Causeway Games
Reality check - Printable Version

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Reality check - Stuart - 17-02-2011 04:40 PM

The following provides some up to date figures regarding Xbox Live Indie game sales. Indie games sell at either $1/3/5 price points but the $1 games are far and away the most successful as you can imagine.

Unfortunately you will notice from the figures below that the potential for us to make anything other than pocket money developing for this platform is unlikely.

The best selling game of all time on Xbox Live Indie is – ‘I Maed a Gam3 with Zombies!!!1’ which has sold a total of 52059 copies since its launch. This is an average of 2892 games per month which in turn is $34804 per year, after Microsoft takes its cut and we convert to GBP we get £15’061 profit for the year.

As you are aware there are 11 of us and by the time we pay what we need in terms of office space, hardware, licenses, tax, spam etc we would be left with a couple of hundred each per year (assuming we were the number one selling game!!!).

The current chart leader is – ‘Baby maker extreme’ with 9794 total sales and after the above calculation this works out at £8499 per year which you may notice is half the above.

Things get worse when move to the realm of puzzle games, which is what we are currently making for this platform. There are no puzzle games in the top 30 best selling Xbox Indie games. The two best selling Indie puzzle games are very obviously aimed at the young females. The number one selling puzzle game has some crazy Japanese name which I cant translate but has total sales of 1589 copies which works out at £1333 per year profit and the second best selling puzzle game is – ‘Cassies Corner’ with 3057 total sales which works out at £930 profit per year.

We would of coarse be hoping to release more than one title per year but if you look at the example of Radian Games (one of the few indie developers providing full data) who released 4 games in the space of 7 months and only made a profit of £9722 for all games you will see that Xbox Indie is not the way to go.

Basically we are not going to make money selling a game on the Xbox unless we pay up for a full license, which we can’t, afford.

Sorry to scare you all but for Causeway Games to operate successfully we need to be selling upwards of £250’000 worth of games per year, and that is giving us all a pretty low salary.

If we are serious about making this into a business and going full time we need to make a game that has the potential to give us a major cash injection and the only platform I can see that has this potential and that is also within our price range to develop for is the iPhone.

Either that or a combination of iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile.
iPhone would potentially make the most money however the issue is that an intel mac is required to develop. I think we should take advantage of the new deal between Microsoft and Nokia as a new wave of Windows based Nokia handsets will soon be out and I would guess that it is similar to code for Windows mobile as for Xbox as they are both Microsoft.


RE: Reality check - Thomas - 17-02-2011 09:31 PM

(17-02-2011 04:40 PM)Stuart Wrote:  The following provides some up to date figures regarding Xbox Live Indie game sales. Indie games sell at either $1/3/5 price points but the $1 games are far and away the most successful as you can imagine.

Unfortunately you will notice from the figures below that the potential for us to make anything other than pocket money developing for this platform is unlikely.

The best selling game of all time on Xbox Live Indie is – ‘I Maed a Gam3 with Zombies!!!1’ which has sold a total of 52059 copies since its launch. This is an average of 2892 games per month which in turn is $34804 per year, after Microsoft takes its cut and we convert to GBP we get £15’061 profit for the year.

As you are aware there are 11 of us and by the time we pay what we need in terms of office space, hardware, licenses, tax, spam etc we would be left with a couple of hundred each per year (assuming we were the number one selling game!!!).

The current chart leader is – ‘Baby maker extreme’ with 9794 total sales and after the above calculation this works out at £8499 per year which you may notice is half the above.

Things get worse when move to the realm of puzzle games, which is what we are currently making for this platform. There are no puzzle games in the top 30 best selling Xbox Indie games. The two best selling Indie puzzle games are very obviously aimed at the young females. The number one selling puzzle game has some crazy Japanese name which I cant translate but has total sales of 1589 copies which works out at £1333 per year profit and the second best selling puzzle game is – ‘Cassies Corner’ with 3057 total sales which works out at £930 profit per year.

We would of coarse be hoping to release more than one title per year but if you look at the example of Radian Games (one of the few indie developers providing full data) who released 4 games in the space of 7 months and only made a profit of £9722 for all games you will see that Xbox Indie is not the way to go.

Basically we are not going to make money selling a game on the Xbox unless we pay up for a full license, which we can’t, afford.

Sorry to scare you all but for Causeway Games to operate successfully we need to be selling upwards of £250’000 worth of games per year, and that is giving us all a pretty low salary.

If we are serious about making this into a business and going full time we need to make a game that has the potential to give us a major cash injection and the only platform I can see that has this potential and that is also within our price range to develop for is the iPhone.

Either that or a combination of iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile.
iPhone would potentially make the most money however the issue is that an intel mac is required to develop. I think we should take advantage of the new deal between Microsoft and Nokia as a new wave of Windows based Nokia handsets will soon be out and I would guess that it is similar to code for Windows mobile as for Xbox as they are both Microsoft.


Good work Stuart, certainly makes informative if sobering reading. I dont suppose you found any figures showing what the top selling genres are on i-phone did you?

I am still not disheartened by this. I think from this point on we ought to view XBLA as a portfolio and publicity building tool rather than a purely cash making one. If we have a past history of console development it should look very favourably among publishers especially if they have already heard of us before we approach them.


