作者：Terence Lee

《尘埃克星》才1岁多。在过去1年时间里它是如何发展的，这对于Hitbox Team意味着什么？

我们将在本篇文章中详细讨论《尘埃克星》的财政状况，即基于我们对于这款游戏的目标来看。让我们来了解有关小型开发团队的一些财政问题，如我们是如何为《尘埃克星》募集资金，需要花多少钱才能创造一款游戏等等。

众所周知，找到游戏销量数据总是非常困难。电子游戏一直都是“受热作驱使”的产业——发行商的大量收益都是源自巨大的商业成功。

而面对着越来越多“不受热作驱使”的作品的出现，发行商尝试着将销量当成商业机密，因为更多让人失望的数字只会让投资者感到不安。所以讨论销量也变成与讨论工资一样，是个让人不自在的话题。

当我们最初开始致力于《尘埃克星》时，我们总是很难找到能够证明独立游戏开发足够现实的相关数据。

最接近的要数一些非官方消息来源，如VGChartz，虽然它们收集了许多详细信息，但却缺少数字销量数据。幸运的是，独立开发者并不需要承担发行商需要面对的财政义务。

现在的我们已经完成了自己的第一个项目，我们希望能将《尘埃克星》的相关数据贡献到独立游戏开发的透明度发展趋势中。

开始

《尘埃克星》是Hiebox（Lexie和Woodley）的第一个项目。他们在2010年夏天便创建了《尘埃克星》的原型，这是受到游戏竞赛的截止期限的推动。

在4个多月时间里，他们一直待在一个户外棚里工作，吃着廉价的冷冻食品并喝着软饮料。Lexie在白天还有自己的第二份工作，所以只能在晚上和Woodley一起创造他们的原型。最终他们在8月份完成了游戏创造，即刚好赶在比赛的截止期限内。

在他们将原型发布在网上后几天内，IndieGames.com上的一篇文章便引起了许多积极的关注。Woodley和Lexie收到来自Valve的电子邮件，邀请他们将《尘埃克星》放到Steam上。这是推动着他们完全专注于这款游戏，将其从原型变成一款完整的游戏的主要动力。但这并不是一项轻松的任务——原型与最终版本总是相差甚远，并且需要更多人共同努力才能创造出最终游戏。

他们至少需要花1年的时间才能完成游戏创造，当然，在此期间需要投入大量的金钱。他们要去哪里筹钱？拥有2份工作需要花费大量的时间和精力，而向发行商或投资者借钱则会不利于项目的发展。幸运的是，他们轻松地解决了这一问题：因为《尘埃克星》的原型赢得了竞赛，所以他们从中获得了10万美元的奖金。

开发成本

10万美元已经算是一笔巨额数目了，但光是这笔钱就足够了吗？让我们着眼于开发一款独立游戏的成本列表：

食物

水

工作室

网络

创造一款游戏所需要的所有元素便是一台计算机以及基本的生活费用。正如他们所说的，时间就是金钱，而我们需要将近1年半的时间才能完成《尘埃克星》。这1年需要花费多少钱？那时候我们都住在世界上的不同区域（布里斯班，东京，纽约和辛辛那提）—-如此算来我们每人每年节衣缩食的话共要花费2万美元。

他们把大部分的奖金拿去支付当前的账单，债务和交通费用。基于三位成员（游戏邦注：第四位成员能够依靠自己的储蓄过活），剩下的钱只能持续1年半时间。

人们经常会说：创造一款游戏需要花多少钱？答案其实很简单：

创造一款游戏的最低成本=生活费用×所需时间×团队规模

需要牢记的是，我们并不具有正式的业务结构，没有公司或福利。我们只是由四个单纯想要创造《尘埃克星》的人所组成，我们也只是足够幸运地拥有一笔可以无需为今后一年的生活担忧的金钱。

同样地，我们也必须清楚那笔钱并不足以帮助我们完成一款游戏—-还存在许多无形的资源，如积极性，耐性等等，这与金钱一样也会被消耗掉。

期望和结果

从开发开始到现在已经过去1年半时间。现在是2012年1月。《尘埃克星》进展如何？几个月前，我们为自己设定了一个艰难的截止期限，即1月17日。因为如果超过这一期限我们便没有过多钱去支持接下来的开发了。除此之外，在历经15个月的艰苦工作后，我们的积极性和耐性也在不断递减。而现在，出于某种奇迹，游戏已经准备在Steam上发行了。在紧张地按下鼠标后，我们终于上传了最终作品，就等待最后发行了。

