I'm still somewhat skeptical. Sorry. 1,000 sales a day would be approx. $20,000 in revenue. Let's assume that they are getting a 25% royalty rate from those sales (average value for all the various rates they receive from different portals), so they're making $5,000 a day. That's $150,000 a month and $1,800,000 a year. As far as I can see, they're done and can retire to the carribean. (I know, I know, this sales rate wouldn't be sustained for a full year but it still seems pretty out there)
Er... I count twenty employees and/or contractors from the picture in NY times. 1.8 million is 90 thousand dollars per employee. It's not much, not at all. You'd want to make a lot more. You're trying to start up a portal aren't you? If you are skeptical about 1000 sales a day, why are you bothering?
I'm not saying it's not a good thing ... if that's what they're getting, then more power to them! I'm just saying that from what I've read here over the time I've been on the board, that sort of sell through is almost unheard of. Even taking into account what you said, being able to afford to pay your 20 employees $90K a year off of a single game is pretty incredible. Is this another case of the top 1% get 99% of the money?
If I would know that a portal will sell my game 50 000 times for sure in the first three months, I would be even satisfied with earning 1$ per sale. It's not only because of the money but also because our developer name will get very popular which would be good for our next game ;-)
I also disagree with your general consensus. The only thing that is unreasonable about 1,000 sales per day is sustaining it for more than 3 months. More than 3 months could be done by some games, but I don't think Diner Dash sustained that daily sales figure for more then 3 months. I have had more than one game sell one thousand units for a couple or few months. There is nothing unreasonable about 1,000 sales per day what a successful games is on several pig portals. At their peek, a single portal can generate a thousand sales of one game in a day. I also don’t see anything unreasonable about Diner Dash’s claim of 50,000 units in 3 months. That is about would I would expect. Now that is very unreasonable. To get this many sales you would have to be using portals that pay lass than that. Also, in the case of Diner Dish, they are also using a publisher (Play First). The revenue would be split between the publisher, developer, portal, and in some cases the portals affiliate. In other cases a distributor or consolidator takes a cut. I don’t have any specific knowledge of the what deal Play First has to distribute Diner Dash, but with my experience in deal like this, I feel confident make the fallowing assumption. Every time Diner Dash is sold on MSN Gaming Zone I would estimate that a portion of the money is kept by Microsoft, Oberon Takes a cut, Play First Takes a cut, and the developer gets a piece. I would be very surprised if that piece was anywhere near $10. I doubt the developer makes $10 per unit and I doubt Play First Makes $10 per unit.
Believe it. Games like this sell DO sell 1,00 units per day. I don't think so. I am sure many of these sales were discounted due to subscriptions, memberships, or promotions. It could easily be less than $15,000. Who is the "THEY" you are talking about? Play First (the publisher)? Or GameLab (the developer)? I doubt either one of them is getting 25% of the revenue from each sale but that is just my best guess. I have no idea what they get but I would be suprised if it was 25%.
Savant, I am not trying to pick on you. I think a lot of developers don’t understand how deals like this work so I am just trying to make everyone aware. But some how it all quoted you. Nothing personal.
James, I totally agree with you that a game can easily sell a 1000 copies per day. But the Diner Dash figures still look strange. Here are some observations (the bold is the information given in the article): - The original New York Times article is dated June 27th. The game came out late last year so that should give at least 6 months since release. - 50,000 units in 6 months is equal to about 280 units/day - 182,000 units in 6 months is equal to about 1000 units/day So either one of the numbers is wrong or DD suddenly jumped in sales/day from the 300 range to the 1000 range. Or then he is quoted out of date and the total sales are closer to 200k units. I think both cases are plausible, but the numbers given in the article don't add up.
Well, I'm apparently the one spouting all the nonsense so quoting me seems appropriate. No worries...
"So, Diner Dash's 1k/day sale is true? That's amazing!!" Sure it's possible. But I doubt if it's possible to just "release" a game and hope for the best and all of sudden "1000 sales per day!". I'm inclined to believe IF a game (or any game for that matter) is selling 1000 copies a day, it's the result of an impressive marketing effort that more than likely will eat well into the profits of the game. There's a fine line in value between total customers and total profit. If you have a dev team assembled or you plan on sticking around in the game market for a spell, it might be wise to put out a game(s) as a loss leader and spend big bucks marketing them, doing $$whatever$$ it takes to get it into the portals, search engines, ppc, etc,etc,etc. The goal would be pretty much to break even or sustain as little financial loss as possible, but build up a user base, and then target that user base (close to free) for your 2nd release and hopefully get new sales for alot less compared to the previous effort. Making money in the software business is not always about the best looking or best playing game around. As any serious indie developer/business will tell you, marketing is usually as important (or more) as the product itself.
He probably meant at it's peak, games never sell consistently from day to day. It is likely they are getting 1000 a day towards the middle of those 6 months.
Selling more than 1000 in 3 months for your first game is probably a high expectation... None of my games have sold as good as that and I'm on my 5th. Of course I'm probably just crap ^.^