How much money do you earn from your games?

I was actually just going to post, it's really nice to see these posts. Gives valuable information for those of us not as far along yet.

 

No, I thank you! It is very interesting to get such an overview on how things can go, without all the sugarcoating and bias that invariable gets added when things are attached to a real name. Keep 'em coming I say!

Had to laugh out loud at that last sentence . My condolences.

 

hi i would like to spend some words if you want to advertise your game with cpi mobi.They do what they say but users uninstall the app very fast.So if your target is to have active users ignore it.They earn you don't

 

Never buy installs, its a bad idea in so many ways and it will backfire.

 

Do you know some good suggestions?

 

Absolutely correct. I spent around $300 on pay per install until I said nope. People would install, not get any achievements and uninstall. Its definitely an exploit. Someone is getting free money for clicking, installing and uninstalling.

I was paying a ridiculous amount per install. If I wasn't paying a ridiculous amount no one would even see the ad. It would be like 200 views per month to 20,000 per day. There was no in between. Lowering the amount by 50 cents returned me to 50 views per week.

 

I'm surprised you spent so much on that. I don't think I would try such a thing even if I were desperate. Common sense dictates that if a customer doesn't want your product they won't use it even if you paid them... they might just do the bare minimum (install) and then uninstall the product. Which seems to be the case. Apologies if that sounds harsh.

 

I think it would be prudent for people at the very least post links to trailers of their games so we can make our own judgements on what type of projects earn what.

I don't mean to bring anyone down but if you're making cookie clicker clones (extreme example) I'm not sure you will earn much off that.

[edit] Oops. Forgot I had already posted here while reading the backlog XD

 

Its not harsh. It was an experiment that didn't pay off. The $300 was over the span of 3 months. I'd ease up on the pay per install spending hoping something would catch fire, but it just went back down to 50 views a week. Then after a few weeks I'd up the spending again and get a flood of people seeing the ads.

It was an experiment. If it worked for a mobile game, I'd pay advertising for my 2 Steam games.

 

It looks like to get some serious downloads, you have to put down a lot of money into advertising. The easiest way i see people doing it is to start a youtube channel making "Tutorials" and then when you have enough following you hit them with your game in a creative way. Its soooo effective.

 

Has anyone here tried facebook advertising? i was looking at their prices. they are really cheap! but i wonder if it would work for a mobile game.

 

i did some analyzing of how much and what people search on google and youtube, and i was shocked how little people actually searched on things. even common things like "new games in 2017" nada. Maybe i should start giving out free coffee so ppl wake up to play some.

me9za: My experince with facebook is that if you have a group that linkes to a external webpage that generates facebook API links it can be very effective to reach people.

 

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=games

 

Such a search is terribly generic and can't hope to cover the breadth of games being released on a monthly (almost daily) basis. And in most cases, the user would find themselves shunted off to a "real" game site with this kind of information, which implies that in the future they might simply go to that site and save themselves the trouble of a search.

I frequently go to websites like PC Gamer or some such for info on new games. And I absolutely never search google for something like "new games 2017"

 

I'd wager people don't need to search Google, they just go to Steam and see what's new.

Then again "game" vs "games" vs "video games."

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 5-y&q=games,game

 

I can't speak for others, but when I am interested in a game I either search generic "new indie games" or go to sites like rockpapershotgun to see what's new. I rarely do this, but if I do the I am super thorough. I will go to websites, Google generics, Google "games similar to X", browse TIG source to check on those perpetual alphas, and as a last resort search Steam with certain tags.

The best results I think are tooling things like "games like X" which leads me to random blogs or crap blogs.

I will also check up on my favorite developers by going to their website. "What is Klei working on?" or "Let's visit the witcher 3 devs."

When it comes to purchases. subscribing to an email list for my favorite games/devs works best. Steam works the worst - hate all the AAA game ads and useless suggestions. But even when useful, I use it to browse but never buy. If the game is Steam only I refuse to buy even if I want it. Devs should know better and I dislike supporting lazy devs who don't look out for themselves by providing a DRM-Free direct buy option.

Getting me subscribed to an email list when I discover your game in alpha is how you get my sale though. I don't go to you - your email comes to me. I dont look for it, and one day I get an email saying that one game I was interested in is released! Buy now & yay!

