“Nothing else is significant,” - Some early morning schadenfreude against the Epic Games Store right there. And why not? No one I know actually buys things from them. Not to endorse the de facto monopoly Steam has as a digital distribution platform, but if you want to compete, you have to be competent. EGS came out so under-cooked, “we now have a shopping cart!” was a major development.
You can give away all the games you want, but if your platform isn’t worth using – heck, if it isn’t good enough to draw people away from where the rest of their games are, why would anyone use it for anything other than your “free samples!” stands? It’s no wonder that, five years later, Rock Paper Shotgun reports it STILL hasn’t made a profit.
Now, I’m sure that extra 18% revenue split would be damned nice, but still, 70% of thousands of sales vs. 82% of a handful is an easy choice.
In any case, I’m glad to hear it sounds like Infestation is doing well – it certainly deserves to.
Honestly…? Yeah. Like I said, I don’t want to endorse Steam as the be all, end all… a lack of competition leads to complacency. But that was up to Epic. Their storefront just doesn’t have the features, and the first impressions were… not sterling.
Not that Steam doesn’t have a whole buffet of issues, and again, that 30% revenue take is pretty extreme. But EGS also upset a lot of people when it tried to buy its way to relevance via exclusivity.
I’ll always love GOG - anybody who digs Fallouts 1 and 2 as much as the founders clearly did has my support - but I do feel like the platform is getting rickety. Searching the store is weirdly difficult. And their last major update didn’t install. That was months ago and I still get an error message warning me to update whenever I open up my older version. But I can’t update it, so it just feels a little more busted every day.
I loved Avernum. Loved it. I came close to finishing but never did - I’ll be back. A lot of games seem to use Avernum as a guide - Underrail the most recent. It’s near enough to be an homage.
I Bought Genforge 2 (and 1) but got distracted with BG3 and have had the chance to really dig in. Looking forward to it though.
It's saddening that Queen's Wish 2 didn't sell that well, I loved the game. Played the heck outta Geneforge 2 already, too. Good luck on any and and all your future endeavors!
Queen's Wish 2 had some real PR issues. Also, I suspect most people got enough of that design with the first game. We will totally finish the story, though, somehow. We really like it.
As a player of both: I definitely started to burn out on the design with the second game, but narratively it's as good or better than anything else you've done, and the ending was truly compelling. Really looking forward to the conclusion!
At the end of the day, your long history of satisfied fans is what is bringing home the bacon, I think. Even though publicity may be a factor, it has to be important that when peoples' interest is piqued, they can easily find fans enthusing about the games.
[I bought Infestation and am about half-way through, though I am currently stuck in a roguelite deckbuilder. I skipped Mutagen simply because Geneforge (the original) was one of my favourite games ever and I was afraid of spoiling the memories!]
I think it would be useful for aspiring designers to get some color on the financial information being sold. Say 5000 units have been sold through steam. What's the profit margin? What's the break even point? If someone spends a year and a half designing and finishing a game, how do you value that time compared to working a "normal" job. Etc
These are very good questions. I need to give this sort of context since I am giving a postmortem for not just one game but a whole process and way of life.
We pay 30% to Steam plus a modest amount for business expenses. About $10K-20K for art. Health insurance. Everything after that goes to my family.
So we are earning a decent living for a family in tech, but we'd have way more if I went into Amazon or some other bigwig company. It helps a lot that we had some good times (like the Indie boom) and saved our money.
We've built a viable sustainable life as indie creators, and we're very lucky.
Not Jeff, obviously, but: this depends on a lot of factors, like "what could you make doing a normal job?" and "what is the cost of living where you are?" and "have you paid off your mortgage?"
But if this was a Spiderweb game, than 5000 x $20 = $100,000. Steam takes 30%, so that's $70,000, before various self-employment taxes (which is complicated, but starts at 15.3% of your income, half of which you can then deduct in actual income taxes).
So if you worked for 18 months on a game only sold 5000 copies total for $20, that would be bad, and you would probably not make ends meet unless you lived cheap and didn't pay rent. But of course with Spiderweb, they have a back catalog, so the math is a lot more complicated than "our game sold this much in the first month, that's it." There are advantages to being a long-term developer!
Good points. Someone who can program a game can probably get a job making from $50,000 to $200,000 doing some other kind of programming without even working for a huge company like Google. So, it's for sure at least in part a labor of love. You would want to look at "lifetime" sales, I guess. If it was 20,000 games sold in 10 years with average profit of $10 per unit that would be $200,000 on 1.5 year effort. I would be interested in Jeff's thinking if that is considered a success, failure or something in between.
