Cliffski's Blog

I used to publish games sales stats years ago, but haven’t for an age. I thought given its 3 years old, it might be interesting to look at the sales stats for Kudos: Rock Legend. KRL is a sim/management game based loosely around my experiences of being in a garage band. You choose members of a rock band through auditions, put together the songs, buy the equipment, book the gigs, and basically try and go from the garage to the stadium. It’s a 2D sim game I released in 2007, and I sold it both direct, and through some casual portals. The game was not a hit, but it wasn’t a disaster either.

The costs involved in the game were not huge, roughly $3,000, which is peanuts by game production standards, and it’s even pretty darned low by modern positech standards (GSB cost way way way more than that :D). Obviously, that doesn’t include my time, or marketing expenses, and the game took about 6 months fulltime in direct development, plus quite a bit of time post-release to promote and sell it.

Here are the sales stats: (click to enlarge)

The total income from the game is $51,174.43. That probably sounds pretty good. I’m sure peoples immediate response is “$50k for 6 months is $100k a year! But it is not so. Deduct the $3k, then deduct at least another $3k marketing/ads. Now deduct roughly 10% for payment processing and bandwidth. Now another 20% in corporate tax. That’s… less. Don’t forget the post-sales means it’s more than 6 months anyway.

But the good news is that long tail. Looky at the far right. The game continues to sell a few copies each month. If you have 10 games like that, then you are making a living (not an awesome one, but not a bread-and-water one either). KRL is not a whizz bang 3D game, so it doesn’t age quite as badly as most games will. I suspect in another years time it will still be earning 60-70% of what it does now.

KRL is not a huge ambitious mega-project like GSB. A single dedicated coder can do a game like that in a reasonable length of time. If you want to know what it’s like, try the demo.

And to anticipate some questions:

Yes, it is in retail in russia, I recall that making a few thousand dollars. It also made a few thousand on the casual game portals, although my cut is tiny.

The game is not on steam, they have only accepted one of my games (GSB). It is on sale through impulse, but doesn’t sell hugely there. I’d say how much, but their reporting is down right now :(

Have you seen this?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/lineage11-addiction/

Craig Smallwood, the plaintiff, claims NCsoft of South Korea should pay unspecified monetary damages because of the addictive nature of the game. Smallwood claims to have played Lineage II for 20,000 hours between 2004 and 2009. Among other things, he alleges he would not have begun playing if he was aware “that he would become addicted to the game.

Now clearkly, the internet world is awash with people saying “what a dumbass, its not like they forced him to play!” and “thats like suing mcdonalds for being fat”. But it may not be…

Is he addicted? This is 10 hours a day for 5 years. That’s pretty heavy usage, when holding down a job too. That’s getting home at 6pm, and playing to 4AM every day 365 days a year (ok, more time available on weekends, but still…).you bet he is. But the big question is are NCSoft to blame? People talk in glowing terms about ‘addicting gameplay’ (grates teeth… we say ADDICTIVE), it would be a brave defence lawyer that tried to argue that making a game addictive was not a core element of MMO design. The entire business model relies on you coming back every month to pay again.

Ok, so that’s fair enough, making a product good enough to encourage replay is fine, hardly criminal. However there is something magical about an MMO that *may* mean that courts take this stuff seriously:

They know how addicted he is.

They know in exact detail that account X logs on 10 hours a day for 5 years**. If it’s a micro-payment MMO, then KNOW that one guy has spend >$50,0000 a year (or whatever). This is totally different to the store that sells alcohol to an alcoholic for cash, they don’t know how much he drinks.

I don’t think the case has merit, and I agree with a lot of the criticism of it, but in these days where companies show adverts to test-subjects inside MRI scanners, and people get better every year at crafting more elegant skinner-boxes dressed up as facebook games, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see judges mandate that all MMO games need to have systems in place to prevent people getting this bad. The industry will complain it’s being held to a higher standard than alcohol or other addictive pruchases, btu I suspect the court system will argue that only the games industry has the technical capability to regulate against true addiction. Addiction isn’t a topic for mockery. I’ve known people addicted to heroin (scary stuff), I’ve known people who used to smoke now and then, casually, and clearly just didn’t have whatever gene makes nicotine addictive. I’ve drunk a hell of a lot in my youth, but bounced out of it before sliding into addiction, as various friends did. Something that you personally can take or leave is another persons crippling addiction, and we shouldn’t dismiss them as idiots because we don’t share the exact genetic makeup that gives us that same vulnerability.

It’s an interesting story to follow, in any case.

(don’t yell at me. I’m not saying that NCSoft are guilty, or the guy should win. I’m saying there are real issues here, and the industry needs to look at them sensibly)

**I know it could be a shared account, but it could still raise a flag. If its the same character being used, without logging in or out, it’s pretty safe to say the same person is behind the keyboard.