How Much My Indie Game Made In 1 Week

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]We can get into the figures, but it was a good the the you know, the headline is the launch went fine. It went fine. A lot of other people in the games industry, solo developers or small teams would say that it was a fail, um but for me as a solo developer, and I've launched, you know, a few of I've launched um Obs Obs Obs independently as a solo game developer, which totally flopped, so this in comparison is much, much more successful. And I co-created 10 Bells with Hill Fort Games, and that has got a really long tail of sales.

[00:00:36]Um so, in comparison, the main headline is this went absolutely fine. Like, it's repeatable, it's sustainable.

[00:00:46]I could in theory make a living from Keep Doing What I've Done With This Launch. So, that's that's the main sort of headline takeaway from this video if you wanted to kind of stop now. It went fine.

[00:00:56]>> [laughter] >> Um but we can dive into the details a bit more.

[00:01:00]This is specifically just looking at the main version of Game About Making a Planet, and we can see the revenue, um so, net 8,000 dollars. And I think that works out minus sort of 30% and then converted into pounds, I think that's something like £4,000 of sort of profit cuz I take away 30% for my taxes.

[00:01:28]Um which is like for what I'm aiming for, like what my aim is to make this a sustainable business, is £2,000 a month.

[00:01:41]So, if I can keep £2,000 a month going, or go higher than that, then I'd say it's like a win.

[00:01:48]And I'll probably keep doing it. Up until this point, for the last sort of year and a bit, it hasn't been that much at all. I've been roughly on like a part-time wage the equivalent with just the money from 10 bells, which launched over a year ago.

[00:02:01]So, this has come very you know, a very good time that I really, really need the money, basically.

[00:02:09]Um so, let's have a look at some of the some of the stats and figures here. So, total units is coming up to 2,000, which is really, really cool.

[00:02:19]Um and the daily active active users are 309 over the past 7 days. That's the average, so that's really cool. It means people are returning to the game and still buying the game. Obviously, you saw the peak in the sales, which we'll look into in more detail. But, people are coming back and replaying the game multiple times to sort of complete the game, which is really good.

[00:02:38]Um and the median play time is 1 hour um 19 minutes, which is brilliant. That's really, really good. And that is just going up and up and up. I I recently checked and I think it's gone up another couple of minutes just uh the last time I checked last time I took this image.

[00:02:54]So, yeah, that the average the median play time is going up, which is really, really good sign.

[00:02:59]Um so, that's that.

[00:03:02]This is the sales chart in a bit more detail, so you can see what an okay sales chart looks like for any sort of small teams. So, the peak was like 88, I believe.

[00:03:16]And then it drops off, and then we've got the long tail here. So, I didn't want to do a day one thing at just 88, because it didn't really give it was like a few grand in one day, a few thousand pounds. I think it was like two or three thousand dollars.

[00:03:30]So, it it didn't really give much information, because it was like, well, that was okay, it's fine, but who knows what the the tail is really going to be determining you know, how if you can make this a sustainable business or not. Obviously, if I made hundreds of thousands in day one, um that would have been a different story, and that would have been a more interesting video.

[00:03:51]But, here you can see you've got the days the day cycle coming and going. At the moment it's still on a 20% discount and it's on for 2 weeks. So this is the end of the first week and then we've got another week of of 20% off.

[00:04:04]Um I think in the future I'm going to do Well, actually I can't really talk about sales, but it's just over $5.

[00:04:14]And that might change in the future because of things like the feedback that I've had from the game on the reviews.

[00:04:21]So yeah, this is the long tail here.

[00:04:24]Looks pretty stable, which is really really good news.

[00:04:28]Um in terms of Tem Bells launch, we launched with only 400 wish lists and it kind of gained popularity after after launch. Like we had the majority of the streamers and YouTubers play the game after launch because it's quite a a good streamer game. Whereas this is more of a good sort of play it by yourself kind of game. And the people that were going to do a game uh you know, content coverage, people like Gray Still Plays, people like AljaxClub, people like Real Civil Engineer, Blitz, I'm Cade.

[00:05:02]They all played and made content before the game launch.

[00:05:05]And I have we and after a week we've not had anyone else um any large YouTubers make any content. So this probably is going to sort of stay the same and then the tail will just gradually tail up taper off. And then when we have a a a sale, then we'll have a a spike.

