Are you hoping for a hit?

There are some game developers who are hoping for a "hit", the one that makes them rich, the game of games, and are always aiming for that pinnacle.

Then there are those developers who don't expect a hit, who work on games with the hope that each one does well enough to monetarily support the next game's development, but never expecting to "make it big".

And of course there are other types of developers, all over the board, with all sorts of thoughts and all sorts of reasons for doing what we do.

What kind of developer are you? Are you hit-driven, secretly (or not) hoping that your game is a bona fide best seller? Are you in for the long haul, realizing "hits" are incredibly rare, but happy to just make a living developing the games you want to make? Are you making games with no monetary reward even expected?

What do you personally consider a "hit" game to be? What would qualify one of your games as such, for you?

 

For a niche multiplayer game, I'd be more than happy with a community of a couple of hundred players. Even half of that would make it worthwhile.

 

I guess it depends on what qualifies as a 'hit'.

If by 'hit' we're talking 1,000 sales, then yes. If we're talking about 100,000 sales then no.... but that'd really be nice

 

I've long accepted that the games I want to make are far too niche to ever be hits. I'm just hoping to find an audience.

 

Yeah I hope its a hit. But if not whatever

 

Niche is great! Where are you going with yours?

 

I always believed my game was going to be this massive hit...

Hey someone is doing a remake of Super Offroad, everyone will buy it!

But after 6 months in soft launch, and it earning next to nothing on Windows Store as a F2P game, and with like 2 purchases on GameJolt, it really hits home that I may never see anywhere near the sort of success I was hoping for.

Granted, those aren't exactly breakout, money making stores, and I still have yet to do my global Steam and mobile launch, in conjunction with my PR company push, and release on web platforms.

At this point in my game's development, after nearly 8 years of working on it part time, I'd be extremely happy if I just got the money and time investment back out of it. Which is now past the $300 000 USD mark.

I'm also at the point where I'm kinda over coding, and want to open up a BBQ takeaway. If my game makes enough to get me well sorted with that, and then some extra cash flowing in each month for a few more years, I'd be very happy.

Although if the game does really well, there are one or two variations of the game I'd like to make, and I'd hire someone to make them, while overseeing the project and chipping in here and there.

 

I am looking at the sustainable business approach to game development: To build games that can sustain the company, and allow it to grow. Eventually, your games get better, bigger, and tick more of those boxes required for a potential hit.

 

"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker. Guys around here will tell ya, you play for a living, it's like any other job. You don't gamble, you grind it out. Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that's it. Get your money in when you have the best of it. Protect it when you don't. Don't give anything away. That's how I paid my way through half of law school. A true grinder. You see, I learned how to win a little at a time. But finally I've learned this: if you're too careful, your whole life can become a F***in' grind."

- from the movie Rounders

 

Windows Store? You're just selling in the wrong place. I don't think ANYONE ever made any money on the Windows Store

 

I am not one for this kind of posts, but after checking your game:
-The Windows store doesn't feature a trailer.
The Windows store feels barebones compared to your site. And your video doesn't feature a link to your site or the windows store.
Everything seems disconnected.
-The trailer feels too cluttered even if well edited.
-Your Youtube channel feels like an user channel, not a developer channel. You feature product reviews in it and the account name is not your company name.
-Your trailer features too many fast action cuts.
When the 'Long jump!' section starts, it cuts the jump right when it starts.
I read a comment in the Windows store where someone said they liked the jump physics, but I cannot get a good grasp of them in your video.
Upload more gameplay footage trailers with good gameplay moments. Uploading videos is free after all.

EDIT: In my opinion, $4.99 is a better number than $5.99. It can make a huge difference, at least on the AppStore and Steam. Though unless you are a famous IP, only $0.99 and Free games sell in there...

On the bright side, as you said, your game hasn't really been released if it was only a Windows Store release. So you can use your current experience to prepare for the 'real release'.

