Launching a $60K Video Game in 4 Months

[JesseEisenbart]

TLDR of my insiders introduction for context:​

• 23-year-old from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
• Quit web development job in August 2022 to pursue solo video game business.
• First game launched in May 2023, grossing over $60K in 12 months.
• Lost my passion for playing video games and got fed up with the woke industry.
• Paused the second game project in April.
• Shiny object syndrome for 3 months after.
• Took a 2 week break from everything to reassess.

What I Learned in Those 2 Weeks:​

• The point of entrepreneurship and business is to make money.
• I don't need to be passionate about playing video games to love the process of making them.
• I fell for a lot of guru bs
• Stop listening and watching so many influencers; live life and execute ideas instead.
• Have a written set of principles for work and life by which you make decisions (shoutout to this book by Ray Dalio).

The Goal: 10,000 Wishlists by October 28th.​

Steam has 132 million monthly users. To rank on Steam's front page during launch week, a game needs 7000-10,000 wishlists. Currently, my game has 4,305 wishlists and passively gains ~300 per month. 4 months * 300 = 1200 wishlists, which would bring us to 5,500 total. Not quite 10,000...

Thankfully, Steam runs a week-long "festival" for upcoming games 3 times per year. You can only opt in once per game but you get insane traffic and wishlists. My first game managed to get 1889 wishlists in one day during the festival. I can likely get a total of 3000-4000 wishlists from the festival in October for my second game.

I've been quiet on social media for the past 3 months, impacting wishlists.

I also plan to launch a free slice of the game separate from the demo, which is a new strategy for generating traffic.

Between the festival, ramping up social media again, and the free version of the game, I'm confident I can break 10,000 wishlists by launch week.

The Plan:​

I had originally planned a 6 month development timeline for the game, but I'm cutting it down to 4. To reach the deadline, I'm going to trim down the gameplay/features to only the best parts VS trying to compete with other game's feature lists. This will save time on development and bug fixing.

My KPIs are median demo play time and wishlists. Demo play time is currently 13 minutes (average). By improving the gameplay and fixing bugs, I want to raise that to at least 20 minutes by the time I launch the free prologue in September.

The game currently has 2 procedural levels and will launch with 4. The 3rd is a forest level, which I whipped up a mockup for in the last two days:

The Money:​

The industry standard conversion rate for launch week is ~20% of wishlists will convert to sales.

Front page traffic brought my first game 10K+ wishlists before launch. Assuming I get half of that for the second game, launch at ~15K wishlists, and convert just 10% of them in the first week. 1500 * $15 USD equates to $22,500 gross week 1 and roughly $13,500 net after Steam takes its cut and VAT/refunds. Week 1 revenue is generally 1/3rd of year 1 revenue, so ~$67,500 gross one year after launch.

There are many other variables involved in a game's success. Some go viral, some don't. While my game is in a hot genre, it hasn't picked up much traction so far, but anything can happen in 4 months.

Conclusion:​

I plan to post updates on this thread with my progress on the KPIs, the game itself, and launch numbers.

If this game doesn't gain significant traction, it might be my last. My company will likely never be exitable unless I reach AAA status (even massive studios are slowly failing, and no one has any intention of buying one), and the margins are brutal for the time put in. Once the game launches, I will reassess future business plans in October.

If you want to follow along, I'll post lots on Twitter.

Time to get to work

 

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[circleme]

I'm looking forward to your updates and I have learned quite a few things from your posting, ty for that.

In the past, I used to think a lot about this industry and I have also reasearched quite a bit in terms of real stats from real indie-devs. Conclusion: It's an insane industry and making money as a non-dev team (I'm not even speaking about AAA) seems really tough.

I wish you all the best. As I do come from a web dev/SWE background myself, what made transition from web dev to the gaming industry?

 

[JesseEisenbart]

I'm looking forward to your updates and I have learned quite a few things from your posting, ty for that.

In the past, I used to think a lot about this industry and I have also reasearched quite a bit in terms of real stats from real indie-devs. Conclusion: It's an insane industry and making money as a non-dev team (I'm not even speaking about AAA) seems really tough.

I wish you all the best. As I do come from a web dev/SWE background myself, what made transition from web dev to the gaming industry?

Yeah, it's tough—not impossible—but compared to other Fastlane ventures, it falls a little flat. It does have that virality factor, though, which could set you up for life.

I've been making games for 8 years and publishing them for 6. Learning web dev was a safer option for me when I dropped out of university, but at the time, I knew I wanted to go full-time in games.