我们不知道该期待什么。我们只能使用少量的数据和近似值进行推测。过去这一年半时间的付出是否真的值得？

当然值得，我们所有人都投入了最大的努力，并创造出了引以为傲的作品。然而还存在一些不确定的财务期望值。我们的目标只是创造出能够支撑我们继续创造游戏的费用。如果我们能够独立致力于下一个项目而无需受到财政亏空的限制，《尘埃克星》便算取得了财政上的成功。

如果1年半的游戏创造花费了我们10万美元，我们就需要每年赚取6万7千美元（直到下款游戏发行前）。而如果我们在生活上的消费得到提高，那么该数值就需要翻两倍。粗略估算来看，如果我们下一个项目需要3年时间，在加上一些缓冲区，那么实现最终目标大约需要30万至40万美元。这是否足够现实？我们不知道。

在销售页面上按压刷新按键几个小时后，我们终于能够肯定游戏取得不错的销量了：第一天，我们卖出了4796份——并赚到了44141美元。不过我们很难进行长期推断—-显然我们不可能每天都卖出这么多游戏，而这最初的热潮会持续多久呢？大约2个月后，销量轨迹开始成形：

不出所料，在发行后销量开始稳定下降。前三天的收益占据着我们前三个月收益的一半。在第二个月末，我们每天的销量基本上是在30至50期间。到那时候我们总共获得的利益是24万3千美元。要知道，这只是收益。在扣除税收，Valve的分红，我们最终只剩下该数值的63%，也就是15万3千美元。

如果在1月25日，或者说是游戏发行后9天内来看，《尘埃克星》算是有利可图的。但是如果考虑到个人所得税（游戏邦注：大约是25%至36%），我们只会在游戏发行1个月后获得盈利。

在4月末，销量开始下降到每天只有零星几个。而后来《尘埃克星》获得了Steam Midweek Madness的推广，即在5月份的前三天半折出售。同时我们还将游戏移植到了Mac上，并添加了定制关卡编辑器和服务器。以下是游戏的新变化：

在3天的促销中，我们共卖出17462份游戏，超过了发行前三天的销量。当然了，因为打了半折，所以收益自然也没那么多，但这仍占据着游戏终身收益的37%。我们真的为此感到兴奋：就好象我们不久后就能够实现财政目标了。

顺带一提的是，我们认为玩家基础的巨大提高能够带来更多基于口头宣传的销量，从而实现游戏的长期发展，但似乎在几天后游戏销售便会恢复到最初的速度上。

Humble Bundle

在1月发行游戏后，来自Humble Bundle（游戏邦注：一家由YCombinator投资的独立的游戏销售平台）的人便联系了我们。他们希望将《尘埃克星》放到未来的捆版销售中，并帮助我们将游戏移植到Linux。在9月中旬，《Humble Indie Bundle 6》最终发行了，除了我们的游戏外还包含其它优秀的游戏。以下是我们游戏最新的情况：

（对于Humble Bundle所出售的单位数，我们只算上《尘埃克星》在Steam上的销量。）Humble Bundle真的为了我们带来了巨大的成功：我们因此获得了153915美元的收益，并且与之前的推广不同的是，我们之后在Steam上的销量也获得了提高。

基于《尘埃克星》玩家数量的显著增加，游戏的每日销量也从12增加至50或60。

在捆绑销售后，我们还在年末经历了3次推广活动：感恩节推出了半折促销，每日交易以及假期促销。尽管这些推动都未曾带来之前那般突出的结果，但是它们也具有很大的影响，即在11月份感恩节开始到1月份圣诞促销这45天间，游戏共创造了7万6千美元的收益。这可是之前45天收益的3倍。

