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Slimebeast on 31 May 2013
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zarx said:
Slimebeast said:

The guy who is making that new Wing Commander game (forgot the name), Chris Roberts, said he believes the sales potential of games typically is 20 times the number of KS backers. I think that's highly unrealistic, even for the big budget games.


He said 10x and that really isn't that unreasonable. Star Citizen (keep in mind that they still have their site open to new backers, so when he said that the total would have been lower) has 181,223 backers currently 1.8m players for a AAA social focused game that is meant to have constant support over many years doesn't seem that outlandish. The Double Fine Adventure has 87k backers and 800k sales for an adventure game may be a bit high but not unreachable considering the buzz and plenty of Steam sales. Project Eternity has 73k, Wasteland 2 60k, Torment: Tides of Numenera 74k sub million sales doesn't sound that unreasonable ether.

He said between 10-20x.

"The game has already gathered over 150,000 backers; how high does Roberts think sales will be when there's actually a game available? "I think people this early maybe represent five to ten percent of the total audience," Roberts explained. "Just based on the ratio of the people who liked Wing Commander... the number of backers in Germany is like 14 or 15 thousand. We sold 400,000 units of Wing Commander III in Germany alone, and that's assuming no market expansion from 1994 or 1995. I think there is. If you look at FTL, and FTL is difficult because it's a very small game, it did much more than 10x in the number of actual sales compared to the number of backers they had. They had like 10,000 backers and did two or three hundred thousand in sales."

Roberts continued, "My gut sense is that 5 to 10 percent of your audience is going to back you early, and I think that number is variable based on the quality. When you do something really good, it's a lower percentage; if you do something that isn't so good maybe it's 20 percent or 30 percent. I'm assuming if I deliver the game I think I'm going to deliver, if it holds up to the level of Wing Commander or Freelancer or Privateer, I think 10x would be a pretty conservative number."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-04-22-chris-roberts-how-incredible-community-transforms-development