$200 Is A Risky Budget For Making Your Game!
I was considering developing a game on a “small budget” of $3,000. Wow, it needs to earn a lot of money for it to be worth my time!
The more research and calculations I did, the more I realized how difficult it is. To explain this, we’re going to show how hard it is to make back a tiny budget of just $200.
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The Budget
We have $200. $100 goes to Steam, we’re using the free version of Unity, and the rest should be spent on Unity Asset Store items to speed up development and purchase basic assets. These will look bland and limit your game’s art direction, so chances are, you are making an unattractive game.
If you are an artist, then you have a huge advantage over programmers on micro budget games. As a programmer it pains me to say this, but a lot of games can be made without any code these days. Unless you’re trying to make a complex simulation game on a micro budget, you don’t really need to be a programmer.
The Revenue Needed
You will lose almost 20% of the games revenue to taxes, and Steam will take 30%. Based on our experience with SimAirport and SimCasino, for every dollar spent on your game, you make 54 cents.
$340 of profit?! Hope you didn’t spend more than a weekend making it! Also remember that your game is ugly! It will be hard for new players to trust you or the quality of your game from appearances. You will be dependent on Steam’s algorithm and the quality of your store page and selling abilities to make sales.
Finding Buyers
Let’s try to make $1,000 revenue with a $1 price tag. Do you know 1,000 people you could sell the game to? I made a free game once called The Great Beyond on Itch.io… most of my friends and family didn’t even play it. I even tried to give out free keys to some of them for SimCasino to get feedback on, a game that’s worth $25, and they still just “Couldn’t be bothered” or “It isn’t my type of game!” I made multiple blog posts about The Great Beyond’s development, and once it came out, I shared it on a couple of subreddits. It only got about 550 downloads.
If you build a following, you could convert your viewers into buyers. This means months of blog post writing, YouTube videos, social media networking, and more! When you make those blogs or videos, people don’t want to hear some random person talk about nothing. You’ve got to offer something really valuable and be entertaining! This is why a lot of developers write development blogs as they go along, but these posts usually appeal more to other developers than buyers.
What happens when you send out keys to content creators? Firstly, only expect small channels to play it. Secondly, only expect less than 1% to actually buy it unless it looks very compelling. (Okay, if the channel has a specific niche and your game fits it, then you may sell a higher percent.) SimCasino had pretty big YouTube videos come out for it and we only would see a couple hundred buyers for each video. Even if a video went up during a discounted period, we saw wishlists spike up much higher than actual buyers. Note: wishlists are when people “bookmark” games that they want to buy in the future.
Making More Revenue
This is where having a following and gaining trust helps. The reality of it is, a $200 budget game shouldn’t sell for more than $1. Usually, people with a following can persuade their audience to spend more via Patreon, donations, or encourage them to buy more expensive deluxe editions that no casual person would ever buy for such a small game. Tim Ruswick, a YouTuber and games developer, made less than $2,000 in base game sales at $10 per purchase. He actually made about 3.5x that on “extras” alone — totaling to just over $7k revenue. So without those extra editions and physical items, he would have made $5k less! This was before he launched on Steam, where he would go on to make a lot more money.
So, to charge a higher price and sell more units you need to gain trust. You have an established following, and you’re able to charge $5 for the base game, and $10 for a deluxe edition. Maybe you sell physical content to your biggest fans for $20-$50. You don’t care about losing the average casual person yet — you can do a steep discount in the future to win them over. That way, you can still (eventually) charge them as little as $1. Now you only have to sell 1/5 as many copies to break even! Revenue from the deluxe versions, donations, and the later discounted sales will be profit. Of course, a deluxe edition will inflate your dev time and possibly the budget too, and you have to factor in the cost to make physical goods plus shipping. The reality of it is — this is not a $200 budget game anymore!
To be clear: this doesn’t mean your game is suddenly 5x better. We’re assuming that if you have an established audience it’s because you are good at what you do, and were able to make a product that benefits from having that experience of sharing your project early and getting feedback. I believe that followers comes naturally with good quality — if you are struggling to gain a following then don’t consider charging $5 or higher for your $200 budget game!
What About My $3,000 Game Idea?
Of course, that budget would give me enough for a good amount of in-game & store page artwork, but it’s not great. The better art would compensate for some of the “trust issues” I mentioned, and of course I would be able to charge a much higher price than a $200 budget game, but the reality of it is, I can’t charge 15x as much for a 15x bigger budget.
The $3,000 budget does not include my own wages. So really, if I spent a month on it, the $5,100 profit really is about $1,100 if I factor in a developers wage of $4,000. Yes, I don’t lose the money that I paid myself, but that remaining profit needs to be put away in case the next project bombs!
If $3,000 is risky then what about raising it on Kickstarter so I don’t have to invest my own cash? Well, that has pretty much the same (or worse) challenges when it comes to raising money! It used to be the place people went to… kick start their projects. Now, it’s really just a pre-order site that requires a pretty far developed product. Unless you have a great following and some really awesome concept art, you can’t kick start a game on there anymore.
Some people may argue this is great for the consumer, but it’s detrimental to those who can’t afford to make their own games that want to start a business. Even a lot of grants require some sort of established project and outside funding now! A loan could lead to debt. Big publishers ignore little developers, while little publishers are mostly lacking the experience to help or are in fact scams with poor business practices.
