on the same topic
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186940/defenders_quest_by_the_numbers_.php
"So are you guys totally rich now?"
That's a lot of money up there -- over a quarter of a million dollars in gross revenue -- but let's take a step back. First of all, we don't get to keep all of that,. Each store takes a cut. I can't give net figures this time around, since NDAs forbid me from revealing several platforms' percentage take, but I can say this: our direct sales payment provider FastSpring takes 8 percent, while Kongregate takes 30 percent of all Kreds revenue. Steam, GOG, and the others take undisclosed percentages. (The silver lining is that sales tax, VAT, chargebacks, etc., are all covered by the stores' cuts).
Next, we get to account for expenses! I don't want to get too specific, so I'll just say total expenses were somewhere between $30-40K. And after that's subtracted, the pie gets shared out between the core team members, who have been working on this for about two years.
It works out to a decent living for doing something we love -- a tremendous privilege in and of itself -- but this isn't anywhere close to Minecraft, Limbo, or Super Meat Boy levels of money.
With that out of the way, let's look at where the money came from.
The Rise of GOG
As for the major portals, GOG's star is clearly rising. Even under direct competition, GOG generated 14.5 percent as much revenue as Steam.
If Defender's Quest had not also been available on Steam, I suspect GOG revenue would have been even higher. Steam enjoys a captive market of ardent loyalists, but GOG is swiftly becoming an attractive alternative and gaining loyalists of its own, especially in the anti-DRM crowd.
I should note that GOGers are a passionate bunch. Since our background is in Flash games, we implemented basic gameplay metric tracking without a second thought -- it's just something you do in that world. Shortly after, GOG players started complaining about the game "phoning home." The fans convinced us that it should be removed or at least switched to opt-out, and we put out a quick patch to disable the tracking. Although we stumbled at first, responding promptly to fan feedback turned things around for us and won us a lot of support in that community.
Daily Deal Delivers the Dollars
The Steam Launch was huge. We launched at 33 percent off the final price of $14.99 for the first week, and later participated in the Autumn sale, but the best was yet to come. When Defender's Quest was selected for the Steam Daily Deal, we made nearly half of the game's entire pre-Steam revenue in a single day.
The daily deal spike is actually slightly under-represented, because the 24-hour sales period was spread out over two data points -- the total take being nearly $34,800.
GOG gave us a similar one-day promotion, a "GOG Gem" feature, on January 23, for 60 percent off, which was another nice, single-day treat.
GOG is Great
GOG was overshadowed by Steam, but still a major source of revenue and matched our take from Kongregate Kreds in a fraction of the time. Shortly after launch, GOG embedded the browser demo in the game's news page, driving further sales.
Even better, Steam and GOG continue to have healthy long tails. A year from now we expect Steam and GOG to account for over 75 percent of Defender's Quest's lifetime revenues, especially if we get to participate in future sales.
Desura, Impulse Disappoint
Desura and Impulse barely register on the above charts, and their combined total was under $1000. Had players not been able to buy the game on GOG or Steam instead, I suspect sales on these platforms would have been higher. I know some developers have made good sales with these platforms, so I wouldn't write them off entirely, but our experience wasn't particularly lucrative.
Final Takeaways
Making good games is hard. Selling good games is even harder. So many factors are outside of your control, and even if you do everything right success may still elude you.
I used to believe that if I worked really hard and made something great, an audience would magically find me and we'd make a lot of money. Reality is quite different.
Sales basically comes down to a simple formula:
Eyeballs * Conversion_Rate = Sales
You can't directly control the ebb and flow of the fickle eyeballs of the internet. You can, however, control how many you capture when they show up.
So make your pitch. Tell them what you're about. Give them a free sample. Repeat nice things others have said, and if you're so inclined, tell them if it's okay for their kids. Learn all about what Tadhg Kelly calls the Marketing Story. Be human, be humble, be open, and if fortune is on your side, good things can happen.
And when you're done, come back and share your data with the world! It's scary out there, and the more information we share, the easier it is for the next developers to chart their path.
http://www.fortressofdoors.com/2013/02/steam-linux-sale-results.html
Shortly after we published our giant sales report, Defender's Quest: By the Number, part 2, the Steam Linux client officially went public and was accompanied by a site-wide sale.
The Linux sale featured every single Linux-compatible game on the service, including Defender's Quest. In preparation for this article, I asked the good people of Reddit's /r/linux_gaming subreddit what sort of data they'd like to see, and today I'd like to answer both their questions and yours.
One thing to keep in mind is that our game is built on Adobe AIR, which Linux users famously hate with a passion (along with Flash). Since Adobe dropped support for AIR on Linux after version 2.6.0, Linux users have had to manually install the run-time, which can be a painful and error-prone process. To aid them, we created a special help page with step-by-step instructions, and put a prominent link to it on the front page of our site.
For the Steam build, my wonderful Linux guru Alexander Sturm was able to create an easy-installer script that provides all of the dependent libraries Adobe AIR needs, and then installs it with one simple click when you first launch the game from Steam. This works great on most distributions - especially Ubuntu and Mint, and we're ironing out the kinks with decent success for more obscure distros like ARCH.
So, keep in mind that our Linux sales could have been higher if we weren't bearing the stigma of Adobe AIR. (One of many reasons I'm seriously looking into using Haxe for our next project).
Since I like to use technologies that makes it easy to target multiple platforms, I don't have to put an enormous amount of effort into "porting" a game to Mac or Linux. It's usually just a matter of changing the export settings on my compiler and doing a little troubleshooting when per-platform bugs crop up. I'd estimate we spent less than $1,000 worth of labor getting our game to run on Linux. All in all, that's a small price to pay for what turns out to be a significant chunk of revenue.
Maybe Linux gaming will take off, maybe it won't. Maybe the Steambox will be a huge game-changer, and we'll reap the benefits of being a launch title, or maybe not.
Whatever the case, I see three things in the Linux gaming community: a passionate and under-served market, little competition, and plenty of room for growth. That's the perfect place for an indie to be.
@TheVoxelman on twitter
