Principles of an Indie Game Bottom Feeder

Jeff Vogel has an editorial up on Gamasutra on his guidelines for indie game releases. It talks about “dead” genres, piracy and sales, specifically for his latest title, Avadon: The Black Fortress.

Last year, we released Avadon: The Black Fortress HD, our first game for the iPad. Old school, Western-style turn-based RPGs are almost unknown on the platform, so we were serving a classic underserved niche. However, the audience for such games on the iPad was, we guessed, not huge. We decided to sell our game for the princely sum of $9.99. That’s a lot on the iPad. We then made what, for our tiny company, was a lot of money.

When the game had been out for a few months, it settled down to a very reliable average sale rate of 25 copies a day. These are pure Long Tail sales, from people just stumbling upon it in the store. Then we had a two-week half-off sale. This got a bunch of PR and attention, and sales shot up for a few days. Then they quickly settled back down to a constant rate: About 37 copies a day. Here is a screenshot of the sales chart:

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So, at $9.99, Avadon HD was averaging about $250 in sales a day. At $4.99, Avadon HD averaged about $185 a day. When I was preparing the game for release, I strongly considered giving in to peer pressure and selling it at $4.99. I’m desperately glad I didn’t.

This is what is important to remember: If you are serving an underserved niche, the neglected gamers who want that sort of game will be thrilled to find you. They will be excited enough to pay a premium price. On the other hand, if you’re selling a game in a genre that isn’t hugely popular (like turn-based old school RPGs), a low price won’t tempt many customers into a purchase, not when there are a million games with a broader appeal for sale on the same page at a lower price.