New Atari Console that Ataribox?

[Rane]

The mean number of owners for an indie title on Steam released in 2017 was 1500. So, even at $20 a copy, you'd be looking at well under $30K in revenue before development costs and distribution fees. That's a terrible return on the time investment unless it really is just a hobby.

 

 

I think this number might be skewed in the opposite direction by the thousands of zero effort asset flip scam kusoge that have ruined Steam. Games that are not complete irredeemable garbage probably have a bit of an easier time.

Edited July 6, 2018 by Rane

[BiffsGamingVideos]

I never said Linux plug-ins. Most developers still work in Windows for development and it's the Windows libraries and plug-ins that often can't be used in Linux.

 

With regard to your business plan, it's frankly laughable. I am very familiar with those links and I have followed that analysis for a while now. The number you should be looking at is the mean sales and not the average as the average tends to be skewed way high by the million sellers. The mean number of owners for an indie title on Steam released in 2017 was 1500. So, even at $20 a copy, you'd be looking at well under $30K in revenue before development costs and distribution fees. That's a terrible return on the time investment unless it really is just a hobby.

 

The reason most indies fail is that there are many, many indie games released every year on Steam and other platforms and most of them are terrible. No amount of advertising is going to overcome that fact.

 

You do know that you can use Unity in Linux, right? It started out on the Mac, then got ported to Windows and now Linux. And what are these Windows plug-ins you are referring to? It's cross platform. This is the first I have ever heard of this. What exactly are you referring to? maybe I can help you out on the game you are designing. What game is that again?

 

No, you should look at the MEDIUM average and not the MEAN or MODE. That take the top and bottom amounts off. And it's not the sales, it's the profit. $20 games on Steam have more in profits than $5 games. There are no development or distribution costs if there is no advertising. Also, Steam is just 1 store. There are more people playing Minecraft right now than everyone on Steam playing right now.

 

and most Steven Speilberg movies suck yet they pull in tons of money. Why? Advertising.

[Rane]

Also if your game isn't shit you're more likely to also get onto curated storefronts like GOG or Humble and we don't have sales numbers for either of those. I know I personally buy games from them like half of the time.

[BiffsGamingVideos]

 

You'll be laughing out the other side of your face when I become a bazillionaire on my game featuring a pixel bug that shoots MS Paint splotches at broken JPEGs. That is, once I figure out how to make him turn right.

 

Sounds like Bit Evolution on the Steam store. I know the guys who made it. On the summer sale for $3.50. You start out in the Atari pixel world and move to the Gameboy monochrome world, then NES and then SNES. They have sold something like 210,000 copies with no advertising.

[BiffsGamingVideos]

 

 

I think this number might be skewed in the opposite direction by the thousands of zero effort asset flip scam kusoge that have ruined Steam. Games that are not complete irredeemable garbage probably have a bit of an easier time.

 

Correct. That's why you need MEDIUM average and not MEAN or MODE. So there are some that make a lot of money and some that make no money. Ignore them and see what's left.

[bojay1997]

 

 

I think this number might be skewed in the opposite direction by the thousands of zero effort asset flip scam kusoge that have ruined Steam. Games that are not complete irredeemable garbage probably have a bit of an easier time.

Unlikely. Steam has a refund policy now and if a game is refunded, it wouldn't appear in someone's library and therefore wouldn't be included in the stats as they are based on how many users actually own a particular game, not on total sales.

 

 

You do know that you can use Unity in Linux, right? It started out on the Mac, then got ported to Windows and now Linux. And what are these Windows plug-ins you are referring to? It's cross platform. This is the first I have ever heard of this. What exactly are you referring to? maybe I can help you out on the game you are designing. What game is that again?

 

No, you should look at the MEDIUM average and not the MEAN or MODE. That take the top and bottom amounts off. And it's not the sales, it's the profit. $20 games on Steam have more in profits than $5 games. There are no development or distribution costs if there is no advertising. Also, Steam is just 1 store. There are more people playing Minecraft right now than everyone on Steam playing right now.

 

and most Steven Speilberg movies suck yet they pull in tons of money. Why? Advertising.

I am quite convinced by the above that you have no idea what you are talking about. The median takes away the outliers on the top and bottom and puts you smack in the middle of the distribution. It's a truer average given the way stats are being collected. Anyway, I'm sure you'll share your stats with us once your game sells a million with all that advertising.

