How Much MONEY does the AVERAGE Indie Dev Make?

How many copies does the average indie game sell and how much money does the average indie game dev make. These are questions that many of us have while we undergo our game dev marketing campaigns. In this video I will answer these questions to the best of my knowledge.
if you are interested in other ways of marketing your indie game, please checkout my channel for more game dev related videos.
Shalnor Legends 2 on -40% Sale:
- Steam: tinyurl.com/35rw8fas
- Switch: tinyurl.com/4792mh3x
- PS4|5: tinyurl.com/3c57m7yt
Facebook Groups that I mentioned in the video:
- / indiegamecommunity
- / igdgroup
- / indiegamedevs
#indiedeveloper #gamemarketing #indiegamedev

[@JohnnyOstad]

Steam (SALE -40%) : tinyurl.com/35rw8fas Switch (SALE -40%): tinyurl.com/4792mh3x PS 4|5 (SALE -40%): tinyurl.com/3c57m7yt

[@user-em3nn5zg6v]

If bronze is below 100,000 copies, then my game is probably in the microplastic ranking. My game sold a grand total of 9 copies in 2 months on Steam...

[@JohnnyOstad]

It's a cold world we live in. But I highly encourage you to try porting your game to consoles, at least on consoles your game gets shown on the main New Release section, and also better exposure during sales.

[@truthiz2805]

Did you do any marketing ?

[@PandaBlyat]

What's the game?

[@gamheroes]

your case is the common rule for the vast majority of indies that gets to finish a game

[@PandaBlyat]

What's the gameee I want to see it

[@TheXentios]

There should be an Iron Rank which is bellow 100 copies.

[@JohnnyOstad]

lol

[@medievalfield]

Oh yeah, literally my game. 5 years of development and no revenue is sure frustrating, you have a decent point. I'm still gonna try a little longer tho

[@wiawaysb]

solo indie dev is a spiky road. good luck on all your projects bro

[@CloudlessStudio]

I really enjoy your videos. I will say I released 2 games on steam and one had a really unique art style and it fairly well (16 reviews) with zero marketing

[@NaviniusGames]

You sold 100k copies but have 3 reviews? what

[@omarahmed51512]

Super under rated channel, videos are super well made. keep it up homie

[@JohnnyOstad]

Thank you :D

[@zejugames5045]

Great point about the dangers of isolating to execute while the market is changing!

[@JohnnyOstad]

Yes, could be that 70% of games that fail do so because of this.

[@hedgewizards]

lots of good advice in this video :D

[@HyuugaRaull]

I'm starting gamedev and I use your channel and games for a lot of reasons... The sucesses and failures of you do really inspire. Your games are not that polished, yet you keep going, learning, improving and teaching us valuable stuff. I really like your channel as well, I hope you keep going for long time and growing this channel in subscribers. Keep improving and sharing with us, while we grow together. You're really an inspiration for me.

[@JohnnyOstad]

Thank you. I'm currently working on a video mainly aimed at people who have "recently started" game dev. So keep an eye out for it ;)

[@bailwl6]

Love it, good sense of humor in this one, "because I don't know how to strike gold" 🤣. Definitely you don't want to do average or your time spent will come out to far less than minimum wage, if you profit at all after expenses.

[@TheXentios]

Spend %50 of your time developing your game Spend other %50 on learning what type of game the world wants Spend other %50 on marketing Spend other %50 on game jams Spend other %50 on learning new tools Spend other %50 on sleeping,eating and maintaining a life Spend other %50 on earning money because you won't by your first 3-5 or infinite games Spend other %50 on writing useless comments on KZbin.

[@JohnnyOstad]

You can save up a lot of time by getting rid of "sleeping,eating and maintaining a life". who needs that? :P

[@user-em3nn5zg6v]

Lol

[@satoshidart]

love your videos man! where does your name come from? Ostad has a cool meaning in my native language.

[@mirokinho]

Good luck man

[@GlebLebedevOnSoftware]

I can't paste image here, I can provide it by request if needed. The MEDIAN income from a game on Steam is vastly different. Median 4X game released last year made $73749 (estimated by vginsights) when median 2D platformer made only $880. For the Shalnor game, if you consider it in Action RPG genre - median genre income was $4638 and it is competing with 755 other games released in the last year. I've looked up similar successful self-published games released in a similar time - 古代风流传 , LunarLux, Wyvia. Good luck with your new projects.

[@Spamkromite]

I'm not sure how much money, but I can say that today you are right now ~9€ richer 😉 Thanks for sharing all this information with us wee indie games that are still starting with all this crazy management of marketing for their games.

