Request for portals? Median Income from game.

[Lerc]

While talking to numerous portals about releasing games the obvious issue of "how much can I expect to make?" always arises. The answers are many and varied because it is a tricky business judging the success of a game before it starts selling.

I have had assurances of "your game should make $X" (it didn't). Comments along the lines of "you could make up to $X if your game is successful". Even the occasional "Product Y makes $X" has turned up.

While some of the figures can be quite impressive, they don't actually refer to my game. How does my game compare? Once again, before the game goes on sale there is very little basis for comparison.

What I propose is for a standard question be posed to All Portals/Publishers.

"What is the median return to a developer for a game?"

In answering this question Publishers should be able to cull titles from their calculations if they feel they are unrepresentative provided that they disclose the list of games that do make up the calculation.

This information isn't any more specific (and consequently not any more commercially sensitive) than the figures that portals have freely given me and others (sometimes even press releases have come out with this generalised info). The differance is that it is simply standarised.

This really is information that should benefit both developers and publishers/portals. Once the information is out there the challange to developers is to make a better than average game. If you are below the median level (and by defenition, half of us will be) then it will be up to you to lift your game. The bitterness that can result from feeling like you were given unreasonably high expectations helps neither the developer or publisher.

Tell me if you support this idea? Asking as a group of notable indies would be preferable to myself asking as a lone crackpot.

[Midnight Synergy]

I guess I'm not sure why you feel this information would be useful. I think that each game and situation is so unique, that little weight should be put on what the "average" game does (other than the realization, that the "average" game - counting all indie games out there - does very little business).

For example, my own Wonderland (the original) has done extremely well on most portals, except for one where it has had a really sub-par performance. Is that the portal's fault? Does it just have different audience? Are there other factors? If I wanted to improve the game's situation on that one portal, I think I would need to look at all the factors involved, and a simple median sales figure for that portal would make little difference.

There are many other factors that could make the median figure less than informative - for example, the number of games a portal carries. A portal with many more games is bound to have a (relatively) lower Median than a small portal given that it is obviously less selective about the titles it chooses - again, I'm just not sure how knowing that one number would be helpful.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you? :confused:

[Lerc]

I guess I'm not sure why you feel this information would be useful. I think that each game and situation is so unique, that little weight should be put on what the "average" game does (other than the realization, that the "average" game - counting all indie games out there - does very little business).You may have a fairly good idea of how little the average game makes. but a lot of people do not. In fact you might even be surprised one way or the other.

For example, my own Wonderland (the original) has done extremely well on most portals, except for one where it has had a really sub-par performance. Is that the portal's fault? Does it just have different audience? Are there other factors? I don't know it it's the portal being univerally bad or the Game just not working with their audience. Perhaps if you knew how much the median game sold you would have an idea which it was :)


There are many other factors that could make the median figure less than informative - for example, the number of games a portal carries. A portal with many more games is bound to have a (relatively) lower Median than a small portal given that it is obviously less selective about the titles it chooses - again, I'm just not sure how knowing that one number would be helpful.
That is why I added the bit about being able to remove games from the list.

If a portal has 50 crap games that everyone knows is crap and no-one ever buys they can drop them from their calculations as long as they disclose exactly what they have dropped.

[arcadetown]

Every title behaves differently so it's really impossible to guess. For example with Wonderland honestly was expecting average sales but it's done quite nicely. Would Patrick have wanted me to tell him that up front, I bet not. Not to mention would have been flat out wrong. As to giving out exact sales figures most authors typically wish to keep that private.

[Midnight Synergy]

I don't know it it's the portal being univerally bad or the Game just not working with their audience. Perhaps if you knew how much the median game sold you would have an idea which it was :)


Ok, I think I get now what you're looking for - basically a standardized measure of how "good" a portal is? I agree, that would certainly be an interesting and useful thing to know when negotiating agreements.

I guess my point is that a single number, regardless of whether this is the mean, a truncated mean (dropping "irrelevant" games), the median, etc, doesn't really give the developer much information about how well a particular title might do on a particular portal. Even if we got all the portals to pick a group of 50 "standard" games and calculate a median of their incomes in a particular month or year, it would certainly make for an interesting statistic - I just don't think it would carry a lot of weight. Too many other factors are involved, even if the list of games is standardized (what month they started carrying them, how much promotion they did on particular games, the portal audience in general, over what time period it was done, sesional sales fluctuation, etc, etc).

[Robert Cummings]

I would like to know how much to expect by going solo and relying on this as a chief income, as it is a big risk to take.

[ManuelFLara]

I think the problem with an "average" measure of this kind is that most portals are hit driven. I mean there can be 10 games. One of them making $10,000 (just an example) and the rest making $10, and the average would be $1,009. Does that mean your game will make around $1K? Probably not. Odds are you'll make around $10.

[Midnight Synergy]

I think the problem with an "average" measure of this kind is that most portals are hit driven. I mean there can be 10 games. One of them making $10,000 (just an example) and the rest making $10, and the average would be $1,009. Does that mean your game will make around $1K? Probably not. Odds are you'll make around $10.

I think that's why Lerc suggested the use of the Median (which would be $10), rather than the Mean.

