In case you live under a rock, the Humble Indie Bundle 3 has been launched. Go buy it! Right now!
I don’t care if you own it all already. It can cost you $1 if you want! OR LESS!! Just buy it already sheesh
SHEESH
You know that excuse you have?
Yeah, SCREW THAT EXCUSE.
A lot of people praise me for my open-kimono style, sharing all the data on my games and such.
I’m not the first (I learned from Brad Wardell, Daniel James, and other generous GDC-goers!), and I know I won’t be the last! Here are a few numbers-posts I ran across recently:
I’ll try to post things more frequently. :)
I touched on most of this stuff, in a condensed form, in my SteamBirds Survival: By The Numbers post last week. It’s received a lot of attention, so I thought I’d expand on it a bit.
I only have experience with the two largest markets: iOS and Android. I will focus on those two, but the same arguments can be extended to any other mobile platform.
I don’t believe that developing a “mobile application” from the ground-up is an easy task. As a port, or an add-on to an existing IP: maybe. But an original title? Scary thought!
Some developers are drawn to mobile platforms for technical reasons: The touch interface, the GPS functionality, or the gyroscopic inputs. For those developers, it can be an exciting new platform with excellent opportunities for innovation. Still, you have a hard road ahead of you, and you have my sympathy and support!
A good chunk of developers, though, want to make original games for mobile platforms purely because of the stories of Scrooge McDuck-style money-bins. I suppose this post is being made to dash those dreams on the reef of reality; I hope I’m wrong, and I wish you luck and success regardless, but I think it is a losing venture.
To succeed in either the iOS or Android market you need to have one of the following:
Assuming #1 and #2 are out of reach for you (as they are for most Indies), I guess that means we’ll be sticking to the “getting featured” item. Why?
Most customers are lazy. They will buy games near the top of the charts. The few people willing to “dig” for a good game are (a) probably not going to find yours amongst the thousands of other titles, and (b) probably not going to buy it even if they do see it. Why would they pick yours over the ten apps on either side of yours? Remember: There are over 500,000 apps out there.
On iOS, the default chart-sorting is by “Most sales in the last 72 hours.” On Android, the default chart-sorting is by “Most sales of all time.” This is (IMHO) complete bullshit, and is why content-discovery is such a problem on mobile platforms (particularly on Android).
Being “featured” let’s you skip the catch-22 of “you need sales to make sales.”
So how do you get Featured?
Note that there isn’t an option there that says “My game will do well, honest!!” or “Play-tests say it’s great!” The gate-keepers are only interested in solid facts, not speculation.
How important is getting featured? Well, most games that don’t get featured disappear into obscurity. Friends and family might be your only customers, if you can be so lucky; expect sales of less than $10-$200. If you get your entire extended family to buy your application, what rank do you think it will appear as? How far down the list will it be on iOS? How far down will it be on Android?
IF you get featured, what kind of sales can you expect? How do the markets stack up?
In my experience, and speaking with other Indie game devs: The Android market will get you somewhere between 10-20% of your iOS sales, if all other things are equal.
Yes, there are more Android devices in the world than iOS products. However, every single iOS device has access to the AppStore. Some Android devices don’t have storage capabilities, are regionally locked, or sometimes carriers themselves block out the AndroidMarket. I haven’t been able to find hard figures on this, but I estimate that the potential Android app-customer base is way less than half the size of the iOS market. 10-20% sounds and feels about right, and seems to fit evidence collected.
In terms of actual cash generated: Being in the top ten can keep you in the top ten for a long time. The rich get richer. So the higher your ranking, the more money you make. But it’s a very steep curve.
SteamBirds had a decent launch on the mobile market. Here’s some figures:
Android’s long-tail is roughly twice as thick as iOS, and I predict that – over the course of 1-2 years(?) – it might even overtake iOS sales.
Other than big-studio- or proven-IP-based- titles, I don’t know anyone that’s done as well as SteamBirds in the Android market [given my 3 months sales time]. I know a lot of developers with Android titles; some made less than $10, and nobody I know of has been featured in that market.
That said, there’s always the chance you can get lucky. Considering how many entrants there are in the mobile industry, though: the odds are against you. Better luck playing the lottery, I think!
If you have any experiences with the mobile markets, please post them in comments! There’s not enough data being shared about this industry!
In the “by the numbers” post a few days ago, I mentioned SteamBirds: Survival introduced a new black-listing technology. There’s been a lot of interest in what exactly this is, so here we go!
First up, I’ll lay the groundwork so you can understand the reasoning here.
