Casual or Retail?

Where's the big money in games, is it "Farm Frenzy" or "Tomb Raider Legend?"

For a small company, obviously casual games are much simpler to aim for, you have a couple of month turn around for each game, and it's easy to distribute through online game portals. But is there profit in this?

I see charts showing which casual games are most popular, but no idea of sales figures or revenue. How can we get this information as indie developers to see whether it's worth trying to make big projects, or aim lower at the casual market?

http://www.gameproducer.net/category/sales-statistics/

Easy to distribute through portals? I've yet to master the art of getting them to answer e-mails.

I'm pretty sure I'm just about done writing games. Too much stress for too little reward. 22 years I've been at it. I could've killed somebody and done a life sentence by now.

I'm ok with Reflexive, but recently terminated a contract with another company after they broke the terms of their own contract. Its more aggravation than its worth.

How about Miniclip or Realarcade ?.

According to this... http://gamedevs.realarcade.com/GameSubmission/overview.jsp
Realarcade claim to pay 30% direct royalties to the developer. They claim to have 8.8 million users.

Are they telling the truth, or are they talking a load of old appendages ?. Are they honest ?.

lots of very successful casual games are now being made into retail boxes such as Mystery Case Files, Azada etc. Soon Fairway Solitaire may make it onto retail (and more...wait and see...)

Depends if you can get it or not! *Dabz whistles*

Enough of the innuendo, back on topic:-

I've seen a fair few Blitz games at retail over the years, granted all down to Idigicons Maxx range and their *cough* dealings with developers.

I would love to see a retial publisher like Idigicon (but not Idigicon) grace programming forum boards again, I think thats what drove the original Blitz 'developers' on to complete their projects as they had a retail publisher on call, who was it again... George Bray?

That'll be nice! :)

Dabz

Speaking as someone who's been a professional game maker for 20+ years, there really is no "big money" in games, whether retail or indie. There's certainly money to be had. Enough money to live comfortably, but the "big $$$" is few and far between.

Besides it's all relative. What's "big" to one person, is pennies to another.

Example: Lets say I made a simple game that took me 4-5 days to make. I sell it on the net and it makes me a whopping $1500 dollars. $1500 for 5 day's (1 week) work. Nice, huh? Well... it's "okay", but nothing for me really to jump up & down about. It's not "big money". As a matter of fact, for me, it would be barely "break even money". (I live in one of the most expensive places to live, "The OC" Southern California, USA). For others, that's "amazing money", it's all relative.

The thing that I find is being in control of your destiny and cutting out as many middlemen as possible is a key to success. In that respect, you're better off being indie/casual. You have a better chance of breaking out, less people telling you how something should be and less hands in your pockets to cut into that profit margin.

BTW, I'd put money that Farm Frenzy has made more money than Tomb Raider Legends. Yeah, Farm Frenzy has probably sold like 10% of what Tomb Raider Legends sold, but Tomb Raider Legends cost at least 20x what Farm Frenzy did to make and then there's manufacture costs, boxes, retail kick backs, marketing, etc.

Yupp ... most likely you are right. Especially if we look at the recent ongoings at EA for example. They start to call 200'000 USD win a flop and the like just because they waste too much money on creating medium to bad games and need to cross finance those.

I'm more for selling 10,000 copies of games making £3 profit each, that'd be great for one person spending a few months writing a game. If you could get that figure regulary, then I'd call you a success. I think it was Doom that sold 100,000 copies on shareware, at about $10 each, thats a million dollars turnover for a game that took about six month to write between five people.

I'm just generalising here using your quote as an example, but if somebody chooses to live somewhere they really can't afford to live, then whinges that the money they're making is not enough to fund their desired lifestyle, what would you suppose the solution to the problem would be?

Make a career change? Or maybe get your head out your ass the clouds and adjust your lifestyle to fit your income.

I think there is decent enough money in independent game development to be profitable, but I think it needs to either be a side project in which you program yourself (but still hold a full time job), or an investment (others program, you put up the cash), or a combo of both (what I am currently doing).

If you can get a retail publisher to publish the game that is great, just understand that the game is, for the most part, no longer yours. There are many huge advantages to this method if you simply want to create a game and be done with it.

I, honestly, do not like these shareware game download sites. I believe that just about anyone with enough drive and motivation (you already have the knowledge/learning capability if you can create a game) can properly market a game. The real key to indie game marketing is to have others market the game for you. I do not have time to detail this right now, but I might throw up a post on this later.

I would say before the release of your game find some local game forums with a tight-nit community and post/get in well with them (for find members that exist on those sites and talk to them about it). You are more likely to get sales from small forums that you advertise on than the huge forums due to the fact that local small forums usually want to support the site, while larger sites people might feel the site is already so large they need not support it.

