The average 'good' indie game makes just $25,000 in its first year on sale, says Grey Alien's Birkett

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Earlier today, indie developer Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games published some research he has conducted into how the Week One revenue of indie titles compares with that generated across a game's first year. He has kindly allowed us to republish this piece

Recently I asked a bunch of devs how their Week One (gross) revenue on Steam compared to their Year One revenue (including Week One). I wanted to know because we had just launched Shadowhand on Steam and I was interested to see if the first week could in any way be a decent predictor of longer-term sales.

I got about 30 data points and you can see the resulting graph below.

A fairly tight range

The results are interesting in several ways. One obvious one is that most of the results fall in the two-times to 10-times range and aren’t something like 50-times or 100-times. However, one dev who runs a large studio did have an outlier title that had a very large ratio, but I excluded it because it’s really not typical of your “average” indie game.

OK, sure the range isn’t that tight because if your game did two-times Week One you might go bust and if it did 10-times maybe you’d end up buying a Tesla, depending on the scale of your Week One revenue. But I still think it’s interesting and can be useful. Let’s consider some more things…

Average

So the mean (average) is 5.1-times and the median (middle value) is 4.5-times

This is pretty useful data. If your game made $10,000 in the first week (not an easy feat btw), you could perhaps reasonably assume it would make about $50,000 in the first year.

Be Conservative

This is not a political statement, but more like a sensible approach to predicting the future based on past performance.

Basically, it might be more sensible to