Comments on: Sales Stats: Winter Tale – $10,000 Sales, 1 Month Development

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:59:04 +0000

well it’s a 0.64% CR which is OK. Plenty of games convert less but the best ones convert >1%. Thing is we don’t know how accurate the “about 100,000 downloads” is…

By: papamook

papamook — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:18:17 +0000

crazy, that’s a lot of downloads, but I’m quite surprised so many sales came of it though

By: Stephen Burns

Stephen Burns — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:48:18 +0000

I do work at starbucks. Well I work at Coles (supermarket chain in Oz) and a Warehouse part time. It was a new car or invest money in some games. All I was doing in 2005 was playing WOW. I feel better making games in 2007 then investing all my time into Wow :).

Our downloads for the month of June are around 400-500 (total) I think. Haven’t looked at the data yet to get a solid DL number. 2 products are out and 2 more are set for release soonish.

I make games because I like too. If I succeed then that would be nice. But you can only succeed if you put in the hard yards at the start (a few years of learning :) ).

By: KNau

KNau — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:55:40 +0000

At first I was worried that this would be another one of those stories about a game that was dumped to market solely to make a quick buck and be forgotten about. You know the ones – where they give you a big impressive number like “$10,000 for almost no work!” and then everyone on indiegamer starts making their own versions hoping to cash in quickly and nobody actually does the math to figure out that a full-time Starbucks employee makes just as much or that a freelancer makes at least double.

I’m glad this wasn’t one of those stories.

By: Roman Budzowski

Roman Budzowski — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:08:39 +0000

PROMOTION thing is not enough. You can’t get 100 000 download just submitting to shareware sites and issuing a press release. Next time you talk to devs ask them about average daily downloads they had before and after release of the game. If they have like 900 downloads a day before they released Winter Tale then I can imagine that they got 100k downloads in 4 months. If they had a lot less, then I just don’t see it.

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:37:37 +0000

Stephen: Yeah but plenty or portals won’t take seasonal games. Like Real Arcade for example.

By: Stephen Burns

Stephen Burns — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:23:05 +0000

100000 Downloads wow. We are doing pretty bad on the clone front over here :) (300 downloads in 1 month). When I looked at Xmas bonus I missed two things 1. Christmas style and 2. Some portals took xmas on. Not going to get the 100 sales atm that I was looking for.

Breaking out the big guns and I am making a R-type clone game. If I am going down then I am going down cloning in style :).

By: VPellen

VPellen — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:23:57 +0000

You may actually want to mention what kind of game it is. A title screen tells us nothing about the game. It didn’t take me more than a few clicks to figure it out, but still.

A Christmas themed match 3.. Well.. I guess it made money at least.

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:19:42 +0000

Is it like Chuzzle? Anyway nice sales figures thanks. Sounds like my Holiday Bonus game, took me just over a month (wasn’t part time, it was more like double time!) and it was already based on an existing engine. I made a few more sales, but because they were via portals mainly the income to me was much less. I’ll send the figures to Juuso soon…

What’s cool is they made so many direct game sales, it’s awesome, tons more than I made on my site. I did a press release and submitted to shareware sites, but didn’t get nearly so many downloads from my site (if I did then I’d have made a lot of sales as CR was > 1%). So what did they do different form me I wonder? Perhaps it was download.com?

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:14:44 +0000

There are press release writing and submission services. Obviously you can do this yourself but it’s generally easier to go to people that have the contacts already so that your release goes to the best possible audience.