最后的数值

1年后我们游戏最后的收益为489404美元（总收益是668490美元）。当然了，还要扣除一些业务运行成本，包括法律和会计费用，软件授权费用，服务器成本以及交通费用等将近3万6千美元。当你在计算这一数值时，并扣除个人所得税后，我们只剩下不到29万5千美元。最后，这便意味着《尘埃克星》每售出10美元，我们拿到手上的便只有4.41美元。然后我们还要将其四等分。

《尘埃克星》是我们完成的第一款游戏，当时的我们并没有任何开发经验，特别是关于业务方面。通过该项目，我们直接领悟到了时间就是金钱这一道理，并且当我们所面对的资源非常有限时，就需要做出必要的牺牲。我们也对一些重要的推广能够推动收益的发展感到惊讶。我们真的很感激拥有这么一个好的开始，并且对于游戏最终取得的成绩也感到欣慰。

我们将所有的收益用在创造下一款游戏《Spire》上。因为保持财政上的独立，我们便能够继续以设计师的身份开发游戏，而不是商人。与《尘埃克星》一样，我们也必须围绕着如何创造出更棒的游戏，而非如何更好地销售游戏去做决定。

对于《尘埃克星》所取得的成绩我们真的是又兴奋又觉得自愧不如。玩家从游戏中感受到的乐趣足以推动着我们去创造下一款游戏—-财政上的成功只是附带条款。

在写这篇文章时我们已经接到了许多问题。以下是对一些常见问题的答案。

你们是如何营销游戏？

我的朋友（来自IndieViddy）一直在帮助我们营销《尘埃克星》，即将游戏的审查副本发给多个评论者和博主。她也创造并发送了新闻稿，并帮助我们创造了视频上传到YouTube上。她的帮助让我们能够在那时候专注于游戏的完善中。

这次的开发是否有价值？似乎相关数值显示它并不能为你们带来较大的收入。

毫无疑问，这是非常有价值的。的确，如果与没有任何风险的正常工作相比较，我们4个人花费了2年时间而获得的最终收益真的不多。

但是必须明确的是，我们一直在做着自己热爱的事，并不是出于赚钱目标，而是为了创造出真正有意义的内容。

但并不是说钱就不重要了，只不过创造《尘埃克星》的乐趣远比做其它工作的机会成本高得多。比起采取各种手段，我们只是笔直地朝着终点前进。

最后，我们通过《尘埃克星》所取得的成功是我们作为一间工作室的坚实基础。现在我们拥有一定的资产能够支撑下一个新项目一段时间；同时我们也因此积攒了一定的信誉和玩家社区。这些都是推动着《Spire》发展的重要元素。这也远比我们创造的收益来得有价值。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Is $100,000 enough to develop a game?

by Terence Lee

Dustforce is just over a year old now. How well has it fared in the past year, and what does that mean for Hitbox Team?

In this article, we discuss in great detail the financial performance of Dustforce, in the context of our own goals for the game. Come and learn about some of the financial issues of a tiny development team, such as how we funded Dustforce, and how much it costs to make a game.

Finding game sales data is notoriously hard. Video games have traditionally been a “hits driven” industry – the majority of revenue for a publisher comes from a handful of big commercial successes.

With so many non-hits being made, publishers try to keep sales numbers a trade secret, as the more disappointing figures can be worrisome to investors. This trend has made discussing sales figures an uncomfortable topic, akin to talking about your salary.

When we first started working on Dustforce, it was frustrating to not be able to find much data about whether indie game development is a realistic thing to do with your life.

The closest thing out there were unofficial sources, like VGChartz, that gathered retail information, but lacked in digital sales data. Fortunately, independent developers don’t have the same financial obligations that publishers do. There was a series of helpful articles [parts 1, 2, 3] by David Galindo that talked about the financial details of his game, The Oil Blue. It was just one data point, but a valuable one.

Now that we’ve finished our own first project, we’d like to contribute our own data about Dustforce to the growing trend of transparency in indie game development.

Beginnings

Dustforce started out as the project of the first half of Hitbox Team, Lexie and Woodley. They built the Dustforce prototype during the summer of 2010, motivated by the deadline of a game contest.

For four months, they worked in an outdoor shed, living on cheap frozen foods and bulk soft drinks. Lexie worked at a second job during the day, and joined Woodley at night to build their prototype. They finished the game by August, in time for the contest deadline.

