作者：Dave Toulouse

从总收益来看，我的游戏《生者行进》创造了我到现在为止所获得的最多收益。当然了，如果要减去Steam的抽成以及发行商的所得，那么剩下的钱可能与我作为全职员工时的工资差不多。游戏发行还不到一年，所以我很难预测在游戏发行一周年时情况会变成怎样。

march of the living(from steampowered)

当看到游戏发行第一周的结果时，我便认为游戏销量在六个月后会更高。而在这里我所学到的一点便是一定要万分谨慎地做出预测。实际上，游戏在六个月后所赚到的全部收益的67%其实是在发行第一周所赚到的，80%则是在发行第一个月赚到的。

如果你希望继续作为全职独立开发者，那么发行一款带有这种结果的游戏所具有的不确定性对你来说便是一大挑战。

对长久发展持保留态度

你是否听过“你的游戏在几个月或几年后将有不错的表现”这样的话？如果你刚发行了你的第一款还算成功的游戏并正在计算它现在为你赚到了多少钱，那么长久发展便不是你的主要考虑对象。当然如果你的游戏发行5年赚到了30万美元固然很好，但现在这对你却没有什么帮助。

我在Steam上还有其它两款发行于2015年的游戏，不过现在的它们几乎名存实亡了。在发行时它们便未取得成功，所以它们并未对我现在的财政状况做出任何贡献。虽然随着时间的发展它们也能赚到些钱，但那真的对我没有太大帮助。

随着时间的发展，你的收益将出现更大的变化，所有的一切也将变得更加复杂。你可能将持续好几周只卖出几份游戏或者根本卖不出去半份游戏，而只在促销期间你才能看到销量的变化。这便意味着你必须好好考虑自己的积蓄分配并想办法去维持好几个月的低收益状况了。

当然这并不是说你应该忽视长久发展，因为这主要是关于你该如何保留自己全职独立开发者的身份。

管理风险并解决不可预见性

所以你决定想要继续作为一名全职独立开发者并在销量不佳时要好好考虑钱的分配。你该留出多少钱于下个项目中？通常情况下你都不可能一下子获得所有钱。当然了如果你发行的是一款在一个月内卖出去5万多份的游戏，那情况肯定就不同了。

现在你正进入风险管理领域。如果将来我将继续赚取不确定数量的收益，那么我所承担的风险将有多少？不过这也取决于不同人对于风险的忍耐度，因为有些人总是更爱冒险。在同样情况下，拥有不同性格人的可能会做出完全不同的反应。你的生活状况同样也会影响你的反应。如果你拥有小孩，房子或其它需要花钱的东西，你可能便不会像年轻的时候那样敢于冒险。

考虑到所有的这些情况，我所得出的结论是自己的抗风险能力真的很低。这便意味着我正错失着一些机会，但同时我也不是那种会孤注一掷的人，我将只是期待着自己的下一款游戏能够获得更好的成绩。即使是成功的开发者也不能100%保证他们的下一款游戏会有怎样的表现，我也看过一些本来认为自己的作品不错但结果却不如意的开发者在费尽心思地寻找原因。

在进行风险管理时你必须始终牢记你并不能真正预测结果。反而当你在做决定时你应该始终考虑一些最悲观的结局。例如我可以想当然认为《生者行进》在今年万圣节促销时能够赚到更多收益（游戏邦注：即根据其他开发者的结果）。这是一款相对较新的游戏并且也完全切合主题，那么它在促销期间到底有何表现呢？好吧，因为游戏并未出现在万圣节页面上，所以它根本未能捞到多少好处。当然我并不是说它未被选择是因为游戏表现得不好，因为我知道至少一款被选择的游戏在发行日的表现还不如《生者行进》。所以到底为什么游戏落选了呢？我想应该是我们运气不够吧。