Also, looking at footage from Super Offroad, I am pretty sure the music is an important aspect of its appeal

 

I suppose I always hope to get that mythical "flappy angry crossy" level of success, but I try to keep my expectations realistic and aim for moderate numbers in my estimates.

Not to say I wouldn't love to pay an army of bright devs to help churn out sweet games, which is where I'd put a nice chunk of that crazy flappy money, haha.

 

I would like for the game I'm working on to be a hit, but my real hope is that the game will make enough to support paying for its own servers really.

 

Thanks for the feedback. Windows Store doesn't support trailers.

I also had very limited budget to get the trailer made, and I'm quite happy with it to be honest, its supposed to be a 'teaser', short and sweet and tease all the game's features in under 30 seconds.

I've only recently changed my game from F2P on the Windows Store to premium, i.e a few days ago. But good point, maybe $4.99 is better, I'll try it.

 

I'm money driven and looking for contract work. When the situation allows it I want to finish one of the many projects I have on hold.

Aside from that, I hope for nothing.

 

This is me.

Of course I hope for this, but it's not realistic to plan based on that eventuality.

 

You may have believed it, but what did you do to make it happen? It sounds like you've got plans, but what did you do before your "soft launch" to help your game become the hit you want it to be?

 

I'm not quite sure I understand your question.. but I believe I made it to the best of my ability and within my time/budget constraints. But when it came to real people playing and the feedback I got, I realised it was so far from being done. 6 months later, its a much better, polished game, but I'm also at the point where I've had enough, and believe the time to release is now.

If it becomes a hit, then so be it.. if not. I can say I tried. Then I will move on with my life...

 

I was asking what you've done in addition to making your game to maximise your chances of it being a hit.

Nothing becomes a hit unless people know about it. I'm not going to suddenly decide to buy a thing that I don't know exists, and nor is anyone else. So making a good game isn't enough. We need to make games that are good, and we need to make sure the right people know about them.

I definitely agree that the "make a good game" part is time consuming and challenging on its own. With that in mind I totally understand if people don't want to market their own games. I'm one of them! But it's a thing that needs to be done, so if you're not going to do it yourself or aren't confident of your ability to do so then look at getting a decent publisher or game marketing agency on board. Yes, they'll take a cut, but if they're going to help you increase sales by more than the amount they take then what's the problem with that?

People often point to examples of games that they believe took off without marketing as examples to counter this requirement. Even assuming that it's true of those games, that's like pointing at a lottery ticket as an example of why people don't need jobs. I'm not saying it can't possibly happen. I am saying that if you want to maximise the probability of your game making significant sales then awareness is a thing that you, or someone, has to actively work towards.

 

If you put your game on steam it will get 1 million impressions. so at least a few hundred people will buy it, and if those people like the game they might tell there friend etc then it might hit a big youtuber

 

Right, I misunderstood you, I thought you were asking from a development standpoint what I was doing to make sure my game was a hit.

I've taken a varied approach...

• Discounted PR/Marketing deal with Novy PR by having my game selected on Windows Store for the promotion.
• Putting the game on Miniclip and Kongregate to cross-promote my game when it hits global launch
• I have a signed a deal with a publisher who distributes in various regions/stores that I probably wouldn't take the time to publish myself.
• Application for feature on the app store.
• Signed a deal with GetSocial.im to use their social framework to help with my game's K-factor and incentivise friend invites and challenges on mobile.

Thereafter, I will send the game out to as many Youtubers as possible hoping to get my game covered. Also posting on Reddit where possible to promote the game.

 

I don't care about a hit. I cant affect its hitness. All I try to do is put out projects that I consider interesting, and hopefully they can fund my next project. It doesn't seem like it'll happen as I don't prioritize a marketing budget, and despise the f2p model that seems to drive games nowadays, but as of now, I enjoy putting projects together.