[cliffski]

I would certainly be interested in this figure. Its way more helpful than the top games figure. Its worth knowing because some expectation of sales is needed for you to weigh the decision to sign to a portal, seeing as though you may lose some sales revenue from your own site when doing so.

[svero]

I would like to know how much to expect by going solo and relying on this as a chief income, as it is a big risk to take.

But it doesn't really mean anything. You can't "expect" make anything in particular. It will totally depend on you and your game. How much my game makes has nothing to do with how much your game makes. If I tell you Pretty Good Solitaire has made over a million bucks does that mean your next game will make you a millionaire? Nope.

[Nexic]

Just keep making the best games you can, safe in the knowlage that it is possible to make lots of cash. Eventually you should succeed, assuming you can actually make half decent games.

[Anthony Flack]

Ah, but how much is "lots" potentially? Or typically?

Yep, I know there's no such thing as typical. But realistically - say you were going to go all-out. How much development cost is too much for the market to support? That would be good to know. And who's audience should you be trying to reach? Realarcade's? Garage Games'?

It's not about trying to predict how well your game will do. Nobody knows that. It's more about getting a clearer picture of what the general state of play is. Whether anyone is going to front up with this or any other information is another matter (now that indie gaming is big business it's all a big sneaky poker game isn't it?), but certainly I wouldn't say it would be useless information.

Because I really don't know what's going on out there. How much does a moderately successful game make? $10,000? $50,000? More? How about a decent top 10 hit? $100,000? A million? And where would this money be most likely to come from? Portals, sure. But some more than others.

Once again, yes, everyone's experience is different. But it would help to know this sort of thing when planning your game out. Not for me, obviously, as I run on pure bloody-minded stubbornness, not money. But I mean for normal people.

[sparkyboy]

Just keep making the best games you can, safe in the knowlage that it is possible to make lots of cash. Eventually you should succeed, assuming you can actually make half decent games.


In a nutshell.
My philosophy exactly.I think everyone (including me :p ) has the potential to make a hit game.Will it be this year,dunno.Should we care,probably,but worry about it,nope :D

[James C. Smith]

If there was some unexplainable reason that all portals were forced to disclose this median number I think you would see a lot more game rejected by portals.(assuming the portal cared about how low this number looked) Any portals that is rather open about accepting any game, and letting the market decide if they like it, ends up having a lot of really bad games. Portals like Big Fish Games and Reflexive Arcade have a deep catalog with a lot of really bad performers at the bottom. Portals like Pogo, Yahoo, and MSN Gaming Zone are very selective about what games they will take and their median would be much higher. (Plus they have a lot more traffic, which would help their median even more). I think your original question/point was to get an idea of what a typical game could make and you weren’t trying to compare portals. But my point is the type of games a portal caries is going to affect this number a lot. Many people talk about this being a hit driven business. They say the games in the top 10 do great and the rest do MUCH more poorly. I think there is more to it than that. It's not only about the top 10. There are plenty of mediocre games that aren’t top 10 sellers but are still successful games. But there is also a flood of really bad games that just don’t stand a chance at ever being profitable. I don’t see how a median could communicate enough information about these 3 categories of games to be meaningful.

If you want to know how much money the typical game will make I don’t think you will like the answer. It is very little. Not nearly enough to make a business out of it. Probably not enough to pay your minimal expenses even if work for free. But if you redefine what you mean by a “typical” game to exclude all the games that are clearly bad then you will end up with a much more appealing number. But no one actually know how to figure out for sure what is so bad that it shouldn’t be included in the “typical” game statistics. How you define that “typical” game will completely change the answer you are going to get.

[James C. Smith]

Another point is that after years of making games, including some hits and some not so great, I still have no idea how much money my existing games will make by the end of their life cycle. Swarm is more than 7 years old and still making money. I don’t know how you would define your sample period. But I don’t think you would want to include 2 months of sales from a 2 month old games and 12 months of sales from a 12 months old game in the same median. It seems simple enough to just report the median profits from the first 6 months of sales for each game but then you would be looking at 6 month old data and ignoring the fact that games released this month are selling twice as much as the 6 moth old games did in their first month. The industry is going very fast and a lot changes in 6 moths. But at the same time, reporting only 6 months of sales for something that will sell for many years is not very accurate.

[Vorax]

It is rather intresting that this information is so difficult to find, yet so relevant.

Although, what would it really change if everyone did know?

The first thing that comes to mind is the saying: Information is power.

If information is power, most of us are 90 lbs. weaklings in this department. If we had the real numbers, my guess is there would be alot less willing to pick a fight (ie: make games) in the first place.

[Bmc]

It's not relevant though.

What is relevant is the number of downloads.

Once you can make an EDUCATED guess about the average number of downloads your game might get ... then you should be able to determine the approximate amount of money you may make by testing different CRs

a decent CR is 1%, that should be your goal.

the CR is Number of Purchases / Number of Downloads

[Emmanuel]

If we had the real numbers, my guess is there would be alot less willing to pick a fight (ie: make games) in the first place.

If you don't know that it's impossible to succeed, then you might succeed.

