 sales whereas MARDEK tends to have fewer.

Youtubers with a higher viewcount like to play released games more than the demo.


Noteworthy!

He's looking at graphs on Steam that I haven't even seen before. I wonder if I can find them...

Hmm, yes, they're in a stupid place disconnected from the other stats, but I do see some fairly interesting stats which suggest that most of the impressions/sales came from people seeing MARDEK directly on Steam? Not what I would have expected! I think it ended up featured for a while, though I didn't even see that and wasn't told by Steam (just by someone on this site or Twitter).

This guy talks about his game getting on that list too - presumably the equivalent of Kongregate's Front Page - which must have been the one MARDEK was on? He mentions his stayed on for about 10 hours; I've no idea how long MARDEK was on there for (if it ever was).

He says he closely monitored Google Analytics following the release. I was so panicked that I just went and 'rested' for like three days! WHOOPS. Not that it would have changed anything though!

He mentions that even though there were points where he got more traffic to his game page, that didn't necessarily amount to more sales, because it just clearly wasn't interesting enough to people. I wonder, considering that a lot of sales for MARDEK might have come from people finding it on Steam, whether Divine Dreams would be no more obviously appealing? HMM.

Tags seem to help a lot. I feel that these were crucial back on Kongregate, too, and MARDEK did as well as it did because it was so high in the RPG category for a looooong time. It seems a ton of games on Steam use the RPG tag though; both this person's game and the other... Star-something one (Starcom?) had it even though neither of them are RPGs in the sense that Divine Dreams is. Maybe I'd have to use JRPG too, though I wonder if people actually look for that.

He mentions a site called Steam Likes, which provides some useful info? Apparently his game is similar to Medieval Shopkeeper Simulator, Hairy Little Buggers, and Hentai Babes - Servants. I see. Do I even want to know what it says about MARDEK?

He mentions regional differences in sales, though I imagine that's more interesting to him as a Russian - learning the Russians contributed so little to his sales - than to me as someone in the UK who's pretty much expecting that the US will be the primary source of sales and income. Notable that his posting on Russian social media - which cost him money - likely didn't amount to much, and the total sales from Russia only totalled $500 (and that's probably gross).

That's it for the details of that video, but here are a couple of impressions I had of it overall:

His game looks quite amateurish, like one of the typical indie games that clutter up the Steam store and which I'd never personally have any interest in. I do remember seeing something called... Reigns, was it? A game where you were a king and you made decisions by swiping left or right on cards. I played that myself a while back, and saw something about how it was a huge hit? Surely a big inspiration for this guy, though his work comes across as a clone to me. Perhaps Divine Dreams could be called a clone though, of other JRPGs? Hmm. At least being very similar to something well-loved would create pleasant, accessible familiarity in a way that, say, Sindrel Song wouldn't?

Also, I've been wondering for a while whether to make youtube videos myself, either instead of or in addition to these long blog posts. I've noticed some devs have their 'devlogs' on youtube in this format, and at least some of them have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. Surely that'd be a huge help, and it'd allow me more easily to show stuff off. And I quite like the idea of at least experimenting with it.

However, I've been too insecure about my speaking skills, and my looks in particular. I'm extremely resistant to the idea of actually filming myself, but I see enough other people only providing audio that that might be an option? At least to experiment with. Hmm.

I mention this here because this guy, uh... His Charisma stat isn't exactly stunningly high. I don't mean this to denigrate him at all, as I greatly appreciate what he's made here and that he had the confidence to post it; it's extremely useful! I'd love to help in a similar way. It's actually inspiring seeing that he did, as it feels like it's more of an option for me too.

I'd probably come across as insane or I'd overshare too much or something though... This guy is fairly monotone, but I might be all over the place in a way that might be off-putting. I don't know! I'm insecure!!

I first thought about the youtube thing a few years ago, and actually tried filming myself a handful of times privately as practice, but the results were... well, I don't know, because I couldn't watch them back. Would have been far too uncomfortable! It's hardly unique to me; I remember one of my Psychology lecturers setting up the camera in the lecture theatre once and hiding her face from the camera while setting up so then she didn't have to look at herself. I wonder how youtubers get used to watching themselves on video so much. Bleh.