In the few days after the prototype was posted online, an article on IndieGames.com drew some positive attention. Woodley and Lexie received an email from Valve, inviting them to put Dustforce onto Steam. This was the motivation they needed to work on Dustforce full time, to turn it from a prototype into a full game. It wouldn’t be an easy task – the prototype was far from the final vision, and would take more than just two people to finish the game.

It would take at least a year to do it, and of course it costs money to live during that time. Where would that money come from? Working a second job would cost precious time and energy, and borrowing money from a publisher or investor comes with obligations that can be creatively detrimental to the project. Fortunately, the answer came easily: the Dustforce prototype won the competition, and along with it, a $100,000 grand prize.

The cost of development

$100,000 USD is a significant amount of money, but is it enough? Well, let’s look at a detailed list of all the costs critical to developing an indie game:

Food

Water

Shelter

Internet

All you really need to make a game is a computer and basic living expenses. Time is money, as they say, and we needed roughly a year and a half to finish Dustforce. How much does a year cost? We were all living in different areas of the world at the time (Brisbane, Tokyo, New York, and Cincinnati) – on average, it would cost us around $20k per person per year to live frugally.

A lot of the prize money went to paying existing bills, debts, and traveling expenses. Between three people (the fourth lived off his own savings), the remaining money would last about one and a half years.

This was just enough time to finish the game, but it was cutting it a bit close – you don’t want to finish the project with zero dollars in the bank. It can take up to 90 days to receive the first payment from sales, and of course it’s possible that the game might not sell well at all, so it would be ideal to leave a few months of money in reserve.

People often ask: how much does it cost to make a game? Well, the answer is straightforward:

Minimum cost to make a game = cost of living × time needed × team size

Bear in mind that we had no formal business structure, no salaries or benefits. We were just four kids who really wanted to make Dustforce, and were lucky enough to have enough cash to not worry about anything else for a year.

Also, it’s important to note that money is not sufficient to finish a game – there are intangible resources, like motivation and patience, which are just as consumable as cash.

Expectations and results

A year and a half has passed since development began. It is now January of 2012. How is progress on Dustforce going? A few months prior, we gave ourselves a hard deadline of January 17th. It would be too financially risky to work much longer past that date. In addition, motivation and patience are running low, after fifteen long months of hard work. Now, by some miracle, the game is ready to launch on Steam. With a nervous click of the mouse, we upload the final build and await the launch.

We had no idea what to expect. We could only speculate, using sparse data points and ballpark figures. Was the past year and a half worth it?

Of course it was – we worked the hardest any of us have ever worked, and we created something we were truly proud of. Yet, there was a lingering uncertainty of financial expectations. Our goal was to just make enough money to be able to do it again. If we could work on our next project independently and without being restricted by a financial cut-off date, then we’d consider Dustforce a financial success.

So if it cost us almost $100k to work for a year and a half, we’d have to make around $67k for every year until we release our next game. However, it would be nice to live a less frugal lifestyle than before, so ideally that figure would be around twice as much. With a rough estimate of three years for our next project, plus a bit of a buffer, we were looking at around $300-400k USD as our final goal. Was that realistic? We had no idea.

After a few hours of mashing the refresh button on the sales page, we were able to sleep knowing that sales were doing just fine: on the first day, we sold 4,796 copies – a revenue of $44,141. It was hard to extrapolate this into the long term – obviously we wouldn’t be selling this many copies every day, but how long would the initial surge last? After around two months, the trajectory of sales took shape:

^^ Right click, View Image, for full detailed chart ^^

As expected, the sales declined steadily after the launch. The first three days of sales accounted for half of our cumulative revenue for the first three months of sales. By the end of the second month, we were selling around 30-50 copies per day. Our running total by then was around $243k. Remember, this is just the revenue. After deducting withholding taxes, Valve’s cut, returns and fees, we’re left with around 63% of that, so that figure is closer to $153k.

With that taken into account, Dustforce was profitable (in that it made over the $100k put into it) by January 25, or 9 days after its launch. If you take into account personal income taxes (between 28-36%), then we were personally profitable by around a month after launch.

