Category: business

So yup! Today is the day, according to my calendar. Six months into Early Access on my political strategy game; Democracy 4! Thats quite a milestone, and a good time to reflect on how things are going so far.

The big thing to note is that this is the first of the ‘Democracy’ games that has been in Early Access. In the past, I did listen a lot of user feedback, and released patches and updates to the game, but that was all post-release. Of course, these days the change between being in early access and post-release support is very blurred, and to be honest totally arbitrary. I doubt I will stop improving and tweaking the game just because we declare it to be out of Early Access at some point. I guess the only real difference is the point at which you want to signal to potential buyers that the game is fully playable and content complete enough to enjoy.

Frankly, that point is now. We have committed publicly to adding Italy as a playable country, and that brings the total countries in the game to 9, which I think is pretty reasonable. This is an indie game, with mod support and I don’t think 9 countries is too small a number.

I’ll almost certainly add more anyway…

The thing is, I don’t actually mind being in Early Access. I guess there is a bunch of ‘deferred sales’ from people waiting for me to flip that switch, but I am in no immediate hurry to do so. Having the game in EA encourages feedback and lets players know you will read it, and thats definitely a good thing.

Something else that suggests that we may be complete enough to declare the game done, is our language support. We entered early access with just English but we now support a total of 8 different languages. I am tempted to add Chinese or Japanese at some point, but TBH there isn’t a particularly strong business case there, and translating from English to these languages i quite expensive…

One thing we have not done yet is an OSX port. TBH apple have done absolutely everything possible to put me off ever considering this, even though the game uses opengl and is not tied to windows. Frankly, apple change what they are doing, pull support for things, and redesign their entire business model and dev platform so often I don’t even *know* if they even support opengl any more, and whatever API they support now will change next year, so whats the point? Maybe at some future point when apple have settled down, stopped charging devs for having the honor of making OSX games, and stopped changing the min specs, maybe it will make sense, but until then my advice to mac gamers is to buy a PC.

Anyway, people like stats on anniversaries of game releases, so lets look at some. Here are some juicy steam stats.

• 1,177 reviews
• Roughly 58,000 sales
• Roughly 88,000 wishlists right now.
• Current review score: 86% positive

Now a bunch of more fun gameplay style stats:

• Games per day: Roughly 4,000
• Most popular screen res: 1920px
• Average framerate: 58.4 FPS
• Most common event: ‘Share IPO success’
• Most triggered situation: ‘Technological Advantage’
• Most triggered achievement: ‘ShuffleMeister’
• Average Socialism: 39.1%
• Average Liberalism: 80.9%
• Average Voter Cynicism: 1.55%

I suspect real world voters are more cynical :D

I know lots of indies would have done a super-complex analysis of that units sold chart with arrows and breakdowns of what each spike was, but frankly I’m too busy and don’t care. My experience is that a HUGE chunk of getting more sales is just improving the game, and that the spikes tend to be steam sales or discount weekends etc. I’m more interested in growing that lower line (regular daily sales) than the spikes. YMMV.

(My wife is triggered when I say ‘math’ because its American. we say maths here in the land of Monty python)

I have a bit of a rule that I try to follow, that when I am trying to make a business decision, I always calculate forwards not backwards. What I mean by that, is I try not to think ‘I’d like a Polish translation of Democracy 4. is it justified?’. That already sets you on the foot of WANTING it to be. The best way to do this is to set out the number that justifies a greenlight, then to work out the equations as best you can, then unemotionally go with the result.

Democracy 4 is currently in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The classic strategy game translation pattern is EFIGS. I have added Brazilian Portuguese because it was done by someone who got in contact with me direct, so was affordable.

Anyway. Lets look at Russian, Japanese and Polish.

If I look at Democracy 3, which was translated into Russian and Polish but not Japanese, I get the following full-history revenue breakdown. Note that the game did not *ship* initially with those, the languages were added later.

• Russian revenue $91k gross
• Japanese revenue $45k gross
• Polish revenue $89k

Democracy 3 sold super well, over 6 years with 4 expansion packs, so the total revenue is really good, and obviously Democracy 4 revenue right now is WAY lower, but I’m trying to plan ahead.

