Introduction

I'll get straight to the point. If your game is good enough to attract a professional publisher, and you sell it worldwide, you should sell at least four thousand copies over two years. Gross profit should be between £5 and £15 per game (UK sterling or equivalent). Most people can live off this. Sounds easy, eh?

This essay is about adventure games, the classic point-and-click style. In this essay I will look at the adventure games market in general, then look at some amateur games that tried to go commercial, and then see what we can learn.

But first, some blue skies thinking. Adventure games deal in stories and human interaction. So adventure games have the potential to reach more people than any other genre. The established games market, outside of adventure games, is narrowly focused on fighting, racing and building. So it only appeals to a few people, mainly teenagers. In contrast, adventure games deal with stories and conversations. One day someone will make a game that reaches beyond the games ghetto and into the mass market. That person will become very, very wealthy. But until then, this essay is just about selling to the established adventure game market.

The economics of the video games market

As an independent games creator, you should know the competition. A major video game (such as the adventure game Syberia, or any of a thousand games in other genres) takes around 2 years and 40 people to develop. A typical small developer will have 10 people in the team, much less than $500k marketing. A major adventure game, if made in the USA, would run between $2M and $2.5M. In Poland, half that or less. However, 50% of game development time isn't game development, but meetings with lawyers, tax men etc.

Big name video games are priced at $40 (in the US) or £40 (in the UK). This typically falls to £10 on the bargain rail after a few months or years, depending on sales. Small independent games can expect to go for up to £30, but most sell online for around £10. For most other genres, most sales take place in the first month. So a game is classed as a hit or a failure based on the first month's sales. Adventure games tend to sell over a longer period, which means that even successful adventure games are often classed as failures because their first month's sales were modest.

For the biggest sales you need to get your game into a physical shop, which means getting a reputable publisher to distribute it. Retailers get around forty percent of the cover price. Production costs are typically around one pound per game, to cover printing and transport. But what about online sales? You will need an established outlet - reputation counts for a lot when you ask for people's money. And the bad news is that some download sites charge just as much as regular retailers, even though their costs are far lower.

Based on the above figures, you can expect to make between £5 and £15 gross profit per game (that is, after manufacturing and retail costs, but before any additional publishers' costs such as overheads and promotions.) So if you live in a small apartment in the cheap end of town, and your partner has a job, and if you can make a new game every two years, you can earn enough to live from selling less than four thousand copies of each game. Less than four thousand copies! Remember that number. But if you want to be a millionaire, you will need to sell around a hundred thousand copies.