[Rane]

Unlikely. Steam has a refund policy now and if a game is refunded, it wouldn't appear in someone's library and therefore wouldn't be included in the stats as they are based on how many users actually own a particular game, not on total sales.

 

Doesn't that just make me even more right as then they would have even less owners dragging the number down further? Or is there some place in that calculation they get removed?

Edited July 6, 2018 by Rane

[RugglesTx]

GameStop use to take $5 deposit on pre sell games, not sure if they do so not anymore.

 

But the concept is in certain parts of our economy to prepay for certain things. Sports tickets, be it season ticket or single games, concerts and amusement park tickets, airline tickets etc..

 

Question is how far we are willing to extend that for more material type items and not services. Im willing to for things that will be hard to get when they first come out (Nintendo Switch comes to mind) or if there is a deep discount offered for pre paying.

 

Heck Id prepay for Shenmue 3 months and months in advance!

 

Ataribox is a maybe as far as coming out so that is a strike, and the discount offered was not deep enough IMO so strike two as far as preorder. That being said Id still buy one if its interesting enough when it comes out,

Edited July 6, 2018 by RugglesTx

[Flojomojo]

Correct. That's why you need MEDIUM average and not MEAN or MODE. So there are some that make a lot of money and some that make no money. Ignore them and see what's left.

Um, what?

 

MEAN is also known as AVERAGE. Add up all the values (dollars, scores, whatever you're measuring) and divide by the number of total participants. Add in you, me, and Jeff Bezos and we have an average net worth of $46 billion dollars. Jeff's $140B net worth skewed things higher, just like the very few runaway hits that take all the money in Steam (or Hollywood, or United States wealth) and mess up averages for the little guys.

 

MEDIAN is the the number in the middle of the distribution. Add up Jeff Bezos, ($140B), you (let's say $100K), Rane (let's say $100K again) and me (let's say $5K). The median is $100K. This is the most useful measurement. Note that it's several orders of magnitude lower than the mean.

 

MODE is simply the most frequently occurring value. In our case, that's $100K again. Not really useful for what we're talking about.

 

"MEDIUM AVERAGE" is not a thing, don't be a Butterscotch Krimpet.

[godslabrat]

I was giving Biff a pass for a while, but I'm really noticing that the more he argues, the less sense he makes.

 

Biff, if you're not outright trolling, please take a step back and get your head together.

[Flojomojo]

In the months ahead, it will be fun to quote some of the fortune-tellers. Here's Thom being particularly obnoxious (but not wrong!)

Deserves a chance? How fucking naive are you?

 

Let me _REALLY_ spell it out for you:

 

Atari is, a tiny office in New York, consisting of the CEO, his secretary, and a pool of intellectual property lawyers. ATARI DOES NOT HAVE ENGINEERING STAFF. After the bankruptcy of Atari S.A., Atari simply became a trademark troll.

 

Atari's business model is simply licensing the brand at an exorbitant licensing fee ($500,000 minimum), and a significant share of profits of what's made. THAT'S IT. Atari LITERALLY takes ZERO risk on ANYTHING. The licensors literally take all the risk.

 

Except, this time, the guy doing the hardware, Feargal Mac Conuladh, a man with a MASSIVE HISTORY of burning people over Kickstarter, time and time again, go look up the Atari GameBand, and the Smartfly USB on an armband (which you can get on Alibaba, btw)., has decided to use his time trusted method of flexible funding method on IndieGoGo (not formally announced, but this falls right in line with his other projects.) to literally throw all of the risk off of him, and have early adopter customers literally shoulder the burden.

 

This project will die horrifically, because the man has a tried and true pattern of shortcutting his way via cheap off-Alibaba chinese hardware, and when it does, I will be here, literally yelling I TOLD YOU SO, to all of you who dared to fucking dream...because so many of you have not dealt with people like this, you don't know, nor understand, that's what makes you horribly naive.

 

-Thom

[RainbowCemetery]

my anecdotal tale - i have a single game on steam and it was made with unity. the mac and linux versions both had problems that took a few hours to sort out, in both cases it was the steam integration at the root of it. i try to avoid the asset store and was rolling with basically stock unity. i could see piling a bunch of random things on there ballooning up to a major issue but i was actively trying to avoid that.