Steam take 30%, and there are refunds, chargebacks, and sales tax, so we actually get about 60% which gives me:

• Russian net income $54,600
• Japanese net income $27,000
• Polish net income $53,400

The cost of a translation for the game is roughly $7-9k. It can go higher with more interesting languages like Japanese, so lets say the high end and assume $9k. We are likely to add a fair bit of extra policies etc. over time, and need to keep everything up to date so lets budget for a final $10k per language. I also have to implement it, play test it, and deal with any problems that might come up that have not been seen before in earlier languages. This generally isn’t taking me more than a few days each time, but lets push the complete implementation cost for each one to $12k.

This currently assumes that Democracy 4 sells the same as Democracy 3. This may not be true due to the following negatives:

• People might be sick of politics due to real world events
• Much more competition in the games market in general
• Players of democracy 3 may have ‘had their fill’ of politics and decide not to upgrade

However there are also positives:

• Young people seem much more engaged in the Bernie sanders / alt-right / Jeremy Corbyn / AOC era than they were during the relatively bland time when D3 came out.
• Steam is bigger, with a larger addressable audience now
• D3 was a hit, and some people will be easy to persuade to get D4 if they enjoyed the previous game.

I’m not super risk-taking, so lets be pessimistic and assume that the balance of these factors means that the long term income of Democracy 4 (which I should have mentioned is a MUCH better game btw) is likely to be about 66% of that of Democracy 3. That gives us these values:

• D4 projected Russian net income: $36,036
• D4 projected Japanese net income: $17,820
• D4 projected Polish net income: $35,244

There is a big assumption here, and that is that people playing Democracy 3 in country X…were playing it in the local language, and would NOT have bought an English-language version. The way to check this is to look at the percentage of sales in the first year of release that were Chinese for D3, and compare it with the percentage in the most recent year (where Chinese was translated). This is not perfect, and china specific but we get this:

• Percentage of D3 sales to China year 1: 0.16%
• Percentage of D3 sales to China last year: 4.33%

Same for Polish:

• Percentage of D3 sales to Poland year 1: 0.53%
• Percentage of D3 sales to Poland last year: 2.7%

So we can see that the effect of a native language version boosted Chinese sales and Polish sales, and the relative native-language-applicable revenue was 96% and 80% respectively, so lets split the difference and assign a value of 88% to the revenue:

• D4 projected income from native Russian: $31,711
• D4 projected income from native Japanese: $15,681
• D4 projected income from native Polish: $31,014

This all makes a super-convincing case to do Russian and Polish, and a slim, but arguable case for justifying Japanese. There are of course other factors, and huge margins for error. One factor is the multiplier-flywheel effect. If I could sell an extra 10,000 copies of Democracy 4 tomorrow and get no money at all for it…its kind of in my interests, because then it climbs up the ‘top sellers’ lists and gets more visibility. Also, I may already be selling copies of D4 to english-speaking players in Polad/Japan who cannot recomend it to their non-english speaking gaming friends yet. Thus, the word-of-mouth of the game is currently not at full capacity.

PLUS! Democracy 4 is not just sold on steam, but direct from us (via humble widget), through GoG, Humble Store and the Epic store. Epics royalty rate is famously higher, and that then changes the figures slightly again in my favor…

I shall mull this over, because no indie dev suddenly commissions $30k more contract work without being 100% sure and sleeping on it, but I thought people may be interested in seeing the thought process.

I know that crowd-sourced translations are a thing, we even started it with D4, but progress is too slow, and also too unpredictable. It also runs the risk of multiple contributors having different translations for the same word in various places throughout the game. I think professional translations are a better system. YMMV.

Thanks to the wonders of excel, and php etc, I can present this amazeballs chart showing both the number of games, and the number of hours in total playtime each day for Democracy 4, my indie political strategy game.

I think people can overanalyze this stuff TBH, and I don’t think there is anything especially amazing to note. This is ALL playthroughs, not just steam copies BTW. There is a very nice bit at the end where the hours played decouples upwards from games played, implying people are playing for longer sessions (which generally you equate with better balance, and happier customers).

