Sale Volumes Of Indie Games On Steam?

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7 comments, last by LOE_Developer 7 years, 8 months ago
Hi, guys!
Maybe someone have information about real sale volumes (number of copies) of Indie games on Steam based on his own experiences, and what it looks, compared with planned? Of course it depends on complexity of the game, genre etc., but anyway...?
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I can't speak about individual developers (and trying to predict sales is probably a hopeless task if you're an indie - slightly less hopeless if you're a publisher), but you might find Steamspy.com quite interesting. Example, here's Terraria: http://steamspy.com/app/105600

Thanx man for information, I`ll check it!

Keep in mind that steamspy is estimated data, not real data. It's often out by 100% :lol:

I checked out that link. In my opinion very inconsistent information, extremely hard to draw conclusions regarding my project.

Hodgman: Still, within an order of magnitude, right? ;)

LOE_Developer: the fact is, predicting sales is next to impossible unless you're a big publisher with a lot of experience mapping marketing spend to units sold. For an indie you could sell 10, 1000, or 100000 units of an almost identical game all dependent on how well your marketing efforts paid off, whether you got any mainstream coverage or not, etc. So what looks like inconsistent information might actually just be an honest reflection of the high variability in sales.

:D yes

Kylotan: you`r right! This is my first project, therefore I try to analyze all possible information to draw parallels with it, marketing efforts is my next object of the research ;) With inconsistent information I mean explanation of number of owners "Might be vastly different from sales" :)

How much are you going to spend on marketing?

For PC it's a bit different, but for mobile games, the average "cost per user" is something like $1 to 1.50, meaning that if you spend $10k to $15k on marketing, you will get 10k users.

If you can't afford to spend anything on marketing, then carry out the project with the assumption that you won't have any users :)

Thanks for the info Hodgman! I'll look into that.

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