[princec]

And that publisher is... Steam. The trouble is even with the might of all those well-targeted customers there's still only a few thousand sales to be made - and thanks to the sudden change in the pricing of games in the last 5 years or so, you can now only make 1/10th of the money from a sale that you could before.

In my original posting I wasn't really trying to complain about the situation; just showing the facts and figures, and the ultimate conclusion of course, which is that we're not making any more of them. Probably. It is quite fun.

[jsnell]

Clearly there's way more sales to made than thousands, it's just that it's going to be a power law distribution. There's only going to be one Minecraft (10s of millions), a handful of Super Meat Boys (million copies) or Legends of Grimrock (half a million), etc.

It seems like the more interesting question is what a developer can do to increase their likelihood of winning the indie game lottery. Besides making a good game. FTL did it by getting lots of publicity from being an early game development kickstarter success story. Legend of Grimrock had excellent graphics for a 4 man indie game, resurrected a genre that had been dead for a couple of decades, and got good launch-time reviews in a lot of big PC game publications. (I expect that the nostalgia effect was a factor both in getting the reviews in the first place, as well as in them being so positive).