How much can you make as an Indie Developer - Dust force sales figures
This article is pretty fantastic if you haven't read it:
http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures
Bearing mind this gives you the upper bound of reasonable success. They made a great game, got it onto steam and humble bundle. Many more great games don't.
The most telling thing for me was the initial outlay required to make the game (seeing that's the reality I'm currently dealing with). Thanks to winning a competition they had $100 000 to play with (combination of hard work and luck), and that was enough for 3 developers to spend a year and half in production. That might seem like a lot, but by my own roughshod calculations it's pretty spot on. A million rand is only enough to pay four/five people a modest salary for a year.
Perhaps others (Freelives/QCF/Luma?) would like to comment, but it's quite a harsh business reality. Of course you can lower the cost by employing interns/younger members, or by having partners equally dedicated to the cause and living on their own savings.
Personally I'm working towards the "able-to-pay-myself" route and saving as much money as I possibly can. Perhaps sage wisdom would be to think smaller and build games I know I can make by myself. It also becomes obvious why alternative funding models like kick starter are so appealing. Alpha preleases are also an option. Even so I'm starting to appreciate how publishers might still have a place in this world...
http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures
Bearing mind this gives you the upper bound of reasonable success. They made a great game, got it onto steam and humble bundle. Many more great games don't.
The most telling thing for me was the initial outlay required to make the game (seeing that's the reality I'm currently dealing with). Thanks to winning a competition they had $100 000 to play with (combination of hard work and luck), and that was enough for 3 developers to spend a year and half in production. That might seem like a lot, but by my own roughshod calculations it's pretty spot on. A million rand is only enough to pay four/five people a modest salary for a year.
Perhaps others (Freelives/QCF/Luma?) would like to comment, but it's quite a harsh business reality. Of course you can lower the cost by employing interns/younger members, or by having partners equally dedicated to the cause and living on their own savings.
Personally I'm working towards the "able-to-pay-myself" route and saving as much money as I possibly can. Perhaps sage wisdom would be to think smaller and build games I know I can make by myself. It also becomes obvious why alternative funding models like kick starter are so appealing. Alpha preleases are also an option. Even so I'm starting to appreciate how publishers might still have a place in this world...
Comments
Just a thought.
I don't think anyone should really try to get into indie game development if they're looking for epic salaries month to month, it's pretty much startup gruel and ramen culture. Plus game industry salaries globally tend to be lower than equivalently skilled jobs in different sectors - you're dealing with the desire that people have to make games, I want to be paid more to get up and drive to some horrible office and push out web pages for 8 hours a day.
I know that $100K isn't a ton of money to make a top-flight indie game in the US. It's a reasonable chunk of a local game budget though, especially if you keep your team size small. Desktop Dungeons has eaten around $170K so far and that's seen as incredibly cheap by our US friends. A discussion we had at EA went "If I were you, I'd put another $10M into Desktop Dungeons and ..." note the another.
Basically, do whatever you have to do to alleviate pressure on yourself if you're making a game. Financial pressure is a big part of that, expectations of comparative salaries to even junior positions will probably destroy any budget you have faster than you can imagine. Either remove the need for a salary from your games at all by not being full-time, or make damn sure that your expectations are solid and you're going to turn a profit with your game. That takes a lot of experience to get right, experience which is comparatively expensive to earn.
tl/dr: I am poor as fuck. But I'm earning more than I used to pay myself.
P.S. I charge a ton for consulting, mostly because that what it costs to stop me working on DD for that long, plus my experience is worth a lot more in the market.
I agree that if you're trying to pay competitive salaries for experienced people you can easily double those figures.
I was basing assumptions presented in the article: "what do you need to not worry about food".
Let's assume the person has a decent amount of experience (mid level - senior), believes in your creative vision, and is seeking more creative license to do what they love. They are willing to take a pay downgrade to do so, but how far can they go? If they have a family and mortgage to support, not very far at all. So assume no family, modest rent, no car payments, but still would like to be able to cover surprise emergencies and afford things like medical aid, well then you start getting to the figures I'm working with. I believe @dislekcia and co take this further and are living incredibly lean, for that I commend them.
