9 ms·

Running an indie game store

102 points by leafo 12y ago

antonwinter 12y ago
thanks for all the great insite into the numbers on your site. its amazing to see an indie marketplace actually take off. congrats to you and your hard work.
egonschiele 12y ago
Time for notch to start working at itch.io? :) The most interesting part for me is how much money free games are making. From what I have heard, open source projects make almost no money. But I think of free games in the same bucket (work done for pleasure, not money), and they are still profitable!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- robert_tweed 12y ago
  That plot is indeed interesting, but it's important to keep in mind that it only shows the distributions of optional payments that were actually made. It doesn't take account of how many people downloaded and played the game without paying anything (it's a free game after all). Nor does it give an indication of the total payments received. I'd really like to see some headline figures comparing the revenues for free games vs paid games (ideally a graph of price/revenue for paid games) rather than just a comparison of the average 'tip' for each category. It seems pretty intuitive that, if one is inclined to leave a tip, it will be higher if the game was initially free.
- patio11 12y ago
  If you saw the per-SKU numbers I can guarantee you that you would weep. They're virtually guaranteed to have a power law distribution. The median game has sales of zero, the median game of those games with sales above zero makes the creator less than a single dinner worth of contributions per month, and so forth. I'm an investor in a company which does a marketplace for commercial OSS. It is not accurate that OSS makes no money. Many individual OSS projects make no money, because they're optimized for making no money by people who think, consciously or otherwise, that making money from software is evil. OSS projects which are more commercial in nature ROFLstomp over web games with a donation model.
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    Having a brain that thinks "commercial OSS" is an oxymoron (and I can see it waving a red flag and building barricades in the back of my head) I would be interested in how people / market places are squaring that circle - could you point us at your investment? Also are you saying that OSS projects that use a donation model do better than indie games (irrespective of the indie game model) or is it both doing donation models. I speak as someone who wants to keep developing OSS but also likes getting paid.
    - nutmeg 12y ago
      Many commercial OSS offer paid support or support an "Enterprise" version of the OSS product. Zenoss ([http://www.zenoss.com/] http://www.zenoss.com/]) is a good example of this. Personally, I see OSS projects that have this business plan as less risky since they are less likely to stagnate due to exhaustion.
      - wikwocket 12y ago
        See also MySQL and PostgreSQL. They are open source and have free community editions, but they have paid enterprise features and support for those who need more than a database for their Wordpress site. The donation model is almost never a good idea if your goal is to actually receive income.
    - alinajaf 12y ago
      Off the top of my head, sidekiq, ansible and saltstack are fully open source but also make money.
    - jasonkester 12y ago
      Open source projects using a donation model tend to do roughly as well as games using a donation model. And both tend to do roughly as well as the guy standing next to the offramp using a donation model. Open source projects using a model where people pay for the software tend to do nicely, however. The distinction in what you pay for can be as simple as "you're now officially allowed to use this in a commercial product" or "in addition to the paid version, we also offer a completely free* version" (where "free" is defined by some insane guy and his cult from the 70s to mean something completely orthagonal to "free", in a completely non-standard way seemingly designed to raise red flags with your company's legal department)
Maven911 12y ago
I adore this kind of data and analytics. I feel that this kind of data is mainly shared by game companies and a few SaaS -- can anyone proof me wrong or find other links where they showcase the internals of a company ? (And I won't count annual reports of big companies as deep insights into a company, even if they are useful in investment decisions)
scscsc 12y ago
Very interesting. They seem to have gained some traction. I'm curious how they solved their chicken and egg problem (not enough buyers versus not enough sellers).
NKCSS 12y ago
You might want to check out TransIP's VPS offering [0]; they have a €50 VPS with 8GB ram, 4 cores and a 300GB SSD, and the option to add 2TB of storage for €10 a month... this might save you a bundle of money on the downloads... [0]: https://www.transip.nl/vps/ https://www.transip.nl/vps/
- xeroxmalf 12y ago
  You might want to check out SoYouStart's (OVH) offerings [0]: For €40, you could get a dedicated server with an Intel Xeon E3 1245v2 (4 core, 8 thread, 3.4ghz), 32GB ram, 3x120gb SSD, 250mbps guaranteed on a gigabit port. [0]http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/offers/e3-ssd-3.xml http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/offers/e3-ssd-3.xml
  - NKCSS 12y ago
    I tried OVH in the past; not your most reliable partner; TransIP is a premium brand and hasn't let me down yet (which is more than I can say about OVH; the server I had never functioned well, constantly rebooted, after 3 weeks of BS from support, I just canceled.
Kiro 12y ago
How do people pay for HTML5 games in the browser?
- jere 12y ago
  >As mentioned above, itch.io utilizes three separate payment providers for all transactions. [Paypal, Amazon, Stripe] Though I'm sure you meant to ask a different question.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- CmonDev 12y ago
  People are willing to pay for HTML5 games?!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dubcanada 12y ago
The amazing thing is this website runs entirely on Lapis/Lua. Very well done leafo!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

102 points by leafo 12y ago

thanks for all the great insite into the numbers on your site. its amazing to see an indie marketplace actually take off. congrats to you and your hard work.

egonschiele 12y ago

Time for notch to start working at itch.io? :) The most interesting part for me is how much money free games are making. From what I have heard, open source projects make almost no money. But I think of free games in the same bucket (work done for pleasure, not money), and they are still profitable!

