Is your game one of the 4% making a profit?

Very interesting stat - Only 4% of games make a profit
That's pretty well 'low'. It makes you wonder whether you should even bother investing untold hours coding a game which is likely to make next-to-no profit

And there was me thinking everyone did it for the fun of programming?

I wonder what % that makes me then? :-p

That's why you have to be innovative. As far as I know, in indie scene, the most profiting games are always the innovative ones like Gish, World of Goo, Darwinia etc.

But, Gish was crap! It was a bog-standard platformer, with physics and not much else. I might be in a minority in that opinion, and I'm sure you'll be happy to post me a link to some sales stats which I'll forewarn you I've already seen, but the game got very boring very quickly.

Can't comment on World of Goo or Darwinia since I haven't bothered with either (or any other games in recent memory).

People throw money at the National Lottery every week with worse odds than that.

I don't believe this. How about Electgronic Arts, Ubisoft, Activision? They surely make a bunch of cash? Or Rockstar, Bethesda???

I don't believe this at all.

No I only sold 1 copy in 5 years, im still plugging away though!

Early on I thought

1) sell a few games and get a few extra quid

OR

2) do it for free and have 10,0000s of downloads and get a bit of kudos

I went for option 2.

My hat goes off to Brucey and people like him who make our programming lives easier for "kudos" :)

or what I do

3) do it for free and get 100s of downloads

:D

They're talking about the mainstream market, which exhibits this characteristic because it is hit-driven (meaning you throw a lot of money at a few triple-A games and cross your fingers that one of them will not only prove to be a hit but generate enough profit to pay for the rest). It's got nothing to do with Gish or anyone on this board's games.

It's also nothing new. Charles Cecil was touting pretty much the same figure ("95% of games lose money") at the State Of Play lectures in London and that must have been -- what? -- at least four or five years ago. That's probably why the original Forbes story is about EEDAR's algorithmic attempts to streamline game content rather than an already established statistic.

I agree with Brucey on this and I would guess a LOT of people code for fun rather than profit.

Just today in the dev news, it said that only 4% of games that start development make a profit and 20% of finished games make a profit.

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/only-four-percent-of-video-games-make-a-profit-ndash-eedar-/?biz=1

Yeah, but many "finished" games these days, aren't really finished, they're just "published".

Given the millions they put into mainstream video games today I'm not very surprised they don't make their money back.

..and having in mind that for you as a bedroom coder 0.01% of profit they talking about is big success..man..keep in mind that they have to fed hundreds of artists and programmers and of course for big companies, is hard time to turn back money...for small studios (up to 10-15 folks), or even one man team, as i said 0,01% of mentioned profit this big guys make is a success..

Gish didn't make much money (comparitively). Think it got pirated a lot though.

I code for fun AND profit, the two do not need to be mutually exclusive.

Yeah, but that 4% make a $#!^ton of money and the odds are much better than the lottery.

Unrealistic hike in media creation expenses don't help. I've had quotes of $500.00 per minute for music creation, $3000.00 for a pac man sprite, etc, etc. Imagine the costs for AAA tiles. Incredible.

That's incorrect. Many innovative games don't sell, while many that lack innovation do. It's all about correct marketing and producing a quality title. Innovation can help, but only if you're targeting those who want to play something innovative.

Innovation required a crap load of marketing to sell the game and make people want to buy it. Most people prefer the familiar and are afraid of change. You have to find ways to get peoples interest and make them want to buy your game.

Games like spore, B&W and fable were hyped for years before they were released. With just enough snippets to make you think maybe this was the next evolution of games, the names behind the games were big and famous so mabe they might just pull it off.

A lot of the best selling games don't have to be good, it's all in the marketing, hype, previews and reviews that give them a fighting change. If you can get the hype up and cram saled in the first couple of weeks before people become wise to your failings even a poor game can do quite well.

I don't think innovation has much to do with it really..

These days user reviews are playing a large part in a game's success. In retail sure, people get swindled by the big marketing budgets. Now check out the games that are doing well in the iPhone app store. User reviews rule the whole thing, well that and Apple themselves can promote your app if they like it. In the future digital distribution and good filters will make sure that the best games according to player opinion stay on top. Still, I think even in retail that player opinion creates the hits. Some games sneak by that aren't good but by and large most of the successful games are actually fun to play even if they're not your cup of tea.

wtf, are you serious?

Can't pay the bills with kudos, though.

DIJ - Yes. But after what I'm going through with my current game, I will more than likely pay those high prices next time if it means the media is created in a timely fashion.

MGE - Makes me wish I was any good at art, lol

lol, most artists get paid sallary from about $40,000 to $80,000 so a set of pacman sprites could cost quite a bit if it took a couple of weeks.

Well that sounds scientific. Apparently 72% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Your percentage may vary.

They're still making up statistics, regardless of which market segment they're talking about. Citation needed!

Too true. Compare if you will games like Psychonauts and Beyond Good & Evil versus games like Halo 3 and World of Warcraft.

Its actually 88.2%.