By the end of April, sales have tapered off into a trickle of a dozen or two sales a day. However, Dustforce was slated to be on a Steam Midweek Madness promotion, at 50% off for the first 3 days of May. At the same time, we finished porting the game to Mac, and also added in the custom level editor and server. Here’s what happened:

^^ Right click, View Image, for full detailed chart ^^

Over the 3 days of the promotion, we sold 17,462 copies of the game, more than the amount we sold during the first 3 days of the January launch. Of course, at 50% off, the revenue was a bit less, but it was still an instant 37% boost in lifetime revenue. We were thrilled: it looked like we’d hit our financial goal pretty soon.

As a side note, we thought that the huge increase in the player-base would help the long tail with more word-of-mouth sales, but it seemed to taper off back to their original rate within just a few days.

Humble Bundle

Soon after our January launch, we were contacted by the fine folks from the Humble Bundle. They were interested in putting Dustforce on a future bundle, as well as helping us port the game over to Linux. In mid September, the Humble Indie Bundle 6 was released, along with some other great games. Here’s what happened:

(Note that for the number of Humble Bundle units sold, we just included the number of copies of Dustforce that were activated on Steam.) The Humble Bundle was a great success: we made roughly $153,915, and unlike the last promotion, we did notice an increase in Steam sales afterwards.

With such a huge boost in the number of people playing Dustforce, the amount of daily sales jumped up from under a dozen to around 50 or 60 copies per day.

After the Humble Bundle, we also had three other promotions to end the year on: 50% off during the Thanksgiving sale, a daily deal, and the holiday sale. Although none of them were as dramatic as the previous events, they cumulatively had a big impact, netting $76k in the 45 days between the beginning of the Thanksgiving sale in November, to the end of the Christmas sale in January. This was over three times as much as the revenue in the 45 days prior to that.

Final numbers

^^ Right click, View Image, for full detailed chart ^^

The final figure for our income after exactly one year of sales is $489,404 USD (from a total of $668,490 in revenue). Of course, there are also costs to running the business: legal and accounting fees, software licenses, server costs, and some travelling expenses have added up over the past year to take a good $36k or so out of our total income. When you take that into account, along with personal income taxes, we are left with around $295k. In the end, this means that for every $10 copy of Dustforce sold, $4.41 of it ended up in our pockets. We then split this between the four of us.

Dustforce was our first finished game, and we went into it without much experience, especially in the business side of things. Through this project, we learned firsthand that time is money, and that sacrifices have to be made when resources are limited. We were also surprised by how critical promotions were for revenue. We are really grateful to have a strong start, and are very happy with how the game turned out.

We’re putting all our earnings back into making our next game, Spire. By being able to remain financially independent, we can continue to develop the game as artists and not as businessmen. Like it was with Dustforce, it is of utmost importance that we make design decisions based solely on making the game better, not on making it sell more.

We are all humbled and elated by how well Dustforce has been received. The joy from our players is enough to keep us making games – the financial success is just an incidental blessing.

Update: We’ve been asked a few questions since posting this article. Here are some answers to the most common ones.

How did you market the game?

Our friend Mary, from IndieViddy, helped us market Dustforce by sending review copies of the game to numerous reviewers and bloggers. She also created and sent out press releases, as well as helped make Youtube videos for us. Her help allowed us to focus purely on the game at a time when we were most busy.

Was it worth it? The numbers don’t seem to translate into a very good salary.

Without a doubt, yes, it was worth it. It is true that the final earnings, spread out among four people to account for almost 2 years of development is not particularly impressive, considering that more money could have been made at normal jobs without taking the considerable risks that we took.

However, it’s important to note that the entire time we were doing what we loved, not for the goal of a monetary reward, but in order to make something beautiful come into existence.

It’s not that money isn’t important – instead, it was simply that the pleasure of making Dustforce was worth far more than the opportunity cost of working somewhere else. Instead of accumulating the means to an end, we just went straight for the end.

Lastly, our relative success of Dustforce was a fantastic foundation for us as a studio. We now have the financial means to work on our new project for a while; we also have a proven reputation and a community of challenge-loving players. It sets us up to really turn Spire into the best thing it can be. That’s something worth more than just the money we made.（source：develop-online）