next »

[gonzorob]

Hi folks,

I’m looking for some facts and figures on the indie games industry for a presentation I have to do. As I’m based in the UK, it’d be great if I could find figures for both the UK and globally. I’ve been trawling the internet for a while and have so far come up with very little. There’s probably a website dedicated to such things, I just can’t find it 

Roughly, what I’m looking for is : what % of dev market is independent (including number of people working in industry, how many games released, value of industry as a whole etc ) and growth over the last 5-10 years.

If someone could suggest a site to find such information I’d be incredible grateful!
 
Cheers

Robin
 

[deadeye]

Does not compute.

"Independent" inherently implies that there is no "industry."  As such, there is no "industry value."  There are no company earnings reports, no shareholders to appease, and basically... no numbers.

Someone would have to contact every independent game dev who sold a game in the last 5-10 years and ask them personally how much they sold.  As far as I know there are no figures readily available the way there are with industry companies.

[gonzorob]

Does not compute.

"Independent" inherently implies that there is no "industry."  As such, there is no "industry value."  There are no company earnings reports, no shareholders to appease, and basically... no numbers.

Someone would have to contact every independent game dev who sold a game in the last 5-10 years and ask them personally how much they sold.  As far as I know there are no figures readily available the way there are with industry companies.

Hey,

Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, you're right, this is a major problem!

Because of this, I was thinking more along the lines of independent game studios that have been published, rather than bedroom hobbyists.

Rather than looking at company reports, I was hoping to use information from publishes. I know some do keep track of % game sales from indie studios however such info is hard to find. An amalgamation of such figures from numerous publishers could give a general overview.  Again, hard to find/do....

I was hoping someone might have read an article that had some figures on the indie dev scene..

any other suggestions?

[increpare]

Deadeye, you make some good points, but the following seems a bit of a non sequitur to me

"Independent" inherently implies that there is no "industry." 

This is a matter of nomenclature I think, but, for instance on has the notion of 'cottage industry', &c..  'Industry' can, and is, be used to denote an aggregate of manufacturers/service-providers by the type of good they produce*, I think.  Wordnet gives as a definition "the people or companies engaged in a particular kind of commercial enterpris".  By this, 'Independent' does not exclude the notion of an associated 'industry'.

*ad-libbed definition, but not too far off the mark for that I think.

[Corpus]

I'm not sure there are any such articles. The "industry" as it is is very much nascent, so there isn't a great deal of data available.

My only thought would be to personally contact people like Introversion, maybe Media Molecule at a push, Jonathan Blow, Bit Blot etc. to attempt to extract some useful information from them.

[Alex May]

A better place to ask would be on forums.indiegamer.com which is more business oriented.

http://forums.indiegamer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2

[gonzorob]

A better place to ask would be on forums.indiegamer.com which is more business oriented.

http://forums.indiegamer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2

Alright mate,

That was my original plan, but I have to wait 48 hours after creating my account to make my first post! As I’m in a bit of a hurry, I thought I'd try my luck with the TIG crowd first 

Really appreciate everyone’s feedback! If i get any solid figures I'll let everyone know...

Cheers

[Alex May]

I can post it up for you if you like.

[gonzorob]

I can post it up for you if you like.

That'd be awesome mate, thanks! I'll get involved in the discussion once I'm allowed to

Cheers

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

You might want to check out the gameproducer.com sales stats section, although that's only for selected indies and a bit biased because only successful indies usually want to reveal their sales stats. It's also not quite what you're looking for since it gives no indication of your exact queries.

This question also depends on what you consider independent -- i.e. is Big Fish Games  and PopCap independent? Is Stardock? There's a lot of borderline stuff. Some people take the approach that you're not independent if you make money from games, some people say you're independent as long as you care about the game you're making, no matter if you've Valve or Blizzard, so definitions matter too. The 'self-published/self-funded' definition might be best for your purposes.

When you ask the % of developers being independent, do you include everyone making a little money from indie game development, even people who make just a few hundred dollars, or are you including only people who make a living at it? The percent would be very different depending on that. If you include everyone who makes at least $100 through game development, including all the tens of thousands of Flash game developers, I'd say the majority of game developers in the industry are independent. If you only include people making a living at it, I'd say about 99% or so are not independent.

Total number of games released has a similar problem: do you include only commercial games? Do you include Flash games which are free but ad-driven? Do you include highly polished freeware games like Iji? Do you include shareware games that only likely to get like less than twenty sales total, like Quite Soulless? The "games" part of "how many games released" is ambiguous.

[Zaphos]

I'm not sure how they get their numbers, or how accurate they are, but vgchartz lists XBLA and WiiWare sales figures.  Which gives you Braid, N+, a lower bound for World of Goo, and a few other indies.

wiiware: http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=2580
xbla: http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=2569

(Actually, I was pretty sure those numbers were under NDA, so I'm pretty confused about how vgchartz would have them ...)

[Mike Lee]

I'm not sure how they get their numbers, or how accurate they are, but vgchartz lists XBLA and WiiWare sales figures.  Which gives you Braid, N+, a lower bound for World of Goo, and a few other indies.

wiiware: http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=2580
xbla: http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=2569

(Actually, I was pretty sure those numbers were under NDA, so I'm pretty confused about how vgchartz would have them ...)

VGChartz numbers are made from unicorn horns and pixie dust. I would ignore their numbers.

[Alex May]

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?p=177578#post177578