Obtaining reliable sales stats is one of the harder things to do in the video game business. Unless you have access to the NPD reports (which are very expensive) you can only rely on numbers from the developers and publishers themselves. Unfortunately, many of the contracts out there prohibit discussing these sales numbers publicly. There is a general ‘brotherhood’ of indie game developers in the PC/Mac scene, however, and just recently a few of them were able to release their sales revenues for 2008. Thanks to all of the developers out there courageous enough to release your numbers!
The sales statistics are conveniently cataloged here, at Grey Alien Game’s blog:
http://greyaliengames.com/blog/some-fantastic-indie-sales-stats/
Looking at the stats, you’ll notice a pretty wide variety in generated revenues. This is just a very small sampling of all indie studios out there, and can’t be considered representative of the whole. However, I do think that it may be useful in understanding market potential for niche genres and mass-market casual games.
To throw more numbers around, I’ve seen the estimates of what a very popular casual game makes on average. It’s important to realize that this is not based on factual evidence I have seen, only hearsay from other contacts in the industry. A popular casual game in this context, refers to a casual game that makes into the Top 10 list of the major portals (such as Big Fish Games) and remains in the Top 10 for a couple of weeks. The [estimated] average revenue for such a game is between $150,000 and $200,000 which results in a developer’s cut of $60,000 to $90,000 if the game was developed without external funding. Of course, making a Top 10 game is no easy feat!
And finally, let’s look at the biggest of the big. Big Fish Games is one of the largest portals for casual games in terms of total revenue. They have created several flagship properties internally (or simply bought IP rights), one of which has been tearing up the casual charts for a good while. Mystery Case File games are hidden object/puzzle games, which recently saw a fifth iteration released. Conveniently, Big Fish Games announced that the first 4 entries of the series on the PC have moved a total of 2.5 million units to date. It’s hard to estimate how much revenue these games have generated, because they can be bought for either $20.00 or only $6.99 with a Big Fish membership. However, I’d estimate that these 4 games have generated between $15 million and $25 million. Not bad. Not bad at all.
