When I last left you, my very popular SteamBirds: By The Numbers article let you know that SteamBirds had made approximately $34,000 USD (gross).  This article was so popular it was copied over to Gamasutra and into two different magazines! (score!) I suppose that means you guys want more?

So let’s start by getting caught up.

SteamBirds: The Original

Since last writing, SB went on to make an addition $11K in various sitelocks and licenses, and to this day is still generating more business (did 3 sitelocks in January alone!). I’m fairly confident that the original SB is going to make money for a loooong time.

SteamBirds has now made approximately $45,000 USD.

Here’s a popular chart: breaking down the sources of all revenues for the original SB:

I really like this graph because it visually represents how much I loathe advertisements.

I say this a lot, but there’s no harm in re-iterating: I hate ads, I’m really bad at deploying good ads, and I have no advertising strategy other than “tack it on hastily.” You can see it really paid off;

• Mochi ad revenue has paid so little, it hasn’t even sent me a cheque yet (they promise they owe me $78 though)
• CPMStar sends me regular cheques, though the amounts are dwindlingly low
• Kongregate’s revenue-sharing advertising model is about the only thing that pays out, and it pays out IN SPADES.

4-5x more revenue than CPMStar and Mochi combined?? Why does anyone even bother with advertising anymore?!

And even then: All advertising combined is hardly 10% of combined revenues. It might be worth it, but only in this larger-scale economy. I don’t think I’d bother with advertisements at all if I had a game that was expecting to make less than $30K.

As far as traffic and popularity goes:

It seems like traffic is dwindling off to nothing, but it’s been nearly a solid year of 50,000 plays per day (and trended up to 150K/day around the time of Survival’s launch). That’s more web traffic per day than I’ve ever hoped for with a personal blog, so I call it a success!

But that’s enough whinging on about the original SteamBirds. Let’s jump into the fun, new stuff!

SteamBirds: iOS

The wonderful fellows at SemiSecret Software (Eric and Adam) worked hard at making an iOS version of the game. They launched two separate SKUs – one for iPhone/iPod Touch ($0.99), and an HD version ($1.99) for the iPad.

The iOS version of the game was identical to the original flash game, except:

• The game came complete with the “Bonus Missions” (previously only available at ArmorGames)
• The in-game art was completely redone by hand by Adam
• The game got a brilliant, awesome title screen (also by Adam)
• Features all the original, epic, awesome music by DannyB (buy the soundtrack here, and support more awesome music from DannyB!)

Here’s a total sales graph:

The iPad sales were fairly consistently around half the volume of the iPhone sales, which was surprising – considering how many more iPhones there are in the world!

What was super interesting, though, was this zoomed-in portion:

(ignore the dip around Jan. 5th – error in the data – sales were consistent)

I love the big spike at Christmas time. Shows people reveling in proper Commercial Spirit! But even more interesting was the App was on an “introductory sale” for December. We bumped the prices up $1 on January 1st ($1.99 / $2.99), and there was no affect on sales at all! Interesting…

I have to say that the iPad edition of the game is, hands down, my favorite game experience. SteamBirds feels like it was designed to be on that platform, and I love it to bits. I bought an iPad just to fawn over it.

SteamBirds: Android

Victor’s team at FlatRedBall created an Android edition of the game for us. This version of the game was again, identical to the original SB, except:

• The graphics engine was entirely re-done from scratch, and features really awesome 3D effects
• Contains dozens of bonus missions and storyline, not available anywhere else
• Contains MULTIPLAYER gameplay!

I don’t have a fancy graph of Android sales, but I know the performance was approximately 20% of the iOS counterpart in terms of gross revenue. I know Android has a vast install base, but not every Android phone has the Marketplace (as opposed to 100% appstore penetration on the iOS), so I have no good feel for how much of this is luck, how much is market, how much is user response, etc… It’s very difficult to feel out the numbers.