Anyway, I wonder whether doing a video devlog might help build interest more than loooong blogs restricted to this site might. I'm thinking about it. Maybe I'll do a practice one for myself and see how much it makes me cringe.



This is a ridiculously long post!! A lot of the words are quoted though. I learned a lot from looking through these things in depth, so hopefully if you were mad enough to read all this too, you got something out of it!!

12 COMMENTS

Tama_Yoshi82~4Y
Nice info. It's harsh and real, but not fatalistic either; there's definitely a possibility of succeeding financially if done right.

My takes from this is to advertise prior to launch (as stated). I know there are devs regularly sharing their progress on public platforms like reddit, and each dev post seems to receive as much attention as posts of new releases, which is interesting. The key factor obviously being that public platforms reach to new people, whereas personalized discords or blogs or youtube channels generally don't (although, Youtube does have an algorithm in the way discord and blogs generally do not, so it seems Youtube is the best way to increase visibility, if only for that). On this matter, though, I know that Youtube's algorithm as of late has been promoting long-form attention-retaining family-friendly emotion-eliciting content, as opposed to short excerpts. Long form intellectual content also works for video essayists, but I doubt you'd want to go down that path (it's actually pretty hit or miss anyway).
This is why let's play channels or reaction channels have become more "standard" in the past years.

I recall the game Stanley Parable made a costum demo personalized to specific let's play Youtubers, and that seemed popular! I can only imagine that such an approach would work very well to increase visibility; you'd have to find the Youtubers that would be willing to play your games, and you'd have to find the hooks to make them interested (keep in mind that reaction videos are the winning genre; crafting a video which elicits strong emotional reactions is probably necessary).

Another pertinent detail raised in a gamasutra interview was that since game-dev is essentially a decentralized work, a game-dev will be more sustainable if they move to locations where the cost of living is lower. This can make a big difference if your cost of living per month is higher than 1.5k/month!

It's interesting how these "financial" blogs tend to leave me grasping for straws as to actual practical solutions, but here, the way to go seems pretty clear!

5
Ampersand68~4Y
One way to keep Steam users engaged and informed of future releases would be to regularly update the "News" section of your games, perhaps even linking to this blog, though maybe that'd attract unwanted attention... Hopping over to the MARDEK discussion page also reveals that quite a surprising number of threads have been opened! Most of them are just technical questions, though I guess those are pretty useful to gauge what people would want to see for DD. There's a couple threads thanking you for your work, however; might get a smile out of that.
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purplerabbits148~4Y
In terms of posting onto youtube your devlogs, I dont know if it would do well with your personality. I watched a video from The Right Opinion about a game dev, Yander Dev, and well,that game dev is someone who got a lot of fame very quickly, but doesn't have the personality that would thrive with a huge spike in attention. Here's a link to the video [LINK]

Since I wasn't around during the fig hunter hay days, I can't exactly say for sure whether a youtube format would work for you. I'm only basing my opinions off some of the stories I heard from those days and how they seem similar to Yandere Dev's experience.

The guy reselling the keys just makes me mad. Though asking them a question from the game is a pretty good way to weed out the sleezy people. I would have asked a trick question, for example, "What did you think about the lore reveal of the Bone Demon boss at the end of Saul's dungeon?" If they catch the 2 different pieces of info, then they prpbably have played it and are genuine.

Or play it a bit like the author of Game of Thrones. He rejected every tv show producer that couldn't answer a question, "Who is Jon Snow's mother?" In the books Jon Snow repeadedly comments that he doesn't know his mother,and it's not a question that can easily be googled, because it's not outright stated. The author really wanted the TV producer to really understand the books so that the adaptation to TV is still faithful to the core of the books, even though there will be inevitable changes. [LINK]
Here a link to the Film Theorist video where they attempt to solve it and bring in more background for how and why things are the way they are.

(Maybe a better question would be for MARDEK would be ,"Do you think this game series would have a grim or happy ending?" Because genere saviness would dictate that it's subversion of the classic jrpg)

For youtubers to mail a key to, maybe try ManlyBadassHero, I saw that he did a long play of Owlboy which is an indie game that took about 10 years of development. Manly also plays a lot of indie games on top of a lot of rpg maker games.
3
MF11~4Y
Yes, there are Steam forums and it seems to be one of the tools for devs to get some feedback (indies in particular), although most posts are about fairly trivial matters ("there's this bug", "how do I get X thing", etc.).

