Do you think selling 8000 copies per year would constitute a ‘hit’ in the indie game market?
That’s well above the average. Most games are lucky to sell a few hundred copies. At 8,000 you’re getting into “hit” territory.
Of course, that’s on PC where there’s a really high level of indie game saturation. Not sure what the numbers look like on Mac.
I guess it’s hard to qualify as many “indie games” are released online where ad and subscription revenue is the marker of success. In those cases it may be hard to track how many “sales” it drove, generally subscriptions give you access to lots of content as opposed to one specific game.
With all that in mind I suppose that I’m with Willem, 8000 sales would be a “hit” in my mind.
FYI: a great source of information along these lines is the IGDA’s Casual Games Special Interest Group. I checked there just now to see if there was anything easy to find that might help this discussion but came up empty. No matter, it’s a good source of information in general.
Well, it comes down to math really. If you sold 8,000 copies in a single year at the typical price point of $19.99 … that’s around $160,000 gross. That’s a very nice income and definitely means you produced a hit.
To me, 8000 copies in a year didn’t seem like a true “hit”. I mean the xbox 360 game “Gears of War” sold 1 MILLION copies in the first two weeks! So in the indie world I would have thought that maybe 50,000 in a year would be hit.
As for the 8000 copies = $160000, that would be a good income for one person… but it wouldn’t really support a team.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare any casual game with a console title like Gears of War. Is your theoretical casual game going to be marketed, advertised and promoted anywhere remotely close to the way GoW (or any console title) are? Nope, no way no how… Also, a product like that needs to move millions of units to justify the massive development investment, marketing costs, etc.
Perhaps you’re right though, 8000 sales may not be a “hit”, the number might be closer to 50000 as you indicated. Let’s look at one of the casual game industry’s biggest hits ever, the Diner Dash series of games (they’ve released a few versions for computers and mobile phones). In December of last year PlayFirst announced that they had reached the 1 million mark, this after having first released the game in 2004. So after roughly 3 years of being on the market they hit the seven figure mark, huzzah!
It depends how you’re defining indie. If you mean the 1- to 3-man team, then 5,000 units is definitely good. I know of several PC/Mac download games made by teams that size which have generated over $100,000 in sales.
In the casual market, a true runaway hit will sell in the millions of dollars. A game that lands towards the bottom of the top 10 for a few weeks will net $100-200k to the developer. Miss the boat completely and you’ll still get around $30k with good distribution and a decent title.
On XBLA, the last time I checked: Uno was creeping up on 400,000 units, Geometry Wars was 330k, and Small Arms (a team of four) was over 200k units. It’s easy to do the math on those–the MS royalty %s are well known–and it’s some very good revenue for the developer (assuming they’re self-funded).
Anyway, to me “indie” means the tiny team developing games for Internet distribution. If you make a game with two people in under a year, 5000 units is enough to do it all over again!
Since when is $160,000 merely “good income for one person.” 
Even in affluent countries, that’s far above median, and way way way above what anyone should realistically expect working in indie games. That’s more than decent income for 3 well-paid people for a year, and if you did 2 games a year (not unreasonable for indie games at all), that’s a 6-person team.
But yeah, from what I understand, 8000 copies is a lot more than most indie games could reasonably expect.
–Eric
It’s all about scale and expectation. I think in the scale of the world, $160,000 is more than decent for a small group of passionate game artists who do work they love; it is at least enough to keep going!
Though it’s true many publishers balk unless they think the game can make at least 3-5 times the cost of development. Call it one of the quirks of our industry, perhaps it is also connected to why we often only see huge and small projects in games (and not much variety) And perhaps a lead into why we tend to attract the money-grubbing sharks… but anyway.
Jeff Tunnell (GarageGames) did an article where he laid out some details on XBLA development Marble Blast Ultra with some concrete info:
The whole article is here:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/marbleblastultra/news.html?sid=6158142
Leaderboards are how you can pseudo-track XBLA sales. If someone has an achievement in a Live Arcade game, they must have purchased it (demos don’t give out achievements). Mygamercard.net and other sites will tell you the total # of users with scores for a given game…
There is an error margin there, somehow, but I’ve verified with multiple developers that’s it accurate enough to make funding projections.