There are usually a few different “versions” of popular flash games floating around on the web:
As a case-in-point, the viral version of SteamBirds exists on around 5,000 different websites, which account for around 30% of the game’s total traffic; that’s where I generate most of my advertising revenue (not that there is a lot…).
Arguably more important than the advertising revenue, though, is the branding. Getting your brand (in my case, a link to steambirds.com) in front of millions of people is potentially more valuable than a few pennies for ad clicks.
Which brings us to the big problem.
Some enterprising portal owners think to themselves:
They will then grab the free, viral version of the game – and do some or all of the following evil, jerky stuff to it:
As Adobe’s Flash/AS3 language is an “open” language, there are plenty of decompilers out there. Asset protection is still difficult in the environment. Doing any/all of the above is a trivial process for most developers.
The original version of SteamBirds had around 4 million plays with various iterations of the above list implemented. Most often it’s ad-replacement and blocking of outbound links; I think only one site erased my name from the credits; other games aren’t so lucky.
The offenders here are almost exclusively based out of Asia, and most of my illicit traffic comes primarily from China.
Sending cease-and-desist letters from a lawyer, pleading via email, and making angry blog posts in English doesn’t work. Any attempts I have made have gone completely ignored; at best, sites will write back claiming they are doing you a favour by exposing you to a large Asian audience.
It’s hard to bring litigious action against these portals when the value of the traffic they are stealing is diminishingly small. 4 million hits across hundreds of sites? That’s not many visitors each. And it’s hard to put a value on branding, such as “name in the credits” or “outbound links back to my site.” Not to mention bringing litigation against a Chinese site is very difficult to do, thanks to differing international laws (nor would I want to go down that road).
It’s not that I want to shut a single infringer down, or that any individual company is harming me directly in a measurable way; It’s that there are so many of them. Stopping them one at a time won’t get me anywhere. I need a way to flip their entire table over, all at once.
Because Flash is an open platform, ripping things off is easy. There are certain things you can do to make the whole process more difficult, though.
Simple changes in the way you code, for example, can result in corrective action. If you play SteamBirds: Survival on a site that blocks outbound links, I can actually detect the failure event in the code, and display a popup box that says “This site is being a jerk! Type this URL into your browser bar…”
Using metrics-recording platforms like Playtomic will allow you to track the number of advertising clicks on each site. If there is a lot of traffic with zero clicks, you can take dynamic (code-based-blocking) or manual (off-site blacklisting) corrective action.
And finally, you can use code-obfuscators to help prevent cracking/hacking of various kinds. These automated programs run through your code and change function names to things like ” ” or linebreak characters, amongst other things. I use Kindisoft’s SecureSWF Pro on most of my projects, and I believe it is the best in the industry.
No matter how much prevention you use, you can’t prevent all types of hacking though. With work, any obfuscated code can be reverse engineered; and there is currently no way to encrypt or obfuscate your art assets. Why hack out advertisements or branding when you can just relocate it to be off-screen, or re-paint it as your own?
Since I had a nice, long list of badguys from SteamBirds, I decided to put it to good use in SteamBirds: Survival.
Here’s how it works:
It worked really well. The sites that used to be a big thorn in my side? Now very nearly zero traffic. I successfully put up enough barbed wire to discourage the dismantling of my game.
Right after I launched my game, Playtomic released a similar service that covers a lot of the basics: Portal BlackList. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of my system, but it provides all the code and integration you need to get a simple system up and running today. I recommend checking it out.
Portal BlackList also shows a list of currently blocked sites in the sidebar. My list is a subset of those sites, so instead of duplicating it here I’ll just direct you there! You can also check out the list on Free Our Games as a reference.
Unfortunately, there are still ways around all of my safeguards. Certain portals will link to your game on your own website, hosted in an iFrame on their own site. Your game then thinks it’s running on a proper domain, while the offending site can strip out any accompanying sidebar ads, branding, or whatever else you might have in place.
Thankfully the number of people doing this is quite small, and not a big deal (for me, anyway).
Well! I’m back from the Game Developer’s Conference and the Flash Gaming Summit, where I spoke about how SteamBirds is doing and let all my cats out of their respective bags. I think it’s time for another by-the-numbers gig!
When I last left you, my very popular SteamBirds: By The Numbers article let you know that SteamBirds had made approximately $34,000 USD (gross). This article was so popular it was copied over to Gamasutra and into two different magazines! (score!) I suppose that means you guys want more?
So let’s start by getting caught up.
