To me, far from being in an omigod we ’re going to need to bury millions of E.T. Instead of being discouraged, I’ve spent even longer working on my next game, an RPG ( Fallen Gods) in a market much more saturated than retro point-and-click adventures. Faced with this math, and with an ever-growing field of excellent indie games on Steam, one could be discouraged. Probability suggests that our next title might not be as fortunate. And what if it sold less? As far as I know, Primordia is the third-best-selling game made in Adventure Game Studio, below Gemini Rue and the Cat Lady but above the rest, despite many of these being truly excellent games. After all, even assuming we could churn out a game that sold as well as Primordia every two years or so, that would yield less than the median salary for an American game designer (different sites put that median between $60,000 and $85,000, plus benefits). A devil’s advocate, or my own sometimes pessimistic self, might say that Primordia proves that it makes little economic sense to develop such games. I have always viewed Primordia as a surprising, resounding success commercially and, more importantly, in terms of player engagement. Those proceeds have been divided about (1) a third to taxes (2) a third to support (a) other developers through Kickstarter and charities and (b) our own development of Fallen Gods and Cloudscape (no out-of-pocket expenses for Strangeland) and (3) a third as “take-home” income. My own share has worked out to about $110,000 (for a game that took two and a half years to develop, and which I have tried to continue supporting for another five), which is to say 18% of the gross sales. What remained was divided among the three of us who developed the game (Victor, James, and me), not quite evenly initially but evenly now. A further cut was taken by the publisher. In terms of the proceeds, of the $600,000, the first 30% went to distributors (GOG, Steam, and the bundlers). But in 2017, for instance, during months in which Primordia was discounted at least some of the time, we tended to move around 6,000 copies, while during non-discounted months, we moved around 150 copies. Sales span multiple months, making it hard for me to break the data down. The only other time considerable copies were sold was during non-seasonal themed sales in which Primordia and a small number of other games were featured. But the overwhelming majority of the copies were sold, even during the first year, in the seasonal sales on Steam and GOG. Primordia sold well at launch (about 43k non-bundle copies in its first year), and has had a long tail (21k, 19k, 22k, 39k copies in each of the next four years, excluding iPhone sales). Of the remaining 160,000 sales that I consider more meaningful, about 46,000 were through GOG, 7,000 through the App Store (for the iOS port), with almost all of the remaining 107,000 through Steam (a very, very trivial number were sold directly by the publisher through BMT Micro). Unfortunately, Primordia was never included in the one bundle that makes some economic sense (the Humble Bundle). Of those sales, around 40,000 were from junk bundles that yielded almost no money (~$7,000 or something ludicrous like that). (Note that there is some lag time here because I receive sales data from the publisher a month after the publisher receives it from Steam and GOG, which is itself delayed a month for Steam and as much as a quarter for GOG.) That means that the average (mean) sales price is about three bucks, 30% of the listed price of $9.99. Primordia has sold just about 200,000 copies for a total of a bit over $600,000 from December 2012 until now. In that spirit, here are some facts on Primordia. M y friend Vince - with his transparency about The Age of Decadence, a game I adore -has convinced me that developers need to fill that gap by sharing their own data with others who might need it. With the untimely death of Steam Spy, independent developers have lost one of the few free sources of game sales data.
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