Point being that starting a legitimate business in the game industry (in South Africa) is really hard. A million isn't a lot of money in business terms, but for an individual trying to raise capital start a legitimate video games studio, it starts looking like a huge amount. The figures themselves are just semantics though. Even the figure of $ 170 K quoted by @dislekcia translates to "A LOT OF MONEY", regardless of how far they've stretched that.
I'm mostly just trying to learn how to wear my business hat, rather than whinging about how unfair everything is. :)
Also, don't compare the local game development industry to the international space. We don't have people like Ubisoft, Activision or EA in our local space, pushing up salaries by hiring people away from their existing jobs. Yes, I earned more at I-Imagine than I do now, but that doesn't mean that there are anything like competitive salaries in local game development outside of the gambling companies in Durban.
Indie game development, once it goes full-time, has much more in common with startup entrepreneurship than it does with the traditional games industry. You're investing time and money into a product that you intend to make a return on. All of your resources need to be managed to make that product grow - you're generally not viewing a salary as "this is my only income" when you're in that mode, it's more like "this is an expense I can minimise to seriously lower my burn rate". That's how you need to think in order to be good at the business part of being indie. Indies earn when a project does well, just like other entrepreneurs.
I can talk about the repercussions of that last sentence for ages, but basically it means that I see a lot of locals making some very worrying business decisions based on expectations they have for their projects that simply aren't grounded in results. The Dustforce devs were smart: They only invested large amounts of time and money into their game once they saw that it had potential based on the reactions the game got in the greater marketplace, even then they only had modest expectations and weren't planning to be millionaires in a year. (Plus they're really nice guys in general, had a great conversation about MoBAs at GDC and The Spire looks amazing)
Everyone would make games if they a) Had the expertise b) it were easy. It's the modern equivalent of manga artists in Japan, "pure" artists in the art field, etc.
It's logical, really. The more people want to do something, the more people are available to do it, supply increases, demand drops. In the same skill level, less people want to be software engineering accountants. So Supply drop, demand increases, prices go up.
Who doesn't wanna tighten up the graphics on level 3 for a job? :) Those who actually stick around in this highly attractive job are the ones who saw past the initial veil of funness, and are now dedicated - but the core of it is still FUN and self-motivational drive.
If making games were as "fun" as accounting, and pays less than accounting, and took the same skills as accounting, would you do it?
It comes down to supply vs demand. There is vastly more supply of labour (talented, dedicated people wanting to work in the "cool" industry of game development) than there is demand for it (available jobs). Which pushes salaries down and allows companies to get away with treating employees as disposable. If you quit because you have a kid and can't work every weekend for 8 months in a row, there are 5 eager graduates with no social lives waiting to take your place.
Average lifespan for a developer in the game industry before they burn out and move out to normal software dev (where hours are lower, benefits and salary higher, and stability greater) is 5 years, from what I've read.
But yeah, the coders that never wanted to make games, ever? Creeeeeeeeeepy.
Though why they don't develop awesome hacker games eludes me.
And some folks enjoy solving database problems...
Though why they don't develop clever mathematical puzzle games has me totally left in the dark.
<_<
>_>
Also Uplink is a cool hacky game? (I still need to play that, dodge judge me too harshly please)
@dislekcia: Funny enough, I've heard the opposite being said. They say people who get into programming for games are more interested in the result than the actual process of programming. Before joining up here I actually knew extremely few people who are programmers and are interested in game programming. 4 of the people I know outside MGSA want to make games, out of the 20 programmers I know well.
Back to thread: In my company of 8 devs, it's pretty much me and 1 other person who would like to make games. I'm the only one who has actually made any progress (slow progress, but thats another thread).
I've read many blog articles saying that people should get into indie games to make money. But I personally don't really see the money factor in it. I like programming, I love making games. It's just what I like. It's like this: People who buy proper 5k+ RC cars, don't buy them to win money racing them at competitions, we buy them because they are awesome. I think it's more of an interest for a person and not "How much money can this make me".
On Topic: If I was able to recieve my current salary to work at a Game Development house, even as the guy that makes the coffee and brings the pizza, I would quit my job right now. So let me know, I'm "available"