Every time i’ve paid for ads it has been a tremendous waste of money. I recommend instead reaching out to subreddits/communities that might enjoy it. or writing a medium post and advertising it in free ways.
Yeah, it’s pretty horrible. I use around 3-5gb during the free time every night. So at least that is available. Only because I’m grandfathered in though. There is a new satellite launching soon that is supposed to bring like 10 times the bandwidth. Depending on the new allowance, that might not be enough to match my current usage if there’s no free time. Whether that is a problem or not depends on how much they slow you down for going over. Right now, if I go over, it goes so slow that https sites won’t work. I have to use a VPN to connect to them, which for some reason allows them to work.
I just downloaded it to watch whenever I get up again. My schedule is completely out of whack now. I could watch it now, but an unplanned nap put me behind on my todo list for the day.
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It’s hard to set an overall budget at once, but you can look through the Clickky’s CPI statistics to get a general view: https://clickky.biz/advertise/self-serve/
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Worth reading:
The Realistic Guide to Pricing Indie Game Marketing
https://launchyourindiegame.com/fundamentals-pricing-indie-game-marketing/
Summary:
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It costs about $50,000 to market an indie game.
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Branding takes about 2 weeks to complete, it will cost you about $7,000 to do yourself, or about that to outsource.
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A trailer takes about 1 week to produce, costs you about $4,000 to do yourself, and maybe less to outsource.
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A website takes about 2 weeks to complete, costs you about $7,000 to do yourself, and maybe less to outsource.
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Social media takes the full 3 months to complete, costs you about $11,000 to do yourself, and maybe less to outsource.
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A devblog takes the full 3 months to complete, costs you about $9,000 to do yourself, and possibly less to outsource.
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PR takes the full 3 months to complete, costs about $9,000 to do yourself, and about that to outsource.
Don’t just read the summary, though. There are many valuable details in the full article.
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Your summary kinda… doesn’t reflect what the article is saying, and a lot of what the article is saying is “here’s what your time is worth on average multiplied by the time it’ll take you” but, like… Here’s the thing. If you make a trailer yourself, or make the devlog yourself, or make the website yourself, or do all the social media stuff yourself, it doesn’t “literally” cost you anything but time. The only thing that has any real bearings on Actual Human Dollars™ is the outsourcing predictions.
The problem with what I’ve long come to dub Time As Indie Dollars is that this all assumes a lot about the returns you’ll be seeing on this. Market rate values mean absolutely nothing. Allow me to explain:
- So your game finally comes out. It took you three years to make, including designing, planning, multiple failed prototypes and all those fun things that come from indie games. You release your game on Steam for an example price of $20. Over the next 6 months, 20,000 people buy your game.
- Whoa! You just made $280,000 in six months! Except you kinda didn’t. You made $280,000 in 3.5 years. So let’s make a few more assumptions. Let’s assume that on this game, you only worked for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. You take Sundays off so you can watch Twin Peaks in your underwear. That’s roughly 1095 days of working, or 8760 hours. All of a sudden, all that work is starting to add up.
- So you have your $280,000 (before taxes) but your sales have started to peter out. But let’s break down those sales figures into how much you actually made. Not your theoretical market rate because nobody is paying you your salary but yourself. Well all of a sudden that $89 hourly value you “should” be making drops down to $32 because that’s what you actually made. It’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s literally a third of what this article is putting forth.
- Here’s the other problem. This article is seemingly obsessed with salaries, but the thing about salaries is that you actually, well, get paid your salary. When you’re an indie dev, it’s actually entirely possible to make a game and not get paid at all. When you’re an indie dev, your salary is what you have made selling your game minus expenses. No more, no less.
- So your $185,638 salary suddenly becomes $80,000. Definitely liveable, unless you live in high expense place like Silicon Valley (don’t live in the Bay Area unless you need to or you were born there and can’t afford to leave, it’s a bad time), but nowhere near the salary this article is pointing out.
- So now we get into the real meat of things. We get into questions like “Okay, so how much did that trailer really cost me?” Well, here’s the thing. Unless you were getting paid from a previously released game, it probably cost you, well, time. Not money, but time. That trailer you spent a week on (a good trailer will take more than a week) probably actually cost you the cost of an Adobe subscription for all their apps, since you don’t want to deal with the time lost learning poorly documented free software alternatives. So we’ll put that at $40. You subscribe for a month for Premiere and After Effects because you want to really make that trailer pop. So in terms of actual expenses, your trailer more cost you $40 to make. It also probably sucks because editing a good trailer is really difficult but that’s not the point here.
- What that trailer did do, however, was contribute to your overall marketing, as does PR, as does branding, as does the devlog, as does, well, everything else. The only reason your “salary” is as high as it is is because you got the game into the eyes of people willing to part ways with their $20 to play the electronic beep boop game. The only reason you made that “salary” of $80,000 a year is because of this work.
