Fundbetter Qs: 7

Yep. Just the one this time. Because wooh boy. This is a scary one. BUT! If I can do it, you can do it! And if we can do this we can do anything!

7. A minimal business plan, including a plausible guess about how much revenue you’ll earn on which platform. ‘Plausible’ means ‘based on at least two sets of figures for similar games which weren’t wildly successful.’

How do you figure this out? How do you present it? OMG WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN! Wait. Okay. Breath. The keyword here you hang on to is 'minimal.' They don't want a full break down with an accountant. Minimal. What do you expect to make and how do you compare it to other games? How do you even find out how much money other games make? Well. There's no sure fire way except directly reaching out to similar games' developers and asking. That works if you've got other games in mind, you know other developers, or have that kind of inside edge.

As for me, I had no initial idea what to compare my game to. (Not because I'm a special snow flake who is doing something TOTALLY NEW AND DIFFERENT, I'm not.) So here's what I did.

I used some keywords on Steam for similar-ish games. Visual Novels, interactive fiction, horror, and so on. I came up with a few titles that didn't appear 'wildly popular.' (Not on Steam's top seller list.) When I found a few that looked reasonably comparable to what I'm doing both in scope and in development studio size, I was ready to figure out how much they made. I'm one person making a game. I may have some help before it's done, but by and large, comparing my work to a studio with artists and marketing is probably a set up for failure. What about you? Consider what you can do and compare how big your party is when you're looking at what to compare with.

I'm going to be pretty conservative here.

So here's what I came up with.

I expect to sell somewhere about 3 to 5,000 copies of this game at somewhere around five bucks a piece. This is similar to what ebook readers seem willing to pay from some of my research. While this isn't an ebook, clearly a lot more goes into it, it looks like only bigger studios with more marketing experience can get much traction at or above ten bucks. So. Very conservatively, that's somewhere in the range of 15 to 25,000 bucks. Where do I get these ideas? Well. Steam Spy suggests that the mean average indie game sells something like 22,000 copies. But again, I'm a one person team for now. I used Steam Spy to look at a few similar games. Here's the Steam Spy numbers for Bad End (which is admittedly more manga visual novel than I'm going for) and they've sold about 6,000 copies at somewhere around two bucks a pop. Or you can look at Versus: The Lost. They've got a much more minimal game interface, but, interactive fiction for sure. Steam Spy says they've gotten something like 4,000 copies out there at around four bucks. I feel like that's a fair comparison. I hope to do better, I actually think I will do better, but this seems to be a rate that's safe to invest in, so to speak. :D

Currently, the plan is to go up on Steam, Itch.io and Gamejolt. Closer to completion of the game I'll look at how reasonable it is to try and export to IOS and get on the IPad or Android store. I can't guess at the numbers for these locations yet as I haven't heavily invested in actually going that way.

Alright. So that's that! This? = scary. You can do it! Let me know if I can help!