Since last writing, SB went on to make an addition $11K in various sitelocks and licenses, and to this day is still generating more business (did 3 sitelocks in January alone!). I’m fairly confident that the original SB is going to make money for a loooong time.
SteamBirds [the original version only] has now made approximately $45,000 USD.
Here’s a popular chart: breaking down the sources of all revenues for the original SB:
I really like this graph because it visually represents how much I loathe advertisements.
I say this a lot, but there’s no harm in re-iterating: I hate ads, I’m really bad at deploying good ads, and I have no advertising strategy other than “tack it on hastily.” You can see it really paid off;
4-5x more revenue than CPMStar and Mochi combined?? Why does anyone even bother with advertising anymore?!
And even then: All advertising combined is hardly 10% of combined revenues. It might be worth it, but only in this larger-scale economy. I don’t think I’d bother with advertisements at all if I had a game that was expecting to make less than $30K.
As far as traffic and popularity goes:
(Click for Big)
It seems like traffic is dwindling off to nothing, but it’s been nearly a solid year of 50,000 plays per day (and trended up to 150K/day around the time of Survival’s launch). That’s more web traffic per day than I’ve ever hoped for with a personal blog, so I call it a success!
But that’s enough whinging on about the original SteamBirds. Let’s jump into the fun, new stuff!
The wonderful fellows at SemiSecret Software (Eric and Adam) worked hard at making an iOS version of the game. They launched two separate SKUs – one for iPhone/iPod Touch ($0.99), and an HD version ($1.99) for the iPad.
The iOS version of the game was identical to the original flash game, except:
Here’s a total sales graph:
(Click for Big)
The iPad sales were fairly consistently around half the volume of the iPhone sales, which was surprising – considering how many more iPhones there are in the world!
What was super interesting, though, was this zoomed-in portion:
(Click for Big)
(ignore the dip around Jan. 5th – error in the data – sales were consistent)
I love the big spike at Christmas time. Shows people reveling in proper Commercial Spirit! But even more interesting was the App was on an “introductory sale” for December. We bumped the prices up $1 on January 1st ($1.99 / $2.99), and there was no affect on sales at all! Interesting…
I have to say that the iPad edition of the game is, hands down, my favorite game experience. SteamBirds feels like it was designed to be on that platform, and I love it to bits. I bought an iPad just to fawn over it.
Victor’s team at FlatRedBall created an Android edition of the game for us. This version of the game was again, identical to the original SB, except:
I don’t have a fancy graph of Android sales, but I know the performance was approximately 20% of the iOS counterpart in terms of gross revenue. I know Android has a vast install base, but not every Android phone has the Marketplace (as opposed to 100% appstore penetration on the iOS), so I have no good feel for how much of this is luck, how much is market, how much is user response, etc… It’s very difficult to feel out the numbers.
20% is still a big chunk, though – but much like the advertising revenue – only if you expect the game to push over $30K or so.
I have a huge problem with Android’s default “Sort by all-time sales” market, and content discovery is hideously broken, so that could be a huge contributing factor here. Hopefully Google will fix that.
The one huge saving grace here was the Android edition’s winning of the IndiePub Game of the Year award. The cash prize (and other perks) that came with that made it all worth while!
Both mobile editions were “featured,” and both rose in ranks quite quickly. In terms of 72-hour sales, SteamBirds rose to a peak of #12 on the iPad “Games” category (#25 overall, if memory serves), which was really nice and super exciting. Sales didn’t hold, though, and tailed off rapidly.
Not hating on the tail at all, of course – it’s nowhere near launch-day-numbers, but they’re still generating cash. :)
If I had to do it all over again, I probably would target Android still – just because I like supporting the platform. Even with a featured, popular application with backing from Penny Arcade (two or three times now!), it hardly paid for it’s own development.
That said: Both mobile editions were done via contractors working for revenue split (50% each, which I think is generous!), and the resultant windfalls from both devices was, essentially, free money.
All in all, iPad/iPhone/Android split out to be a fairly even pie: around 33%/33%/33% each.
The mobile market has a fairly long tail, though – and that tail is pretty thick and lucrative, especially for Android. I believe these figures will round out nicely in the coming year, but they were only launched near the beginning of December, so we don’t have a lot of data yet.
Let’s move on to the NEW game!
SteamBirds: Survival wasn’t a gigantic technical change from the original, but it has very different gameplay. I’ve blogged about the specifics previously, so I’ll let you go read that (or just play it!) instead of updating it here.
