pouët.net

chock: i would say a lot of them are university/school projects (like QUBE or all the Digipen games) or spare time projects (like minecraft) that sometimes grow out of proportion. and i dont think they make all that much money. there's a select group (usually centered around IGF/TIGSOURCE) who usually end up in humble bundles / the potato sack promotion / xbla / etc. who do really well, but i could probably name equally as much which don't.

Or just to quote the Wikipedia-article that chock posted:

To put it simply: in order to make a $300.000.000 profit, something like $100.000.000 was spent. So the game made $400.000.000, they recouped their expenses of $100.000.000, and are left with $300.000.000. A sizable chuck of change -- a lot of money.

But! Their ROI isn't very impressive -- 300%.

Now: take a popular indie-game and say that it cost sweat and tears and had no real CAPEX costs to speak of. To extrapolate, say that lost potential income from working on the game and NOT doing something else is $50.000 (the average american household income) then your investment is $50.000. Your game goes on to sell a million copies at $20 a pop -- that's $20.000.000. Pull out publishing rights and other expenses and you're left with something close to $15.000.000.

That gets you an ROI of 30000% -- 100 times as much. (minus the initial $50.000 investment, but really, there's not really a need to go into details here)

Granted, I'm dumbing it down here, but it seems it was needed to get the point across.

chock: yeah, you have to subtract your initial investment of course, I simplified it too much. :) Still: the point stands. ROI should not be confused with "the larger your income, the better the ROI", because it completely ignores the whole point of ROI: your investment.

gargaj: the Machinarium piracy is a damn disgrace :(

"information wants to be free."

Apparently, "free to play" has the same ratio of paying/playing users. (5-7%)

oh don't even mention free to play. we can talk about this in private (i'm an mmo developer) but that's a very skewed comparison for a number of reasons.

The piracy rate of our last retail PC game was so absurdly high that we didn't know whether to cry or laugh when watching the server logs...

A couple of years ago students at our university developed a game called "And Yet It Moves". The game won several awards and was subsequently thrown onto the market.

great game, actually, but also another game that probably didn't break any sales records, although it had it's fair share of promotion.

Well, it was part of the 3rd Humble Bundle, that made 2+ million altogether, so they still made a buck or two. :)

gloom, i perfectly know what ROI means... I deal with ROI (if you want to treat ROI as a math formula measurement which gives a percent) every day (I manage an online store)... if you want to measure "return of investment" as literally speaking, then I think a $100 million inverstment that returns $300 million profit, gives a better return of your investment than a $1 million investment that returns $30 million.

Probably not right in "theoretical maths" and understanding ROI as a formula, since, as someone pointed out, you "supposedly" could make 100 $1 million investments and get $30 million from each, you'd make $3000 million instead of $300... but since that's unrealistical because not every $1 million project makes $30 million, then, thinking as a businessman, I'd rather make the "generally safer" $100 million inverstment to get $300 million profit.

There's more risk in a $100 million AAA game inverstmen than on a $1 million indie one... but not than on 100 $1 million indie ones :-)

jcl: Bah, please no more ROI stuff since you clearly don't know what it means, you are just trying to redefine it to make it mean what you want, but that's not how it works. :)

And the success rate of indie games is LOW. One 100 million project that's part of a well understood and established franchise is much less risky than 100 random indie game titles combined.

That's exactly what I said

Garg kinda wins for quoting Timothy Leary via William S. Burroughs but I disagree with the "it's not what you know but who you know" ethos here - these guys aren't aiming at pitching their game at a bunch of VC's at a junket.

It baffles me that you insist on using the term ROI to label something that you clearly know isn't ROI, especially when you consistently use it wrong in your examples.

Your example above, for example, where the latter investment of $1M is literally gives you an ROI that's ten times better than the $100M investment.

Feel free to talk about how putting a large sum of money into something and getting a large sum of money out is something you think is "better", but stop using terms that mean something completely different. :)

I should point out that since you also insist that you "think like a businessman", the higher the investment, the lower the ROI and the higher the chance for failure becomes.

This is "Business 101".

Your measure of risk is also completely wrong, since making a series of a hundred small investments VS making one big investment is the definition of economic risk. Of course the risk with many small investments is smaller, since it spreads your risk over multiple ventures.

This too, is literally, "Business 101", so I'll repeat my skepticism of you running any sort of business. :)

gloom, we are talking about the videogame industry specifically... if you really think investing on 100 indie games is less riskier than investing on one AAA well-stabilished franchise game which costs 100 times what each of those indie games costed, then there's no more talking, we just see thing differently.

I don't have the $100 million to invest, so it's not MY business or my risk in this precise matter.

it baffles me how you still manage to argue while talking about sth completely different at the same time ;)

Maybe we could start a kickstarter for Pouet? So we can raise money to upgrade the website?

I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS.

Okkie: will you go back their project instead of talking nonsense please? KTHX

okkie: before we try to make incentives for people to code features on platforms (which isn't that bad an idea) we should look into helping people organize events with such money.

another fine kickstarter worth mentioning:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/165500047/broken-sword-the-serpents-curse-adventure

jcl: I don't think I can explain things any simpler, so I give up. You are making an utter fool of yourself and your business-savy ways :)

If I had a $100.000.000 I wouldn't finance indie games, I'd finance my exorbitant life style until the money ran out and then live in a box - indie games will take ALL your money, better to just spend it ALL on coke and whores, and one box.