 

the low effort asset dumps may skew the numbers upward since their main revenue came from generating keys to sell offsite to bot farms, i know i didnt sell no 100k copies. none of my acquaintances with a steam presence have pulled numbers anywhere near that either. could just be our collective crap marketing

[Matt_B]

Whatever numbers you might get on Steam probably aren't too applicable to the VCS as, on the one hand, you've got a userbase in the hundreds of millions for Steam, versus about 11,000 promised at the moment for the VCS. Maybe the latter could get into the high tens of thousands with a retail release, but without anything confirmed yet even that's not something that a potential developer could count upon.

 

Raking over the coals of the Ouya, which sold hardware in the tens of thousands, the most successful game sold just 7000 units. The median figure is probably a lot less than that too; we're maybe looking at three figures, possibly even two.

 

And again, not every indie game is made in spare time and out of love. Games like The Witness and Monument Valley, to give concrete examples, cost upwards of a million dollars to make. For people whose time is money and who have bills to pay, ports to the VCS won't be looking too viable.

[Rane]

I think no one in their right mind would port to the VCS, but porting to Linux on Steam which has an estimated userbase of between 1 and 2 million is generally a pretty solid choice. The real question is the VCS store. I doubt even VCS owners will buy from the VCS store over Steam.

[Pink]

I doubt even a lot of the VCS owners will even open their "bomb-diggity" Day One Woodgrain editions with their numbered 1-6000 piece of paper.

 

If we assume the average steam games sells 32,000 copies

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-19-the-average-game-on-steam-sells-only-32-000-copies

 

With a userbase of 125 million registered Steam Users

https://kotaku.com/there-are-over-125-million-steam-accounts-1687820875

 

32k divided by 12 5million is 0.000256

 

So on average, significantly less then 1% of the entire Steam Userbase purchases a particular game on Steam.

 

Take 11,000 Atari VCS consoles, heck lets just use 20,000 instead. Take 20k muliply by 0.000256 that comes out to 5.12

 

So if the average Steam game sells 32k and each game were to proportionately sell the same on the VCS as Steam, that would be an average of each game selling 5-6 copies.

 

 

 

27 PS4 games have sold more then 1 million copies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PlayStation_4_video_games

 

Over 70 million PS4s currently sold.

 

1 million divided by 70 million is 0.014

 

So if your a developer and 1.4% of the PS4 userbase buys your game, you can consider that to be extremely good.

 

Proportionately,

0.014% of 20,000 is 280.

 

 

 

The best selling game on the PS4, Uncharted 4, sold 8.7 million.

 

8.7 million divided by 70 million is 0.124

 

12.4% of PS4 owners have purchased Uncharted 4

 

Proportionately,

12.4% of 20,000 is 2485.

 

 

 

And these numbers are all inflated since im using 20,000 versus the 11,000 or so consoles they "pre-sold" through Indiegogo

 

So Realistically, we can assume the typical VCS game is going to sell less then 100 copies. You're looking at most games just selling low 2 digits or maybe even single digits. It just isn't worth it for anyone to port their games over to this thing (Assuming it ever sees the light of day) unless they're just doing it as a hobby and it doesn't cost them any money or anything.

 

As many others and myself have echoed throughout this thread, a userbase of 11,000 consoles is not even remotely close enough to support and sustain a viable marketplace.

Edited July 6, 2018 by Pink

[RugglesTx]

Feargal Mac Conuladh

 

Thats a awesome name.

 

Bet the dude can drink like a fish.

 

Scammer or not Id have a nice cold Belhaven Stout with him just cause of the name.

[RainbowCemetery]

even ignoring all the numbers i'd be hesitant to trust their marketplace when they're currently being sued for withholding developer royalties

[Rane]

Seeing as they're supposedly hoping to license off this to a third party will that third party run the storefront too? No way Atari SA is competent enough to manage one.

[godslabrat]

if Atari has to run the storefront, I doubt there will be one.

[Flojomojo]

I hope that if/when they make a digital store, they provide a web view. I would like to peruse and mock it. Without having to buy an AtariBox, of course.

[BiffsGamingVideos]

Um, what?

