{"id":115347,"date":"2020-07-13T21:18:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-13T21:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/366294"},"modified":"2020-07-13T21:18:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-13T21:18:00","slug":"blog-can-you-be-a-full-time-solo-indie-developer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/07\/13\/blog-can-you-be-a-full-time-solo-indie-developer\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: Can you be a full time solo indie developer?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><i><small> The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.<br \/>The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. <\/small><\/i><\/strong> <\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Hi, I\u2019m Karl Kontus, one of the creators of a free games market research platform <a href=\"https:\/\/vginsights.com\/\">Video Game Insights<\/a>.&nbsp;In this article I will cover how much a typical indie game developer is expected to earn by releasing a game on Steam. Is it boats and private islands for indie devs or super noodles and credit card debt?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Let\u2019s start by looking at <\/strong><strong>Steam games lifetime gross sales.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Steam games revenue distribution\" height=\"307\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/blog-can-you-be-a-full-time-solo-indie-developer.png\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<p>This graph looks at all 41,000 games on Steam and ranks them into percentiles by estimated sales. I\u2019ve used the Boxleiter method for sales estimates, which has its imperfections, but works well when looking at a large sample size.<\/p>\n<p>Initial insights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Over 50% of the games on Steam have never made more than $5,000<\/li>\n<li>Only 23% of the games have made over $50,000, an average annual salary for a full time game developer in the US<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Oh dear. That doesn\u2019t sound promising. But then again, the majority of the games on Steam are hobby projects and c20% of the games are free to begin with. So let\u2019s apply some filters to our criteria.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Earnings potential of a full time solo dev<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m narrowing down the list by looking at self-published single player indie games that are fully released (eg not early access). They have to have at least 5 ratings in order to remove the really low end of games on Steam and it has to be in the price range of $4.99-$19.99, where most indie games lie. I\u2019m also only looking at games released after 2018.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve narrowed the # of games down from 41,000 to 3,300. That\u2019s better, but we\u2019ve also removed the AAA games with hundreds of millions of sales. So where does it leave us?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Steam games revenue distribution\" height=\"310\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/blog-can-you-be-a-full-time-solo-indie-developer-1.png\" width=\"646\"><strong>Results:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Bottom Quartile: &lt;$5k \/ game<\/p>\n<p>Median: $13k \/ game<\/p>\n<p>Top Quartile: $44k \/ game<\/p>\n<p>Top 15%: $108k \/ game<\/p>\n<p>Top 5%: $555k \/ game<\/p>\n<p><strong>Only 15% of indie games make more than $100k<\/strong>. Scanning through games in that scale we find examples like MicroTown and Horizon\u2019s Gate \u2013 Games with beautiful, but simple art and refined look. This looks like the kind of target an ambitious solo dev could set.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What it means to be top 15%?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now, leaving aside that the solo dev has to be good enough at art, coding, marketing and the business side and needs a bit of luck on their side, let\u2019s have some faith and say we can get there. Let\u2019s also assume that the development time of such game would be c. 1 year, which is on the faster end, but not unheard of.<\/p>\n<p>You\u2019ve achieved greatness! You\u2019ve proven the doubters wrong and have made it to the top of the solo dev food chain. You\u2019ve made it to the top 15% of indie games in terms of earnings on Steam. Where\u2019s your $100k?<\/p>\n<p>Not so fast.<\/p>\n<p>This $108k is the gross revenue, not including Steam\u2019s cut, discounts, chargebacks, returns etc. Let\u2019s see where we get after taking these out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Gross Revenue:<\/strong> $108k<\/p>\n<p><strong>Post Discounts:<\/strong> $86.4k (A typical game like this sells a fair amount of games at discounts of &gt;50%. On average, a good rule of thumb is to apply a 20% discount to gross revenue to account for discounts)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Post Returns and Chargebacks:<\/strong> $77.8k (Typically c. 10% of games are returned and chargebacks applies)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Net Revenue Post Steam Cut: <u>$54.4k<\/u><\/strong> (Steam takes 30% of the revenue)<\/p>\n<p>So, even in the optimistic case, defying odds and making it to the top, a solo indie dev would make as much as an average developer in a typical games company in the US, but without the job security and other benefits.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Is this the death of the dream?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Well, no. There are successful solo devs out there and there are many things a developer could do to improve their chances. I would argue that most of these, however, lie on the business and marketing side. A successful solo developer must realise that they are a solo entrepreneur. That means making the right pricing decisions, devoting a LOT of time on marketing efforts and doing proper research into the game space and competitors before fully getting into the development phase.<\/p>\n<p>Being a solo dev is an option, but one that comes with some typically less appealing sides of game development if you want to succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Hi, I\u2019m Karl Kontus, one of the creators of a free games market research platform Video Game Insights.&nbsp;In this article I will cover how [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}