Being an independent game developer doesn't seem to pay

[Don]

One of the Chinese sites compiled a list of the number of sales by Touhou series, generally regarded as one of the bigger fan-made game franchise in Japan, and the numbers are pretty surprising:

Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil - 2777
Perfect Cherry Blossom - 1320
Immateral and Missing Power - 588
Imperishable Night - 1303
Phantasmorgria Flower View - 692
Shoot the Bullet - 1223
Mountain of Faith - 2251
Scarlet Weather Rhapsody - 2758
Subterrean Animism - 3928

One of the polls in Japan puts the number of people who has played the series at 14000. It appears the sales number are fairly comprehensive, or at least as comprehensive as anybody could find, so that seems like there is also close to a 80% piracy rate. Somewhere around Mountain of Faith Touhou seem to hit a cult status due to internet videos, as you can see there's a huge drop off between the Scarlet Devil Rhapsody and Mountain of Faith before rising again.

For comparison, the other cult fan game in Japan, Tsukhime, had some unknown number of sales in the dojin era, and then Typemoon went mainstream and Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Hallow Ataraxia both sold 100K+. Capcom also licensed 3 more Fate series game for PSP/PS2 and I assume if Capcom was wiling to license your brand it's probably going to be pretty profitable.

Now I know the maker of Touhou, ZUN, does this as a hobby. But if I was making a game and it sold 588 copies, I'm not even sure if I'd continue making the game. It doesn't really matter that Phantasmogria or Immaterial Missing Power are junk. It's not like it's much worse than one of the Fate spinoff games licensed by Capcom that probably sold 100K+ easy.

The sales also seem to suggest that just because a game costs $10 or $15, doesn't mean you can expect people to put up with stupid designs. Going by the polls from the same site, Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night consistently have the highest marks, but sold only half as much as Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil. This is probably because EotSD is the first Touhou game and is stupidly hard and nobody in their right mind is going to waste $10 on a game that you cannot beat on Easy. So I'd guess people bought the first game and was turned off by the fact that they just wasted $10 on a game that cannot be beat, and then resorted to piracy thereafter, because according to the polls the number of people who played the major Touhou titles is consistently at 14K for all major titles despite a rather large difference in sales.

And keep in mind the Japanese are probably some of the least piracy/cheating prone people in the world. When Phantasy Star Online came out in Japan people actually played the game legitmately and Sega was very surprised to find it was hacked to death the first day it went to US. It's kind of depressing if you think about it. Does anybody have a story of some independent game developer that does pay off? Not necessarily super rich, but do well enough so you didn't lose money? Well the guys in Typemoon obviously made a lot of money, but then they went commercial too, and if you got a series anchored by someone as good looking as Saber it's usually a license to print money in the cute-obsessed world of Japan anyway.

[SineSwiper]

You might want to go on Steam and XBL and reconsider that argument...

[Mental]

Touhou and its developer are not a good example of an indie game publisher, at least not a commercial one.

It's doujin. It's for love, not money. And honestly, "bullet hell" as a genre is popular, but "insane bullet hell" of the kind that Touhou represents is a very niche market even for the Japanese.

Also, as far as "if I were making a game" goes - you're not. You don't have the interest, drive, staying power, and determination to finish any kind of playable game, at least as far as you've related to us. So you're going to run into problems comparing your mindset to anyone who has determined to finish a title, whether or not it's intended to make money.

[Julius Seeker]

iPhone app store has a good market.

[Flip]

It might be overloaded at this point. 50,000 apps and counting?... how can you get your game the buzz it needs to succeed? Even scrolling through the pages and pages of games to find one you read was good is annoying... Maybe it takes high ratings and reviews, but the more apps that are out there, the less you will hear about some indie programmer making 100's of thousands.

[Don]

You can't just say to be a game developer you've to be willing to do stuff for no real chance of even making your time worthwhile. It's known that grunt game programmers don't make a lot of money but you're looking at a number that is well below what even a grunt programmer would make.

Anyway if you look at the difference in number of people that participate in a poll between say Typemoon and Touhou Project, the difference in fanbase is not an order of magnitude, but the sale most definitely is (100K+ per game vs not even 4K at best), and it's not like Visual Novel is that much better of a niche than Bullet Hell. I remember looking at some of the sales in the Visual Novel genre and they're usually in the few thousands or less range too, and those are commercial entities. Visual Novel games are also priced like full priced game (think Fate was like 6000 yen or whatever, as opposed to 1500 for Touhou Project), and certainly it's hard to imagine whether any programming effort was involved in a game like Tsukihime.

I'm not able to find data on Steam or XBox live very easily. I was under the impression most of these are at least commercial entities to start with, which generally have no problem of turning a profit if their game was actually good.

[Mental]

You can't just say to be a game developer you've to be willing to do stuff for no real chance of even making your time worthwhile.

Actually, yeah, you do.

[Don]

You can't just say to be a game developer you've to be willing to do stuff for no real chance of even making your time worthwhile.

Actually, yeah, you do.

Do you mean that because you believe it should not be worthwhile or is it just a reflection of the sad state small game developers are in?