[@JohnnyOstad]

Thank you :)

[@user-sb5fm1gk7l]

Alright, i don't know how common it is (must be pretty common), but how i often discover games is through Steam Nextfest and the like. Events with demos of upcoming games. With those i'm much more willing to give a game a chance, if it looks remotely interesting. So i try a few dozens of games in a few days and continue even after the fest has ended (most devs don't take their demos down, but if they do, it's their loss). The downside, of course, is that i have much less patience with them. I would often drop games after less than 10 minutes. And you also need to spend time making a demo. And have it done by a particular timeframe.

[@kmyc89]

(1:22) The Days, where you could buy copies and holding in your Steam inventory are gone, for years.

[@gamigem]

Hey hey people, Seth here

[@Uhfgood]

I'm actually planning for my game to take 5 years.

[@JohnnyOstad]

I admire your passion, just make sure you don't skip on marketing it all the way throughout the years, constant social media posts and gathering your audience so that when the game comes out there is a player base for it. (And other forms of marketing)

[@Uhfgood]

@@JohnnyOstad - That's the interesting thing, basically it's going to be all marketing, I figured instead of focusing on releasing a game that sells well, I'm going to focus on making videos about development of my game as the focus. I might even release it for free (but don't hold me to that) if I get that far. I notice KZbinrs tend to actually make money with extraneous items, like merch, stuff like patreon, subscribestar, etc, that I might make more money just developing the game, as long as I make actual progress, and make somewhat interesting devlogs, I have a good chance.

[@JohnnyOstad]

@@Uhfgood What you are referring to is called the "Givers Gain" marketing method, I plan on making entire videos about this subject of marketing. And to a certain degree I myself will be implementing it. But if you are going to do devlogs or other forms of gamedev content on youtube then you need to learn about the youtube alghoritm, so far from my experience youtube alghoritm is 10x easier than steam alghoritm haha. I suggest you have a look at VidIQ, they are a KZbin channel that teach about the KZbin algorithm and stuff like that.

[@Uhfgood]

@@JohnnyOstad - Yeah i've seen a few of their videos, will be looking into the algorithm although it tends to change a lot these days

[@gyokzoli]

Shalnor Legends has currently 38 mixed review on Steam. How did you sell more than 100 thousand copies? The math doesn't add up. Of course, it might had been sold in bundles and other sites as well, but most money comes from the steam store and I doubt that you get a lot of money from bundle sellers and a lot of sale on other stores if your game is not popular on steam.

[@JohnnyOstad]

100k copies across ALL platforms (Steam, Xbox, PS4, Switch)

[@gyokzoli]

@@JohnnyOstad ok thanks, that makes sense

[@enjoilife1128]

You tricked me, I wanted Seth

[@JohnnyOstad]

Wait, did the algorithm recommend my vid for that? :O I only did it as a parody.

[@enjoilife1128]

@@JohnnyOstad I follow a lot of game dev content, so that’s probably the real reason it was recommended to me. But I won’t lie, I saw Seth in the thumbnail and that’s what made me click.

[@eonhet7826]

You ripping Seths intro put a bad taste in my mouth

[@JohnnyOstad]

Why? I love that guy.

[@eonhet7826]

@@JohnnyOstad I got tricked for a second into thinking I was watching a seth episode!

[@Gatrehs]

I'm so happy that I don't do gamedev to live off of it. I just want to make a couple games that me and a few friends can play together.

[@JohnnyOstad]

Yeah, doing this as a business' is stressful. But don't worry, I'm gonna start doing videos that focus on the development side and not just marketing ;)

[@Red_and_Black_Manic_Artists]

yoo i played shalnor legends

[@JohnnyOstad]

😍

[@TravisBerthelot]

So what market change occurred that made your project worth less?

[@JohnnyOstad]

The main one is that on consoles (my main source of income) there used to be 30 game releases per month but today it's like 120 games per month. this significantly decreased store visibility.

[@TravisBerthelot]

@@JohnnyOstad Seems like the only solution to this is to stop supporting consoles or work more for less. Which of the 2 did you choose or did you have an alternative solution?

[@JohnnyOstad]

@@TravisBerthelot If I stop releasing on consoles I would lose even more income so I would definitely not choose that. my solution is to keep improving myself in the field of marketing so that I can get past the competition. Truth is that all markets are gonna be high competition no matter what, even if you find one today and use it as an advantage, in the future that market will also be highly competitive. So the better thing to do is to adapt to the competitive markets.

[@kmyc89]

(1:35) Female protagonist

[@JohnnyOstad]

How do you know the Scout from Vosaria isn't female? :D

[@ChallengerYasuoHighlights]

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