 

I think it's very hard to derive meaningful data just from stats on relative numbers of search terms. I've querried the following 5 searches:





Note how the searches for free **** have continually declined, but the searches for the most popular aggregator in that area have stayed relatively consistent? I think people are just getting smarter at what to search for when they want free ****. Could be the same for games. See how the search for steam outperforms the search for "video games" by an order of magnitude? I've added the search term depression as something entirely outside of this whole entertainment discussion, that seems likely to be useful as a general search term when one want to find out more about it (I do not think that is the case for "(video) games" as a search term, because it's too generic). Interestingly there are often slight down-spikes in depression searches when large up-spikes in steam searches occur. Does steam cure depression? Hell no, it's probably just that steam-sales correlate to holidays like Christmas, where you spend time with friends and family.
Also I'm fairly sure that a large percentage of google searches is by people who are just too lazy to type or remember a full URL. Why else would the number of searches for aggregator sites be so consistent otherwise? Imho it should rise as they grow and then drop as more and more people start using their bookmarks or directly type the url, but they're probably just used to using google as a sort of smarter autocomplete for urls.

Edit: I'm sure other search terms would show different results, possibly also more useful ones. It does look like searching just for **** without the "free" and just for games without the "video" shows similar relation of long term decline for the generic search term vs. steady searches for the biggest aggregator in the respective field. And both generic searches outperform the number of searches for the aggregators by a lot.

 

Yeah sure allot of people go on steam. But still if there some info you want, google is the way to go, i am also talking about youtbue. btw both games and game give almost same trend, and that is down..

 

I'm noticing a trend between you and a certain subject today...

 

We released 1 game, published to the web. It is multiplayer-only, and has generated about $5k in 6 months, purely from ad revenue.

 

What is your game may I ask? Sounds like it's going well.

 

www.kazap.io

 

What is the infra behind the multiplayer aspect? Using a service like Photon or alike? Free tier?

 

Gross or net? Care to share a breakdown?

 

It's a custom back-end of our own design. It is not built on Unity, and it is vastly more capable than Photon.

 

Gross. The net is a slightly negative number if you factor in wages. It is, however, bringing in more money than it costs to operate now, so it might eventually break even.

 

I tried facebook advertising for my first game. I chose pay per interaction, and that gave me no love. I got the projected number of ad interactions per day, but it didn't reflect any for interest or installs. I came to the conclusion that fb has employees that click facebook ads to get the interaction revenue, and that's all she wrote. Im about to put up a mega update for my second project, and will try fb again, but this time, I will try the pay per view method. Lets see how that goes

 

Why would they click ads when they can just tell you they clicked them?

I paid for advertising on a gaming website once a flat $5 fee for a month. I think the click through rate was high at first say 3% view to click ratio, but dwindled after two weeks since people were used to the ads. It went down to 0.25%, which is still high as I remember other ventures into paid advertising were 1 in 1,000. It gained me no sales.

On my Steam page I have Google Analytics... I don't feel Google analytics picked up any of the traffic from that site. Here's where a twist comes in... the ad went from like 70 clicks to 7,000 for the last week it was run. So I asked the staff wtf? I was told some Yandex search bot basically indexed every single page in the site and must have clicked on the add 7,000 times. I've dealt with and blocked Yandex at my day job. That thing is horrible. Gets lost in your site, indexes the same things over-and-over.

Back to the real issue: The Google Analytics didn't spike. Not even with 7,000 new clicks. Perhaps Google didn't track Yandex, but it made me suspicious if people were clicking on the ads or if it was bots or if the site itself just says 3 clicks per day at random.

 

I was considering not doing fb again because I assumed it was fake revenue. I was trying to decide on where to put my advertising dollars that would maybe make a difference. If you have a similar experience with someone else, I don't think I know if anyone is legit. Indies trying to get noticed definitely have it rough.

 

Make a webpage with good SEO (avoid wordpress or jomlaa they have huge secruity problems and is a mess). Better make a webpage your self, MVC is good technology now days, and makeing a page your self is pretty simple for a normal game coder.

Then you get some number when you link link your page as referal or do direct marketing. Link your page to facebook tru the facebook API. (so that ppl that clicks your facebook link goes strate to your webpage and does who click on your webpage goes strait to your fb. I had some pretty good numbers this way on more than 1 project (not game related thought)

 

I publish all my games for free without ads.

I got a Patreon currently at $54 which is enough to pay off most assets, though the Patreon is rather young (less than 2 months)

 

How long before you made the Patreon did you release these games? Are they new releases or are you somewhat established?

 

Not much. 4 years Project, first one. 1,5 years on teh market. 45K gross. I'm at least managing to rise the sales and defy the classic rollercoaster curver you get on first week of sales. I made in last month almost half of sellings so I'm somewhat optimistic.

 

They are in development.

 

Yet you already have supporters? Very nice.

 

Does anyone believe fb averts for anything other than fb games work?
Maybe for mobile games but advertising on a social network that actively attempts to keep users plugged in at all times - is counter to the platform the adverts are presented on.

 

Personally I believe ads (on a scale that indies can afford) don't work, period.