Which reminds me of a MARDEK post I've seen ([LINK] asking about modding support, does it have any viability? I almost asked about it on this blog before, but didn't because it could interfere with your current project. Maybe mods could increase the sales, mainly from die-hard fans? Probably unlikely, but I don't know.

2
codyfun12329~4Y
Before the MARDEK port was released, somebody commented on the blog about whether a translation feature was added, and it had to be stated that it would require a lot of rewiring of the game's internal code to support, something which Tobias said was off the table.

Modding suffers from the same issue. You usually have to code a game from the ground up with modding in mind in order to have all the various features support loading arbitrary data.

MARDEK, obviously, wasn't built like this. Modding doesn't even make much sense for games which are hosted on Flash portals, like MARDEK originated as. Level creation, on the other hand... There *was* Alora Fane: Creation, so I don't know... Not MARDEK, though.
1
Dingding32167~4Y
Definitely ask people to sign up for updates! It's free, means you don't lose people interested in your areas as much over time and encourages them to stay connected as well.

I think it's really useful to know that most people start off in the same boat of not knowing how to market, not being interested in it but being able to figure it out sufficiently if you're invested enough. And also how long people have taken on that journey as well!

It's a shame you hadn't done all of this before re-releasing MARDEK, as it's so useful to know beforehand, hopefully Divine Dreams will make up for some of it though.

The "At the same time, I had to resist the temptation to pivot the overall design based on the strongly expressed opinion of a handful of players." reminds me a lot of you, since you tend to get influenced by that quite a lot!

I do think that if storyline is going to be important, it'll be difficult for you to expect the number of players to keep increasing throughout the trilogy if they aren't playable individually/ if players who didn't play the first one but see the second one would get put off. Longstanding series generally have appeal for both returning and new fans, which helps build that player-base. I know you're already considering this, though!

In terms of videos, you might be even more comfortable with "live" comments typed with screen-sharing or something like that? Might take longer but still be worth it if it helps you gain exposure. Your posts here could get shorter as well, to save time covering the same ground. And having an external site link does help others find it as well!

Sorry if I ended up repeating a lot of what you said, though I guess it's just mostly agreeing with you!
3
Refurin24~4Y
I've not watched or seen many videos on YouTube of devs doing updates there, but I can think of two examples which I guess you would be interested to hear about, even if it doesn't really line up very well with what you'd be doing.

Introversion Software, a couple indie developers, worked on a game called "Prison Architect" and they did (monthly?) video updates on YouTube of what they'd been working on or what had been released recently (it was an Early Access game, I think).

They were never on camera, it was just the two chatting via the internet over gameplay footage they were recording alongside it, with little avatars holdings signs of their names.

It wasn't very structured either, they mostly just talked casually and there were a lot of tangents and other nonsense. I don't know how this comes across to most people, but I found it made things more fun and less business-y.

And those videos average between 100,000 and 200,000 views. Which is quite a lot! However this game was also very popular and quite successful, I think.

You might also be interested (and disheartened) to know that despite the fact that I watched all of these across the development of the game, I never actually played or bought the game!

Although this was more because of the price than anything. It was a $40 game, quite expensive for an indie game, I can only think of a couple others with that price tag!

I'm actually part of a team that makes a fan game based on Super Smash Bros (in Flash, too, actually!) called "Super Smash Flash 2" that has releases every couple months.

Oddly YouTube seems to always get far more attention than any other social media. A lot of our update videos average around 100,000 to 200,000 views, much like the numbers Prison Architect got. And we don't even have voiceovers! It's just music, gameplay footage and text.

That said, a couple times we've had updates in the works for years with no release (this game's been in the works for 13 years!!!), the longest gap was about 3 years, and still saw hundreds of thousands of views on some videos.

Our most viewed video update/reveal/trailer has 677,000 views!!! I am still surprised seeing that myself and I work on it!!! It makes no sense!!!

