When the IGDA online white paper was presented at the GDC someone asked for sales figures for downloadable games. The GameHouse representative answered with their figures which I noted for reference. Disclaimer: I might be remembering details wrong but the overall numbers should be correct:

Hit game: 100,000 units (They had 3-5 of these)
Average game: 25,000 units

If you estimate the lifetime for one of their products at 2 years their average game has roughly 1,000 sales per month.

Just as a benchmark to compare your own products against. :)

Did they mention/define who their target market was?

Alfie

What I'm more interested in is where does GameHouse advertise? I don't think I've ever seen a banner ad or print ad promoting their site and yet they generate that much traffic.

I wonder instead if that was the truth... ;)

You know, those business men always saying "our company is the biggest in the world, last year income was 100000 billlions $" then the day after they go bankrupcy... :D

p.s. I didn't even know that they existed, differently from Real or Bigfishgames...

Looks like they target the casual, ten-minute-sessions audience to me.

I've looked for Gamehouse rank in Alexa and it's around 1500!!
Surely it does get LOTS of traffic... :p

Bah, after I finish my sport game I'll do another puzzle/word/shoot'em up game... I still wonder how cliffski manage to sell a NON "casual-ten-minute-gamer" game !!! :confused:

Originally posted by Jack_Norton
I didn't even know that they existed, differently from Real or Bigfishgames...
Jack, where were you when Real Arcade bought them for THIRTY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS? http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040126/sfm116_1.html

Based on their reported revenue those numbers sound very plausible. Keep in mind that using that 2 year estimate their hit games sold over 4000 units per month.

I agree that they are one of the top performers in the field, but when the whole market is predicted to grow pretty rapidly that top performance is likely to be average within a few years.

Gamehouse is for real (heh, no pun intended ;-). I would have no reason to doubt their numbers.

Jack, where were you when Real Arcade bought them for THIRTY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS?
* blushes *

erhm, I've been recently in mission on Mars, didn't you know? :D

How much money is making a programmer or artist at GameHouse ?
That is what you need to compare VS your number of sales I think...

pat.

That is what you need to compare VS your number of sales I think...
exactly... if I could be in another company, I'd like to be Dexterity, Retro64, Twilight games, etc, not surely GameHouse ;)

also sales not necessarily means revenue.
if you spent 10.000$ month on advertising (it's just an example), you MUST sell 100 games / month :)

the real question in effect is where they advertise since they're not even present in the first pages of Google... ?

the real question in effect is where they advertise since they're not even present in the first pages of Google... ?

They don't advertise too much, at least not more than you, I think :)

But, I believe that those numbers are sum of sales made through all of theirs "affiliate channels ", and certainly not of the sales made from their web site !
From the RealNetworks site:
Based in Seattle and founded in 1998, GameHouse has consistently published many of the top casual games on the Internet - including Super Collapse® II, Puzzle Inlay, and TextTwist®. GameHouse distributes these games through its own direct-to-consumer web site (www.gamehouse.com), through third party affiliates, and through distributors that include Comcast, Earthlink, Pogo.com, MSN, RealArcade, Shockwave, Sony, and Yahoo! In 2003, GameHouse generated over $10 million in revenue and $5.5 million of net income.

Gamehouse has over 20 employees and occupy an entire floor of a building in Seattle's pioneer square. So, compared to other small developers, their overhead is high. The founders are ex Microsoft guys, marketing director is from Vivendi Universal, and creative head worked for Microsoft game studios, so I imagine they work for more than pennies. But at $10 million in revenue ($5 million net) a year, I think their cost/benefit works out fairly positive :)

Wow that's cool!
Even if I suspect that of those 5$, 4$ will be shared with the founders (4-5 people maximum) and the rest with the other employees.

Anyway it's great without any doubt :)

Of course, contrary to the subject of this thread, the sales numbers being discussed are hardly the "average sales of an Indie game".

Misinformation like this is going to cause a lot of frustration and disappointment. I honestly believe that there are a LOT of folks out there who think they can write an indie game and make hundreds of thousands of dollars. As most of you know, that's just not the case.

Of course, by the time they all realize the truth the already overcrowded market is going to be flooded with even MORE titles. That may not be a big deal to some of you established developers, but I'm still finishing up my first game...

Yes, the average sales of an average indie company are 1000 times less (minimum) than those number shown here...
I too when finished my first game was disappointed of its "10 sales only" in the first month.
That month is still one of my best month for number of sales... even if version 1.1b is doing great so far :D

Yeah, I'd probably modify the topic to, "Average sales of an online publisher/distributor." Certainly those are not average sales of a self-published Indie game. Even the majority of Indie games distributed by those portal sites rarely see those kinds of sales.

