Genre Question

[EscapePod]

I am a veteran of the mainstream games industry. I have recently rediscovered the idie gaming scene, after many years.

I am looking for genre related sales information.

Excluding simple puzzle games, does anyone know of any sale breakdowns across all the indie gaming genres? For example, how do shooters sell versus RPG's, or adventure games, etc? Just doing a look-up of downloads isn't really accurate, as that is affected by the developer's ability to market their product.

After looking at most of the recent indie games, I am somewhat surprised by the limited number of genres. I would have expected more variety, given the lack of shackles. That said, maybe these developers know something about sales distribution that I don't.

Thanks for the help!

[Fost]

It's not that simple sadly. To start with, the kind of information you want can often be gleaned from various forums. However, most of the people who freely post their sales figures are selling around 1-2 copies a day if they are very lucky. The big names (who have usually become portals) are never going to release sales information. You can't really base a decision on sales of games that had very little marketing, where fluctuations between genres are only a couple of copies each month. We often get daily fluctuations that make little or no sense, and we only have the one game right now.

The other issue is that genre isn't perhaps the most important question. For example - if you find out that a particular genre has never sold well then that could be a good thing - maybe no-one has ever done it well, and there's a gap in the market. The best information you could have, would be detailed information about a specific game. Then you could investigate what was good about that game, and what the company did to market it. Even so, if that game has done really well, then perhaps it isn't a good idea to enter the market and try to compete with it (Puzzle games for instance, used to sell very well judging by what I've read, but now the market is saturated it's hard to stand out)

Greg Micek at diygames is currently conducting an anonymous indie game developer survey which includes figures about sales and game genres etc. Whilst again, I'm not so sure you can draw many conclusions from this without knowing the specifics of each game, it will definitely be an interesting read, and something to keep an eye out for.

[EscapePod]

It is really good to hear that someone is trying to gather that information.

I find the indie market to be rather peculiar. I would think that it would be in everyone's best interest to have as much information as possible. I am used to seeing weekly or monthly sales reports for mainstream titles, which can certainly help make better decisions. That information would appear to me to be even more valuable within the indie market.

The scale of the industry is obviously such that overhead like this is very difficult, but I would expect a grassroots effort to make it happen. The important point about the indie industry is that (in my mind) competition is not cut-throat, and everyone can help everyone else (probably to their own advantage as the industry grows in appeal).

Thanks again.