Last week I talked to Brendan Sinclair of GameIndustry.biz regarding the lack of transparency in digital distribution. If you’re a game developer trying to decide whether to make a game for the PC, XBox, Wii U, PS3, iPad, Android, etc. knowing the likely sales outcome is critical. And yet, even at this stage, it’s very difficult to have an idea of how well a game will do on a target platform.
For example, last year, we released a little Christmas game for the XBox Live indie channel called Elf Squad 7. For a couple weeks, it was in their top sellers list. But that meant selling just a few hundred copies. If we had been a start-up targeting XBox Live Indie, we’d be doomed. What is needed is some sort of metric that lets would-be developers gauge what their prospective return on investment is if they are successful on that platform.
As a game developer, I’m a lot less interested in how many copies the #1 game on a platform does than I am what the 100th did. I’m sure Angry Birds on the iPad has sold millions of copies. But I’m not likely to make the next angry birds. Getting into the top 10 or even top 100 sellers on a given platform is a successful achievement. But if my game can make it into the top 10 seller on a given platform by selling only a few hundred units for a given time period, that’s not a good sign to me.
For all the shouts that “PC gaming is d0med” we’ve heard over the years, it strikes me as odd that Galactic Civilizations II, a game released 6 years ago and is almost certainly in the top 100 best sellers on Steam has done over $1 million in the past year alone on that platform. And that’s just Steam and not counting Impulse or direct or retail or anywhere else it’s available. That strikes me as a pretty healthy platform. As a developer, if I know that something that didn’t even crack the top 100 for that year can make 7 figures then that’s a good platform to target.
But until that developer has taken the plunge on a particular platform, there is no readily available way for them to know what kinds of sales their game can expect. If I were making cars, I know exactly how many Chevy Volts or Honda Accords have sold in the past year. But in games? It’s guess work.
It would be really handy if the platform owners would divulge what their 100th best selling game did that year. They don’t need to name the game. Just the # of units sold and its average price point. Understandably, the weaker platforms wouldn’t divulge this but the stronger ones could use this as a competitive advantage. Right now, game developers too often feel like they’re playing the lottery and that’s not a healthy way to run a business.
