The Business Of Selling Frozen Synapse

[In this article, reprinted with permission from Games Brief, Mode 7's Paul Taylor gives a postmortem on the business of selling its squad-based tactical game Frozen Synapse, stressing the importance of Steam and price drops.] It's great to be back on Gamesbrief, although I always feel slightly strange writing for a blog which focuses exclusively on business. (Editorial note: Paul's earlier post was Why Free-to-Play is not the answer to everything) The reason for this is that, if you're a company or individual looking to enter the games market, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you do things the way we do! Making a "pay-once" (i.e. one upfront fee, no microtransactions) indie game with a long development cycle is a very risky endeavor; you may think that it's wiser to choose another path, especially when starting out. Feel free to disregard, disagree with or argue against any of the conclusions I draw from our experiences. I won't be disclosing full data for various reasons, but hopefully there will be some useful nuggets in there. I'll kick things off by explaining our situation, then I'll move on to a little bit of data and then conclude with some things I believe we've learned from the process of releasing this game. About Frozen Synapse Frozen Synapse was born out of a desire to do two things: firstly to do justice to a particular game design concept and secondly to go all-in on making a high-quality game, in order to figure out if we could really do it! If you'd like to know a bit more about the game, it's a simultaneous-turn-based tactical title with both single player and multiplayer; it's available on PC, Mac, and Linux. Here's a trailer. We knew that the major expense would be our time, rather than any tech, personnel or art assets. So, we took low salaries and treated the company as a young start-up, even though we'd been running for a few years prior to the start of development. Taking away the pressure on cash-flow created a much more creative environment which gave Lead Designer Ian the space he needed to work on the gameplay. Commercially, our targets were:

As you can see, we weren't targeting the mainstream games market; we felt that the rise of social games, ever-huger console titles and skill-light MMO's had left a gap for a more traditional PC game. Additionally, we wanted to make something skill-based that people could play between long sessions of other games as a distraction – a kind of "casual hardcore" title. However, to compete in that space, the game had to be something which felt big: we knew that dual multiplayer and single player was a must in the genre; a narrative, big soundtrack, lots of game modes and random generation options would also help boost the amount of content we could produce on a low budget. We also wanted to borrow from other types of game, so we added social features like instant YouTube export to the mix. Finally, we decided to do a "paid beta" (customers could pre-order the game but get immediate access to a beta version) and offer a free full copy of the game for a friend with every purchase. Results The game went on sale at $24.99, with two different special edition bundles at $34.99. Here is some data on how the game has performed to date: Commercial

Critical

Here is a graph of our direct sales (units sold) since the start of the paid beta in April 2010…

Frozen Synapse Direct Sales

Notes