How much do indie PC devs make, anyways?

February 2, 2015 5:33 AM

Back in November one of my primary concerns was that the general public had little to no knowledge of ocean oil drilling to begin with. I wasn't modeling the game realistically (in fact, I did little to zero research on oil drilling at all) but I knew that the focus of the game might hurt me a bit. Who the heck would know, or care, anything about ocean oil anyways?

David Galindo describes what happens when you launch an oil drilling game as an independent developer just after the largest oil spill in history took place in the Gulf, in part one of his series on how much indy devs earn.

In part two, David looks at the lessons he learned from releasing and promoting Oil Blue:

There are many things I’m coming away with from the release and sales of the Oil Blue. One was the excellent article on Gamasutra highlighting the need to hype up games months, not weeks, before release. The Oil Blue didn’t have much time to be noticed- a strong preview from IndieGames and a release just weeks later dissolved any kind of hype buildup I could possibly have.

Part III talks about how to detect piracy through Youtube referal links, among other things:

About a week after launch, my Oil Blue trailer view count spiked to over 10,000…but I couldn’t see any discernable difference in sales. So I loaded up the traffic page and, to my horror, found four different piracy forums linking to the trailer, all with up to five links apiece to download my game on Rapidshare and other sites of that nature.

In part IV, David talks about the challenges in designing and launching his next game, the hardcore restaurant simulator Cook, Serve, Delicious!:

I decided to finally make the game a lot of people had requested I make since 2004: a cooking game that was influenced by the old Japanese PS1 game, Ore no Ryouri. Back in 2004 I made a free fan game based on ONR that was filled to the brim with awful hand drawn sprites and ripped music from the Sims, and yet somehow it really took off with people. The combination of cooking dishes while trying to keep customers from leaving was a fun, chaotic challenge.

In part V and VI he follows the launch and sales of Cook, Serve, Delicious! and shows how much of a difference being on Steam makes for a small developer like him:

Just two and a half years ago, I questioned my decision to even make Cook, Serve, Delicious after that awful first weekend of release. Today, Cook, Serve, Delicious has grossed over $610,000 in sales across mobile, Steam, distro websites and my cut from the Humble Bundle, with over 100,000 copies sold. Steam accounts for 78% of that financial figure.

posted by MartinWisse (12 comments total)

See also this postmortem on the making and sales of Eldritch.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:45 AM on February 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

It will be interesting to see if the "Just get on Steam and you will get tons of sales" will hold in the future. Right now Steam has switched to more of an "Open the floodgates!" model of releasing games, with 5-10 new indie games every day. It might take a lot more effort to stand out in that stream of games.

Then again, Steam is trusted and collects all your games in one place, so buying games there has a lower threshold than if people were going to buy something on, say, Desura or IndieGameStand.
posted by ymgve at 6:32 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm fascinated to find out there is a website to buy games called GamersGate.
posted by smackfu at 6:50 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah ymgve, a lot if it I think is that many, maybe even most PC gamers will pirate a game that is not on Steam before they buy it. So even if devs don't get a visibility bump from being on Steam, something which is more true every day, there are still massive advantages in terms of actually managing to get paid for your product.
posted by teh_boy at 6:57 AM on February 2, 2015

A couple days ago the people who made Octodad posted an infographic that broke down how their game did a year on from its release.
posted by sparkletone at 7:06 AM on February 2, 2015

Indie developers are in much the same boat as musicians - there's a ton of content out there, but only a very small percentage of those content creators a) make a consistent living off of their development work; and b) strike it "rich" with a big winner.

Not that this is a bad thing, of course, it's just the nature of the beast.
posted by tgrundke at 7:15 AM on February 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

He could have just cloned the original oil-drilling game (which also made no appeals to realism)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:40 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Rami Ismail (of Vlambeer: Ridiculous Fishing, Nuclear Throne, etc) just posted a pretty good state of the industry blog.
posted by kmz at 9:55 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I did some research into this a while ago.

Here's a good place to begin.

My summary; you really have to hit the zeitgeist, and that's a bit of a crapshoot. Don't quit your day job because you want to be the next Notch Marcus Persson.
posted by adept256 at 11:06 AM on February 2, 2015

I"m surprised he sold as many copies as he did. An oil drilling game? Why would anyone want to play that?
posted by mary8nne at 1:20 PM on February 2, 2015

I'm surprised he sold as many copies as he did. An oil drilling game? Why would anyone want to play that?

This is an odd question for me and the answer is obvious: Because it's fun (to them if no one else)? The trappings a game is wrapped in matter, certainly, but at the end of the day it's not the most important thing.

Why would anyone play a game with goofy physics where you're an octopus in a suit? Why would anyone play a game where you're nominally a plumber and hop up and down on turtles? Why would anyone play a game where you hook a bunch of fish on a line, fling them into the air and then shoot them a whole bunch?

You could ask this about pretty much any game (and many works in other media as well). Why would anyone watch a movie about a billionaire who likes to dress up like a bat?

As Ebert used to say: It's not what a thing is about, it's how it's about it.
posted by sparkletone at 1:45 PM on February 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

For people who are confused by references to "the greatest oil spill in history" please note that this article is from 2010.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:06 PM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]