Adventure Gamers - Forums

Vehelon - 03 November 2020 06:30 AM

(did anyone play Cyan’s first few games before Myst? No one really heard of the company before their breakthrough game)

That’s because they only made games for children. 
There are a few references to their previous games in Obduction. So I looked it up.

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (5) - Karlok, TimovieMan, Doom, Pegbiter, Intense Degree

The Journey Down, Chapters 1-3 (4) - SoccerDude, TimovieMan, Doom, Chrissie

Boïnihi: The K’i Codex (3) - Luhr28, TimovieMan, Vehelon
Heavy Rain (3) - Intense Degree (leader), Chrissie, Pegbiter
L.A. Noire (3) - Intense Degree (leader), Chrissie, Pegbiter
Loom (3) - SoccerDude, Doom, DCast
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies (3) - Adv_Lvr (leader), TimovieMan, Pegbiter
Shivers 2 (3) - RTRooney, TimovieMan, SoccerDude

Vehelon - 03 November 2020 10:09 PM

I also think “There Is No Game” should be disqualified - being that this is a PLAYthrough thread, for GAMES.

Who’s with me?

Oh for Pete’s sake! Why are you here, what’s your goal? To be as annoying and/or provocative as possible? Most of your posts are, and I’m sure that’s not a coincidence. Like your bullshit about one banned user, like your attacks on me, not to mention your attempts to promote astrology.

@Simon_ASA: According to Steamspy your 6 games sold a total of 37,000 copies. Average price 12.39 dollars. Is that correct? Steamspy is kind of wobbly from day to day, so I have no idea how accurate their numbers are.

Vehelon - 03 November 2020 11:53 PM

Don’t worry Karlok, I think my time here is just about done. All those things you mentioned should have shown me this is not a nice place to be, and now that somehow even my humor is misunderstood, and I’m attacked, it’s time to go.

Yeah, you never attacked anything or anybody, it was all just innocent jokes, and just one comment from the forum bitch is enough to make you leave. Bye!

Karlok - 03 November 2020 11:17 PM

@Simon_ASA: According to Steamspy your 6 games sold a total of 37,000 copies. Average price 12.39 dollars. Is that correct? Steamspy is kind of wobbly from day to day, so I have no idea how accurate their numbers are.

Unfortunately it’s not accurate at all!
If these numbers were true I would be more than happy, that would do almost $500k of revenue over the years
I’m sorry but that makes me angry (not again you, against Steamspy) as if I was lying all the time about what I earn with my games.

As you can see from my Steam financial summary it’s not what they say:

First of all I am not selling 6 games but only 4: ASA, Catyph, Myha and Boinihi.
There are other games on my account that I distribute for my collective The Icehouse: Bloodwood (a game by Juanjo Barcelo Molina) and Chilie (a game by mt brother Yves), which was decided because it is complicated to sell games on Steam for them (you need a TIN/EIN number, you have to pay a $100 subscription to Steam per game, etc).
And I have also Kitrinos which is a 100% free game.

Even if we count that free game and the 2 games that don’t belong to me, we don’t yet reach 10000 copies in totality. As you can see in the financial summary above.
These numbers also include the keys I gave for free and the copies I sold at a very low price during sale events, on itch.io, or in bundles in the past.

When you see $68000 you could think that it’s a big number and that it’s really good. Well, it’s not that bad and I am very honored that people trusted me enough to buy my games, but that is not the question.

I’ll talk of $65000 revenue next to simplify and because part of the 68k money is not for me. Steam takes 30% of it, so they take 19500 and what they send to me is $45500.
I receive even less because of international transfer costs, probably $45000 or lesser.

The French government takes 25% of it because of my status of independent (we call it auto-entrepreneur). So what really is for me is $33750 (I stayed in dollar but for me it’s euro). You can see that the money I really earn is already half of the Steam total revenue…

Of these $33750 I also split some money with my colaborators: programmer Andy Rinaldi for ASA Remastered (30% royalties), music composers of Karreo (5 to 15% depending on the games), ...

Anyway what I really received for myself is probably less than $20000 (I have not calculated right now). From this I remove the software licenses that I bought in 2014 for my activity (3dsmax $5000 and After Effects $1200). There are many other costs but let’s say I earned $15000 from the sell of all my games together since 2013.

