Business Plan

#21 I know Indy companies don't make allot of money. What I'm trying to get a hold of is some solid numbers. Example how much a Garage Game title makes in the 1st week 2nd week 3rd week, 2nd month ETC Then using a chart you can predict the sales of the project over a 3 or 30 year period.

Of course there is exceptions, everyone knows sales could jump unexpectantly but a business plan is about facts about what has happened. There is plenty of garage game titles. If I could get the 3 month sale period for some of the games on a week by week basis that's all I'd need.

If not what I'll do is guestamation.
If I don't have solid numbers I probably won't provide it to the whole community since it will just be hear say.

#22 I would say assume about 2 grand +- $2-$300 a month for a good game. Your sales are gonna be a bit higher the first month and drop the second and third etc unless you do something to bring them back up. That something could be putting your game on another site where more people see it, created an update that fixes a lot of the issues people had when they gave you feedback and then readvertising that update. The update solves two purposes in my eyes, to show that you do infact listen and improve your product and it also allows you to advertise your game on all the websites again since your sending them new news to post about. If you do nothing, in a year you will probably be lucky to pull $100. If you work on it though you still could pull $100 in a year but you could also pull 10 grand a month in a year. This is why we say trying to predict a 3 year business plan is almost impossible as an indie. You just can't use a chart like the pros with millions of advertising and box publishing can. An indie game isnt gonna be on TV and draw lots of customers, your gonna have to work to getting your game in front of their eyes and if you don't work on it your game is gonna do poor.

-Tim aka Spock

#23 I bet the Starscape guys are making a decent amount of money right now. They are advertising on Penny Arcade with banners, amongst other things. I don't think it is enough for several people to live off of though.

Just like with every product there is a certain number of people out there who would be interested in buying your product if they had the right information. Can you get that information in front of enough people? And how many people are we talking about? For Diablo, a game that pretty much every gamer tried at least once, it was in the millions, for a turn-based simulation of carrot growing, more like in the hundreds.