I have quite a lot of Democracy 4 stats, but they are much more interesting to me than most people, and the data can be a bit complex. Probably the most interesting stuff is player feedback on what they think the developer should work on next (taken from in-game voting). Here is the data from the latest version:

I do find stuff like that pretty helpful tbh.

So…. my political strategy game Democracy 4 has been in Early Access on steam for 2 months exactly today, plus on sale in a soft-launch alpha before then for a few months. How are things looking from the POV of one of those oh-so-predictable stats-dump indie dev blog posts?

Here are the headline numbers:

Net revenue (cash I get) about $500,000.

Gross revenue (headline dick-swinging number) about 800,000.

Before you go OMGZ how successful, I must also make a political strategy game ASAP, lets dig deeper and find out more about what that means in terms of profits. Firstly, the game is not actually even profitable yet, unless I count money that is in sales reports that I have not received. (Stores can take a while, usually 20-30 days to pay you after a month ends).

Everybody likes pie charts, so here is a breakdown showing where the NET money comes from. Note that the gross split is different as epic famously gives a higher rev share to the developer (as does the humble store). Direct sales came through itch.io and through the humble widget, both of which net me 95% of the sales revenue (woohoo). You can see how that pays off if you can get early, keen players to buy direct instead of through a store.

Of course, as I KEEP trying to make new devs aware, revenue, even net revenue after currency conversions costs and everything else are NOT profit. You have to spend money to make the game. So far Democracy 4 has cost $357,000 to make, including a reasonable but not exorbitant salary for me. Thats to get to *this point*, and there will be more spending to come because the game will likely need some more translation costs, some more time (quite a bit more), and just existing as positech costs me over $200 a month server fees and $150 month forum fees, and all sorts of other nonsense.

Still… it looks like I have a profitable game, and certainly one that should make a profit by the time it comes out of Early Access. Its a sequel to a very successful indie game so that’s not a surprise, but I didn’t take anything for granted. Its easy to get cocky and arrogant and then lose a fortune on a sequel.

So far I have not spent the majority of my allotted marketing budget for the game. My plan was to have a marketing spend of $150,000. So far I have spent just $35,000 of that. Part of that was to promote the recent autumn sale. Some more will happen between now and early access release, and then there will likely be a bit of a big ad-splurge when we come out of Early Access.

So far the game has been full price apart from the recent autumn sale on steam where it was 20% off. Its not a cheap game ($26.99) so its still likely at a price a lot of the more cost conscious gamers are not going to bite at. Also there are a lot of people who just *do not buy* early access games, so I am guessing there is a fair bit of pent-up-demand waiting for future purchasing opportunities.

In terms of wishlists the stats are like this:

D4 currently has about 60,000 wishlists. Conversion rate is 13%, total additions is 75k. I don’t get that obsessed with monitoring those figures TBH.

Because my strategy has always been maximum independence and resilience as a company, I try to spread my income as much as I can between different stores. I know a lot of indie devs think that PC == steam, and that’s just flat out WRONG. I got Democracy 4 on the epic store slightly later than I hoped for, so it missed the initial launch, but its still a nice source of revenue, and has not been discounted on that store yet, which is interesting.

Feedback on the game has been GREAT and last time I checked the average review score was in the 90s, which is fantastic. Obviously these are keen, early-players so that review score might be skewed high, but I can live with that :D. Its also worth pointing out, when assessing potential sales, that the game is currently PC only, and in English and (90% done) Italian languages. By the start of January I expect to have French, German, Spanish and Portuguese translations, which should open up the games potential market quite a bit.

A final note: My personal opinion, with a LOT of years indie experience (selling since 1997) is that new indies get WAY TOO OBSESSED with comparing their own games to those of others in terms of stats. Unless you have the exact data on 50,000 indie games (including their budgets) and a machine learning AI, its NOT going to predict whether or not your indie game will do well. I think devs should spend less time analyzing sales stats and more time analyzing player feedback and player stats. I spend a LOT of time trying to balance and optimize and improve the GUI for Democracy 4, and thats a far better use of my time.

I hope this was of some interest.