DIYgamer

Fascinating Indie Game Metrics

Being an indie developer isn’t easy. Anybody who tells you that is probably lying, or really lucky. Aside from actually, you know, getting the game developed, you’ll need to figure out exactly where you want your game to get distributed. Did you want your game on Sony’s system? XBLA? XBLIG? Is it more of a portable game made for iPhone? PSP? Maybe a PSP Mini or DSiWare? And finally is the game going to be made available for PC/Mac/Linux? How about them all? These are all questions you have to answer before you finish your game because without a distribution platform you won’t have any customers.

Simon Carless, from Gamasutra, recently attended GDC 09 where he was able to sit in on a lecture called: ‘Independent Games & Sales: Stats 101′ gave a lecture called ‘Independent Games & Sales: Stats 101′. Seems very interesting, but what is even more interesting, in my opinion, is what he has done with that information. Simon decided to update his metrics based off this month, October, to find out the varying degrees of success for each distribution platform.

So as you can see there are varying degrees of pros and cons for damn near every service. Sony seems like a good bet, but largely your success hinges on being able to get Sony’s attention or not. XBLA seems like an almost instant hit so long as you can actually get on the service. The iPhone has a huge customer base who are rabid for games but the competition is through the roof. And so on and so forth like that.

My only problem with his metrics is that he left out Xbox Live Indie Games (aside from a short snippet). I don’t know if this might have been due to the fact that there is no way to track individual games or simply because the service doesn’t matter as much as the others but it still would have been nice to see.

Anyways, if your an indie developer this metrics still provide some great incite into the various digital distribution platforms and should, hopefully, help you make the final decision.