我在这里所获取的教训便是不能寄太多希望于那些我们并不能掌控的事情上。如果你够幸运那当然很好，当你却不能将业务计划完全依赖于运气上。

独立？

当我与其他独立开发者交谈时发现，很多人在发行了一款游戏后都觉得自己需要回到起点重头开始。你能赚钱去支付账单但却不能为“你所拥有的优秀理念”投入必要资源。就拿我来说吧，当我丢掉了全职工作并需要发行商去帮我实现任何项目时，我便是处于这种状态。而这也绝不是我想成为的那种“独立开发者”。

如果你依赖于发行商的推动，这便意味着你需要提高你必须获取的成功的门槛，因为你需要将一半，甚至更多收益分给发行商，所以你需要努力赚到更多的钱。举个例子来说吧，如果我能够不依靠发行商去发行《生者行进》，那么我现在的财政状况将会大大改善。我将可以不在别人的帮助下资助自己的下一个项目，并且在赚到下一笔收益前我至少能够承担自己2年的生活开支。当然了我尽量不让自己这样想，因为如果没有发行商或许我的游戏根本不会有现在的成绩。

这将变成一种恶性循环，因为如果你想要成功发行一款游戏并让自己变成真正的独立开发者，你便需要较长时间依赖于发行商。

这便是为什么你会看到那么多独立开发者都有发行商在背后支持。我们都认为游戏能够帮助开发者快速获得独立，但事实上这往往需要花费好几年的时间。实现自立并不是件简单的事，并且也不是你做得好就够了。

这不是什么新鲜事

许多独立开发者应该都写过这一内容了吧。所以“独立开发者做的不错但仍需要努力”这样的题目可能不能获得多少点击率。

但我敢保证大多数人应该都知道这并不是一个能够轻易深入的业务，因为在过去九年里我已经发行了许多不是很成功的游戏，所以我非常了解这一现实，但我认为当我们在听到有关成功的故事时并不该对这一事实感到麻木。

与其他人一样，我当然也希望发行一款热门游戏，但是我的首要目标还是维持生计。当然我也不介意拥有额外的经费去创造自己想要创造的东西。

我经常会听到独立开发者面对着焦虑困扰，在过去我对此一直不是、很能理解，因为我认为他们正做着我希望自己有一天也能做到的事。而现在当自己和他们站在同一条船上时，我便对自己自己的看法感到懊悔了。

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

The financial reality of being indie and doing just okay

by Dave Toulouse

My game March of the Living made more money than I have ever seen in my life if you look at the gross revenue. Of course, once you remove Steam’s cut and then split what remains with the publisher, what is left will be more or less the same kind of salary I was making when I had a day job. It haven’t been a year since the game was released and it can be tricky to make predictions so I don’t know for sure what the picture will be on the game’s first anniversary.

When seeing the results during the first week of release, I thought sales would be much higher six months later, specially that the game was well received. One thing I learned is to be much more careful when trying to make predictions. In fact, six months later I can say that 67% of the money the game made was during its first week of release and 80% during the first month…

Sales over 6 months

This uncertainty when you released a game with that kind of results can be a challenge if your objective is to remain a full-time indie dev.

Taking the long tail with a grain of salt

Have you ever heard “Your game will do fine over X months or years…”? When you just released your first moderate success and are counting on the money it makes to pay the bills in the present, the long tail isn’t your primary concern. It sure is nice if your game can make $300,000 over 5 years but it still doesn’t help you right here, right now.

The long tail can also be a very short tail. I have two other games on Steam that I released in 2015 that are now pretty much dead. They were not successes when I released them so they have little to no effect on my current financial situation. They still make a bit of money from time to time but nothing I can rely on.

Things get even more complicated as your revenue may vary a lot from month to month. Many weeks you’ll sell just a few copies or none at all and only during special sales will you suddenly see an increase in sales. It means that you really have to be careful with your money and always have to make sure you somehow managed to keep a safety cushion as some months will be really thin.

It’s not that the long tail should be dismissed as this might eventually be how you manage to remain a full-time indie dev once you have released a few games that are doing reasonably well but when you just got your first game that should be doing fine over a few years, it still doesn’t fix the present.

