State of the Industry

The Adrenaline Vault has a new developer article, which is about the current state of the game industry. Basically it's not going real great. Even when you do think a game is selling well, it probably isn't despite what the publisher is saying. Besides touching on how publishers are faking sales numbers, the author also shows how hard it can be to get your game into stores.

So if you don't get your game onto retail shelves you're left with electronic distribution. Here's the flat out numbers based on experience and talking to other publishers and developers. If you put your game on a download site, you can expect it to get about a 1% conversion rate -- downloads converted to an actual sale. Try it for fun: Go find a game that displays how many downloads it's received. Let's say it got 100,000 downloads. That means the demo generated around 1,000 sales on that site. Sounds unbelievable? Probably but it's true, ask any game developer.