20% is still a big chunk, though – but much like the advertising revenue – only if you expect the game to push over $30K or so.

I have a huge problem with Android’s default “Sort by all-time sales” market, and content discovery is hideously broken, so that could be a huge contributing factor here. Hopefully Google will fix that.

The one huge saving grace here was the Android edition’s winning of the IndiePub Game of the Year award. The cash prize (and other perks) that came with that made it all worth while!

Mobile Edition Summary

Both mobile editions were “featured,” and both rose in ranks quite quickly. In terms of 72-hour sales, SteamBirds rose to a peak of #12 on the iPad “Games” category (#25 overall, if memory serves), which was really nice and super exciting. Sales didn’t hold, though, and tailed off rapidly.

Not hating on the tail at all, of course – it’s nowhere near launch-day-numbers, but they’re still generating cash.

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would target Android still – just because I like supporting the platform. Even with a featured, popular application with backing from Penny Arcade (two or three times now!), it hardly paid for it’s own development.

That said: Both mobile editions were done via contractors working for revenue split (50% each, which I think is generous!), and the resultant windfalls from both devices was, essentially, free money.

All in all, iPad/iPhone/Android split out to be a fairly even pie: around 33%/33%/33% each.

The mobile market has a fairly long tail, though – and that tail is pretty thick and lucrative, especially for Android.  I believe these figures will round out nicely in the coming year, but they were only launched near the beginning of December, so we don’t have a lot of data yet.

Let’s move on to the NEW game!

SteamBirds: Survival

SteamBirds: Survival wasn’t a gigantic technical change from the original, but it has very different gameplay. I’ve blogged about the specifics previously, so I’ll let you go read that (or just play it!) instead of updating it here.

Sponsorship

The game went up on FlashGameLicense.com looking for a sponsor. We were fairly open to anything, but being the Christmas season with an non-thematic game: we had a fairly poor turn out. Several sponsors said they’d be willing to pay more in the Spring, but we didn’t want to wait. Not to worry: in the end we got a really good deal.

Our primary sponsor ended up being AXE, the body-spray brand (pit, pit, chest). They paid just over $10K for the game. A hilarious conversation came out of this:

Me: “OK, I’m done incorporating your logos. Where should I sitelock the game to?”

Them: “Oh, uh, we don’t have a website. Can you host it?”

Me: “Y… yes?!?!”

You see, typically a sponsor is paying for the traffic redirection back to their site. In this case, Axe didn’t have a dedicated portal – they just wanted the ad space. This allowed us to retain and control our traffic, show our users exactly what we wanted to show them, place up-sell icons for the mobile editions, place our own blog and twitter feeds… That’s worth an extra $10K of value any day!

And again: Much like the Original SB, sponsor and licensing requests for Survival keep rolling in, and I expect it to make us money for a long time coming.

Advertising

This go-around I learned my lesson from the original Steambirds: no advertisments. We didn’t bother integrating with Mochi or CPMStar, and any revenue put forth by Kongregate was just a nice dollop of icing on this cake.

MicroTransactions

A new twist, however, was Micro-Transactions. To date, Survival has made an additional $10K or so in MTX – not too shabby considering there’s a maximum limit on how much you can spend (there are no consumables, by design).

The airplanes in SteamBirds: Survival are so different from each other, that unlocking/purchasing a new plane is like getting to play a whole new game. Some of the planes have fairly straightforward changes, but some themed planes – like the SolipSkier, Canabalt, and AughtNine planes – drastically change gameplay into something entirely different.

So here’s how we worked MTX:

• The game contained a total of 24 planes
• 16 planes were unlockable by regular gameplay
• 8 planes were only unlockable with cash
• The planes ranged from $0.75 (Cockroach) ->$10 (AughtNine)
• Buying all the planes individually cost $20
• There was a prominent “Buy ALL!” button in the game that only cost $15 (25% off!)