Managing risks and dealing with unpredictability

So you decided you want to remain a full-time indie dev and are carefully setting money aside for when sales won’t be so great. How much money do you have left to work on your next project once the bills are paid? Probably not a lot as remember, you don’t get the money all at once. Of course, if you released a hit that sold 50,000+ copies in a month then it might be a different story…

You are now entering the realm of risks management. How much can I reasonably risk assuming I’ll keep making an undetermined amount of money in the future? Some are more adventurous than others so it really comes down to your tolerance to risk. Two persons in the same situation might have completely opposite reactions based on their personalities. Your life situation can also have a big impact on how you react. If you have kids, a house and other financial engagements then you might not want to risk as much as when you were younger and had less responsibilities.

Considering all of the above, I have to conclude that my own tolerance to risk is pretty low. This can be a problem as this might mean I’m missing opportunities but I’m not one to bet everything I just made hoping the next game will do even better as I’ve seen way too many games that were supposed to do well ending up being disappointments. Even successful devs don’t know for sure how well their next game will perform and I’ve seen quite a few scratching their head wondering what the hell just happened when they thought they had a solid game that did poorly.

When dealing with risk management you always have to keep in mind that you can’t really predict what might be coming or not. At best you should always consider the most pessimist scenario when making decisions. For example, it could have been easy for me to think that March of the Living would make quite some money by being selected to be part of the Halloween sale this year (based on results from other devs it’s an event that is doing quite well). The game is relatively new, it’s doing okay and it fits the theme perfectly so how much did it make during this sale? Well, it wasn’t selected to appear on the Halloween page so it didn’t make much at all (less than a weeklong deal). I can’t even say that it wasn’t selected because it’s not doing well enough as I know of at least one game that was selected and that performed a lot less than March of the Living on its release day. So why wasn’t it selected then? Lack of luck I guess…

The lesson here is to not put too much hope on things you don’t control. Good if you’re lucky but you shouldn’t count on getting lucky as part of your business plan as obvious as it might sound.

Independent you say?…

Talking to other indie devs, many feel like they’re back to square one after releasing a game. You made money to pay the bills but can’t quite put the necessary resources on “that great idea you have”. In my case, I find myself in the exact same position I was when I lost my day job and needed a publisher to make any project possible. That’s not being as “indie” as I’d like it to be…

If you have to rely on a publisher to keep going forward then it means you are raising the bar of the level of success you must achieve to make just enough money as you’re most likely giving up half of your revenue or more (often publishers will have different percentage of revenue distribution until they recoup their money). For example, if I would have been able to release March of the Living without a publisher then my financial situation would be quite different. I’d be able to fund my next project without any help and pay for living expenses for at least two years before really having to get “new” money. Of course I try not to think too much about that as without a publisher this game wouldn’t have been possible anyway.

This can become a vicious cycle as it’s already difficult to release a game doing okay but if you need it to do twice as well so you can become truly independent then you might have to rely on a publisher for quite a long time.

This is why you see so many indie games with publishers backing them. We all like to think about games that were big hits and provided quick financial independence to the devs but it’s often something that took years to achieve. Reaching self-sustainability isn’t easy and often cannot be done by just doing okay.

This is nothing new

Many indie devs could have written about this (or already have), it’s simply not making the headlines. “Indie dev doing okay but still struggling” probably isn’t a title that would get many clicks.

I’m pretty sure most people know that this is not an easy business to dive into and I surely knew it for having released quite some not so successful games over nine years but I think we can easily become numb to this fact when we keep hearing about success stories. I’m the first to admit that I’ve been guilty of this at times.

Like anyone else, I surely wouldn’t mind to release a big hit but my first objective was always to just make a decent living. To do okay with the additional bonus of working on what I want when I want to. Now that I’m at this point though, I’m realizing that things are not as bright as I thought they’d be.

I’ve been hearing about indie devs dealing with regular anxiety issues and I frankly didn’t understand them as they were doing what I was hoping to do one day. I may have even been quick to judge them in a way I now regret as now that I’m in their shoes, I’m dealing with the exact same issues. It shows that even when you’re told something, you don’t always listen or even refuse to…（source：gamasutra）