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
robert_tweed 12y ago
That plot is indeed interesting, but it's important to keep in mind that it only shows the distributions of optional payments that were actually made. It doesn't take account of how many people downloaded and played the game without paying anything (it's a free game after all). Nor does it give an indication of the total payments received. I'd really like to see some headline figures comparing the revenues for free games vs paid games (ideally a graph of price/revenue for paid games) rather than just a comparison of the average 'tip' for each category. It seems pretty intuitive that, if one is inclined to leave a tip, it will be higher if the game was initially free.
patio11 12y ago
If you saw the per-SKU numbers I can guarantee you that you would weep. They're virtually guaranteed to have a power law distribution. The median game has sales of zero, the median game of those games with sales above zero makes the creator less than a single dinner worth of contributions per month, and so forth. I'm an investor in a company which does a marketplace for commercial OSS. It is not accurate that OSS makes no money. Many individual OSS projects make no money, because they're optimized for making no money by people who think, consciously or otherwise, that making money from software is evil. OSS projects which are more commercial in nature ROFLstomp over web games with a donation model.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Having a brain that thinks "commercial OSS" is an oxymoron (and I can see it waving a red flag and building barricades in the back of my head) I would be interested in how people / market places are squaring that circle - could you point us at your investment? Also are you saying that OSS projects that use a donation model do better than indie games (irrespective of the indie game model) or is it both doing donation models. I speak as someone who wants to keep developing OSS but also likes getting paid.
  - nutmeg 12y ago
    Many commercial OSS offer paid support or support an "Enterprise" version of the OSS product. Zenoss ([http://www.zenoss.com/] http://www.zenoss.com/]) is a good example of this. Personally, I see OSS projects that have this business plan as less risky since they are less likely to stagnate due to exhaustion.
    - wikwocket 12y ago
      See also MySQL and PostgreSQL. They are open source and have free community editions, but they have paid enterprise features and support for those who need more than a database for their Wordpress site. The donation model is almost never a good idea if your goal is to actually receive income.
  - alinajaf 12y ago
    Off the top of my head, sidekiq, ansible and saltstack are fully open source but also make money.
  - jasonkester 12y ago
    Open source projects using a donation model tend to do roughly as well as games using a donation model. And both tend to do roughly as well as the guy standing next to the offramp using a donation model. Open source projects using a model where people pay for the software tend to do nicely, however. The distinction in what you pay for can be as simple as "you're now officially allowed to use this in a commercial product" or "in addition to the paid version, we also offer a completely free* version" (where "free" is defined by some insane guy and his cult from the 70s to mean something completely orthagonal to "free", in a completely non-standard way seemingly designed to raise red flags with your company's legal department)

Maven911 12y ago

I adore this kind of data and analytics. I feel that this kind of data is mainly shared by game companies and a few SaaS -- can anyone proof me wrong or find other links where they showcase the internals of a company ? (And I won't count annual reports of big companies as deep insights into a company, even if they are useful in investment decisions)

scscsc 12y ago

Very interesting. They seem to have gained some traction. I'm curious how they solved their chicken and egg problem (not enough buyers versus not enough sellers).

NKCSS 12y ago

You might want to check out TransIP's VPS offering [0]; they have a €50 VPS with 8GB ram, 4 cores and a 300GB SSD, and the option to add 2TB of storage for €10 a month... this might save you a bundle of money on the downloads... [0]: https://www.transip.nl/vps/ https://www.transip.nl/vps/

xeroxmalf 12y ago
You might want to check out SoYouStart's (OVH) offerings [0]: For €40, you could get a dedicated server with an Intel Xeon E3 1245v2 (4 core, 8 thread, 3.4ghz), 32GB ram, 3x120gb SSD, 250mbps guaranteed on a gigabit port. [0]http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/offers/e3-ssd-3.xml http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/offers/e3-ssd-3.xml
- NKCSS 12y ago
  I tried OVH in the past; not your most reliable partner; TransIP is a premium brand and hasn't let me down yet (which is more than I can say about OVH; the server I had never functioned well, constantly rebooted, after 3 weeks of BS from support, I just canceled.

Kiro 12y ago

How do people pay for HTML5 games in the browser?

jere 12y ago
>As mentioned above, itch.io utilizes three separate payment providers for all transactions. [Paypal, Amazon, Stripe] Though I'm sure you meant to ask a different question.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
CmonDev 12y ago
People are willing to pay for HTML5 games?!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dubcanada 12y ago

The amazing thing is this website runs entirely on Lapis/Lua. Very well done leafo!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]