Just for reference, the senior dev jobs at the highest paying big tech cos (Google, Amazon, but other smaller ones too) pay more like $350-500k per year when you include RSUs (base salary will be more like $180-250k).
Well, I said someone who can program a game, not necessarily someone on the cutting edge of software like people at the big companies. There are lots of software programmers who get paid considerably less. So if you can be your own boss, program what you want to program, and have complete control of your work, and can make $150K to $200K a year including residuals, that's not shabby.
Hi Jeff. I've been playing your games for a long time, I feel your games are among the best when it comes to world building and writing (not verbose writing, but concise and evocative descriptions) but I feel there's a missing opportunity here with your latest remakes that I like to address.
- The first is the issue with UI. Your UI's were never the best, and always had to resort to other programs to remap the keys, but I would love if you incorporated controller support. I have carpal tunnel issues, and playing games with a mouse is something I want to avoid.
- Another issue is that the increase in resolution compared to the old version makes everything absolutely tiny. It's not not hard to read, but It makes everything a bit more sterile, and the world less mysterious. Looks like I'm playing sim city or something.
Cheers. And thanks for all the games throughout these years.
Glad to here it's selling well. I picked up a copy, too! Felt kind of bad -- I only recently discovered your games (currently nearing the end of The Queen's Wish -- and loving it) and have a whole bunch of them in my Steam library, but most were purchased on sale at steep discounts, so I figured I owed you a bit more and picked up Geneforge 2 at full price.
It’s fascinating reading about how you do these things today. The first game I ever bought with my own money was Exile. I played the demo off a Macworld CD, mailed you a check (that my girlfriend wrote because she had a bank account and I didn’t) and had to wait for the physical mail back with my code. I’d love to hear you compare and contrast the economics of those early shareware days with today’s Steam etc world.
3000 copies from steam in the first 2 weeks is not bad, I think. Of course, you can't expect that to hold for half a year, but it does show the game has traction. I do expect those to balloon.
Congratulations on a good release. The game is very good.
Our long tails are long, each game helps sell the others, and the big wishlist count we have now will slowly pay off. It's not rich-person money, but we'll be fine.
“Nothing else is significant,” - Some early morning schadenfreude against the Epic Games Store right there. And why not? No one I know actually buys things from them. Not to endorse the de facto monopoly Steam has as a digital distribution platform, but if you want to compete, you have to be competent. EGS came out so under-cooked, “we now have a shopping cart!” was a major development.
You can give away all the games you want, but if your platform isn’t worth using – heck, if it isn’t good enough to draw people away from where the rest of their games are, why would anyone use it for anything other than your “free samples!” stands? It’s no wonder that, five years later, Rock Paper Shotgun reports it STILL hasn’t made a profit.
Now, I’m sure that extra 18% revenue split would be damned nice, but still, 70% of thousands of sales vs. 82% of a handful is an easy choice.
In any case, I’m glad to hear it sounds like Infestation is doing well – it certainly deserves to.
I really wish the Epic Game Store situation turned out differently than it did.
Honestly…? Yeah. Like I said, I don’t want to endorse Steam as the be all, end all… a lack of competition leads to complacency. But that was up to Epic. Their storefront just doesn’t have the features, and the first impressions were… not sterling.
Not that Steam doesn’t have a whole buffet of issues, and again, that 30% revenue take is pretty extreme. But EGS also upset a lot of people when it tried to buy its way to relevance via exclusivity.
I’ll always love GOG - anybody who digs Fallouts 1 and 2 as much as the founders clearly did has my support - but I do feel like the platform is getting rickety. Searching the store is weirdly difficult. And their last major update didn’t install. That was months ago and I still get an error message warning me to update whenever I open up my older version. But I can’t update it, so it just feels a little more busted every day.
I always enjoy reading these updates. Keep up the great work!
And yes, I own the games. Even backed them on Kickstarter. One of these days I'll get around to actually playing them....
I loved Avernum. Loved it. I came close to finishing but never did - I’ll be back. A lot of games seem to use Avernum as a guide - Underrail the most recent. It’s near enough to be an homage.
I Bought Genforge 2 (and 1) but got distracted with BG3 and have had the chance to really dig in. Looking forward to it though.
It's saddening that Queen's Wish 2 didn't sell that well, I loved the game. Played the heck outta Geneforge 2 already, too. Good luck on any and and all your future endeavors!
Thanks for the kind words!
Queen's Wish 2 had some real PR issues. Also, I suspect most people got enough of that design with the first game. We will totally finish the story, though, somehow. We really like it.