$15000 over 7 years of work is ridiculous! If you think of it, it’s about $2000 per year, so less than $166 per month to live from. Games are my only income to pay bills and buy food. My budget has never been balanced, my monthly expenses are higher than my income despite all my efforts, and I live like a poor person. I live in France, it’s not a country where life is cheap. Happily I was supported by my father until 2018 but he passed away. Since then I received some money as an inheritance, but I am not happy that I have to use it to survive.
Next to this I am doing a lot of efforts to spend less money: vegetable garden to buy less food, cut off the cumulus of hot water in summer to save electricity, dry toilets to save water, limited car travel, no travelling, no parties…
I will soon have 9000€ of expenses for necessary work on the roof and gutters of my old house which was built before 1820. My laptop is from 2006 and my work PC is from 2013 and I will soon have to buy a new one if I want to continue to create beautiful games as the standards are increasing. My windows are not double-glazed and I heat with a wood stove, it is barely 15°C at home in winter and I am cold. Etc.

I am not an exemplary person but I make efforts and I don’t complain (not too much!) given my situation. Anyway I hope that you understand clearly why I couldn’t continue to work on the Black Cube series despite doing my best all these years. I love my job of indie developer and it is time-consuming, I can’t imagine doing quality games as a spare-time job, and I want to continue as long as possible, but it’s really a crusade (if I take another job I know that I’ll stop making games). My games are not perfect, I would like to do more and better, include more voice over, etc, but it costs money.

Well, I’m sorry this is not the good thread to talk about all of this, I would have prefered to do it during a CPT for example, or an interview, but I thought I had to reply because Steamspy is sharing bullshit and I really don’t want players to think that indie adventure devs are becoming rich on their back (not all).

If you’re curious, my other sources of income are itch.io, where I have $500 of lifetime earnings that I keep for The Icehouse collective. There is Fireflower games but it is very new. There was the Adventure Gamers shop and Desura but the sales amount were low too. Same for Humblestore that I decided to quit. I tried other stores too but never suceeded on them. Finally I have a Patreon page where great people are giving me $25 every month. Last but not least, since 2019 I get a kind of social aid which is recalculated quaterly, that gives me between 0 and $200 depending on what I earned on the 3 previous months.

I hope I have been transparent enough to show you that I am a true passionate creator and that despite the joy of having such a wonderful job, it’s not easy and I don’t live on a private beach with $500,000 stolen to people who are stupid enough to buy my crappy games!  I have the greatest respect for the people who buy my games, even if it’s not always easy to show it (I’m all alone to do everything, to answer messages…), and every penny I receive is spent in full consciousness. Thank you!

Didn’t know Steamspy reported such “precise” figures since Steam blocked games ownership on profiles.

I’m also far from these numbers :p Demetrios should reach $50,000 total revenue (before Steam cut & VAT) in 4.5 years and many, many sales. Fortunately I also release on consoles!

Well at least be careful everyone when you interpret results from those sites.
Also this is one of the reasons why I am not against Steam like many other people, as they are the only ones who allow me to survive. I know very well that there are debates about Steam vs Epic Store, or about games not being DRM-Free on Steam, and I totally agree with many of the ideas in there. But Steam has a huge community and if they could do an effort regarding their 30% fee, they could really improve the life of many “small” devs…

100% agreed.

I’ll always be thankful for Steam because they offer a chance to (mostly) everyone.

GOG and Epic are not open platforms, they’re curated. Only about 10% indie games are accepted on GOG (they had refused Demetrios until there were enough wishlists), and Epic only cares for indies when a game starts to be popular…
And itch.io isn’t sustainable.

Though I was a bit gutted that they lowered their percent cut… only for the biggest games. Epic are full of themselves and only bring trouble. (but that’s another topic)

Now I’m designing my games to run on as many platforms as possible, with both PC and consoles in mind (as well as touch controls in case I do mobile someday but it’s not priority for me - I made less than 5% revenue of Demetrios on mobile) Because each platform brings almost as much money as the Steam/PC version, and a port is much less work than creating a whole new game!

NB : Sorry for deviating from the topic. In case you want to do a community playthrough on Demetrios, I’ll be glad to give Steam keys!

(Yeah sorry it seems that we have polluted the CPT thread! Admins please don’t hesitate to move this to an all new threads, if people are interested to react - personally I won’t say a word more, I have exposed my life more than enough for today)

Back to votes!

@Simon: I apologize for bringing Steamspy up. I simply thought: hey, I can check with this developer if the Steamspy sales are correct. Because I started having doubts when I saw one game’s sales (The Longing) dropping by tens of thousands in a single day. But I should have thought twice before posting your sales figures. Let me know if you’d like me to delete my post.