Great Sellers

#1 In my opinion, critical acclaim is what has most often moved something from online only/shareware to full retail. Sierra understand that an online-purchase game is, in the current climate, only going to sell a fraction of what it would at retail.

Moreover, one game might sell only twice as much in retail because it's the kind of game only hardcore gamers would buy, whereas another would only sell 1 copy were it released on the internet and millions at retail (-cough- WWTBAM -cough- -cough-).

#2 Seriously speaking though, if my team were to take a loan on making this game, we'd have to ensure some good online sales or box publishing to repay the loan. What would be considered good sales for a project using say, 1.5 mil to make?

#3 I have no idea, but 1.5 mil sounds like one hell of a lot of money. If you've got that kind of money you want to be certain you've got a retail publisher.

#4 By Industry standards 1.5 million is reportedly chump change. By Financial Institution standards it's not really.

The folks who made Vampire: Masquerade (totally as a for instance I haven't even played the game) cited a budget of (if memory serves) 5 million. The Volition Project Lead described this amount as uncommonly small. Not sure how sales went by the time it was ported to its various platforms, or even really how sales for the average retail title look. The best sellers for the previous week, and their sales figures, are available at gamsutra.com.

Having said that, Vampire had a more or less built in potential audience of folks who'd played the RPG, and the team behind it was experienced. Your Personal Profile didn't have much information on it, and your website suggests that you are probably fans ("Vice President & Director of XtremeBuilder: Deathwinger") looking to make the jump, like a lot of us.

Securing 1.5 million loan with an idea is --for all intents and purposes impossible-- (the reasons for this have been well documented elsewhere) - I don't doubt that it has happened but you'd want to consult a star chart for planetary allignment and so on before holding your breath.

There are other options you might consider. If you need character models and don't mind paying something for them, Joe Maruschak may be willing to take this on for you. Other companies, a quick search through google turned up a lot of them, could help you out for this side of 50,000.00. There are reportedly lots of programmers here looking for the right project who will work for something like free short term - in anticipation of eventual revenue and compensation.

Most of us here are Blood, Sweat, and Tearsing it for the "Love of the Game" and freely acknowledging that we'd like to make some money along the way. I've described my teams' project as a "Four Credit Cards and The Truth" endeavour. Starting with concerns about money is putting a very worn-down cart before the horse.

If somehow you do get 1.5 million though, it could happen after all, be sure to spend it on your game. People get that part wrong all the time.

#5 Yes, many developers are spending millions developing modern games (not even including the marketing, which is more of the publisher side of it), with hefty portions of that money going to pay the salary of large art teams, and the rest paying for the programmers, tools, etc.

As depressing as this sounds, consider that you still see great selling titles that were developed by tiny teams for peanuts. Rollercoaster Tycoon jumps instantly to mind.

Small scale (in terms of development team size) games can work well, if done right, but there are certain genres of games where its very difficult (and just going to get more so) for indies to compete with the 'big boys'. FPS shooters are such a genre. Sadly a lot of GG/Torque products seem to be shooters or slight variations on shooters, which somewhat makes sense based on Torque's history and architecture. Some of these games may end up being very fun but it remains to be seen if anyone would pay even $10 for them when they can get last year's professionally made FPS games for about that much in the bargain bin at Walmart.

#6 Heh, I wouldn't waste a budget on a game that is basically an FPS rip off. But I wonder how much it would sell on a site like garagegames if it is really deserving a purchase, who would pay to download a game is what I mean?

#7 games usually sell about 1% of there overall total online, so anywhere between the line of 1,000 to 10,000 games sold on garage games would be considered a successfull game.

#8 Don't take out a $1.5MM loan ot make a game. It is a sure way to get yourself into trouble. If you do decide to approach investors or lenders, please have them contact me for their due diligence.

As I have stated many times, we don't know how many units an indie game published on the GG site will sell because we have not done it yet. Monster Studios has "over spent" and has several hundred thousand dollars invested in Chain Reaction, but we have not illusions as to the return. This was a long term business investment that needs to be amorized over several products and a couple of years of sales before we expect a return.

I do not see a scenario that could justify spending $1.5MM in an on-line game published through GarageGames. We simply do not have the data or the history to make this gamble yet.

The argument that $1.5MM is a pittance compared to most PC games is incorrect. Although there are high level PC games getting big budgets, most are below $1MM. As an indie, you have to figure out how to do it for less than 10% of the norm.

Jeff Tunnell GG

#9 Most of our titles have been around the $150k-$200k mark... it goes very very fast....

-J

#10 i dont know it just might be me but isnt some people missing the whole idea of INDEPENDENT game development? i for one expect no more then a $0 budget and a team spread out across the world.
if youve got a budget great but money and an engine wont make a great game. although they say that if a 100 monkeys were at a computer for long enough you would eventually get quake 4...