But it is interesting to know a hit game on a portal can sell upwards to 100,000 units.

Originally posted by John Cutter
Of course, contrary to the subject of this thread, the sales numbers being discussed are hardly the "average sales of an Indie game".
So what are the average sales for a self-published indie game then?
Could some of you who released a few games on your own give your average sales figures? *curious*

Do a search with "sale figure" in the forums, you'd find some ppl willing to share them.
I am quite new, but I'd say that 10/month is the average sale for a decent indie game.

HOWEVER

A good simulation/strategy game that costed 4-5 month of development can sell 4/month, despite the efforts.
A crap game but with some "unknown" appeal (like a puzzle, a children game, etc) could sell 100/month.
The same game can sell three times in a different site as affiliate.
The same game with a small improvement can change the CR from 0,1% to 1% (that happened to USM with 1.1b!! yeah! :P)

What I'm trying to say is that shareware is unpredictable so even if you know the average sale figure, your game could sell 100 times more or less :)

Originally posted by Jack_Norton
What I'm trying to say is that shareware is unpredictable so even if you know the average sale figure, your game could sell 100 times more or less :)

True so true... I've given up trying to figure out what will sell and what won't. I've been surprised to good / bad side too many times now.

The 25k - 100k lifetime sales per title sounds lowball given their huge exposure on all the big sites. If you consider that biggest outlets take a large slice of the revenue and that GH reported $10 mil revenue, the #s don't jive. Plus heard a hit title on yahoo alone can drive several hundred sales a day.

Having been acquainted with the sales results of many indie developers, the best advice I can offer is this: Don't be average!

But that isn't just true of indie development -- it's true in pretty much any field. The exceptional performers will see results that are orders of magnitude beyond average.

Original post by Jack_Norton
The same game with a small improvement can change the CR from 0,1% to 1% (that happened to USM with 1.1b!! yeah! :P)

:-) What was the improvement?

Well I wrote badly, wasn't a SMALL improvement, was a cool improvement but didn't take me so much time to implement it :)

I added some major match events, like:
"Montero break Baggio's leg and get sent off"
"Del Piero crosses for Trezeguet who scores with a superb heading"
or "Signori shoots directly from free-kick! but it's out"

now the match seems more "realistic" and live.
Also added a teams.ini file with which you can modify/change the teams present in the game.

Finally, I fixed some major bugs thanks to the help of some great customers :)

Jack I think your latest improvements are good, but I've always wondered why can't you choose your team? It's frustrating getting assigned a team that you don't really want.

Hehe because you're playing the DEMO version ;)
In the full version you can choose any team you want from 6 leagues! :)
I it should be explained in the buynow screen (at least I think I put that).

Originally posted by Jack_Norton
Hehe because you're playing the DEMO version ;)
In the full version you can choose any team you want from 6 leagues! :)
I it should be explained in the buynow screen (at least I think I put that).

IMHO,
I think you should rather have designed the team selection screen to give the player the choice of teams, but tell him that only the first one is available in the demo if he tries to choose any other team.

I'm going to have to agree that I have absolutely no desire to be average.

Ten sales a month on a product seems really abysmal to me. Is the conversion rate and ability to drive people to your site much worse for games over other shareware software?

The company I currently work for sees fifty-five units a month for a product we haven't updated in many many months, and had its last major upgrade over a year ago. I see this sales rate as a failure, and think it should be at least a hundred units a month.

This is a utility product with several competitors and only on the Mac OS X platform (so niche of a niche).

So, is it simply that the game market is that much more difficult to achieve sales on, or is something else going on here that I'm missing?

I'm working out a business plan and am targetting what I think is a low estimate of 5 units a day per game if it's on Windows XP and Mac OS X. I'd rather being doing 10, but for planning reasons (funding) I'd rather lowball it.

These sales are all direct sales from the website. If I can do a non-exclusive deal with a portal then all the better. Are these numbers outrageous?

My current company sees about a 5% conversion rate from downloads (estimated), I'm targeting 2% for my games with half the visitors downloading a game. This means I'll need 1000 visitors a day for each game to hit this number. I'll most likely be offering bundle deals for buying multiple games at once to encourage multiple buys at one time.