And here’s the real trick of it. The number I pulled out of my behind at the beginning there? That 20,000 at $20? That’s being super generous. I mostly picked those numbers because they’d cover the cost of living expenses (admittedly very late) for the three years you’d have to have worked on the game. In reality, most devs don’t make anywhere near that much. A lot of indie devs have to work two, three jobs just to make do while they work on their games. It’s why a lot of games go without ever being released. When you use the word “salary,” there are certain expectations there. There’s the expectation of a clearly indicated wage. There’s the expectation that you’ll get to buy food that week.
The real takeaway is that these things aren’t costing you actual money, just time. And if it wasn’t for that time invested, you wouldn’t make any money aside from the pennies you’d get from somehow showing up in the Steam discovery queue. Your salary is also, unless you make pretty successful games with a decent degree of consistency, never as high as the article points out. The article is 100% pie in the sky thinking in its optimism. In reality, things are never that simple and clear cut.
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It’s an exact copy-paste from the article’s summary headings.
I get where you’re coming from, though. You’re right that as a hobbyist (as I think most people here are) time is fairly cost free. But when you depend on the income to keep a roof over your head, you need to make these kinds of comparative decisions. Do you spend the hour adding a feature to your game, or spend it on marketing efforts instead and ship without that feature? Or spend it on a freelancing gig so you can pay your bills?
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If you are running this as a business, the key thing to consider is opportunity cost. In simple terms that’s the amount of money you can earn by using that same time to do something else. I know my monthly rate as a chemical engineer. If I was to quit and do my game full time my lost wages as a chemical engineer would be a very real, very quantifiable cost.
The only way your time is free is if there is no opportunity cost. This might be true for teenagers who don’t have the ability to take on paid work, to stay at home parents tied to kids, to people otherwise unable to work, or during a severe economic downturn. But the ‘average’ game developer certainly has other very real opportunities they could pursue instead of games.
Sort of. My time in the evenings and weekends is very cost free. But its also very low quality time. I can’t get much done after a full day at work. If I want high quality time, I’ve got to sacrifice something else to get it, which adds a cost (not always measurable in dollars).
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If we’re going to talk opportunity costs and games then you may as well just skip games altogether and get a job in retail :v
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Pretty much. Indie game dev rewards the very good handsomely. But mediocre developers tend to barely break even. And the poor ones loose money.
If you don’t want to use opportunity cost, you can use living expenses instead. The number is significantly lower. But it still adds up to a real cost you have to pay.
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It assumes that
I think most peoples time as an indie dev isn’t that valuable lets be fair
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He shows the break down of the calculations in the article. Which part specifically do you disagree with?
This sounds dumb, but all of it? Hear me out
He used professional rates for everything. One could argue that an indie dev could be just as good as a professional developer earn as much, i dont dispute that. But the notion of basing the average indie devs salary off of someone who’s a professional at all of these things, especially marketing and business management? I don’t think most indie devs would put them selves at professional class in all these fields
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From article:
So that’s like a third of that in my country and 0 if you’re unemployed (your time is worth jack ****).
Good marketing probably cost more than most indie developers have to spend.
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Depends on where you are marketing. Steam and mobile are two very different worlds. Mobile is what I’m more familiar with.
For mobile, first you have to hire someone that knows how to get good rates. That’s a skill all to itself, and not knowing what you are doing here can cost you a ton like 4-8 times what you would get without an expert or publisher. This is one area where publishers can be worth it for an indie.
You can test your retention with a few hundred dollars. You need a minimum here, probably around $300 or so before you have enough to get a measurement that’s worth anything. Plan on spending a few thousand to figure this part out. The general assumption is if you can retain users, monetizing is a given almost. Most people investing money in mobile want to see 7 day retention at 20% or better as a general rule.
After that you will probably need to plan on spending at least mid 5 figures per month, maybe around double that the first month. The thing is you are up against people who know all the tricks and have huge banks. You get better deals with larger ad spends, and ROI goes up the more you spend to a point also. Basically if you are trying to spend just a few hundred/thousand a month, you are basically paying 3-5 times more then the competition per player. Which puts you in a really bad spot because the pro’s are operating on thin profit margins anyways.
There are of course variations and exceptions to all of this. But mobile is very competitive and honestly if you are out to make money, you need a pile of it to start with or don’t bother.
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that article sucks stop talking about it lol by the figures they use, who is the article written for? those prices, i woulda paid someone to have read that article for me cause iam too rich and busy… and since when does Elon Musk dev video games? hue hue
actually that article makes me feel really good,
sounds like marketing my game costs like $1000 tops LOOL from that article
but yeah thanks though, ill have to check out getting into those expos… in like a year or something…