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Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale Postmortem

By james_fudge

Indie developers tried a lot of different distribution and sales methods in 2010 and have been met with varying measures of success, but a blog post from Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale distributor Carpe Fulgar puts something into perspective: big sales number -even for an indie - don't always equate to big money.

First the good news: the action strategy RPG sold 100,000 copies through various promotions. The bad news is they did not get rich off it. That is because of those 100,000 copies, the game didn't always make a lot of money per copy. A blog post by Andrew Dice details what happened when Steam offered the game as part of a $5 indie game pack. For every sale of that pack, Carpe Fulgar only made $1 on a game that sells for as much as $20. Let us think about that for a second. If Recettear had sold 100,000 copies at $20 that would be right around $2 million USD before costs. Read More

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Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on January 03, 2011 (boomark / email).