I've heard some interesting things about facebook on podcasts, that lead me to believe the plattform is actually starting to be pretty useless for non-paid self promo. Like if you have a page there and 10k people "liked" it to get updates about your stuff, facebook will still only send out your updates to x percentage of your followers and will ask you to pay extra to reach everyone. I can't quote a specific source, but cgp grey said it on two of his podcasts (cortex and hello internet) and I have no reason to doubt this.

 

FB ads have prvided me nothing but losses.

I tried also Google adwords adn Outbrain. None worked.

YouTube ads, with a neat tráiler did an awesome work. One of those you can dissable after 5 secs.
Expensive but had true impact. Still as you've to pay lets say 3k in ads, the sales derived from there still pay 30%Steam commission aswell as derived VAT so its not still clearly worthy to me.

 

Do you have any numbers what there is to be gained from just uploading a cool trailer to youtube as a regular video?

 

Don´t missunderstand me. The cool tráiler on YouTube cannel will do nothing. I mean a YouTube tráiler that can do great if is part of a YouTube Add. Those kind of ads that go before the video you whant to see and that let you go to original video after 5 seconds.

 

IF you have the marketing budget, and if your game shows very high day3 numbers (>40%), then I think ads can make good sense if you target them properly. This is what the big shops do: They flood the market with games they've created quickly, then watch the analytics. They then polish and heavily market the ones with the best retention numbers.

 

Am I the only one who found it humorous that so many people replied, just to say "I'm not gonna answer that"? You could have said the same thing by not replying......

 

Thank god I didn't waste my money on facebook ads. Unity ads anyone? Anyone currently advertising with them? How's the numbers.

 

I'm not certain facebook's demographics are what they say they are. We have done some advertising - not for a game but for our asset - and found that there was basically zero follow-through vs other platforms where we get a good following.

 

Unity ads are ok but you should have views from Europe,US,and Canada therwise you can have poor income

 

I did a Halloween sale. By far my lowest sale yet on my $1 game. A few larger developers have told me over the past year "do a 50 cent sale" "you're a nobody, do a 50 cent sale on your $10 game" "you'll get lots of reviews." So rather than do a 50 cent sale on my $10 game, I did it on my $1 game to test the water.

It sold 140 copies in this 1 week alone. I see that as a bad thing.... but hey its 140 copies more than I had before. I see plenty of higher quality $10 games on sale for $1. How much did I make on those 140 copies during a 50 cent sale? $50 and that's before Steam takes a cut. Keep in mind currencies have different values that's why its $50 rather than $70. Then taxes happen at some point which is 15%. This honesty is another reason to stay anonymous.

I should point out that of the 140 copies sold only 15 were people buying it from their wishlist. 2,000 people have this $1 game on their wishlist. It seems staggering people wouldn't just buy it and even on 50 cent sale they still didn't buy it! Perhaps they're waiting for it to be in a bundle as well $1 games are usually bundle fodder.

Has it gotten more reviews? Nope. Not yet, but reviews are a marathon. Someone could review it in 2 weeks or 6 months.

I did expect more sales as people tell me "cheap games with cards sell a lot of copies. Look at game X its got 500,000 owners!" Not in my case. Perhaps th

Funny thing is this 50% off sale sold about as much copies as the first 15% off sale. Looking at card prices for the game, it seems like nothing changed. The cards didn't sell, they are still 8+ cents and there are a few more available rather than say a few dozen or hundred more. So at the moment I'd say people bought the game for the game. Depending on what cards the player is dropped, there is a high percentage the card value is worth more than the 50 cent game.

What I do find interesting is before the 50 cent sale 5% of the game's owners were Russian. 35% of those who bought the game this week are Russian. Bringing its total up to 7% are Russian overall. The game has no Russian language support.

Here's the punchline. I made $50 on this past sale from 140 copies. The other game made $40 from a mere 5 sales when its not even on sale. So the 50 cent sale manages to sell copies of $10 game.

 

In this Halloween Sale I've run the game at higher discount ever without adds sold 2800 $ gross. I'll report how do future campaigns work as will have Little lower discount.
Friday and Sat sold really well, then the magic dissapeared.

 

Keep the 0.50 cent sale active until you pull in 50% of the 2000.
Then if reviews are good, put the price up to 2$.

 

This is probably true with any ad platform. Google adsense for games is in the sub $5 RPM range - often around half that. Does anyone have a ballpark of what video ads are running right now?

 

A few people have told me raise it to $3 as they feel its worth it so that way I can rake in more sales when I do a $1 sale. Maybe if the amount of reviews warranted it, then I would.

So far the reviews have been so generous I question them. One guy managed a 1,400 word review. My $1 game is what I'd say is less than 1 hour of fun since its a simple arcade game, but a lot of people reviewing it have 9 - 20 hours in it.