You can also utilize your friends, myspace, facebook, and other sites to help draw up interest.

Use the power of social sites and the overall social nature of the internet to attempt to self-market your game (can even be done for free) before you decide to fork over a decent percentage to these shareware distribution sites.

Purchasing a few books on marketing would be wise as well. If you are an indie game developer you are more than just a programmer, you are a business owner and as such you will wear many hats. You need to become proficient at marketing, advertising, public relations, budgeting, etc...

It does not matter how good your game is, if you lack essential business skills the game will either fail or you will get taken advantage of.

Almost been there, box was designed etc, then the publisher pulled it before sending it to distributors and didn't tell us!

I personally reckon there's oodles of mun to be made with a good idea, anywhere, anyhow - always has been, always will be.

Try pummelling your frontal lobes with a tin of Pilchards whilst travelling on public transport - if you manage to smash the tin open, you know you've hit pay-dirt!!!

Works great if you're striving for that 'original' angle.

Actually I'd try making the extra money first for a challenge, and if it works, you could also move to somewhere cheaper and then live like a king!

Here's some indie/casual game thoughts to keep you going (trust me, you *need* to read this if you are at all serious):

http://greyaliengames.com/blog/is-it-possible-to-earn-a-living-making-indie-or-casual-games/

For money write applications, or design systems to implement applications or implement applications. The money I've seen people throwing at Oracle consultants is obscene. Games is too hit and miss, with the odds stacked against you, your better off getting a good job and playing roulette.

Darkheart

Yeah, agreed. I did business software for 9 years and turned over nearly £2,000,000. However, in the end my heart wasn't in it - I wanted to make games.

@Grey Alien: $3,157,200.00 (3.1 million) ?!??

Wow! thats and average of £222k per year, if you were making an estimated 30% thats £66,600 per year. Thats a nice living!

I've been developing app's for the desktop and web for 9+ years and dont earn anything near that! Mind you, I am employed and not self employed. I guess that is what makes the difference.

I need a pay rise!

I started as Senior developer and was no.2 in the company under the manager, but the company was owned and invested in by someone else. After a few years I became the manager and that's when we really ramped up the turnover. Income from support contracts was about £100K per year. System prices ranged from £3K to 30K (it got installed in the House of Lords and the House of Commons for example). We only had 4 staff members on average and made a great net profit after salaries each year (surprisingly your 30% is a pretty good estimate). I had a good wage and profit share but the profit was not mine, it was the owner's. However, I had built that company and the software over the years and knew I could do it again but on my own, so I started making games. 3 years later it's going well, but I've not turned over £2,000,000 yet ;-) However, it's early days.

@Grey
I am the senior developer and develop in the insurance industry for one of the UK largest brokers. A management role was hinted to me, but I was not interested purely on the basis that I enjoy my coding too much, and didn’t want to divert away from it into a roll where I may have no longer enjoyed my job. I guess management is where the money is? But happiness comes first, right? It's a great job, and I enjoy going to work every day (to be honest, it don’t feel like work). However, I have always aspired to work in the gaming industry, but now I am too afraid of the risk and career change (house to pay for, wife, 3 dependants, etc). I've got quite comfortable where I am (which is probably a bad thing), but self employment always seems tempting.

To leave a comfortable job that was paying such a good salary, to then "go it alone" took some guts and balls! My hat is off to you!!!

Who knows, maybe I will be in a situation later in life where this decision is made for me?

Well said.

Let me just second that. Even if you're just 9-5ing it, it's ridiculous how much money you can make developing business applications. Most companies are so desperate for manpower, you don't even have to be a competent programmer anymore. I mean it helps, but it's not a prerequisite.

So true, the company that I do occasional programming for once payed $1000~ per hour, for some guy to fly into the states and out every week (not to mention they payed for the flights), and the project he was working on was scrapped later!

u2o: Management has it's own rewards but yeah it was a pain in the end as I was doing too many things. It was tricky "going it alone" and it caused family problems (partner worried about money etc.) and I had to get loans to keep going etc but I gradually built it up. I've got 2 kids, house, car etc so I know how you feel right now about not wanting to risk a change - but through change can come the biggest opportunity! And it's true that sometimes these things can happen anyway.

I'd refine this to say that there is some GOOD money to be made by a few (also depends on where you live in the world), and some big money made by a very few (owners of portals or big game companies for example). Oh wait, I see that you already said that :-) I'm just aiming on moving up the ladder in a career that I love loads more than business software (as much as that career does pay out)

Plash: Crazy but it doesn't surprise me.