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[larsiusprime]

As a follow up to last year's article, we just posted a full sales stat breakdown for Defender's Quest on Gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186940/defenders_quest_by_the_numbers_.php

Bottom line:
Gross: $286,646
Sales: 40,451

We would never have had the confidence to do this without other developers who have shared their stats in the past, so it's only fair we share our numbers now.

Chief takeaways:

• Direct sales are still #2 source of overall revenue
• GOG is a viable (albeit small) competitor to Steam
• Browser based demo was key to our success
• Desura/Impulse were a disappointment

Your results may vary, this is just one data point and there's still no proof that we have any idea what we're doing. Hopefully this information helps someone!

Sales breakdown by source:


Sales over time:

[Schrompf]

Great writeup! Thanks for sharing.

[Liosan]

Wow, nice info Thanks a ton.

"Browser based demo was key to our success" - I played that on Kong, it was pretty fun But one question - I noticed some people complained that the game is a "demo version". They got angry that they had to pay for getting the rest of the storyline. Wasn't that an issue?

Liosan

[larsiusprime]

@Liosan:

Only sort of.

The people who complain are much more vocal than those who don't, and the complainers aren't our customers. If we released the game for free, we could have never afforded to make it as big, complex, and with the same production values. So, the only real reason to worry about those who insist that it should be free just because it's on Kongregate is that they will 1-star your game and tear down the rating, which affects visibility. Mostly we just tried to avoid surprising people and signal very clearly that it was a demo and not a full game, and just ignore the haters. Eventually our fans went to bat for us in the comments with messages of support.

That said, next time around, we'll put more thought into how we can manage those expectations and minimize the hating.

Depending on how you calculate it, our conversion rate on Kongregate was between 2% and 4%, either of which is considered high for that platform. So we still had plenty of customers, and enough liked the game that our rating stayed high enough to give us good visibility.

[Hipshot]

Very interesting!

I really hope we can share numbers like these later on.
Btw, I'm one of all those steam sales =)

[Falsen]

Love these write-ups. Thanks for sharing.