I'm looking to put out three games in a year along with a professional website (I have plenty of experience in websites for ecommerce now, and am a very experienced developer. The only area I am lacking in is artistic skills.). I'm looking at a $25 price point, which gives me at least $20 in my pocket after paying credit card transaction costs to whomever I use. I figure one game will be not so great, and the other two will hit my target. This gives me at least 10 units a day, or about $7500 a month plus whatever the flop game gives me.

I guess I'm hoping to hear from people experiences in selling shareware games if I'm out of my mind and using utilities program metrics too much towards games, or if this is actually reasonable. I intend to focus on marketing efforts for my games as much as I focus on development, and launch a PR campaign about myself to the press to establish myself with the industry as well.

Thank you for any advice and thoughts. This will obviously have a big impact on what direction my business plan (particularly financial forecasts) takes.

Cheers!

Jeff

Well, like Steve said, you cant be 'average' then.

If you have a great game a 2% conversion is possible. The game has to be great though! That doesn't always mean a long production time, what it really means is very polished look and a very mouth-watering demo. A 5% conversion is also "possible" (there are some that claim it) but I would never forcast to one of my clients that I suspect they could get a 5%. Games and sales are too unpredictable to make a claim like that. My advice is plan for 1% and hope for 3% and make 2% your goal. Afterall, if you plan for 1% and get 3% you are a lot better off than if you had planned for 3% and got 1%.

Half your visitors downloading... I honestly wish this was as simple as it seems. IF you are counting ONLY the visitors to your site as a source to get your product, it is POSSIBLE to get 50%. Averages seem to fall around the 20-30% range really. A very well laid out site that focuses on getting people to download the product could get 50%. Keep in mind though, a higher % is not always better. You could find that by changing your site to weed does not affect your sales or even improves your sales, and you use less bandwidth (not that using BW is really that expensive).

IF you are counting every download across the internet.... well, you could easilly find that you have 110% of your visitors downloading, or something like that. A lot of downloads may not come directly from your site. They could come from download sites, they could come from affiliates, maybe even from file sharing.

At least you are thinking about these things... that is definately a sign of promise.

For us and our next title: We are anticipating 2% conversion and hoping for 3%. We are anticipating 30% of visitors produce downloads (our site only). Our goal is 100,000 downloads in a year. (so, 2,000 sales).

Your numbers point to the fact you want 182,500 downloads. That is going to take some marketing power since you have no client base to draw on (thankfully, we have 50,000 e-mail addresses, a couple thousand dollars for marketing, and a full time marketing agency (me).

So, I don't know what resources you have at your disposal, but 180,000 downloads is a lot.

I worked a "deal" with Gigex Inc. that they could deliver us a promised 140-200,000 downloads for 45,000 dollars over the space of 3 months. Heh... now where did I leave that check book?

Joseph Lieberman
Marketing Manager
www.vgsmart.com

Joseph,

Thank you very much for your response. I'll be adding in a section to my business plan about building up an email contact list as I hadn't discussed it in there. I've been involved in it with my current company so I can leverage my experience there to get it building up to resonable numbers.

I agree that forecasting for a lower number is a wise move particularly since I will be dealing with my own money. If you can't be realistic with yourself... In the end if this means I wind up blowing away my business plans goals then I'll be plenty pleased.

In regards to downloads, I completely understand. I track all of our sales, visits, and downloads at my current company and it is definitely a challenge. Obviously a large portion of downloads come from external site links, but this number still seems to float around 50% of the visits to the site. I can re-confirm those statistics to make sure I'm not remembering something wrong. I do think though that for the purposes of a plan I should think of downloads in terms of volume as opposed to a number of site visits. So I'll change things to target a goal of downloads and a goal of site visits. I'll still target an average of 1% CR though downloads from our site will probably have a higher CR over external downloads, though as long as I hit the average I'll be fine.

As for building up downloads, I still have to get this down in my plan, but I'll be using my own experience and "will" to get it done. I don't plan to release a single piece of software for four months into the plan. This time will be spent not only developing the software, but also getting the "right" web site built and getting started on my marketing plans. (If only I had two heads and four hands) It may be that once I work out what I can achieve I'll have to lower these numbers.

The Gigex thing seems pretty expensive revenue for a $25 product. I'm sure their CR would be lower (say 1%), which after paying a processor either breaks even or loses money. :( A higher CR product or more expensive one makes it far more attractive though.

Thank you again for all of the thoughts. It's time to flush out even more of the document. I'm sure I'll have more questions/sanity checks. :)

Cheers!

Jeff