 

I don't hope for a hit, I expect one. From the point of view of product development, I think it's a bad idea to develop something that doesn't feel as if it is so good that everyone will surely want it. It's probably unlikely to reach the level of expectations but that's just part of the way things work.

I'm not sure whether you use the term 'hit' to mean something that succeeds due to circumstance, or to the size of the margin by which it is better than its competitors, but I'll say that I think creating a product from the point of view of hoping that circumstances will prevail in its favor is a pretty uncomfortable position, and at best is a sign of a lack of strategy, so I avoid it.

 

At this point a hit for would be just to finish a game. I started over 30 at this point and never got more then 10% done before I lose interest.

 

Afaik Ori sold significant numbers there.

For me personally: one that earns a considerable multiple of what it did cost to make, and puts the calculated hourly wage into an area of "I can't make that much anywhere else".
But generally I think there need to be at least 6-figures of sold units for other people to acknowledge it as a "hit".
A hypothetical game that takes a week to make and earns 30k$ still is "shovelware trash" in the eye of most pc gamers.

A friend of mine recently quit at a rather big mobile games studio and their policy was to bin every project that doesn't have "hit potential". They were exclusively aiming for hits, and cutting their losses on all else.

I just want the financial freedom to work on games without needing to care about releasing or monetizing them (because those two parts seem like a whole lot of stress for rather poor reward more often than not). A "hit" would happen to be a great way to achieve that, though I'm sure most of the game concepts that interest me have little to no "hit-potential". Bottom line I'm doubtful releasing games is the best way to finance making games for me. I don't know what would be better though. The kind of freelance work I do already doesn't really work out that well for it either, for a number of reasons.

I believe the market is headed into a direction where the "best of the best" will still earn about the same as they do now, and the rest will earn much less. Imho the "middle class" of indie games that break even, and maybe even turn a slight profit, is likely to shrink, while the portion of games that fail commercially grows. The portion of hits I'd estimate to shrink proportionally due to overall market groth, but stay numerically fairly consistent.
So in that context aiming for either a "hit" in terms of sales numbers, or an unfilled (and easy to reach with marketing) niche, seems to be a smart idea imho. If one doesn't think they can be among the "best of the best" with their game, or fill an underserved niche, maybe treating it as a hobby would be a better choice?

 

Well a hit simply means that I get true fans who like my work. If I can get people on board who understand where I am going with my modest means, and want to fund my development with larger teams, and more ambitious projects, that's a hit. A hit with true fans is surely the whole reason why we develop?

 

This would define me pretty well.

For me a hit game for an indie developer would be a game that produces more than 1 million sales (across several platforms or just one) within a years time or less, that would be a definite hit.

At $14.99 a pop and your talking $14,990,000+ revenue.

I would consider my games a hit if they garner more than 100,000 downloads within the first year of release (across several platforms or just one). This would definitely allow me to increase development budgets to very high degrees. Could probably start hiring freelance to create unique character models for the protagonist(s) and antagonist(s) as well as custom environments, even have the ability to correctly tailor the game to a unified look from start to finish.

To me an indie has finally made it to the big leagues if they get several hundred thousands of downloads (or 1 million+) across PC, XBOX and PLAYSTATION consumer bases individually. That means something like Hippocoder gets 1,121,687 PC downloads, 854,324 Playstation downloads, 978,009 XBOX downloads one just ONE GAME! Game priced at $39.99 and your talking the big leagues. That comes out to $118,131,259.80.

P.S., sorry Hippocoder for using you in the example.

 

There's the storefront's cut, fees, regional pricing differences, VAT, and then you pay taxes on top of that. Gamedevs doing the "10k sales @ 1$ = 10k $ in my pocket" kind of pseudo-math puzzle me more than those that say "I'm gonna make the most amazing game on my own", because basic school math and just knowing that taxes are a thing should be enough to not make that degree of mistake in a calculation imho.

How do you plan to run a successful business if your example calculations are already off by tens of millions?