[00:05:25]So that's the Yeah, that's the long tail. So that's the good sign. That's what means that this could potentially make this like a living wage, which is really good.

[00:05:34]So then we got the player count as well, which which I think is really good for me.

[00:05:38]Um so it shows that the people were coming back and playing for, you know, over the week people were buying the game and over the week people were playing the game, and then people were coming back and replaying more levels because we've got over a few hours of of content. So, I think roughly it's 2 hours 45 minutes to kind of like get the full experience of the game.

[00:06:02]Um but the yeah, the medium play time was over was over an hour. So, that was good. So, that's kind of average as well for small small indie games, which is really good.

[00:06:10]And then this shows what kind of what Steam did to kind of show the game to people.

[00:06:18]So, it does show So, we launched on the 5th of May. So, it does show that Steam did show the game to people in the discovery queue, which was which is really great, and that did mean that I got some more money from the game that I wouldn't have had otherwise just relying on the YouTube content um and the wish lists prior to launch. So, got to thank Steam. They did showcase the game. They did put it forward.

[00:06:42]Um and for a game with with that many wish lists, that's a pretty good result.

[00:06:48]Um So, we can see down the bottom here in the impressions that we didn't get into new and trending, but we did get shown on new on Steam page, which all games do, and that did, you know, that did show 20,000 impressions, which is kind of cool.

[00:07:01]Um the tag page is still going along as well, which is really good because it's an incremental game. There are similar games that where the tags will be um similar games. So, that's kind of where that's being shown.

[00:07:13]Um but yeah, it's a shame that we didn't get into new and trending. That would have been great. If we had a big YouTuber maybe launch a game in this week uh launch a video in this week, we would have maybe got into new and trending, and we would have gone into another bucket in Steam. So, that's a shame that that didn't happen, but it just goes to show with the money that we've made over this week that you for a team of one, it's not you don't need it.

[00:07:38]So, that's that's an interesting takeaway that I hadn't thought of or known before.

[00:07:44]One of the big reasons why the game did okay despite having not huge number of wish lists, so we launched with like 4,000 wish lists, was the amount of bundles that people wanted to do. So, the incremental community, the developer community in any case, the fans are absolutely toxic waste of waste of space that are really unhelpful. Um but that's another video for another day. But, the incremental indie indie dev collaborative and really friendly and really open and honest with sharing information and data, so I thought I would continue that. So, all these developers have got the the the bundles um on the on their pages as well. So, the biggest ones, the standout ones is a game about feeding a black hole, which is the two games about space um game here.

[00:08:35]And we've got Oh Hell the Orb came out um recently and that did really well, so that's like a bit of a incremental success story.

[00:08:45]So, I've been chatting with the developer on there, that was really good news. Void Miner did really good. Void Miner was like the highest um earner for me in terms of bundles, which was a really big surprise. I knew it was a great game.

[00:08:56]Um I thought that Click and Conquer or A Game About Feeding Black Hole would have been better just because of the the developer and the similarity between the black hole game.

[00:09:04]But, yeah. Um so, Void Miner did the best. Maybe maybe everyone had already bought A Game About Feeding Black Hole, and so people that were getting into incremental games were getting the the well-known like you know, the second most well-known game, and so Void Miner is probably up there.

[00:09:21]Um what other notable mentions? So, yeah, we've got Click and Conquer.

[00:09:25]Um MMO 98 bundled, so that was really cool, but that was after launch, so um the didn't perform as good because it didn't get as much of a visibility spike, but that's how it goes. And then the supporter bundle I've hidden for now because when the soundtrack is launched, when Steam agree for it to be launched, then I'm going to turn this on again, and then discount it a bit more, so it's only like a couple of quid extra to buy the supporter pack than the the main base game.

[00:09:55]So, yeah, we had some really cool Oh, yeah, Rock Crusher, that was like the big one. So, Rock Crusher um we launched they launched the daily deal when I was launching my game.

[00:10:07]So, that worked out really well. So, because Rock Crusher was on the front page of Steam, and then they pinned my game to their game, that means that I got a lot of visibility through Rock Crusher.

[00:10:20]So, that's really good advice. If you're launching a game, bundle up with people, as much people as possible, because it doesn't take too much to sort out bundles. It really doesn't. It's pretty pretty easy process once you've done it a couple of times.

[00:10:33]And it really really paid off financially, so that was really good.

