Absolutely. It’s disingenuous to claim there was no marketing. It takes an enormous amount of time to build up a YouTube channel that can maintain 40k subs. He could have saved that time and paid another popular streamer (or YouTube personality) to promote his game, perhaps resulting in more sales.
Higher risk/ reward.
Building the channel himself may have a cost, but it’s not direct and it is dispersed. The route you suggest has higher sales potential, but has direct up front costs that are probably significant. If he does it himself it only costs time. Plus he probably made a few bucks along the way with ad dollars. A very few probably, but not zero perhaps.
Which isn’t actually free either.
Presumably, building his youtube audience wasn’t purely for the purpose of marketing his game, so it would be disingenuous to say that he had months of unpaid marketing work in addition to his unpaid development work. But still, there’s still some pro-rated value of what paying a 40K subscriber streamer to talk about his game would have cost. For instance, there’s an opportunity cost where he could have been making more money from his own channel by taking somebody else’s paid sponsorship to talk about their game.
Just because he’s bearing that cost himself (and not paying himself for the time) doesn’t mean the cost doesn’t exist.
Well, pretty pro Itch.io because Itch.io happened to feature the game on the front page and that translated to lots of visits, and from that to sales. If itch.io would have happened to feature another indie game and not him… he would tell another story.
Which kind of confirms why indie devs are always fighting with Valve, because having the luck of being chosen by the almighty algorithm to feature on the front page or not means a lot.
Look, if it’s not something that literally anyone else in the world can do for no extra cost, then it’s not “free”.
Most people don’t have a successful YouTube channel with tens of thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands or millions of viewers. So most people cannot benefit from those things with “free” or “no marketing”.
It just reminds me of those infamous Wall Street Journal articles completely lacking in self-awareness, where “self made” entrepeneurs explain that they didn’t get any help along the way (except for free rent from parents / connections from parents / access to expensive equipment and such for free / whatever else)
Like, I don’t hold it against people if they had advantages which helped them get where they are today (I certainly benefitted from many in my own life), and I’m sure it was hard work for him to build that YouTube channel in the first place, but he can’t pretend that he spent nothing to market his game.
I’m just amazed that he thinks $7000 revenue in the first month is a good result. On a game he spent 4 years on. And now he says his revenue is about $30 per week after that first month. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model. How is he making enough money to live? A day job, I guess?
It’s an indie platformer. He’s done way better than average. Look at it as making some income from self-published books at Amazon. Most authors do it just because they want to write and publish and to get some spare change- People making more than $1k are the exception.
This is the same.
Yes, from what I understand, a $7k launch month for an indie game with no major news site coverage, streaming publicity, or Steam feature is a pretty darned good showing.
TBH unless you have >$100,000 of sales over a games lifetime…is there any point in really over-analyzing the breakdown of what/when/how? At a certain (small) scale, you are just too much a victim to random events.
This is a big trend, there seem to be dozens of ‘analyzing my indie games sales figures’ blog posts with fifty pages of pie charts and diagrams to analyze exactly how that $100 was arrived at…
Which is maybe entertaining for fans of that specific game, but I’d suggest the data is too small to be of help in building any kind of analysis thats useful to other developers.
YMMV IANAL
I think that’s right.
The new data here for me is someone made $7K from a platformer on Itch. That smaller platform maybe finding its audience? Because previous sales numbers on there have been in the dozens, not hundreds.
But you are right, anything below $100k isn’t much worth talking about.
So it’s a platform game with a kind of obnoxious trailer and he decided to make a video about the money behind it, which is fine but it’s also kind of… well marketing. I just don’t really buy this claim of “zero” marketing coming out of these types of devs/ video personalities. Marketing isn’t limited to a marketing department and ads on Facebook or Google.
Oh definitely. In fact the ‘make a post about how nobody bought my games’ strategy is very well known to indie devs who know it will generate eyeballs.
Especially over 4 years of dev.
Individually yes. In aggregate maybe not (bring in the econometricians/statisticians). But that’s a harder analysis and no one has that data (well, Steam does, and SteamSpy did)
Anyone know what the other games coming out for them are this year? We’ve had New Dawn and Division 2 so far, and I know Anno 1800 next month, Skull and Bones in the Fall. And no Assassins Creed this year. So what else?
That was a typo, I was comparing 2009 to 2018, not 2019 to 2018.As I did for the other companies :P. A drop of 50% is way lower than the other AAA publishers.
Apart of the games you mention, they also just published Trials Rising (not AAA).
They seem to be setting for 5-6 big releases a year.
Tips for the pitch:
QC Gmaes, the makers of Breach, are done.
https://account.qcgamedev.com/users/shop
Unfortunately, today is the last official day for QC Games, as we begin winding down internal operations on Breach. We’re sure you have a lot of questions about Breach, your accounts, and the future of the game. Our team is still working on defining what this means for Breach and for our community, and we’ll post an updated article soon with answers to as many questions as we can cover.
Servers will remain online at this time and we will be turning off the ability to purchase both the Breach Starter Pack and in-game QC Points tomorrow (April 4th) during a maintenance period. Servers will come back online after our Thursday maintenance for those that want to continue to play Breach, and we hope to provide more information soon.
I never even heard of that game.
I searched here on the forums and don’t see a single post mentioning it.
Impressive!