RE: Reality check - Rodney - 17-02-2011 09:50 PM

I dont think we should write off the xbox just yet. I'm guessing these xbox live games have had little to zero advertising and promoting from their creators?
Also found this quote "There are so many bad Indie games on Xbox Live. I'm glad we can try them all for free."

But yeah I do see the logic in the hitting the iphone market. It's annoying that we will all need mac's and iphones (or ipod touch, ipad) which will be expensive. I've yet to try my hackintosh at creating apps but I doubt I'll have much success. We would have a much greater audience although we'd also have much greater competition.

Windows mobile has a history of flopping and nokia's ovi store is struggling. Having said that I recently made £30 from the ovi store with an education game that took only 3 hours to write...

XNA can create windows mobile 7, Xbox & windows versions will almost no changes to the program.
Unity (with optional licenses) can create windows, mac, iphone & android with (apparently) no (or only a few) changes.


RE: Reality check - Rodney - 18-02-2011 01:30 AM

Just checked out "Cassies Corner"...

Er...


RE: Reality check - Stuart - 18-02-2011 10:57 AM

I have no issue with releasing on Xbox Indie as well, I just don't think it should be our main focus if we are interested in making money.

I agree with Rodney that these games had probably little in the way of advertising however we also have no money for advertising. The point I am making is that with the limited resources we have we need to focus on what is potentially the biggest market in terms of what platforms we release on. The ultimate goal would be to release on all platforms but this would be a fortune in terms of license costs.

At the very least we should launch on both Xbox Indie and Windows 7 mobile / PC together in order to maximize profits since these are all XNA.

And yes 'Cassies Corner' looks absolutely horrible however it is still selling better than 'match three colours' puzzel games like Rotasphere and the reason for this is because it is aimed at a very particular market which I would guess has little in the way of competition.
A quick google search shows iPhone games genres that are most popular are Action games at number one with Puzzel and Racing games joint at number two.

http://www.igamestats.com/games-by-genre/iphone/


RE: Reality check - Ryan Brown - 18-02-2011 06:41 PM

lads we don't all need macs to develope for the iphone etc. the Unreal engine allows you to develope for the iphone on a pc (tho im not 100% sure how the is then ported to the mac). What I do know is that it is definitly possible and since udk is only available on pc and unreal games have been put on the iphone (infinity blade and the citidel), it would then mean that the only way to code for udk on the iphone is the pc.

Lets talk numbers, how much is udk? well free so long as u use it for educational purposes... if you release a game then it will cost $100, which isnt that bad, so to release on the iphone would cost $100 for the apple licence and $100 for the udk licence which would mean that it would be $200 (yeah simples right). However there is a bit of a snag, if we were to make a successful game (greater than $5000 made) udk will then want a 25% cut on whatever we make... that means that apple will take 30% giving us 70%, udk will then take 25% of that 70% so that we are left with the rest. So how much do we get? right well that 25% is technically 17.5% of the original so thats 30+17.5 = 47.5%, meaning we get 52.5%. Personally, I like the fact that udk do it this way, since it means that a start up company can use the package for pretty much nothing. As a start up option i would advise going down this route first to make a bit of money.

Another way to play the market would be to create a free to play game for the iphone. For those of you who do not no what a free to play game is, check out farmville on facebook. Altought the game is free to play, ppl still buy money inorder to progress through the game quicker. What is hoped here is that the game makes money on the iphone (a good bit like) or at least enough for us to launch the bugger on facebook. Why don't we just do that anyway? well inorder to do that we would need a dedicated server and flash. flash is alot of money for the commercial licence (how much, havent checked and i would but my internet is being really shit lol), and a dedicated server, well it would need to be big enough to cope with the traffic that farmville etc cope with (50 mill+). Ok ok, maybe not as big as 50 mill to start like, but it would need to at least a good 10 thousand, and it would also need to be on constantly.

Also Im of the opinion that the more iphone games we release, the more we will tend to make and the more we will take advantage of the year licence. Also the free to play game does not need to be in 3d, infact ideally it should be isometric, which means that instead of udk, we would only need to use cocos, which also means that we would get 70% instead of 52.5%. The draw back, to code using cocos you need a mac, simple as that...


RE: Reality check - Stuart - 18-02-2011 08:35 PM

I agree with Ryan in that isometric social gaming is huge at the moment having recently spent a few months playing Ikariam a similar strategy style browser based game also available through Facebook which can be played for free but in which you can advance at a rapid rate if you decide to throw in a few dollars here and there.

However although what I have stated in my first post is correct in terms of the figures from the official Xbox site, I have dug a little further back and found Xbox Live Indie game stats from 2009 showing 'GAM3 W1TH ZOMB1ES' selling 160'000 sales in 2009 making a profit of $112'000 dollars or £69'000 for the year. Therefore the current sales stats on the Xbox site may actually be based on 2010 or even (hopefully) sales so far in 2011 although I cant find anywhere that it states this and so it is just guess work at the moment.

Please see the link below for 2009 Xbox Indie sales chart (incomplete). A major issue I am coming across when trying to research this accessing official stats for recent indie game sales which also give information regarding time periods sold and price. It seems the case that it is up to individual developers wether or not they release these figures.

The importance of knowing this information is vital as when we go to Invest NI or any possible investor we are going to have to show examples of similar developers who have recently entered the market and what the potential profits are.

This link shows some sales details of the top 20 Xbox Indie Games of 2009

http://www.gamerbytes.com/2010/01/indepth_xbox_live_indie_games.php