I had to dress up for this video. And get a drink. Kippis! Ahh, water… The finest drink of them all. So, in the beginning of 2020 I released my
first game, Mortal Glory. This was after 9 months of learning and hard
work while also working a full-time job at the same time. Now the game has been out for a full one year
and it’s about time I shared with you how much money the game has made. Some of you are probably inpatient so I will
reveal the total number right away. So how much has my first game sold in one
year? Drumroll please. Here. That’s how much my game and it’s DLC sold
in total during one year. That’s not how much money I got myself though. Not even close. Stick around if you want to hear some more
details. Hey, my name is Auro! I’m an indie game developer and I also make
weekly youtube videos to help you on your own gamedev journey. If you are interested in hearing more details
about how I reached that sales number with my first game, consider subscribing to the
channel. I aim to be transparent and share all the
useful information that might help you. Ok so 128884 dollars. That’s the total and the vast majority of
that is from Steam. Aside from Steam, the game was also a brief
moment on Chrono.gg’s creator store. The game sold 39 copies over there, totaling
301 dollars. Everything else is from Steam as I haven’t
put the game up in other stores. So, let’s take a closer look at the Steam
data. I have sold 17486 copies on Steam, which totals
to just a bit over 113 thousand dollars, making the average selling price 6 dollars and 46
cents per unit. Which is 20% lower than the default US dollar
asking price. It is lower because of discounts and differences
in regional prices. Surprised by the popularity of the game, I
decided to start working on a DLC. After a few months of work, I released the
DLC in September of 2020. It has sold 4693 copies in a little bit over
4 months. Meaning that 27% of the people with the base
game have also bought the DLC. Nice! This amounts to around 15500 dollars in sales. Let’s take a quick look at what these sales
look like on a line chart. As expected the biggest peak is from the release
week. The curious thing with the release is that
I actually got a lot more sales on the 3rd and 4th day of the release instead of the
first two days. I’ll probably make a video specifically
about the release week so let’s skip the details for now. Coming to the next peak in mid-April. That is when I pushed out a localisation update
and put the game on sale for the first time after release. Then the next peak is at mid-May. I believe this was either because of Steam
pushing the game to a Chinese audience or then a Chinese streamer featured the game
as I got a large bump from the Chinese audience at this point. The next small peak is again a sale. This is the steam summer sale. Here in mid-September I published the DLC
and had a sale again. This time for a new low of 30% off. The bump here at the end of September is again
thanks to the Chinese audience. I didn’t have a sale or anything so either
it’s the Steam algorithm doing it’s crazy thing or a popular Chinese streamer played
the game. Then here is again a sale and the small bumps
at the end are also sales. There’s one more important revenue source
from steam that I almost forgot to include. That is the Community Market fee. I have gotten 14 dollars from that during
the few months that it has been out . If you are wondering where this comes from, I get
10% of all the trading that goes on with Mortal Glory’s Steam assets. I created them myself and if I remember correctly,
it took me a full day to create everything that was needed. So from a purely financial point of view,
it probably wasn’t worth it to create those assets. But I did get a few positive comments when
I put them out so I would say that made it worthwhile. That brings the total amount of sales, base
game + DLC, up to 128884 dollars within 1 year. I am very happy with this number and it blows
my mind that the game has sold well. Initially my expectations were very low and
selling just 10% of this would have been amazing for me. But, now that we have looked at the big numbers,
the second most important question is, how much of this do I get myself? Glad you asked, let me show you. I will leave out the Community Market fees
and the Chrono.gg sales to make it a bit more simple First Steam takes out of that price returns,
chargebacks and taxes, which in my case amounts to 19152 dollars. That takes around 15% of the pot. Then Steam wants it’s cut. For most games, this is 30%. So that takes 32825 dollars out of the pot. I don’t have a publisher so this is now
the money that gets sent to my company’s bank account. My bank account is in euros so a small amount
of that money is lost because of the currency conversion. But let’s stick to dollars so it doesn’t
get too confusing. So 76592 dollars gets sent to my company’s
bank account. But again, that doesn’t mean it’s money
I get to keep. At this point it will differ a lot based on
what country you are doing business from and what type of a company you have. Or if you don’t have a company. But having some sort of a company is recommended
though. This is money that I can now use freely to
buy game assets or use for some other company needs. One of those is paying salary. If I pay salary to myself, I will need to
pay income tax on that salary. If I just leave that money on my company’s
bank account, the company has to pay income tax for it. Let’s first deduct the development costs
of the game. I went through them in more detail in a previous
video. But the total amount ended up being 3174 dollars. So 73418 dollars after deducting the costs. It’s good to note that this amount does
not yet include any compensation for myself for all the hours I used. At this point it’s very dependent on how
you use that money and how much you are able to optimize your taxes, but I think a decent
estimate would be that of this amount I still need to pay around 25% in taxes. So that leaves around 55000 dollars that I
could get to my own bank account from the total sum. I haven’t actually paid myself any salary,
but that’s about the sum I could pocket after taxes. That’s around 43% of the total sum. So in essence, for every dollar my game has
sold, I have personally earned 43 cents from it. I didn’t have a publisher. But if I had, this number would be even lower. Let’s say if the publisher took 30%, it
would be around 29 cents for every dollar It’s not quite so glamorous after first
seeing the big numbers. Considering that making games is tough work. But don’t get me wrong. What I have gotten is a very big sum of money
compared to the amount of hours I have put in. Based on my hour tracking, I have put in a
total of 1681 hours into Mortal Glory. Around 1000 hours before release and the rest
after that. These hours also don’t include all the hours
I have put into my company itself. With the 1681 hours, my earnings would amount
to an hourly wage of almost 33 dollars. I’m quite happy with that. It will also keep going up as the game keeps
selling more. An article by Danny Weinbaum suggests that
on average games sell 58% of their lifetime revenue within the first year. So based on that estimate, my game would end
up selling a total of 222000 dollars during its lifetime. This would bump up my personal earnings up
to 95000 dollars and the hourly wage to 56 dollars per hour. But of course this is all hypothetical and
in reality I will end up using a good chunk of that money for my next game. Hopefully I will have enough time soon to
start working on that. I’ve been anxiously waiting for it, but
so far I have just been way too busy with other things in my life to give it the focus
it deserves. But anyway, that’s everything I can think
of now to say about the sales numbers. Please leave a like if you found this interesting
or helpful. Also let me know in the comments if you would
like to hear more about some specific aspect of the sales data or anything else. Alright, thanks for watching and see you in
the next one!