[00:10:37]I'll If you want it me to go over the figures and stats about how well the actual bundles did, then um reach out, but I might not do a video about it, but I might just send the information through Discord or something.

[00:10:48]Um because yeah, it's a bit different me talking about my money, but talking about money that came through other people's accounts, they might they might feel a bit funny about it, so I just don't want to give that information out too freely.

[00:11:00]Um but yeah, what happened with the wish list? So, this is the 3-month view, and here you can see this is like the first major spike. It comes up along here for the bit further back with The game's been in development for about 5 months at this stage.

[00:11:14]And this is like GrayStillPlays and Idle Cub, and then this is Real Civil Engineer, which is the big one. And then we've got some other YouTubers here, like Blitz around here, I think. And then this is I'm Cade here, which is like the last one before launch. And then this uh section at the end is when Steam started to showcase the game as well on on the platform about like you know games that are going to be released soon. And so that gave more sort of organic wish lists on Steam page which is really good. And then we had the launch spike which I don't know if this is a new trend or not because I remember when we launched 10 bells the wish lists didn't spike like that.

[00:11:57]Maybe that's because we only had 400 but it seems to be when you launch your game you get a spike in wish lists which I get because people might fancy the game but understand that later on there's a higher chance that the game will be discounted or they might bundle up later or now it's just not the right time for them to buy a game. So I understand why there's wish lists on launch. There's lots of reasons why people would do that.

[00:12:19]Because people use it as a mechanism for just to keep informed about the game.

[00:12:22]They might not be in a buying state right that second.

[00:12:26]And then we had a lot of conversions. So the conversion was really really good.

[00:12:29]Way more conversion than I thought on launch day. Again because I hadn't really had a successful launch at this stage even though 10 bells kind of was it was a success I would say.

[00:12:40]And then loads of deletions as well which is really interesting because the visuals on Steam and the capsules and the trailer hasn't changed a huge amount so I don't know why there was a a huge amount of deletions. Maybe it's robot maybe it's bots I don't know.

[00:12:54]And they get flushed out when you launch not not not not really sure. Maybe they're looking at the reviews which will come to.

[00:13:00]Who knows. So yeah we had a huge amount of uh wish list additions.

[00:13:06]Which is really good and a huge amount of conversions which is really good. So really really thankful for that. So everyone that wish listed before launch just thank you because basically Steam needs you to have those wish lists for you to make money on Steam.

[00:13:21]It's really difficult really tough. You need to have like an overwhelmingly positive like super good game, otherwise.

[00:13:30]So, yeah, the reviews. So, we're mostly positive.

[00:13:34]And we got 73% and we got 26 over So, 73% is positive, 26 reviews overall, and we've been out for a week.

[00:13:43]So, in some ways, that's really good.

[00:13:45]And comparing it to other incremental games that have launched over the last sort of month or so, I'm kind of doing better than most.

[00:13:54]Obviously, it's not an a runaway success. It's not It's not a hit game.

[00:13:59]And I have been reading the reviews and paying attention.

[00:14:02]I did price the game highly.

[00:14:05]Um That's for a few reasons. Like, I'm a small solo indie game indie game dev.

[00:14:11]This is my full-time job.

[00:14:15]There It's It seems to be like a race to the bottom and I wanted to price my time and I wanted to price the players' time to what I thought was fair.

[00:14:26]So, it's roughly about 2 hours 45 minutes of gameplay.

[00:14:31]And the game is like $6.

[00:14:34]So, it's like 3 hours It's like 3 hours for Wait, no. It's like $3 an hour of gameplay.

[00:14:44]And I think that's fair. And if you compare that to like a cup of coffee and how much you enjoy a cup of coffee and how much coffee's are Cup Coffee's like $7 now.

[00:14:53]So, I thought that was a fair trade.

[00:14:56]It's not It's not the most expensive incremental game out there.

[00:14:59]It's certainly not the average cost of um an incremental game and it's certainly not the cheapest, but I can't afford to be the cheapest and that's just the way it goes. So, I knew I was going to take a hit on reviews, but the wishlists told me that I wasn't going to have a runaway success launch in any case. So, it was a So, it was a judgment call.

[00:15:21]Um based around So, I costed the game based on the gameplay time, the situation I'm in, the wish lists that I had at the time, and I knew that I'd take a hit on reviews, and that's fine.