Let’s see how well each did:

Isn’t that interesting? 70% of all sales came from the “Buy All” button. It almost seems like we shouldn’t have put the microtransactions on the other planes at all! The vast majority of users would rather just hand us $15 than actually buy each individual plane.

I love that people would trust me with an investment of that size, you know? It feels really good when a flash game player drops $15. Gives me hope for humanity, and the industry!

Free Plane!

We wanted to bait people with a free plane – just give us your EMail address, and we’ll send you a free premium plane! Of all the total users that ever entered the game: 10% clicked on the newsletter signup button. However, only 1% actually made it through the signup process! Signing up for the free plane required you were already signed into a Gamersafe account, so we lost 90% of our potential email addresses because of this hurdle. BIG LESSON LEARNED!

The BlackList

One big problem with the original SteamBirds was certain shady sites (usually in Asian countries) ripping out my advertisements, breaking sitelocks, and preventing outbound links (and sometimes even erasing credits!) or otherwise hacking the game and posting it without permission. For Survival, I implemented a dynamic blacklist – that allows me to block any site from seeing the game on a whim.

Thanks to the first release, I had a lengthy list of ne’er-do-wells, and put them in right at the start of SB:S’s launch. I also put in metrics to see who was trying to defeat my locks!

6 sites in particular were pretty bad, hammering away at the game thousands of times trying to make it work, to no avail. In the end, I had some interesting stats:

• In the Original SteamBirds, I had 4,000,000 plays from “banned” locations
• In SteamBirds Survival, I had less than 60,000.

I’d say that’s a success! 4 million plays that generate zero revenue and zero fan love is 4 million hits I’d rather not have.

What was super interesting is how this has skewed my stats of plays-by-countries; the USA is always #1, but the rest of the top 5 were always Asian countries in each of my other games. In SB:S, Brazil, Spain, The UK, and Canada come into the top 5. Now I know where to localize my games to first!

Other Interesting Stats

I cranked up my statistics tracking in SteamBirds: Survival, and got a bunch of neat figures out of it. Here’s a few:

• Avg. PlayTime of SB: Original: 24 minutes
• Avg. PlayTime of SB:S: 30 minutes (improvement!)
• 25% of all rounds end with the player clicking “More Tips” on the gameover screen
• 25% of players quit the game manually (without dying or closing the window)
• 15% of all players unlocked >2 planes
• 11% of players hit Mute (up from 6% on the original SB, down from 80% on my crappy games!)
• 10% of players attempted newsletter signup, 1% succeeded
• 3% of players clicked on the Twitter/Facebook icons at least once
• 0.9% of players clicked on the Credits button (this is sadly consistent from everyone I talked to in the industry)
• 0.7% of players unlocked the AllUrBase (hardest non-pay plane to get)
• 0.5% of players clicked on the “buy the mobile edition!” button in game

That last one is super interesting to me. Totally tells me that there is very, very little crossover from the flash to the mobile market. Maybe not worth ever including? (then again: if a single journalist sees it, it might make a huge sales difference)

Total Revenues

So how is the SteamBirds franchise doing, overall?

I estimate we’ve made around $200,000 USD so far, with all things included. Here’s how I break it down:

“Old Rev” being the Original Steambirds, “Flash” being SteamBirds: Survival. Note that the original SB has an extra year headstart on Survival, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Survival overtakes it in the long run.

A lot of people will look at this chart and say “Woah! There’s so much money in the mobile market… Why are you bothering with the flash version?!”

My response to that is quite simple; the only reason we made more than $10 on Android is because we got Featured by Google.  It’s a similar story on iOS.  The reason we were able to get featured so easily is because of the fame and endless praiseworthy reviews the Flash version got! If the Flash edition never existed, we would never have had an opportunity to get as much exposure as we did.

I fully plan on developing for Flash into the future. And I think what we have in store will turn the tables on where the biggest revenue lies.

The Future

So what are we working on now?

