Too many numbers...

You work every day, just to stay alive...

I spent today in videogame number hell and after looking at too many projection models, I wondered if maybe I could use the data I have from my own games to create something of an expectation floor for the game I’m currently working on. The benefit of using my own, previous games for this is that I know that they were made under roughly the same conditions as my current project, which means that assuming everything stays the same, I can gauge where it’s going to end up.

To build this floor, I used the GB Rober’s wishlist conversion rate in its first month after release (around 9%), as well as GB Rober’s average daily wishlist additions (without the additions from the Steam Next Fest, since those were several orders of magnitude higher than usual).

Assuming that my next game’s steampage would be up for a year, I would get around 1500 wishlists for it (which is lower than GB Rober had, but again, no Steam Next Fest). Assuming a 9% conversion rate of those wishlists into sales, that would lead to earnings of around $800 within the first month, and about $2000 for the first year(by the way I’m using some projection models I found on the internet for these numbers, but since they aren’t that important for my overall point, I’m not specifying those here).

My “I can live off of making videogames for a year” threshold is around $20,000 (which is barely above the poverty line where I live). So going from the most likely outcome for my next game, I would have to beat my own expectations by a factor of at least 10, to get there. Without changing anything, that seems highly unlikely.

So how could I raise my current floor by that amount? I could increase the price, but there is a point where you get diminishing returns, and I doubt that people would be very happy to buy a game for over $100.

I could also try and get a better wishlist conversion rate, and that’s probably possible to some degree, but you fairly quickly reach the ceiling here as well.

So the best method to raise the whole floor up, is to somehow get more wishlist entries for my upcoming game. By the way: This doesn’t mean that the wishlists themselves are what’s relevant here. They are more an indicator of how many people you’re able to reach in total.

The question now is, how do I manage to do this, with the resources that I have? And to be honest, I do not currently have an answer for that. I would like to have a better answer than just “I hope the game is going to interest more people!”, because that’s not something I have a lot of control over. Sure, I’m trying my best to make the best and most interesting thing (in my opinion) that I can, but I cannot force people to pay attention to it.

There isn’t really a great takeaway here, aside from that it was a good way to put the challenges I have into perspective and how frankly unlikely it is that I can get out of my situation, unless I find some way to raise the overall floor of how well my games do commercially.

And as intimidating as this is, it’s good to know the height of the Mountain you have to climb, even if it’s really tall.