I can certainly see why it turns out to be like that. It seems like the big companies exploit people who love the game and is willing to work extreme hours for little pay just because it's their dream. But I don't think it should be this way. You don't have to all be paid like a superstar but if you need to work 16 hour a day to develop a game, at least you should get paid more than an average grunt that works for 8 hours a day in a comparable position. But of course if you go alone you'll never get anywhere either. Piracy alone seems to eat up any chance of getting anything wortwhile back. Stuff like Steam may change this, but I don't have any data related to that to tell.

[Mental]

There's no sad state. Game development is a risk, from the indie trying to get started to the biggest publishers and developers out there. The number of hits is even smaller than the movie industry relative to the number of titles released and you need at least a minor hit relative to the size of your company/title in order to be profitable.

It's a rough business where the labor supply and product supply both are dramatically boosted by the fact that it's an entertainment industry. Salaries are lower because of the high labor supply. Competition is rough because of how many products are out on the market.

Making games is a risky career, period. It's a dramatic industry filled with upheavals that requires one to stay on top of new technology constantly or be left behind in a surprisngly short amount of time. If you need stability and security, it's not the place to be.

[Kupek]

Making games is a risky career, period. It's a dramatic industry filled with upheavals that requires one to stay on top of new technology constantly or be left behind in a surprisngly short amount of time. If you need stability and security, it's not the place to be.

As an added explanation, game development is a risky business because you're making things people don't need. Yes, very few of the things we purchase we actually need, but most things still have a function. But games don't; we buy and play them because we enjoy them, not because we need them. Engaging in any activity which doesn't have obvious utility is risky - this includes writing and acting.

In short, game development is inherently risky due to the nature of games themselves.

[Zeus]

Entertainment certainly has a utility. It may not be a necessity but that does not preclude it from having a utility level

[Kupek]

I'm trying to distinguish between things that we buy because they enable us to do something, and things we buy because we enjoy them. Replace "utility" with whatever word fits that definition for you.

[SineSwiper]

You can't just say to be a game developer you've to be willing to do stuff for no real chance of even making your time worthwhile.

In the business world, they have a word for this. They call this "risk".

[Anarky]

You might want to go on Steam and XBL and reconsider that argument...

Actually I was listening to a podcast last night about this very subject. Microsoft gets 60% of the sales on XBL arcade releases... thats a big chunk.

[SineSwiper]

You might want to go on Steam and XBL and reconsider that argument...

Actually I was listening to a podcast last night about this very subject. Microsoft gets 60% of the sales on XBL arcade releases... thats a big chunk.

True, that is a big chunk. However, I think that's the standard cut for programmers and distributors of video games. Pretty sad, actually. Not nearly as bad as the music industry, but the creators should get the better cut.

[Mental]

General rule for all industries: publishers quickly lock down paths to market and rape content creators through their rectums. You think the game industry is bad, check out the comic book industry some time (Chris, feel free to chime in here).

[Chris]

General rule for all industries: publishers quickly lock down paths to market and rape content creators through their rectums. You think the game industry is bad, check out the comic book industry some time (Chris, feel free to chime in here).

it's not the companies that fuc the creatrs so much as it is the current bull shit distribution system. There is one distributor left and that has forced massive price increases over the last decade. When I first got back into comics in 2000 a comic was 2.00 and an expensive one was the unbelievably high price of 2.25. then it because 2.25 and 2.50 a year or so in. Damn..>>Then suddenly 2.50 and a couple still at 2.25 but the expensive onese were suddenly 2.99. Now it's suddenly become 2.99, 3.99, and 3.50 and the regular price seems to be about to jump to 3.99 at the big companies. A lot of this is so that yes. creators can be paid tolerably. 9Except in Marvels case where they actually had an executive describe marvels price increase as a liscense to print mney thanks to the zombie factor. yes fuck you very much marvel. there is a reason I don't buy most of the stuff you put out.

But even then they still pay creatrs pretty well.

the problem is with Diamond. THe only distributor that the big companis go through which gives them a monopoly on product where they set unreasonable standards to keep the little guys out of there now only one warehouse (Used to be 3 a year ago) They sell books to shops at about a 40-50% discount depending on order size and whatnot. They pay less than half that for each issue they get in there warehouse. it's utter bul shit and it's caused the price of comics t skyrocket over the past few years.

[Mental]

I was tempted to say "distributors" instead of publishers, believe it or not.

Anyone who controls the final marketplace controls the price.

[Don]

Manga sort of is like this too. If you're not on Shonen Jump or another similarly large camp nobody's going to read your stuff except the pirates.

[SineSwiper]

the problem is with Diamond. THe only distributor that the big companis go through which gives them a monopoly on product where they set unreasonable standards to keep the little guys out of there now only one warehouse (Used to be 3 a year ago) They sell books to shops at about a 40-50% discount depending on order size and whatnot. They pay less than half that for each issue they get in there warehouse. it's utter bul shit and it's caused the price of comics t skyrocket over the past few years.

Heh, back in the day, Diamond was just one out of many collectable card mgfrs. They weren't even the most popular; Topps was.