Gish sales stats released!

Title:Gish
Developer: Chronic Logic
Released: May 2004
Development time: About 6 months with three developers.
Platforms: Windows, OSX and Linux

Development Expenses:
Sounds and music: $3500
Of the $3500 only $500 was paid up front and the rest was a percent of royalties after Gish was released and selling.

Marketing Expenses:
Independent Games Festival (IGF) entry fees: $200.00
Rough estimate of Affiliate and other fees: $2000.00

Total Expenses: $5700.00

The time of the developers and the cost of office space, computers, etc. is not taken into account here.

Sales from chroniclogic.com per year:
2004: 2587
2005: 1335
2006: 449
2007: 140 (through April)
Misc others sales: 10

Total Sales: 4521

Price: $19.95 USD

SWREG (Credit card orders): $79543.98
PayPal: $1436.86
Manual orders (checks, cash, money orders): $195.48

Approximate net sales from chroniclogic.com: $81176.32

Total income from other sites: $6212.04
(Garage Games, Reflexive Arcade, Linspire, Totalgaming.net and Manifesto games)

IGF Prize winnings: $16000.00

Total Retail publishing: $17539.71
(Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Russian, Singapore and Malaysia)

Approximate total income: $121,000 USD

Marketing and Promotion:
For promotion and marketing we did press releases on our web site and tried to get them to as many news sites as possible. We did a pad file and submitted to as many shareware sites as we could find although I don't think they had a large effect over all. We also did advertising in a local print magazine which I don't think had much of an effect either. Keeping other products and news coming out helped keep people coming to chroniclogic.com and finding Gish. We also did a number of patches which made improvements to the game. Each patch was accompanied by a press release. Winning the Grand Prize and Innovation in Game Design at the 2005 IGF gave us a huge boost in traffic to our website but we could not take full advantage of it as the demo downloads slowed our web server to a crawl. In a single day after winning at IGF our web server served 110 GB of the Gish demo which was much more then it could handle. It was after this that I moved all our demo hosting to other servers so if we hit a traffic spike the demo downloads might be slow, but at least the website will still work correctly. It also seemed a lot of people already knew about Gish before it's triumph at the 2005 IGF.

Gish won Game Tunnels Game of the Year and Adventure Game of the Year awards in 2004 which added a nice boost in sales. We also sent out review copies to whatever web pages and print magazines we could find. Gish scored very well in almost all reviews and even got mentioned in the New York Times. We also did a number of interviews and Q&As with magazines, websites and local news papers.

I think the single biggest factor in Gish sales was word of mouth. It is such a unique and fun game that people want to talk about it and they want to tell people about it. Individuals telling friends, posting on forums, talking about Gish to other games all made a huge contribution getting Gish out to the public.

As you can see Gish did not sell well in retail or on other sites and the majority of income generated from Gish (%67) was from direct sales through chroniclogic.com. Gish also missed out on a number of opportunities that could generate a lot more income such as North American retail and console distribution because of a lack of a shared vision among the developers.

Here are some of the reviews Gish received:

Game Tunnel GOTY awards 2004
http://www.gametunnel.com/html/section-viewarticle-66.html
http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=359

Game Tunnel 100%
http://www.gametunnel.com/gamespace.php?id=97&tab=3

Game Chronicles Magazine 95%
http://www.gamechronicles.com/reviews/pc/gish/gish.htm

gotoandplay.it 93%
http://www.gotoandplay.it/_reviews/review.php?r=76

GameZone.com 88%
http://www.gamezone.com/gzreviews/r23881.htm

Gaming Nexus 87%
http://www.gamingnexus.com/Review.asp?ID=519

Home of the Underdogs Top Dog
http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?name=Gish

PC Gamer UK Magazine 85%

Gish is the 2nd best overall selling game for Chronic Logic. Bridge Construction Set remains the best selling game overall and is currently selling better then any other other games despite being almost five years old. Stay tuned for those sales stats and in the mean time check out our latest game:

Shameless plug
Kingdom Elemental

Kingdom Elemental is a light-hearted and comical real time tactics game with serious game play. Set in a fantasy setting Kingdom Elemental takes core game play elements from RTS, tactics and RPG games and combines them into a game that is easy to play without investing most of your real life. Kingdom Elemental features an unlimited number of possible tactics by pitting combinations of your ten hero units and their unique abilities against waves after waves of enemies ranging from the lowly Kobold to the mighty Minotaur.

Kingdom Elemental combines the popular fantasy, strategy, tactics and RPG genres into a compact gameplay package. It is easy to pick up and play and has a simple 2d interface to get users involved in the 3d action.

Check out the webpage:
http://www.chroniclogic.com/ke.htm

Download the free demo:
http://www.chroniclogic.com/ke_download.htm