As a player of both: I definitely started to burn out on the design with the second game, but narratively it's as good or better than anything else you've done, and the ending was truly compelling. Really looking forward to the conclusion!
At the end of the day, your long history of satisfied fans is what is bringing home the bacon, I think. Even though publicity may be a factor, it has to be important that when peoples' interest is piqued, they can easily find fans enthusing about the games.
[I bought Infestation and am about half-way through, though I am currently stuck in a roguelite deckbuilder. I skipped Mutagen simply because Geneforge (the original) was one of my favourite games ever and I was afraid of spoiling the memories!]
I think it would be useful for aspiring designers to get some color on the financial information being sold. Say 5000 units have been sold through steam. What's the profit margin? What's the break even point? If someone spends a year and a half designing and finishing a game, how do you value that time compared to working a "normal" job. Etc
These are very good questions. I need to give this sort of context since I am giving a postmortem for not just one game but a whole process and way of life.
We pay 30% to Steam plus a modest amount for business expenses. About $10K-20K for art. Health insurance. Everything after that goes to my family.
So we are earning a decent living for a family in tech, but we'd have way more if I went into Amazon or some other bigwig company. It helps a lot that we had some good times (like the Indie boom) and saved our money.
We've built a viable sustainable life as indie creators, and we're very lucky.
Not Jeff, obviously, but: this depends on a lot of factors, like "what could you make doing a normal job?" and "what is the cost of living where you are?" and "have you paid off your mortgage?"
But if this was a Spiderweb game, than 5000 x $20 = $100,000. Steam takes 30%, so that's $70,000, before various self-employment taxes (which is complicated, but starts at 15.3% of your income, half of which you can then deduct in actual income taxes).
So if you worked for 18 months on a game only sold 5000 copies total for $20, that would be bad, and you would probably not make ends meet unless you lived cheap and didn't pay rent. But of course with Spiderweb, they have a back catalog, so the math is a lot more complicated than "our game sold this much in the first month, that's it." There are advantages to being a long-term developer!
Good points. Someone who can program a game can probably get a job making from $50,000 to $200,000 doing some other kind of programming without even working for a huge company like Google. So, it's for sure at least in part a labor of love. You would want to look at "lifetime" sales, I guess. If it was 20,000 games sold in 10 years with average profit of $10 per unit that would be $200,000 on 1.5 year effort. I would be interested in Jeff's thinking if that is considered a success, failure or something in between.
Just for reference, the senior dev jobs at the highest paying big tech cos (Google, Amazon, but other smaller ones too) pay more like $350-500k per year when you include RSUs (base salary will be more like $180-250k).
Well, I said someone who can program a game, not necessarily someone on the cutting edge of software like people at the big companies. There are lots of software programmers who get paid considerably less. So if you can be your own boss, program what you want to program, and have complete control of your work, and can make $150K to $200K a year including residuals, that's not shabby.
Hi Jeff. I've been playing your games for a long time, I feel your games are among the best when it comes to world building and writing (not verbose writing, but concise and evocative descriptions) but I feel there's a missing opportunity here with your latest remakes that I like to address.
- The first is the issue with UI. Your UI's were never the best, and always had to resort to other programs to remap the keys, but I would love if you incorporated controller support. I have carpal tunnel issues, and playing games with a mouse is something I want to avoid.
- Another issue is that the increase in resolution compared to the old version makes everything absolutely tiny. It's not not hard to read, but It makes everything a bit more sterile, and the world less mysterious. Looks like I'm playing sim city or something.
Cheers. And thanks for all the games throughout these years.
Glad to here it's selling well. I picked up a copy, too! Felt kind of bad -- I only recently discovered your games (currently nearing the end of The Queen's Wish -- and loving it) and have a whole bunch of them in my Steam library, but most were purchased on sale at steep discounts, so I figured I owed you a bit more and picked up Geneforge 2 at full price.
It’s fascinating reading about how you do these things today. The first game I ever bought with my own money was Exile. I played the demo off a Macworld CD, mailed you a check (that my girlfriend wrote because she had a bank account and I didn’t) and had to wait for the physical mail back with my code. I’d love to hear you compare and contrast the economics of those early shareware days with today’s Steam etc world.
3000 copies from steam in the first 2 weeks is not bad, I think. Of course, you can't expect that to hold for half a year, but it does show the game has traction. I do expect those to balloon.
Congratulations on a good release. The game is very good.
Our long tails are long, each game helps sell the others, and the big wishlist count we have now will slowly pay off. It's not rich-person money, but we'll be fine.