I see this a lot. So please don't take it personal. I've just taken this as an example.

 

@Martin_H playing devil's advocate (sorry) but they're $1 = $1 is probably correct to within 1 order of magnitude, which is probably enough considering their point that one million sales might be an unreasonably high threshold for a "hit"

 

Well lets not get ahead of ourselves. Various market deals, taxes and overheads all bring numbers back down to sensible cup of tea holding contemplative values.

Can still dream.

 

Some of you might find this interesting. We put a web-based game out this last spring. We never had a goal of it making much, it was really just a test to see how expensive operating a free online game is. That is using google adsense for games, as well as regular adsense on the landing page.

The metric we were interested in was the income per CCU. It turns out, that our game, which people play for an average of 6 minutes per session, makes over $15 per average CCU per month - just on ad revenue. It costs about 1/5th of that to 'operate'. The game made a lot more money than we expected, but we expected pretty much zero to break-even. We never factored in our development costs because we are focused on tools. If we had, the game has to run a bit longer before not being underwater.

All in all, we consider that a success. The moral of the story is success should be relative to goals, and not all goals are monetary.

 

I didn't mention any of the overhead costs you mentioned as that went beyond the scope of the question, What do you personally consider a hit?.

The problem of having too payout overhead on 15 million, I say give me that problem; that's the type of problem I would like to have.

Not taking offense, but you did make me re-do the math and the basic calculation is not off.

(1,121,687 + 854,324 + 978,009) = 2,954,020

2,954,020 * 39.99 = 118,131,259.8

 

Hmm, seems there's an implicit assumption here...

A few of our more illustrious members like yourself or a zombie gorrilla or a hippo coder (I think) do this, but how many of the rest are really expecting to make a living with this? I confess I'm not.

That's all separate from the thread question...

Am I hoping to make a hit? No. Quite frankly, I'm not expecting to even have the time, ability, and sadly motivation to make the majority of my bigger ideas (the scope of which might be shown in my post in the "Game Ideas! Post them here" thread--some are even larger and span multiple games). Furthermore, none are in particularly popular genres (visual novel, action game, point-and-click RPG, "walking sim" type game), and in each case my focus is on story rather than gameplay, yet another area which is less popular in games.

As was already said, I'll be happy if I find an audience (whenever I get around to releasing something).

 

Haha yeahhhh - a million downloads? - on mobile platforms anyway - most certainly does not equate to the kind of numbers I'm seeing here.

I have a variety of apps on several platforms, and all are free mind you, and those all together would come reasonably close to the million downloads figure - but considering I make money almost exclusively through advertising, and many - I mean manyyy of them - are "throwaway downloads", where the user downloads, doesn't like the app, and almost immediately removes it (or doesn't even use it all!) and I end up making exactly $0 per user when that happens, its not exactly in the same ballpark as the numbers I am seeing here.

This means that A) I don't have $14,990,000+ dollars - lmfao - and B) not only that, I'm still struggling to hopefully make enough to continue developing for many years, in hopes of eventually having a surplus of money (not even remotely that much) to support larger games, potentially on more platforms...

That being said, I surely will keep going even if it means eating ramen noodles and borrowing wifi from mcdonalds - because its what I love to do!

But yeah, to be realistic - to get that kind of money for a million downloads, you need to be SELLING a killer app or game obviously, and it needs to be really really popular.

That's my two cents anyway (which is more than the app stores seem to pay on average per user).

 

At the end of the day, I will still make games because it is fun and I like to share.

 

What I meant wasn't to imply that you could't add and multiply, I meant that "sales numbers * price" is not your income. Very recently I've heard a mid-sized dev team say they get to take home roughly 60% of what the steam pricetags say - before paying taxes, which depending on multiple factors can get really close to another 50%. When you sell your million games at 1$ within the same fiscal year, you could easily have less than 500k$ in the bank in the end. And being off by more than 50% isn't "still technically correct in a way" for me, that's all.