The game went up on FlashGameLicense.com looking for a sponsor. We were fairly open to anything, but being the Christmas season with an non-thematic game: we had a fairly poor turn out. Several sponsors said they’d be willing to pay more in the Spring, but we didn’t want to wait. Not to worry: in the end we got a really good deal.
Our primary sponsor ended up being AXE, the body-spray brand (pit, pit, chest). They paid just over $10K for the game. A hilarious conversation came out of this:
Me: “OK, I’m done incorporating your logos. Where should I sitelock the game to?”
Them: “Oh, uh, we don’t have a website. Can you host it?”
Me: “Y… yes?!?!”
You see, typically a sponsor is paying for the traffic redirection back to their site. In this case, Axe didn’t have a dedicated portal – they just wanted the ad space. This allowed us to retain and control our traffic, show our users exactly what we wanted to show them, place up-sell icons for the mobile editions, place our own blog and twitter feeds… That’s worth an extra $10K of value any day!
And again: Much like the Original SB, sponsor and licensing requests for Survival keep rolling in, and I expect it to make us money for a long time coming.
This go-around I learned my lesson from the original Steambirds: no advertisments. We didn’t bother integrating with Mochi or CPMStar, and any revenue put forth by Kongregate was just a nice dollop of icing on this cake.
A new twist, however, was Micro-Transactions. To date, Survival has made an additional $10K or so in MTX – not too shabby considering there’s a maximum limit on how much you can spend (there are no consumables, by design).
The airplanes in SteamBirds: Survival are so different from each other, that unlocking/purchasing a new plane is like getting to play a whole new game. Some of the planes have fairly straightforward changes, but some themed planes – like the SolipSkier, Canabalt, and AughtNine planes – drastically change gameplay into something entirely different.
So here’s how we worked MTX:
Let’s see how well each did:
Isn’t that interesting? 70% of all sales came from the “Buy All” button. It almost seems like we shouldn’t have put the microtransactions on the other planes at all! The vast majority of users would rather just hand us $15 than actually buy each individual plane… But of course, that was the plan all along: Tempt users with greater value. The “Unlock Everything!” button wouldn’t have done so well without the other plans to compare against!
I love that people would trust me with an investment of that size, you know? It feels really good when a flash game player drops $15. Gives me hope for humanity, and the industry!
We wanted to bait people with a free plane – just give us your EMail address, and we’ll send you a free premium plane! Of all the total users that ever entered the game: 10% clicked on the newsletter signup button. However, only 1% actually made it through the signup process! Signing up for the free plane required you were already signed into a Gamersafe account, so we lost 90% of our potential email addresses because of this hurdle. BIG LESSON LEARNED!
Edit: As DanC pointed out – if 90% of people couldn’t be bothered to sign into gamersafe for a free plane… how many didn’t bother to sign in to PURCHASE a plane? I think the MTX really suffered because of the extra signup layer. Every payment provider requires a signup of some sort, though, so I wonder what could have been done to fix it?
One big problem with the original SteamBirds was certain shady sites (usually in Asian countries) ripping out my advertisements, breaking sitelocks, and preventing outbound links (and sometimes even erasing credits!) or otherwise hacking the game and posting it without permission. For Survival, I implemented a dynamic blacklist – that allows me to block any site from seeing the game on a whim.
Thanks to the first release, I had a lengthy list of ne’er-do-wells, and put them in right at the start of SB:S’s launch. I also put in metrics to see who was trying to defeat my locks!
6 sites in particular were pretty bad, hammering away at the game thousands of times trying to make it work, to no avail. In the end, I had some interesting stats:
I’d say that’s a success! 4 million plays that generate zero revenue and zero fan love is 4 million hits I’d rather not have.
What was super interesting is how this has skewed my stats of plays-by-countries; the USA is always #1, but the rest of the top 5 were always Asian countries in each of my other games. In SB:S, Brazil, Spain, The UK, and Canada come into the top 5. Now I know where to localize my games to first!
I cranked up my statistics tracking in SteamBirds: Survival, and got a bunch of neat figures out of it. Here’s a few:
That last one is super interesting to me. Totally tells me that there is very, very little crossover from the flash to the mobile market. Maybe not worth ever including? (then again: if a single journalist sees it, it might make a huge sales difference)
So how is the SteamBirds franchise doing, overall?
I estimate we’ve made around $200,000 USD so far, with all things included. Here’s how I break it down:
“Old Rev” being the Original Steambirds, “Flash” being SteamBirds: Survival. Note that the original SB has an extra year headstart on Survival, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Survival overtakes it in the long run.
