I’ve mentioned in previous posts the challenges of finding information on starting a small, casual games company. One of the most difficult things to find data on is sales figures for casual games. There are very few companies who are willing to share their financial results. Perhaps it’s because most indie casual games companies don’t make much money, perhaps some make a lot? It’s hard to say why.

At any rate, I’ve been collecting links to websites that do have glimpses of insight into the world of casual games sales. My first reaction was to contact NPD Group, because I’ve seen their reports on console sales. Let’s just say that unless I find some serious investors, their reports aren’t really within my budget for fiscal year ’08. However, I have been able to find some free information out there:

• VG Chartz (www.vgchartz.com) – This website provides free reports on weekly game sales numbers (number of units sold, not dollar figures). I’m not entirely sure how accurate their numbers are, but if they’re even close, it provides some useful information. Unfortunately, they don’t track casual PC/Mac games much. However, they have started producing reports on Xbox Live Arcade game sales. You’ll find these reports in the “News” section of the website each week. Here’s the report for the week ending July 26th, 2008.
• GameProducer.net (www.gameproducer.net) – Juuso Hietalahti, a game producer, runs this blog. Unfortunately the sales-statistics page hasn’t been updated since October 2007, but it’s still an amazing resource. You can see that indie games tend to sell anywhere between $2,000 and $100,000 worth of copies. This is perhaps why so many companies are unwilling to share sales numbers. Not many companies would be willing to admit that their game sold $2000 worth of copies.
• Casual Charts (www.casualcharts.com) – This site lists the Top 10 games at most of the major casual games portals on the web. It doesn’t list sales numbers at all, but it does show you what’s currently the “hot” genre of casual game, if you want to track trends.

While we’re on the subject of number, here are some important numbers I’ve been rolling around in my head while starting this company:

• 1.0-1.5% – This is the typical “conversion rate” for a web-distributed game. Conversion rate is the percentage of people who try the demo who then purchase the game. So if you manage to get 100,000 people to download your demo, expect 1,000 of them to actually buy the game. Great odds, huh? I’ve heard that some really huge games, like “Peggle” had slightly higher conversion rates, but those are just rumours.
• 6 months – This is how long I’m projecting it will take me to build my first game. I’ve chosen a game with a scope that I know I can complete. I need to schedule it out once I’m done my prototyping, but I’m targeting 6 months until release.
• $200,000 – Minimum budget required to build a game for Xbox Live Arcade (this is just a number I’ve heard a few times, it’s not necessarily guaranteed “fact”). This is why I’m not doing XBLA games yet. This, of course, wouldn’t apply the same way to Microsoft’s new Community Games initiative, but the profit margins on those games still needs to be proved out.

So given all of this, why on earth would anyone want to do this? Why would I want to do this? Because I love making games. I can’t imagine doing any other job anymore. In this role, not only do I get to build the game, but I get to create it. I get to take an idea and turn it into something that is (hopefully) wonderful and fun, not only for myself, but for other people as well. I can’t imagine a better job than that!

Owen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Business, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.