 

A hundred thousand? Lucky you. I'd happy if I break a thousand in a year.
But also, who knows, I'm about to give my current a massive update, then try advertising again. It might do something this time.

 

I know, but I have been known too make mistakes with simple arithmetic so I had to redo it for my own sanity, otherwise my OCD of double checking my work would get to me and 1:00 in the morning I would be up checking it. Best to do it now rather that later when I should be in bed getting what little sleep I get anyway.

 

I'm making a Multiplayer VR game. Making any money is a bonus

 

Hoping but never planning for it.

I wasn't expecting to become rich with my first game but I was certainly expecting more than what I got.
For my second game I had more reasonable expectations, I wanted to make similar numbers to keep working... now I'm on my way to make less than with the first one.

Having reasonable expectations is not enough, maybe I should start looking for a hit, basically abort any reasonable project that doesn't make heads turn from day one. It sounds unreasonable but "being safe is risky" like I heard in some TED talk a long time ago.

EDIT: a hit for me would be to make enough to start my own studio and get a bit of fame.

 

If I can drink myself through what seems to be a bout of depression, then I'll be a-okay. The other option is I buy/build a copper still and start making some moonshine/whiskey. The bourbon I'm drinking hasn't been giving me ideas, I swear.

 

Unfortunately, in most markets the sales graph is the "Long Tail". Consequently, breaking even is almost as unlikely as having a hit.

 

Hope has no limits. But expectations differ. Some have a good sense of what to expect, based on data and experience. Others just don’t know what to expect, but that doesn’t stop them from keep rolling.
But where it comes to hope? Who doesn’t hope a hit? Who’s going to forfeit it, if the game is more popular than expected? The hope is latent. Expectations differ.

 

That's correct, the long tail is a waste of time unless the business model depends only on the long tail, and it's a fatter tail (such things exist but have to be designed for)

 

Another thing about that graph it is not taking into account the dynamics of an individual developer. For some the "costs" that went into the game development life cycle could be as low as NIL or as high as ten thousand dollars. Some of us are more of a hobbyist with development so our time has virtually no cost. I, for example, work at home when I find the time. I do not have to spend gas money driving to an office, pay monthly rent or utilities and I do not have employees.

My costs currently are only in asset purchases for my one project that is further along than the others and that comes out to a rough estimate of about 50-60 dollars. For me my break even point is considerably lower than what the graph shows.

Depending on my retail value I decide to go with, I could get to my break even point with as little as 1 sale if I go the No Man's Sky route and demand triple AAA prices, or just over 60 sales if I go with the 0.99 cents clearance value.

If you take into consideration your own unique situation you get a very diverse curve, and as others have mentioned making money is not always the ultimate goal, just a beautiful side effect if it occurs.

 

To make matters worse, the only reliable way to get significant numbers of players is to “buy them” via ads or some similarly expensive marketing effort.

But the cost of acquiring a player in this way is usually higher than his “Long Term Value” (LTV). So you must rely on a “k-factor” = the ratio of additional players each purchased player recruits.

The most effective way to increase the k-factor is to be high in the charts, which gives an “organic bump”. But pushing a game high in the charts is a big, risky investment!

 

I sold 4K on my game. To me a "hit" would have been 40K sales.

 

I think with 40k sales you can say you're be a successful game developer. If that was your peak performance, you'd be golden. But I think a "hit" is more like, a game so big, you could retire right there if you wanted to.

 

Link?

 

Too bad it's not more like the Asset Store.

In Asset Store, the tail is everything. You upload something and seemingly nothing happens, but then over time you start getting sales monthly, and it goes on forever, providing you're active, update, improve, and make some a little noise regularly.

If Steam was like that ... you'd know by overlapping several games you could eventually maintain a stable income.

That's why if we had a Unity Game Store ... I wonder if would have the long tail effect.