[00:15:35]If I had like 10,000 wish lists, I might have a priced it lower because I knew that the volume was going to be enough to to justify lower a lower price.

[00:15:44]Um so, people were complaining about Yeah, mainly So, they either thought it was boring, which is fine. I can't do much about that. The game is what I thought it was going to be. It's exactly what I was aiming for. I'm really happy with the game, and I know that some people are going to find that boring. It's like a chill incremental. It's like a cozy chill satisfying incremental. So, it's about the feeling.

[00:16:06]It's not a crazy crazy experience, which some incremental players want, which is great. And I hope that in the trailer I did that.

[00:16:14]And I I think players have a responsibility to like check out the screenshots, check out the trailer before they purchase, but early adopters and the the early reviews, they just see the game that's new, and tell me if I'm wrong, but they they go Oh, they get caught up in the hype and they're like, "New game, incremental, yes. Download. Play. Oh, it's not what I wanted. Bad review." And they never like looked at the information that was going to inform them of whether or not they should have purchased the game in the first place.

[00:16:44]So, I'm grateful for the money, uh and I'm not grateful for the review, but um maybe I need to do a better job of advertising that it's a a chill incremental, chill incremental. Maybe I need to create that subgenre or something.

[00:16:57]Um but um yeah, the other thing So, it was boring, and it was overpriced.

[00:17:04]Um there were a couple of really good pieces of feedback about things that were broken. So, early on, I launched like I was like on it after launch. So, there was only a few bugs, nothing game-breaking, nothing tremendously bad, nothing too um unreasonable. And and the community were really good at feeding back the the bugs and I fixed them usually within a few hours of when I found out about them.

[00:17:26]So, that went really smoothly. So, there was no headaches there.

[00:17:30]So, that was really good experience.

[00:17:32]Um and yeah, so that's kind of like how the launch went. I'm going to keep working on some game modes. Uh I'm going to keep make tinkering away at some improvements. I'm going to add some more Steam reviews. One of the one the most recent feedback was that you can't save your number of evolutions in the endless mode.

[00:17:52]So, they gave me a negative review and it was like that's like is that what made you think the game was bad? The fact that the the number at the top of the endless mode didn't save. I I never even occurred to me that people would want that number saved.

[00:18:07]But yeah, thinking about it that I can see why people would want that. So, I'm going to implement that. Um and it sucks that I got a negative review to figure that one out. Um but I think that review they just found the game boring. I just don't think it was for them, which is fine. But yeah, going to work on some game reviews and then um depending on how the game goes, if it keeps getting reviewed put more poorly cuz the the trend is getting worse similar to like MMO 98. It started off higher and then over time the review scores started to come down, which is a really interesting sort of trend in incremental games, which would be interested to see from other games if they found something similar. Is this just normal for a an okay indie game launch? I'm not sure.

[00:18:55]Um let me know what you think.

[00:18:57]But um yeah, if the game does okay, I'll do more and if the game doesn't do okay, then I'll do less. But I'm working on some on on some game modes as I say, so watch this space. The soundtrack will be coming out as soon as I can um as soon as I can launch it. There's like five tracks there. It's like 13 minutes of songs which I've which I've I've made, which is kind of cool. The first time I've ever done that really, launching music as a standalone piece of media. So, that's kind of interesting.

[00:19:23]Um and yeah, that's kind of how the that's kind of how the game launch went.

[00:19:28]Um if you have bought the game and if you enjoyed it, thank you so much.

[00:19:31]Really really really appreciate it. It's literally paying the mortgage. You know, I've been in a really bad financial situation recently over the last couple of years.

[00:19:39]I'm getting married in a couple of month in like less than three months now, which is really cool, but like money is a real big uh yeah, it's a real big concern at the moment. And obviously I want to do like big life things. Like I want to be able to afford a pet and do other like you know, big life things.

[00:19:55]And at the moment this launch has made me think that this could be a viable sort of career long-term.

[00:20:05]But that depends on how good I can do the next games because this isn't going to be I can't retire on this game.

[00:20:11]That's the kind of another yeah, headline.

[00:20:16]Game developer doesn't retire from game launch.

[00:20:18]>> [laughter] >> Um but yeah, so we'll see. We'll see.

[00:20:22]We'll see what happens. Watch this space. Um and yeah, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are in the comments and I'll see you in the next one.