But the game cost $140k plus his equivalent salary for 4 years. Assuming he could have earned a $50k/yr salary (which is probably quite low), the game “cost” him $340k to make. $67k is probably a pretty good success as an indie game, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to making back the income he gave up by making it.
Edit: My point is that, while his game appears to be successful as an indie game in 2018, he spent way, way more making it than it could reasonably earn.
I think the reason he brought up the 120k figure is not that he expected this niche indie game to earn that for him, but rather that that’s the sort of salary he was commanding in the AAA development space and gave up to go indie.
Sure, but unless you’re independently wealthy or have an understanding partner, you need to make something personally from the game. The $140k was what he paid contractors, so if the game makes that he will only have not lost money. From a saving for retirement perspective, he will have essentially taken a 4 year vacation.
Edit: My point is that I can’t afford to quit my job and work on a game for 4 years and then make no money from it. Other people have more savings or other sources of income, so that may not apply to them.
Let’s posit the game has made $67k in the first month. Normally that would mean the game will end up making twice that by the end of its first year, which would be around $130k.
If the game releases on consoles you can expect to more or less duplicate those earnings, which would make about another $120k and residuals kicking for 2-3 more years, probably amounting (in total) to another $120k (although this last part of the earnings is highly variable).
I would bet this game making (three years in and after the Steam/Sony/MS/Nintendo cut and if there’s a sensible discount/slae strategy) something around $300k-$500k if it releases on consoles. Half that otherwise. The game probably was too expensive to make and the yearly salary expected/needed for the livestyle of the developer is also probably too high due to his living location, but the numbers are good if you don’t factor in publishing contracts.
No disagreement. An exploitative publishing contract would knock the earnings way down.
To me, the game development just seems like a series of bad decisions.
The whole thing is either utterly unrealistic expectations of sales or the sunk cost fallacy keeping development going.
Why would you take a publishing contract for an indie game sold via digital distribution means only and also shoulder 100% of the costs of development? That doesn’t make a bit of sense. If he did take a publisher they must have kicked in for some of his dev costs.
Are you familiar with the kind of contracts some publishers are throwing around? Most of the time they try to recoup “marketing costs” (which are hard to tally anyway) before the developer gets anything. Whih given that developers have normally invested more in the product, is ridiculous.
He did mentions paying at least $140k himself for contractors. If that’s true, under no sensible circumstance should he be seeing $0 of about $70k in sales.
Your numbers are off. That would be $300-500k in sales, minus app store costs (so 70% of that). So now it’s $210-350k. Now subtract the $140k he paid for art, sound, narration, etc… and you have $70k-210k. So no those numbers are NOT good.
Now lets consider he said he was hoping that it would take 2 years to create. If he met that deadline his salary would have been $35k-$105k per year. That high end is not anywhere close for the risk of what he was trying to accomplish and leaves him no room to work on the next game. He said it actually took him 4 years, so that’s halved again to come out to $17.5k - $52.5k per year for his effort. Even on the high end that type of salary is not great outside SF, and the middle amount is not good anywhere in the US.
So even without a publisher contract there was no way to make the numbers work for this to be a non-hobby gig.
I already discounted that. 6k sales at an average of $15.50 (due to first week discounts) is $93k. $65k takes already the 30% off from the storefront’s sale value. Duplicate for consoles, duplicate the combined for first year vs. first month. Add it again for next 2 years (this could be less or more, depending on the tail)
They did. The article specifically mentioned that he ran out of money at some point and had a bunch of unfinished art assets with no budget to get them finished. And the publisher bailed him out.
I think you’re misinterpreting the post. It’s not saying that his revenue is $0, but that he hasn’t even gotten close to covering even just the out of pocket costs.
Even then the numbers still don’t look good for a single developer working full time, which is my real point.
Ahh, OK. So he didn’t finance development on his own, then.
Random fact: When I made my own indie game (Land of Legends, published through Shrapnel Games) over a decade ago, I lost about $60k.
I was entirely self-funded (through a personal loan I later repaid). I didn’t even make enough money from my monthly royalties to pay for the interest on the loan I took out.
All ended well for me in life, but when I read the summary of the WTWTLW situation, I thought to myself “yup, sounds about right.”
I think it’s a common tale. You just don’t always see Polygon articles about it.
My reading was that he paid $140k out of his own pocket. The publisher spent some unknown amount on top of that.
Yep, but it doesn’t explain why he has seen $0 out of the sales so far. Co-financing should mean sharing the revenue from the get go. That is…
If this is not true, but it might. My reading of the post is that he has made $0, and on top of that there are $149k in expenses, but it is ambiguous, and if it’s just he’s not recouping yet, yeah it’s going to take a while, and most likely only if he goes multiplatform.
Yeah, I disagree. Most indies I know would be really, really happy with that. And that’s multi person teams. Current rule of thumb for unknown indie teams: create a financing structure (grants, tax rebates, crowdfunding, cutting corners) that puts you in the black, including (not very good) lead developer salaries, with about 10-20k sales (depending on your confidence threshold, but hitting 20k sales multiplatform -5k per platform- is still doable in a year for relatively unknown titles). Next year these numbers could be very different, though.
Look at the original article and the $30k median in the first year. This is at least 4 times that (with the added focus of the postmortem it can be more), and it’s a gamepad optimized game with easy porting (no online) that can double that again when it launches on consoles (hard to tell because of the nature of the game, but that’s the rule of thumb). And first year revenues are not total revenues by a wide margin. For a niche title it’s a (mild) success.
Now, as others have pointed out, the discussion of whether the game was too expensive to make/took too long/expectations were too high and unrealistic is a valid one. But under current market conditions for a niche indie title, it’s doing pretty well.
I can’t see this game selling on consoles, which also have a fee just to get in. Maybe on the golden age of the iPad, but that’s long gone.
Most investors went their money back+profit before you see a cent.
I disagree. I think it would sell as well as on PC,
given a same-size marketing campaign (not very well but certainly making some sales). Maybe half as well if we are pessimistic.
Also, what fee are you talking about???
If they take on the full financing, otherwise they are normally fine with shared revenues.
I was never much of a console fan, so it could more appealing to those users than I think.
As to the fee, I might’ve read too much into something I’ve read in the past. I thought there was a fee for adding a product or providing a new patch - Steams charges $100 per game and patches were pretty expensive on XBox and were abandoned by… err, someone.
I think the reality is that if you’re indie in 2018, you should be making your games as cheaply as you can. Make it look expensive, sure, but don’t have it really be expensive, otherwise…