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Research Week - Day 1

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago2,337 words

Here's a look at some sales stats for my games so far, as well as a couple of articles about the financial suicide of trying to make a living from indie games!!

I AM RELUCTANT, since I've been doing some creative stuff over the past week that I'd rather continue with than tackling this thing I find generally aversive, but I suppose I need to start doing some research into how to market games!

I've been doing some passively for the past few months, regularly checking indie devs on Twitter, reading articles when they come up, bookmarking relevant videos (which I intend to watch in bulk and take notes about). So I'm definitely more in-the-know than I was before. When I look back to how naive I was about all this when I released Sindrel Song, I feel quite embarrassed! It'll be valuable to focus on it for a bit and take some notes, though.

I wrote ∞ this post ∞ 5 days ago, with a series of questions I don't yet know the answer to and should research. I'll use that to guide me, and I'll write a new post every day this week with attempts to answer those questions.

First, though, some stuff about where I am currently, what I've achieved this year.



I have two games on Steam now: MARDEK and Memody: Sindrel Song, plus soundtrack/extras packs for both. MARDEK's been out for around 4 months, Sindrel Song (why do I call it that rather than Memody?) about 10. Here are the current total sales:



There's also this thing:



It seems to show lifetime sales, but the numbers are significantly different for some reason? So I don't know what's going on there. It lists 1431 sales for MARDEK, for example, with a gross of $11,685.71, but there's also this data I can view for the specific game:



$17k and $15k are both significantly higher than $11k, so what's going on there? I'm not used to having or dealing with money, at least not like this - Kongregate had revenue share, but it literally just gave one number per month showing what I'd earned - so can any of you make sense of this?

Hmm, there's this:



So maybe those "Life to date" stats only go up to the 23rd of September, when Steam last paid me? But the numbers still don't add up, so I don't know what's going on!

Anyway, you can see from this that sales for Sindrel Song have been poor in general, and sales for MARDEK were big at the start, but still continue to trickle in every month. I hadn't run discounts for either of the games, but this past month I experimented running something like a 20% or 30% discount for both. Here's what happened:



That's for the previous 31 days, with the +N% being relative to the 31 days before that. So sales do make a difference! I'd already been told a few times that a lot of people only buy games on sale, but it's interesting seeing that proven with data.

Here's some more data for MARDEK specifically during those 31 days:



$2208 is quite a bit higher than the ~$1100 figures from earlier, but it also says $1811 for the previous 31 days, so none of these numbers make any sense to me!

I've been wondering for a while - ∞ quite openly in blog posts ∞ - about how financially viable this games development thing is. I'd been fretting about how games make the bulk of their income in the first week, but then trail off to effectively nothing after that. While checking these numbers recently though, I was reassured a bit by seeing that the monthly numbers were quite far from zero!

(I just re-read that 4-month-old post linked to there, and it's great to see how much actually has changed for the better for me since then!)

I have no idea what other people in my country earn, but literally seconds of googling gave me ∞ this article ∞, which mentions an average of £585 per week, or £2340 a month. Let's generously say I'm getting about £900 ($1161) from Steam each month, plus £250 from ∞ my Patreon ∞ (which I'm aware I haven't updated in a while, but I'll definitely be asking people there if they want to help with testing once I've figured out how best to take the next steps). So that's £1150, which is almost exactly half of that average UK monthly income.

So financial stability remains a dream, but not as distant a dream as it once did. At the start of this year, I wrote ∞ a post ∞ with my goals for 2020, the topmost of which was to earn £12000 from my creative work, after earning around £1650 during 2019. I don't know if these sales stats show that I'm there just yet, but I feel like I'm close? So that's not nothing.

I'm wondering though how long this kind of income will last, and how often I should do discounts. Just because MARDEK's earning over $1000 a month now doesn't mean it always will.

It gives me hope though that if I could get a couple of other games out with these kinds of numbers, I might be able to make it work. At least for a while. I just need to get into the habit of releasing decently-successful games without too much time between each one. That's easier said than done!



∞ Here's an article called 'Barely Surviving as a Game Developer (While Steam Still Gets their Cut) ∞.

It mostly seems to be about advertising some blockchain-based Steam competitor or something (called Ultra; I've never heard of it), but it has some interesting bits that I'll quote.



One whole year on a game?? But that's foreeeeever!! I say, rolling my eyes, noticing that most of the indie devs I see on Twitter take considerably longer than that - unless they're making throwaway 'crapps' - so I wonder where this data is coming from. I did make Sindrel Song in about 6 months while recovering from major brain surgery, though, so maybe 7 months isn't a bad estimate. Depends on the type of game, of course.



I knew that Steam required you to pay $100 for the privilege of publishing on their platform, but I didn't know they gave it you back. Good to know.



I'll have to look at that article later. I wonder whether his perceived prominence made him cocky, and he made something really experimental that nobody would actually like thinking it'd still succeed because of past successes. This was the case with me and Sindrel Song. Or Memody. Whatever!



I wonder whether 'branding' or owning a website actually help sales in the end. I wonder how many dev teams pay exorbitant amounts to create these things even though they make no difference to how well the game eventually sells. You could say art or music are quite expensive... unless you do them yourself. The same is true of marketing, surely.



I follow that guy on Twitter; he's one of the publishers of Hypnospace Outlaw. I'm surprised the number here isn't higher than 82%.



I'm... intrigued by this statistic. 2000 sales in the first month? Is that the norm? Maybe MARDEK was a particularly poor seller, then? I wonder if it'll get $30k in its first 12 months (it's been out for about 4 so far, and you can see the numbers yourself up there). It calls $21k grim, but I'd actually be quite happy with that. I could live on that, maybe.



That seems more realistic to me, and MARDEK's numbers compare favourably to it.



This also seems to be similar to a lot of what I've seen from other indie devs. It's why I'm so concerned about looking into this now, because I know Atonal Dreams will get similar or worse numbers unless I do something about it. Maybe it wouldn't do any better than Sindrel Song.


Let's look at ∞ the other article, encouragingly spittle-screamingly titled YOUR INDIE GAME WILL FLOP AND YOU WILL LOSE MONEY ∞.

It's from 2017, and the aforementioned stats (3500 owners etc) are for:



I bet that was Sonny!!! Because there are no other RPGs with zombies! Or maybe it was MARDEK! I bet it was!!



Oh. I wonder what it was, then. Unlike what the other article said, it doesn't seem to be the top indie game he found, but rather one deliberately chosen from around the middle of the top sellers list. The very top one likely had exponentially more sales.

The rest of the article basically stresses the point that the indie games thing is financial suicide and that pretty much nobody earns enough money from it even to get by. This I know to be true. It's why I keep falling into stress and panic when I realise the absurdity of the path I'm on... and why I avoid looking into things like this most of the time.

But I'd also like to at least finish what I'm working on now before rethinking my entire life. So for now, I need to look up how best to make it work rather than getting too disheartened by the cold reality that it probably never will!!

...I was going to keep writing this post over the rest of the day with more research, but perhaps a better way to do this would be to write one of these posts every day, or something. Few people will read them, I know, but they should at least be more digestible than some mega-post, and I'll be able to give each thing I read a chance to sink in. I hope you can also understand how mentally draining it is to read about the reality of making money from this, and how it's not something I can just dive into for extended periods without feeling like I want to just give it all up. So it's best to just take it one step at a time.