Yes, because whether the precise percentage is 96 or 95 or 92.2564 is totally what's important here. Not the fact that, whatever the exact figure, most mainstream games make a loss. Saaaaay, you're not a programmer by any chance, are you? :P

No. What's important isn't the figure. What's important is the way they *arrived* at the figure, which sources they used, the credibility of these sources, how they evaluated and weighted these sources and other aspects of their methodology. Basically, what's important is the foundation for their claim. Are they just parroting some random number some anti-piracy spin-doctor threw out, or did they actually do an audit on every mayor game publishers books to figure out which games made a profit, or which didn't. Also does the number reflect profit, in absolute economic terms, or compared to its relative market expectations?

The lack of a source and attribution, suggests we're talking about a "magic number", pulled out of thin air and with no basis in reality.

Again, that's a nice hypothesis. If it were true however most mainstream publishers would go out of business. Since they don't, I have an empirical observation that contradicts your hypothesis. In fact we know as a matter of fact that some games (World of Warcraft and The Sims to name PC exclusive titles) make frankly embarrassing profits, and even "niche" games which appeal to a very specific demographic, and an even smaller market segment of that demographic, like Crysis (which is the equivalent of pr0n for your Graphics Card) despite selling much worse than projected, still managed to make a nice profit at the end of the day. So there is corroborating evidence that suggest the opposite hypothesis is more likely to be true. Namely that most mainstream games, while maybe performing less stellar than expected, will still go out of the red eventually.

Not recently, no. Apparently I'm now a market analyst.

45% of market analysts are incorrect.

It's pretty simple. Say I have a studio and I make 10 games costing £1,000,000 each (yes I know this is cheapr), then the max loss I can make is £10,000,000. So let's say 4 games make no money (cancelled or whatever), 4 games make a partial loss (so say like £2,000,000 total) and 1 game breaks even, and one game makes £10,000,000 in sales. We have a total of £13,000,000 income and thus the total profit is £3,000,000. Basically because the lower limit is defined and the upper limit is not, it's a pretty good gamble providing you have some actual skill and understanding of whatthe market wants. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not a good idea (as the closure of many banks recently has demonstrated).

well first off - my game is in the 98% of probably never going to get
finished. So im not really worried about failure...its almost assured ;)
putting your eggs in different baskets doesnt matter - if theyre in a van
thats jst been in a ugly road accident...oooh, deep! ;)

on a more positive note - god likes me :) - er...we play chess every 2nd
tuesday.. :)

This has really got nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the relationship between disposable income and the impulse purchase price point of games software and, crucially, how that encourages the winner-takes-all mentality that you see in mainstream publishing. Whether that stifles innovation and whether that actually matters are the questions which logically follow.

No, if it were true you would see some publishers going out of business along with massive amounts of consolidation. [Looks at last ten years of vidgame publishing.] Yup!

I don't see how any of what you've written there forms anything like an alternative hypothesis. The Sims is exactly the kind of bankroller that Grey Alien describes above; WOW's success optimises the winner takes all phenomenon thanks to MMORPGs being so exclusively demanding of their players' time; And if Crysis -- the must-have bleeding-edge extravaganza -- still only trickles into profit then where do you think that leaves A.N. Othershooter (y'know, the one that doesn't get bundled with graphics cards or sell CryEngine2 licenses)?

And as for eventually going out of the red -- I believe the lion's share of revenue is generated in the first couple of weeks on sale for most titles. The winners in this period obviously establish the longest tail for themselves so, again, you're going to get a few performers covering the costs of the also-rans.

If you're that bothered about where the initial figures came from I can do some digging. They're sufficiently embarrassing that you'd think the industry itself would rush to discredit them were they seriously awry, though.

did write something equally pointless here...delete me ;)

For the interested, I dropped Charles a line and he confirmed that he quoted a generally accepted figure for his talk. I think you really just need to apply Ockham's razor at this point: Which is more likely -- that every mainstream developer and publisher is fibbing to you, or that mainstream games publishing genuinely follows a high-risk business model?

Pop down to your local, neighbourhood venture-capitalist with a view to having them finance a single multi-million pound game and you'll soon find out.

I moved on from games coding 2 years ago doing full-time business software development instead, and I love it just as much it turned out! Sometimes I wonder if my old BlitzCoder buddies are still writing games in Blitz and it turns out some of them are (which half-surprises me)!!

But yeah I decided that while Blitzcoding was fun in its time, doing full-time C# and ASP.Net was better-paid work. We're even still making a profit despite the recession!

(Maybe a reunion is in order some time...)

Your friendly neighbourhood cyberseth.

Well slap my face and call me judy. :)

It's been a long time since I've seen that name. I'm glad you are well and working still in the field of programming.

Love your Music by the way. Don't remember the name of it but there was one particular rpg tune you composed which I think fits RPG games perfectly.

Hope to see you posting more.

And yes a reunion is deffo in order. :)

Haha thanks Amon. Probably won't be posting much since it's been a long time since I've touched Blitz (but you never know), just wanted to say hi and how's it going and [Please Insert 2¢].

Thanks for the compliment on the music too. Currently working on a double-CD rock concept album based on the book of Genesis, telling the story of the beginning of the world and exploring the themes of the people and their lives in that book. Here's a sample: http://www.sethjeffery.com/muz/TheGreatFlood.mp3

ZOMG

That's a very good tune. Good luck with the album but from hearing your work and this tune it doesn't look like you'llbe needing it. :)