How Much Money Can an Indie Game Make? The 2010 Edition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 5, 2010

Minecraft continues to defy all expectations. It’s now selling as much as 10,000 copies per day (It actually spiked to over 25,000 one day, after a few days of the server being down).  It’s sold over 300,000 copies total as of several days ago. But just think about it. Thousands of sales.

Per. Day.

At about $13.50 USD per hit (depending on  exchange rate), and assuming a 15% transaction cost, that’s still around $11.50 per sale times 7,000 to 10,000 copies. Per Day.

Most indies I know would be thrilled to make half that much in an entire year for a single game.

Now, it’s a fluke. An inspirational fluke. It’s reset some expectations.  But an indie can’t just go out and expect that they could just sell “half as much” as Minecraft. In all likelihood, it ain’t happenin’. But it’s nice to know what’s possible. And while it’s the current poster child for runaway indie success (and every article about it, like this one, helps its success just a little bit more), its story is not entirely unique. Just of the largest magnitude that I’m aware of to date.

But let’s not focus on the aberration.  Let’s look at some more numbers:

Jeff Vogel explained that he sold a little under 4,000 copies of his science-fantasy RPG Geneforge 4 in a little over a year. And it’s a pretty typical game for him in terms of sales.

A quick look at the XBox Live Indie Games sales charts for 2009 shows that the top-selling game enjoys ten times the sales of the 17th best-selling indie game, at approximately the same price-point (the 18th best-selling game sold a little less than 1/10th as much, but its price was ten times higher, resulting in sales in the same ballpark by dollar amount). But in the “other sales” category, we see games that have only sold a few hundred copies.

I know many, many indie games that never sold a single copy. Or only sold a handful. Literally. You could count the sales on both hands. Many times, these indies give up in disgust. After putting hundreds of hours into a game, only to have it completely rejected on the market… it’s hard.

You can find some more indie sales statistics at GameProducer.com.  Many are painful. Some are inspiring.

I just wanted to point out what kinds of extreme variation exists in indie game sales.  When prospective indie game developers start asking about how much money they could expect to make on their game, they are putting forth a serious effort to try and understand the business so they can work around those expectations. You don’t want to spend $15,000 of your own money out-of-pocket (or out of your credit cards’ max limit) on a game with which you can’t expect to make more than $10,000.

But the problem is that it’s very much of a “how long is a piece of string?” type of question. There are a heck of a lot of variables at work, not the least of which is a factor of pure old-fashioned luck.

With all this in mind, I wanted to note again Mike Kasprzak’s October Challenge. I’ve found that this is inspiring a lot of people – from absolute newbies to some fairly high-profile indies – to jump in and try to get a game to market by the end of the month.  There’s no real “point” to winning the challenge other than bragging rights and personal satisfaction, but the pros all know that having a solid deadline in mind really makes a difference. I’m not even planning on releasing in October, but I’ve found that some of the thrill of this challenge is wearing off on me and helping me move towards my goal more quickly.

Even if the end of the month seems an impossible goal, I’d say shoot for the moon anyway. With whatever time, effort, and budget you can spare if it turns out you never sell a single copy. Maybe you won’t. Probably, you won’t sell many. Maybe you could be the next Minecraft.

But the thing is, the mainstream games biz has become stale. Not totally – there are still some great games coming out from big publishers through traditional channels that have been great fun.  But I do feel that the huge budgets and risk-aversion has caused the industry to lose a lot of the vibrancy and creativity it once possessed.  Indies are a major source of new blood and fresh ideas that we need. So I hope this challenge does inspire a bunch of creative, fun-loving people to take the plunge, break the ice, and begin their journey.

Good luck.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read



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