If I looked at the CR for my first title as being what I'd get for any game I'd ever make, I wouldn't have continued. But my second title has a much, MUCH better CR. Make good games that people want to buy in a category for which there is demand and forget about that median sales stuff, it might make you feel fuzzy inside but that won't turn an "eh" game into a buyable one; alternatively it may make you depressed but you still can turn out a great game and sell a lot more than the 'median'.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Anthony Flack]

Well, for example, there was Wik entered in the IGDC thingy. And the budget for Wik was listed as, what? $350,000? I forget. Something like that; sorry if it's wildly out but I'm too lazy to check.

Anyway, what that tells me is, Reflexive, who have been doing this for quite a while, thought that a game of Wik's standard had a reasonable shot at making a profit on that. Which is good, useful information (even if they were wrong in this case, it's reasonable to assume that they're not crazy).

It's all very well to say, "just make the best game you can". That's what I'm doing, and I'm working for free so it's no big deal for me. But what if you went and made a $350,000 game, when it turns out that a big hit is only worth $35,000??

[Emmanuel]

I would hope that anyone budgeting $350,000 to make a game would sign a few distribution deals in advance, and size up the market on their own, before committing even part of that money. Otherwise, it's Darwinian selection at work I guess :)

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Jack Norton]

Woah, I think that maybe you meant 35,000$.... 350,000$ as budget, is incredibly high for ANY shareware games (not only Wik)...!!! :eek:

[ManuelFLara]

Woah, I think that maybe you meant 35,000$.... 350,000$ as budget, is incredibly high for ANY shareware games (not only Wik)...!!! :eek:
$350,000 is what the Wik IGF profile states as the project budget. And yeah, it's BIG money.

[Nexic]

Thay 350k includes the pay for the various people working on the project, so assuming we were all paid the same as a lead programmer at reflexive, most games would end up with a dev budget of a good 50k as it is. Now compare the quality of *most* indie games to Wik and you'll see how the cost was justified.

[Matthew]

Here are some ballpark figures I've heard from open sources:

- Current casual games with competitive production values cost around $100-150k to create (this is going up)

- Sit-on-the-#1-slot type hits make millions, and could sell as many as 500k units over their lifetime (this is going up)

- B titles make ~$100k+ (this is going down)

- The above revenues are gross. Royalties are anywhere from 25-40% from the portals. I expect this will change, but only through the leverage of emerging publishers.

- The top portals by unit sales are: Yahoo, MSN, Shockwave, RealArcade, Big Fish Games

Again, all of this information isn't tremendously hard to find. Dig around the IGDA Online Games SIG, GDC reports and powerpoint slides; those kinds of things.

[Jack Norton]

The above revenues are gross. Royalties are anywhere from 25-40% from the portals. I expect this will change, but only through the leverage of emerging publishers.

Change up or down?

[Travis Dorschel]

I read or heard somewhere that Feeding Frenzy from Sprout Games has sold over 100,000 units, so that would be quite a success, in the million dollar range. Others have posted their exact numbers here for sales over the first 1-3 months being somewhere in the $2K range. My guess is that these latter numbers are pretty realistic for the majority of indie developers just starting out. Just my guess because there really isn't a wealth of info out there about this.

[ManuelFLara]

I read or heard somewhere that Feeding Frenzy from Sprout Games has sold over 100,000 units, so that would be quite a success, in the million dollar range. Others have posted their exact numbers here for sales over the first 1-3 months being somewhere in the $2K range. My guess is that these latter numbers are pretty realistic for the majority of indie developers just starting out. Just my guess because there really isn't a wealth of info out there about this.
Maybe I'm wrong but I compare Feeding Frenzy's success to Ricochet's, they've been around since more or less the same time and they're both everywhere. IIRC in some thread (maybe it was back at Dextery forums) James C. Smith said Ricochet (maybe it was the sequel?) sold around 300.000 copies in the first (3, 6, 8?) months at RealArcade. If that's true, being there for a longer time and in a lot more of portals, the total number of copies sold must be really really huge.

[svero]

I know of some other hits that have sold in the hundreds of thousands of unit ranges. Certainly those numbers are possible. But the competition for top 10 slots is tough. If it happens then it's a great thing, but again you can't really EXPECT it to happen if it's your first game and you're just learning the business. A lot of the hit games we see are from companies that have been around a while, and often companies that moved into casual online stuff from previous retail work or in related fields like online gaming. These are people who already have great artists, musicians, full studios of programmers etc... I think a lone guy can still compete with a fun game, but the bar is definitely raised much higher than it was a few years back.

[Nexic]

- B titles make ~$100k+ (this is going down)

Well I guess that makes my games in the Y title range :)

I've worked out if I make 2 games a year that equal or better xeno 2 I *can* just about scrape a living. To me making a low income and doing something I love is worth it. I'm sure a few years down the line this will change, but at the moment I'm still having fun :)

[ggambett]

To me making a low income and doing something I love is worth it.
Sure... but work your ass off, be positive, be persistent, listen, learn, and sooner than you think you may find yourself doing something you love AND making a high income :)

[Nexic]

Oh, just because I'm having fun doesn't mean I'm not working 12 hours a day :)