nd where\how is everyone selling indie games besides Steam and Greenlight?

There are a lot more - like F.e. itch.io and gog.com ... you can also host on your site for example.

I can't give you any figures as I don't currently have any product on Steam.

What are the best search engine queries out there too?

Thank you,

Joshuae

The 'typical' earnings for any game are 'pretty minimal', not 'pretty great'.

As for your most recent question, you need to be more specific, and to do some of the work yourself - we're not here to Google for you.

Steamspy can give you an estimate of how well various games sell on Steam.

What is the typical earnings for a typical tile based game, pretty great?

...

(With some figures if possible?)

I can't give exact figures as it's against steam's EULA, but I can say that the "Typical earnings" for a small game (say, done in a few months max), is a few hundred $'s a month for a few months, then in the upper 10's of $'s per month (just shy of $100). All of that is before steam's cut, of course.

Steamspy is pretty innacurate now for small/mid indie games, as most of the copies "owned" were sold for .10 through sites like bundlestars/greenlight bundles just to get the game approved.

Every income source besides steam is small enough to hardly matter (itch is gaining momentum though).

If your plan is to get rich by making a few games, you'd be better off buying 50 lotto tickets. It's less expensive with similar break even odds, and way less effort.

Sorry Kylotan I thought maybe there was some secret terminology besides distribution...

For all the work why are quality indie games not earning much revenue, perhaps a publicist/marketer should be used? I imagine people try to get written up in media for games on their website and then hope for word of mouth.

Maybe on a demo CD too?

Advertising?

It seems to win and not be 'pretty minimal' we need to be clever!

I just assumed there would be markets available and still do!

Joshuae

Does Steam only accept games from major publishers, or will I take a game from an indie developer?

Any new developer (Without a major publisher) has to go through greenlight.

I know quite a few indies (myself included) that have gotten a publishing agreement with Valve without going through greenlight.
They don't seem to have very solid internal procedures, so you pretty much just have to make contact and ask the right person nicely.

For all the work why are quality indie games not earning much revenue, perhaps a publicist/marketer should be used?

If you're launching a product, you definitely need a marketing budget.
In my city alone I know of three companies in that area that are indie friendly - Lumi, Double Jump and Surprise Attack!
This is definitely a thing if you're serious about running a business.

Hodgman I would even say that perhaps if your launching a game you need do dedicate time to the business side. Are your games hosted anywhere or do you keep them private?

I suppose I should ask a marketer about the possibilities of earnings of a product marketed well. Of course this needs to be done smartly, that's the thing.

How do I say why I deserve it, why the games great, so that they understand and I get the fullest use of their resources. To take it to the fullest.

The first game has got to be the hardest not knowing what to expect.

When I was asking about searching the web really I'm wondering what can be expected for revenue from a successfully marketed game? This is a tough question to ask and perhaps a tough question to answer but how people have won substantial earnings with there confidence would be a nice thing to hear. Especially for us that are newer to the marketing side.

Joshuae

Geeze I just looked at the indie games on greenlight and they look fantastic. Are the bigger indie games making decent income? I didn't find any greenlight games on steamspy.

I couldn't believe they weren't recommending one of the games.

Joshuae

Are the bigger indie games making decent income? I didn't find any greenlight games on steamspy.

If they're still in the greenlight voting stage, then they're not actually being sold on steam yet.
One way to tell if they're making decent income is to look into the developers/studios of those games. Is this their first game? If so, who knows... If it's not their first game, then they must've made money on their earlier games or they'd have gone out of business :wink:
Again though, there's huge varience in sales. Some games are a hit and make back 10x their costs, other games don't break even.

I would even say that perhaps if your launching a game you need do dedicate time to the business side

Of course. Any company needs a decent director / executive / "business guy". Not just someone who calls themselves "CEO" for fun, but someone can actually make sure that you've got a solid business plan. Ideally a business shouldn't even start making a game before they know how they're going to sell it.

Most indie studios won't have a marketing expert on the team, which is where consulting firms like the ones that I linked can come into play.

You also need a good accountant so that if/when you do make money, you don't lose all of it to excessive taxes (or worse: get in legal trouble for running a business incorrectly) and you also need a lawyer.

It goes without saying that you also need to actually be a business, which may requiring filing paperwork with your country/state/city government.

In business in general, people talk about the Customer Acquisition Cost -- how much money you have to spend in order to get one customer to use your service / buy your product. In some industries where getting customers involves hiring a whole team of sales people, your CAC can be as high as thousands of dollars per customer -- meaning that even if you make a thousand dollars in profit from a customer, you've only just made enough to keep your sales staff paid...
In free-to-play mobile games, it generally costs a few dollars to acquire a customer, which means that your Average Revenue Per User also has to be a few dollars in order to pay for those advertising costs, let alone make any profits...
In PC gaming, AFAIK it costs more like $5 to $10 on average to acquire a customer via traditional advertising...

So for example, if a mid sized game spends $10M on development and $10M on marketing, they can expect to get $10M / $10CAC = 1M customers. If the digital price of their game is $60 and Steam takes 30%, they get ~$40 revenue per customer, bringing in $40M. Subtracting costs, that means they've spent $20M, gotten $40M in revenue, making $20M in profits, assuming everything went to plan...

That's the best case scenario -- making a 100%+ return on their investment.

They could also spend $20M on dev/marketing and only gotten $1M in revenue -- making a $19M loss for their business... It's likely that a company will see both situations -- one game might put several million dollars into their bank, and another game might simply drain their bank account...

Also note that I called this a mid-sized game :lol:

"Indie" these days covers games with budgets ranging from $0 up to several million dollars. Honestly, a $1M budget for any game is very low - and these ones often go into the same greenlight pile as the $0 hobbyist games.