A lot of people will look at this chart and say “Woah! There’s so much money in the mobile market… Why are you bothering with the flash version?!”
My response to that is quite simple; the only reason we made more than $10 on Android is because we got Featured by Google. It’s a similar story on iOS. The reason we were able to get featured so easily is because of the fame and endless praiseworthy reviews the Flash version got! If the Flash edition never existed, we would never have had an opportunity to get as much exposure as we did.
I fully plan on developing for Flash into the future. And I think what we have in store will turn the tables on where the biggest revenue lies. ;)
So what are we working on now?
I’ll keep you posted as long as you keep your eyes glued here!
I NEVER THOUGHT THIS DAY WOULD COME!!!
Fireworks! Explosions! OMG OMG
I finally sold my first ever game, Space Squid. After years of marketing and attempting to find a buyer, I was able to sell the full source code for the game for a whopping twenty big ones.
I still retain IP rights; I mainly didn’t have the time or effort available to do up a sitelock so I sold the entire source code and made the sponsor do it.
I’ll chart the game’s financial success:
Yep, launched back in May of 2009, the game has cost me approximately $2/month in hosting, but this recent payout was an astounding bump in the game’s history. Never before has Space Squid seen such profits!
Well, “profits” should be in quotes because I’m still around $20 in the hole for this game, over all.
You can play the [ugly, broken] sponsored version on Newgrounds, or you can play my original implementation at Space-Squid.com.
And to all those that said it could never happen:
HAHAHAHAHHAHAH
SteamBirds: Survival is launching sooooon (next day or two!) and I thought I post about the various analytics I’m using.
I use all these products to tell if, when, and how well/how bad my games are doing. What do you use?
Our man Victor Chelaru at FlatRedBall has told me that the Android verison of SteamBirds is a go!
This version of the game the game has some custom content (new missions) and a really, really wicked cool parallax feature for the clouds.
I just sat there jaw-agape as I scrolled the map around, looking at the plummeting spiral of smoke coming out of one of my ex-adversaries.
It looks so amazing I’m immediately sent off to a whistful dream about 3D displays…
Anyway, pick it up now! It’s on sale for 99 cents! It goes up in price in roughly a week! The more purchases we get the more likely we are to be adding more content (including – if lady luck smiles upon us – multiplayer!)
The AppStore version of SteamBirds is now live! Check out our splash page at SteamBirds.com, or just go straight to the AppStore and buy this sucker!
A great big thank-you to the illustrious SemiSecret Software (Canabalt, Gravity Hook) for producing an excellent iOS version of the game for us.
We’re offering SteamBirds for the iPhone at 99 cents, and the HD iPad version for a buck more. The game art has been completely re-done and I have to say – playing on my big new iPad screen is the most fun I’ve had in the game since the launch of the original. It looks fantastic and the gameplay translates perfectly to the touch-interface.
I’ll have a further announcements for an Android version and SteamBirds: Survival soon!
Protonaut has been suffering a slow death. Ever since the first beta, it hasn’t generated a single sale and is suffering from a severe lack of traffic. No traffic means no new levels, which means there’s no reason for traffic to keep coming back… One of those old Chicken-and-the-Egg problems.
Of course, since I last really worked on Protonaut, Greg Wohlwend has been off making fantastic trailers and new games, and I’ve been working on SteamBirds. We haven’t had a lot of time or desire to work on something that isn’t being successful.
Greg and I decided that Protonaut wasn’t really working; it’s missing a key nugget of user-retention-fun, and the effort required to fix it is exceeding our desire to continue work. We pretty much decided to write off the game and put it to rest, but I decided to give it one last push.
In the latest update, I added some character-building signposts and rewrote a bunch of the tutorial levels. Fixed replays and made the controls keyboard-and-mouse, which is a whole lot easier to master than the old keyboard-only layout. And then I did the crazy: I posted it up for bidding on FlashGameLicense.
Bidding is probably a week or three away from closing, but it’s looking good so far! The game is already exceeding average sponsorship rates, despite the fact that the game has been out for a while (albeit with no traffic) and has a few external links in it. Exclusive sponsorships probably won’t work without a fancy non-standard deal with a sponsor, and yet we still have a lot of interest!
If the sponsorship gives the game the boost of traffic it needs to jumpstart the engines, I’ll be able to continue developing it. But if it fizzles out over a month or two, I won’t put in much more effort than bugfixes. Crossing my fingers!
follow: RSS
