Let's talk about finishing games.
Number incoming!
It took us 10 months to make Mars. With a big update at the end.
We're close to the anniversary now and I'm still working on the game, why?
Work that goes into the game:40% is actual game making. Code & Art & Sound.
40% is marketing, trailers, gifs, SEO, uploading builds to stores. Preparing art for all the different uses.
20% is support and bug fixing.
What's the outcome?
I'll just share the iOS data, the rest I'll prepare for a proper post mortem in like a week.
Mars sold 25k copies over the year.
We got $17k from sales.
See for yourself!
Little peaks are various features.
Grand peaks are our efforts.
How good is that?Kinda bad, it's good pocket money, but...
Divide 17k by 4, lose 25% on taxes and you get...
$3k per person for year. And we've been working for a year.
If we were hoping to sustain ourselves solely on this we would starve.
You saw that 40% of work on this game is marketing etc. Reaching out for opportunities.
One thing we did was make a DELUXE edition. Put it on Steam. It's been gathering wishlists!
Deluxe means more levels and more music etc.
See that grand peak? That's where we finished the steam game page. Got the proper tags and promotional materials done.
The lesson here is that you need to have all assets ready and done for the page on day 1.
You get some eyes there.
And if you can do proper SEO on Steam, you'll get 40 wishlists per day.
Commercial games average 200 per day.
See that drop after the grand peak?That's when the Steam's "recommended" algorithm changed. And all indies were hit.
Everybody suddenly lost half or more store page visits.
In our case, because we are not released yet, we lost 80%.
We sit at 400 wishlists right now. That's bad.
Day 1 you sell 20% of these wishlists.
Day 7 you sell 50% of wishlists.
Over the year you sell 400% wishlists.
Looks like our grand premiere on Steam won't be as successful as it was on iTunes.
But we will try our best, not all cards have been played yet!
At least it's a very good learning experience,
I can tell you that putting games on Steam is hard and doing it well is very difficult.
The amount of work around these games is OH MY GOD...
There's a Switch version coming.Unfortunately we've had huge problems with our console publisher, as is common in this industry.
Lessons here:
- Read the contract thoroughly.
- Make sure the publisher has penalty fees for them being late or not delivering what's written in the contract.
- There are many many many publishers who want to exploit you. Most of my colleagues in the industry with their indie games have been exploited by sleazy publishers. Such publishers promise to hire artists for new art but they never deliver. They just want to take a slice from a successful product with no investment.
Based on our experience and knowledge of this industry -
you probably don't need a publisher.If one comes to you... that means your game will sell by itself. And the publisher won't do anything for it.
If the worst comes, you will have to do the publisher's job on your own and you will HAVE to share the revenue with them. Alternatively, some games were just shelved for years. Beware!
Now, you might need someone to do marketing and all that stuff. I'd suggest hiring or sharing revenue with a PR person or an agency. They are much more useful than publishers. We live in the times when the consumers decide what's popular, not publishers. Internet posts, gifs and videos are much more important than contacts with journalists or whatever resident consumers the publisher might offer.
Okay, that's all of my thoughts for now!
I'll be back with more informational posts what I've learned, and most importantly,
what I wish I read here on this forum 6 years ago.Please wishlist the game!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/977230/Mars_Power_Industries_Deluxe/
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