[This article was originally posted on IndieVision, an indie community I'm helping set up (but more on that tomorrow. I'm re-posting it here because it's relevant to what we're trying to do. Oh, and because I enjoyed writing it. Thanks Rich for the push!]
Good numbers on digital downloads are hard to come by. Why is that? Well, console manufacturers are notoriously cagey about releasing these figures. They can restrict the information because they control the points of access (and particularly the only point of sales). NPD doesn’t get their retail numbers from Microsoft, or Nintendo, or Sony. They work with distributors and retailers to obtain their information.
For the digital world, VGChartz and Fade LLC are so far the best we have. A collection of numbers extracted from leaderboard rankings, and information from Fade reports collated to give an estimate on sales. The only other sources come from word of mouth and whispers and the once in a while decent person willing to divulge in an interview.
We are a community that encourages sharing information in order to help each other. We believe this information should be freely available, and we resent the restrictive NDAs they apply on 3rd parties. Of course, some 3rd parties also like to keep the numbers to themselves when they’re not as high as expected and it can be hard to want to discuss numbers when you don’t do well. This is especially important for platforms where numbers are hard to come by (like PSN and WiiWare). The numbers we do get will tend to suffer from a positive bias, distorting the expected sales for an average title. Remember that there are a 100+ titles on each platform, and we only have a small sample of the better performing titles.
We encourage Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to start releasing figures for all their titles. Those numbers should be out there so that developers can make more reasoned estimates for their budgets and expected revenues.
For other indies reading this, we encourage you to join us and share your experiences and see what others have shared. We aim to leverage the aggregate experience of the development community to ease the path to small indies, and help build up new companies. This is what keeps our industry fresh.
Now we take a look at some recent numbers for downloadable titles on the major consoles and PC. The information here is extracted from the excellent work Simon Carless has done for his recent presentations on digital distribution. Most of these numbers are also estimates based on the numbers of players in the leaderboard rankings. Simon estimates that sales are usually 80-90% of leaderboard totals.
PSN
- Flow (by ThatGameCompany) sold 120k copies worldwide between February and September 2007 (source: Sony in Game Informer)
- Shatter (by Sidhe) sold 30k copies in its first week or so in August 2009. 47k on Leaderboards by early September 2009.
- Noby Noby Boy (by Namco Bandai) sold ‘about’ 100k units from February to August 2009.
- Burn Zombie Burn (by DoubleSix) sold 70k copies from March to August 2009.
- Astro Tripper (by PomPom Games) has approximately 15k on Leaderboards from December 2008 to April 2009.
- Super Stardust (by ) has 331k on Leaderboards.
XBLA (as of mid-September 2009)
- Trials HD (by RedLynx) sold 300k units from mid-August to mid-September 2009.
Numbers on Leaderboards:
- Shadow Complex (by Epic): 290k.
- Trials HD: 357k
- Castle Crashers (by The Behemoth): 1.26M. The Behemoth have confirmed surpassing the million sale mark on their blog.
- Splosion Man (by Twisted Pixel Games): 160k
- Defense Grid (by Hidden Path Entertainment): 52k.
- Worms 2 (by Team17): 52k.
- Lode Runner HD (by Tozai Games): 19k.
- Invincible Tiger (by Namco Bandai): 3,800.
- Penny Arcade Adventures (by Hothead Studios): 23.3k.
WiiWare
- Very difficult to obtain public WiiWare numbers. Probably because of even more stringent NDAs, but it’s not a positive sign for the platform.
- World of Goo (by 2DBoy) estimated at 300k+ (which puts it in the Top 5 of all time).
- Some well-known, well-executed ‘core’ titles have only done 20-30k (considered mid-range)
- Very few titles didn’t meet the minimum payment rate for individual territories (which is less than US$ 6,000).
- Vgchartz and Fade LLC charts seem to be way off on the lower-end, sometimes by orders of magnitude.
iPhone/iTouch
- Super Monkey Ball sold 500k units as of November 2008 with price as high as $9.99. However, this is a major exception due to the being an early launch title and benefiting from a large amount of Apple publicity.
- iShoot was #1 in January 2009 with 17k downloads at $2.99 each in a single day: $35.7k in net revenue.
- Creator of Blocked was selling 5-15 units per day until he price-dropped to $0.99, hit #1 and sold 10-15k units per day (March 2009 interview)
- Flight Control (by Firemint) sold over 700k units at $0.99 in 6 weeks (March/April 2009).
- Anecdotal: it takes 20-25k sales to reach #1, mid-thousands for top 10, mid-high hundreds for top 100. Per day.
That’s it for this introductory article. We will explore each platform in more depth in subsequent articles, and also take a peak at sales on the DS, PSP, Flash and PC markets. Once again, thank you to Simon Carless for his excellent research.
[If you've got something to share, ou can leave a comment or bug me on twitter.]
Related Posts
No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Going Indie During a Recession.
