(This is a post I shared on Reddit a couple of days back. You can read the original post here)

I wrote a couple of posts on Reddit about quitting my job to go full time indie, and then another announcing the release of the game 2 years after that. The game, Rainswept, was released on Feb 1st (I worked on it alone, while contracting out the music)

Getting straight to the important question - Was it quitting my job worth the risk/ Did it work out?

Yes - but it might not work for everyone. The game wasn't a hit, and in fact performed a bit lower than expectations. But I can get by on this. One of the major things to consider that makes this work is the very low cost of living where I live.

The numbers

Before I get into that, let's discuss the fun stuff. Here are the numbers (1st Feb - 6th May, 3 months since release)

Total units sold: 1249 (Steam - 978; GOG - 271)

Gross income: $12,248 ($9,736 + $2512)

Net income: $6422 ($4955+$1487)

(The game is priced at $11.99)

Net income is the exact amount that finally reaches me after withholding rates, Steam's/ GOG's 30% cut, returns, lower prices in different countries etc. Yes, it's almost half of the gross income.

I find 55% of the gross income is a good way to calculate how much I'll be earning for each month's sales.

I'll now focus on only Steam's sales and data, as their reports go into much more detail, is the major source of my income, and is also what most devs are interested in I'd imagine.

On a monthly basis, this is the split:

February (release month)

Units sold: 711

Gross income: $6793 (incl $100 recouped Steam direct fee)

Net income: $3966 (incl $84 recouped Steam direct fee after VAT)

Also:

1st day: ~165 units; ~$1500 (gross)

1st week: ~507 units, $4618 (gross)

I was initially quite disappointed with the first day numbers as according to my research from that time, to reach my 1 year target (4k copies) I needed to sell 500 copies on the first day. That would then equal to 1st day x 2 = 1st week units (=1000) and 1st week x 2= 1st month (=2000 in first month) and finally 1st month x 2 = 1st year (=4000 in first year)

Since then I've learned that this formula doesn't always apply, at least not for smaller games that have a longer tail and depend highly on word of mouth, discounts and sales. In any case, I'll learn more about this as time goes on.

March:

Units sold: 161

Gross income: $1771

Net income: $988

Daily avg sales - 5

161 units is 22%, or almost quarter of the 1st months sales.

April:

Units sold: 94

Gross income: $1029

Net income (estimated): $565

Daily avg sales - 3

94 units is 58% of March's sales, so the earnings are nearly further halved going into the 3rd month from the 2nd month. It is also 13% of the launch month's sales. I'm hoping that this is where the graph stabilizes, and that the coming months maintain the same number of sales as the 3rd month (except when discounted for sales, of course)

I also released the game on itch and gamejolt a month later, but the sales were depressing, around 20 in total. This despite the game being featured on both those stores, and the demo I released in 2018 getting about 12K downloads. It would seem those are good platforms for demos/ free games, but perform terribly for paid games/ full releases.

Surviving on this income

So I've made about $6420 in the first 3 months, and I expect to earn at least $500 per month going forward, from Steam alone. Considering upcoming console ports for the game + discounts and seasonal sales, I expect the number to be safely above that.

How can I get by on this, and how does this work out for me? As I mentioned above, low costs of living in my country help tremendously. During my time as a junior architect, my starting salary was about $220. (I also earned anywhere between $70-120 every month from selling random t-shirt designs on Redbubble) During that time [during job, before game] my monthly expenditure was less than $150 (including rent, food, parties, everything) Of course, with no family to support etc I could afford to live in what was pretty much a dump (which I shared with my friend)

Once I quit my job, I moved in with my parents for the duration of the game's development. I'm now planning to move out and live on my own again, this time my monthly expenditure shall be double of what it was before (as I'm moving to a bigger city which is also more expensive) Going by everything I've often heard, I'm guessing this still counts as a very low cost of living (do correct me if I'm wrong and if this is infact normal monthly expenditure wherever you live)

Traffic sources

I think discussing the source of traffic during this period is also important. Here are the major sources:

Feb - 66k visits | March - 16k visits | April - 13k visits

Discovery queue - 38% | 43% | 35.4%

New releases - 4.2% | 1.5% | ~

More like this - 0.5% | 2.2% | 2.15% <----- needs to do better

Google, other, reddit about 5% each; review on RPS about 0.09%

New and trending - 8% | 11% | 9.92% <-------I don't understand this one. Never caught the game trending (maybe I missed it) but how is it a source 3 months from release?

Main takeaway: The discovery queue is a MAJOR source of traffic, and I'd be dead without that. Only yesterday I read this blog that talks about what factors affect a game's appearance on the queue, but it seems there's not much you can do to help that other than be a popular and appealing game with positive reviews.

It would also seem that I wasn't affected by the October bug that killed discovery queue as a source of traffic for many games? I'm not sure.

Wishlists:

At the time of launch: ~3300 (Created the Steam page on Jan 2018, so the duration here is about 1 year)

During Feb (release month) ~4400

Current total wishlists 10,101 (3 months)

Conversion rate - 4.9% (below Steam avg of 14%, expecting this to change with discounts and such)

Main takeaway: wishlist numbers explode around release time.

Upcoming plans

A couple of days ago, I went through this excellent blog in an attempt to optimize my Steam page, and mainly improved my short description and prioritized my tags (read point 5 in the link - order matters) I also discovered steamlikes.com - a website that shows you which game's "More like this" your game appears on. At the time, I had 13 likes, and all games except Virginia were relatively unknown, or weren't released yet. My major aim was to get on Night in the Woods' m.l.t list, as that's a huge game with a lot of similarities, and I'm sure players of that game would be interested in this game as well.