So, with Sector3 about to release its first game, Turret Wars (sector3.com.au) within the next week or 2, this is a great thread to have popped up.
A few of you have pointed to data regarding XBLA etc as to how to judge how well a game is going, but what about companies that wont be selling their games on XBOX?
We will be releasing on the MAC and PC, and plan promote Turret Wars everywhere we can, but that leaves an interesting question… where do we start?
What resources woud you suggest we look at to help promote Turret Wars? Esp on the MAC? Does anyone have definitive or even ramshackle list of web resources that we can showcase/list Turret Wars on to generate a lot of traffic?
Obviously getting a listing on Apples Site is a must, and places like mac.softpedia… but are there any more game specific portals and websites that we can hit?
Inside Mac Games is the biggest Mac gaming site. Maybe buy an ad, or start a topic. (Better to be specific and involved instead of just posting a screenshot and a few bullet points though…there’s a pretty high resistance to anything that smells slightly like spam.) The site also has a game store that has partnered with various companies to sell downloads.
–Eric
Hey Eric,
Thanks for that link… have never seen that site before! I have just emailed them re advertising rates.
Cheers 
Inside Mac Games should pretty much do it. When we released Open Fire it was the main featured news event of the day (a friday so that we would be the main news all weekend). Thanks to them we got a huge number of downloads just in the first week. All the mac gamers I know go to IMG and I don’t know anyone that goes to the apple games web site.
My guess would be IMG would be good for more involved gamers, and apples site would work for more casual gamers. Once you make it on ether of those sites you will be refered to in all kinds of blogs and such. Jeff
P.S.
Make sure to get IMG to review the game for you, that will get you even more publicity.
$160,000?! For a single title that could be developed with a team of 3-4 in less than 6 months or so? That’s a “HIT” in my mind.
I’d wager that I could round up three other folks on these forums in a second if I could promise them $80,000 each in a year developing only two titles.
Sign me up please.
PS. But it does require a confluence of factors some of which can’t easily be estimated when the project gets underway. If you’d told me that I’d have downloaded almost 400,000 widgets in less than two years I’d have told you you were absoltuely, positively NUTS. I figured WidgetMonkey might be downloaded 100-200 times. Setiously.
Now imagine if you had 25cents for each one of those downloads, you would have $100,000 in the bank to use in developing your next game.
Another thing I think about is that all those people have the webplayer, right? so that is a potential market of at least 400k people for Unity web games.
DaveyJJ your widgetmonkeys is a great example of success. Wish there was some way to monetize it.
I imagine that every single day. Heck, I’d have been happy with a few pennies each.
Yes there is. More on that soon.
I have brand, yup. And that is a good thing.
Gameproducer.net has some stats for indies, as well as post-mortems from developers:
http://www.gameproducer.net/category/sales-statistics/
Cheers,
df
DF…
Interesting Link… Seems tiny sales conversions compared to downloads on most games listed there. Not very encouraging!
I can only assume that the puzzle game/platform game arena is over saturated, and hope that wont be the same for 3D action games.
Do you all think price is a barrier for many? Some games listed there are $19.95… some $12.95… Do you think keeping a game title under the US$10 mark ($9.95) will encourage more conversions?
Clearly a demo version is required, but how limiting can it be? Turret Wards (we feel) is a very quick and addictive game. We don?t want the demo to be too easy, but we also don?t want to offer too much in it to discourage sales conversions.
Sheeesh, this first release is going to be a very interesting one!
Cool. I’ll download Turret, the screenshots look good. It will be interesting to hear how the idie game thing work out for you.
As for the price, I’ve heard a lot of people say that lowering the price can actually hurt sales! People expect to pay a certian amount for quality software… I guess $19.99 is the norm.