Was just reading Almost Human’s blog about their only game so far, Legend of Grimrock, and they mentioned that it sold 600k copies, ten times what they needed for it to be profitable. Now I loved the game and think they deserve every penny and cent they are getting, but it did leave me curious what sort of piles of money we are talking about here. The game’s full price is 14 euro (14 dollar to US folks I’d imagine), but Steam takes its cut and I’m willing to bet most people bought it with some sort of discount or a part of an indie bundle or something. After that there’s taxes too.
So, anybody know any details of how much of the money actually ends up in developer hands in the end for small indie developers like this?
Steam takes roughly 30% of the cut across the top, regardless of any sale prices. It’s a much higher ratio than traditional distribution, where the publisher gets IIRC around 15% of the total sale price, and then they only give a small percentage of that back to the actual developer.
Digital distribution allows them to both keep a MUCH higher percentage of their sales, allows profitable discounting to be much lower (with digital, you could sell a bunch of units for $2.50 each and still make a profit because the actual costs are next to nothing, whereas steep discounts only happen in retail space when they just want to take a loss on a product to get rid of it), and they don’t necesarily have to go through a publisher who takes a large cut. They can also simply price games lower at the base price and still turn a profit.
Digital games can recoup a profit at much lower sales volume numbers, which is fantastic news for gamers - not everything has to be call of duty 22 to turn a profit, products that are unique and aren’t slaves to the lowest common denominator can turn a profit with much more modest sales numbers.
Legends of Grimrock was also in Humble Bundle 7 which sold some 395,000 copies. But, LoG was a “beat the average” so it’s not obvious how many of those 395k bundles contained Grimrock. Also, because of how you assign the money in the Humble Bundles, there’s no way of knowing how much of the $2.6mil went to the developers.
Legends of Grimrock was also distributed and heavily promoted by GoG.com and, anecdotally, I know a few people were buying it from them to support the DRM-free thing rather than from Steam. You can guess that GoG has the same 30% cut as Steam but I have no idea if that’s true or not.
It’s not super outrageous - you’re looking at a team of 4 getting a vaguely decent wage for two years of development (4 x 50k x 2) and then some various incidental expenses off the top - rent for offices, or development equipment, or whatnot. Something like that anyway. I don’t really know anything about Grimrock’s development, so it might’ve been a smaller team or a longer time or whatever, but on a game of that scale (i.e. “not tiny”) it doesn’t really surprise me.
Now if you’re looking to make the game entirely by yourself with maybe some contract payments to artists or composers, then you can probably get by on less than half of that. But really what it comes down to is “can you afford to live on your savings until the game is done?”
Edit: Did a little research; Grimrock was definitely a “team” though I’m having trouble finding numbers, but they were only in development for 10 months. Not entirely sure how they burned half a million dollars in that time, but there’s a lot of speculative numbers in this thread anyway, so…
I don’t think they actually spent half a million - 60k copies was what would’ve ensured they can keep on making games as far as I understood the blog post, so half a million to both fund their development for it and to keep them going until the next game.
[QUOTE=Almost Human blog post]
And to sum up the year, we’re now proud to announce that Legend of Grimrock has sold over 600.000 copies! We would’ve been happy with just one tenth of the sales numbers, so needless to say we’re very happy and the future of our company is secured for a long time.
[/QUOTE]
Small game development startups like this tend to do tons of unpaid overtime to get their first game done instead of actually spending a lot of cash, or that’s the impression I’ve got.
Boy. That’s what I get for not reading what they actually SAID. “We would have been happy with one tenth that number” is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from “Sold ten times what it needed to be profitable”.
Being happy with one tenth that number probably means that they:
A) Paid everyone an appropriate amount
B) Paid off any other expenses incurred in development
C) Have enough money left over to fund at least one future project WITHOUT having to do the “yeah, we’re all basically working for free and running up our credit cards” plan.
Which means that the game probably cost closer to $150k or $200k than $500k.