Telepath Tactics Sold Approximately 3,000 Copies

Developer Craig Stern has penned a two-part blog post on the sales of Telepath Tactics, his indie turn-based tactical RPG. The first blog covers the game’s total budget and the developer’s financial goals, while in the second post he talks about the game’s actual sales and what that means for his development career.

Unfortunately, having only sold about 3,000 copies, Telepath Tactics didn’t sell well enough to give Stern a chance to switch to full-time developer. If there is any silver lining to be found for the independent developer, it’s that he believes that the experience at least taught him a number of valuable lessons that he’ll keep in mind for his future projects:

At $31.62 an hour, 2,320 hours of work puts an additional $73,358.40 of uncompensated labor onto the game’s true cost to develop. Had I compensated myself fairly for all the time I spent developing Telepath Tactics, the total cost of development would actually be something closer to $127,883.65.

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Despite my ruthless efficiency in getting as much out of the game’s budget as I could, I still had to make some hard choices on how to spend the budget I had. I dropped a variety of wish list items from the game, including: animated character portraits, idle animations, hurt animations, swimming animations, battlefield corpses for each class type, and custom character sprites for all unique characters. Faced with the choice of making the game deeper or making the game prettier, I sacrificed innumerable pieces of polish like this throughout development in favor of focusing on giving Telepath Tactics as much complexity and depth as possible. I don’t regret my decision, though I believe that this ultimately hurt the game’s commercial appeal.

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With that in mind, how is Telepath Tactics doing so far? Three months after release, I have sold approximately 3,000 copies total across all platforms, with gross sales revenue upwards of $36,660.

Net sales revenue, which accounts for the cut taken by the various distribution platforms, is a good deal lower than the gross note that net is the amount I actually receive. Valve prohibits developers from disclosing data regarding sales made on Steam, so I cannot reveal my net revenue or otherwise break down my total sales by distribution channel. Ultimately, however, the breakdown doesn’t really matter for my purposes: regardless of what the distribution is, I (1) succeeded in fully recouping my out-of-pocket expenses, (2) made a small profit, and (3) failed to make enough money at launch to support myself making a game full-time over the next two years.

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I have some theories as to why it didn’t sell as well as I had hoped; I will explore those in a future post. For now, though, I’ve learned some valuable lessons that I’ll be taking forward with me into future projects. While Telepath Tactics didn’t meet my primary goal of permitting me to leave my day job and develop my next game full-time, it did do some very valuable things for me: it exposed my work to a much larger audience; it made me progress toward accumulating 1,000 true fans (or 10,000 modest fans, or some agreeable combination of the two); and it provided me with a robust engine and some great pixel art assets that I can use to quickly develop and release future titles.

That last part is important if I can get to a point where, reusing the existing engine and assets, I can develop and release one new RPG per year, then sales comparable to Telepath Tactics’s sales would actually be quite sustainable for me.