• SteamBirds: Survival for iOS and Android
• SteamBirds: Multiplayer (working title)

I’ll keep you posted as long as you keep your eyes glued here!

At the IGDA leadership forum in San Francisco Chris Hecker demanded that game developers ask themselves why they are making a game before they design it. Hecker is a renowned contributor to game graphical and physics technologies and a long time proponent of indie gaming.

‘Why’ is step one in any other art form, but Hecker is right. We don’t hear that question too much in games. It is my opinion that the earmark of great art is the purpose behind every choice involved in its creation. Even if that purpose is ambiguous at best, there must be justification for artistic decisions. But Hecker did a good enough job of making this point, so I’m going to say something that may be to the contrary.

I believe that many indie developers have already challenged themselves with ‘Why’ for some time, but there are other challenges. As Hecker points out, the way to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of games is not yet understood. This may explain why our ‘art games’ tend to be overly-abstract, even inaccessible, and still relatively shallow. Developers are forced into extreme formalism just to get over the steep learning curve.

I’m a formalist. I love formalism. But there’s more to art than form and frankly, I’m sick of abstract games. I want some damn content up in here. That’s why I call for developers to ask why less. As it stands, game developers are asking why for the wrong reasons. They’re asking why something is fun or entertaining, which leads to shallow, uninteresting answers. If they ask why in search of something deeper, that’s great, but I’ll set my expectations lower. We’ll get quicker results if we skip the whole why and go for an intuitive form of expression. I’m calling for something closer to improv. Stop looking both ways, and just cross.

When you forget about what other people think and just plop down what you gotta plop down, whether you like it or not, your work reflects who you are. Put yourself under pressure. Tie a gun to the back of your head and make sure that if you don’t finish a game–a good game–within the next 2 weeks, a bullet will go through your head. The definition of ‘good game’ will transform during those two weeks into two priorities: (1) What you can program quickly and (2) whatever comes to mind. The first priority depends on how good of a developer you are (which may be the flaw in this approach for many), but the second is what guarantees that your work will be artistically interesting.

Say you see a man with a unique wardrobe. That wardrobe can tell you a great deal about this man that he didn’t mean to communicate, like what he does for fun, what he’s up to now, the kind of work he does or how much he gets paid. You ask him where he got his shirt and he replies with 30 words. Out of those 30 words you might get an accent that tells you his place of origin. You might discern his political views or religious beliefs. You might discover he’s a racist, a reverse-racist, or that he’s just sensitive about the subject. You can learn any number of things from signals that are not designed at all to communicate the messages you are receiving. The man’s individual signature exists in every choice he makes–including the subconscious ones. If he is a game developer, his games will reflect his personality.

However, our expression can be stifled. As a staunch supporter of introspection and a sober, conscientious approach to art, I know there are times when action is more important than philosophy. We need games that don’t hold back and I believe unleashing our ideas is the way to make them.

Stream of consciousness game development. Maybe that’s impossible, but by working fast and flowing, we can get something close. Developers can focus on self-expression and proliferate. Games even be as short and simple as casual games, but the mechanics should have a context that makes them meaningful (which requires asking why, yes, but answer fast and start coding).

I would love nothing more than to see developers engaged in real philosophical argument about their medium, but right now that sounds like forcing sixth graders to study the Renaissance before you let them paint. Yes, they need to hear about Da Vinci, and yes, it will make them much better painters, but these kids don’t even know what they want to do when they grow up. Let them get their fingers wet, then assign some book reports.

There’s one problem with this plan. Games have been around a long time and developers aren’t discovering the same happy accidents that finger-painters do. That’s because of money. Hecker mentions that industry development is all about profits. So it’s up indies. What else is new.

Really, I agree with Hecker entirely, but I would hate to see indie developers slowing their productivity to find a ‘deep enough’ reason to make a game. Call me a devil’s advocate.

-Christopher J. Rock