Of course I should mention that it is a free game, being a fan game and all. If it wasn't, I'm sure Nintendo would have some kind words to send our way in the form of emails from lawyers. So the amount that would translate to interest in and sales of a paid game would surely be very underwhelming.

I'm sure it's easy to tell that very little of these examples would translate to your own work. But I guess the takeaway is that YouTube video updates actually do surprisingly well if you've got an audience to watch them, and you don't need to be on camera, nor do you even have to record your voice.

And although it's fairly small in the grand scheme of things, it seems like your own YouTube channel still gets a decent amount of engagement on videos (particularly ones related to MARDEK, 2.4 thousand views and 100 comments is nothing to scoff at)! So definitely consider making short updates on there when you have something substantial to show (and keep in mind that YouTube's algorithms favour regular uploads, the more frequent, the better)!
3
TheJop32~4Y
I'm glad you're learning so much, but...part ONE?! I will have to clear out a few days for this blog saga.
1
codyfun12329~4Y
The guy who called his game overwhelmingly positively reviewed probably just saw that he had >95% positive reviews and took a shortcut by calling it that. However, Steam has a review count threshold only after which it uses adjectives--before then, it sticks to "Positive" and "Negative" instead of the longer category names.

Don't like GrayStillPlays? How come? Is it because of the way he titles his videos?

I wonder what the Steam analytics data for Sindrel Song is like in comparison to MARDEK's.
2
LotBlind53~4Y
I think a free demo shouldn't hurt sales since few people will have truly enjoyed the demo but not enough to buy the full thing at a reasonable price. I feel won't it just weed out people who were going to feel scammed and post negative reviews anyway? If you didn't pay anything for it, you're more likely to just stop playing and forget the game, aren't you?
1
kasheeste2133~4Y
First time here an I'd like to throw out some thoughts as a boring middle aged guy who was having a beer and thinking about his life and somehow ended up here. Firstly, I'm really glad to see you're in a better place and back on the horse, last I knew you were in a dark place and I remember thinking to myself "What a shame, this guy has potential." Secondly, while he has some lessons in my mind you're doing yourself a bit of a disservice by comparing your results to that of random space guy. Entirely different genres, entirely different audiences and entirely different games. Comparing past kongregate results doesn't mean much considering how things change and especially with his space results I can tell you that your average person see's his game and thinks "FTL wannabe." Its not a flashy enough game to attract the space action crowd and the space strategy with a bit of story genre has been milked dry. Meanwhile, the substantial RPG market is the same it's ever been and are so much more forgiving of gameplay so long as the story is good; just look at Tyranny, sure its got some flashy graphics but ultimately its the story that makes it a success and it is certainly no higher quality than anything you've done. You have a way of capturing the imagination, engrossing the player, its special... there is a reason I looked you up in this drunken nostalgic trip, not ubz (mudnblood), not sugarfree (caravaneer) or any of the other games I enjoyed. That being said, you definitely need to get out there and try to reignite some old fans. I had no idea Mardek was out on steam (purchased btw) and if it wasn't for a 40oz Steel Reserve I never would have known. You have a proven record, you had an enthusiastic fanbase, you've surely still got the talent; all that's left is to deliver a quality game and let people know that the wait is over. You seem set on getting an early start but I'd also caution you that people have an incredible distrust of indy devs anymore due to countless games that were hyped too soon and never materialized... no, not Star Citizen, I'm talking about The Seed, Examina-sui generis, Grimwood, and the countless other indy projects which despite being entirely viable and from formerly successful developers only served to get people all excited and smash their hope and goodwill.
Regardless of all the theorizing and whatnot, I just wanted to let you know that your art had an impact on my life and I'm sure there's plenty of others out there, waiting (albeit unknowingly) for your next masterpiece.
1
Tobias 1115~4Y
Thanks for commenting; things like this are so valuable to hear. I just hope that I can live up to this eventually!

The scale of the project which currently seems most viable is such that I could conceivably have it out in a few months, rather than lingering forever in development hell and letting people down. I think something like this would definitely be my best bet, just as proof I can make things if nothing else.

I talked about this space game so much just because that postmortem came up on Reddit on the day I happened to decide to do research, but I find it interesting how a game which to me doesn't seem all that interesting still managed to be as profitable as it was. Gives me hope I can do even better!
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