 

MEAN is also known as AVERAGE. Add up all the values (dollars, scores, whatever you're measuring) and divide by the number of total participants. Add in you, me, and Jeff Bezos and we have an average net worth of $46 billion dollars. Jeff's $140B net worth skewed things higher, just like the very few runaway hits that take all the money in Steam (or Hollywood, or United States wealth) and mess up averages for the little guys.

 

MEDIAN is the the number in the middle of the distribution. Add up Jeff Bezos, ($140B), you (let's say $100K), Rane (let's say $100K again) and me (let's say $5K). The median is $100K. This is the most useful measurement. Note that it's several orders of magnitude lower than the mean.

 

MODE is simply the most frequently occurring value. In our case, that's $100K again. Not really useful for what we're talking about.

 

"MEDIUM AVERAGE" is not a thing, don't be a Butterscotch Krimpet.

 

That's what I said.

MEDIUM is usually the middle 50% of so averaged together taking out the top 25% and the lower 25%. In your 140b, 100k, 100k, and 5k example: 46.67 billion is the MEAN average, 100k is the MEDIUM and the 100K is the MODE. This is exactly what I said. A previous post said use the MEAN average on Steam sales. But that takes into account AAA games at $60 and $1 games. So we get rid of those and use the middle part. You are saying what I just said. What I find even funnier is that name nimwitz 'iike' the same posts all of the time. Your hatred for Atari just spills over to every post you make.

[Matt_B]

I think no one in their right mind would port to the VCS, but porting to Linux on Steam which has an estimated userbase of between 1 and 2 million is generally a pretty solid choice. The real question is the VCS store. I doubt even VCS owners will buy from the VCS store over Steam.

 

Yeah, and the Ouya was again in a similar spot. Porting games to Android, with its userbase in the billions, was a no brainer, but the extra effort to put them on the Ouya storefront to reach just a few tens of thousands just wasn't worth it.

[BiffsGamingVideos]

 

my anecdotal tale - i have a single game on steam and it was made with unity. the mac and linux versions both had problems that took a few hours to sort out, in both cases it was the steam integration at the root of it. i try to avoid the asset store and was rolling with basically stock unity. i could see piling a bunch of random things on there ballooning up to a major issue but i was actively trying to avoid that.

 

the low effort asset dumps may skew the numbers upward since their main revenue came from generating keys to sell offsite to bot farms, i know i didnt sell no 100k copies. none of my acquaintances with a steam presence have pulled numbers anywhere near that either. could just be our collective crap marketing

 

 

I am just wondering a few things about your marketing. It takes time and money. You can't just release it. Yo have to market it a year or more in advance.

1) Did you show it off at shows, expos, conventions?

2) How any youtube reviewers did you get to talk about the game?

3) How many magazines was it in including indie magazines?

4) Did you have a web site with gameplay footage and such?

5) Do you send out twitter feeds in the thousands at the same time?

6) Do you advertise on facebook and google sites?

7) Is it on multiple stores and multiple platforms?

What was the price point?

9) How many sales have you had? Did you do the summer sale? Have you tried bundling it with other games?

So I am just wondering how you marketed the game? If no one knows about it then no one will buy it. You know there are marketing and distribution companies that you can work with to sell the game even after it's been released. I am assuming your game is at least OK. The average on Steam is 22,000 sales for an indie game at $9.99 (although $19.99 sells fewer but returns a bigger profit). It's not to late. There is a game written in town that sold 70,000 copies or so on Steam and then had bundles and sales and have sold about 140,000 more this year. That is for a game released in 2015. SO maybe one of those companies can help market your game. They take probably 1/3 but they pay the marketing expenses (ads).

It is good to hear that someone else here has actually made a game. Good job.

[godslabrat]

I am just wondering a few things about your marketing. It takes time and money. You can't just release it. Yo have to market it a year or more in advance.

1) Did you show it off at shows, expos, conventions?

2) How any youtube reviewers did you get to talk about the game?

3) How many magazines was it in including indie magazines?

4) Did you have a web site with gameplay footage and such?

5) Do you send out twitter feeds in the thousands at the same time?

6) Do you advertise on facebook and google sites?

7) Is it on multiple stores and multiple platforms?

What was the price point?

9) How many sales have you had? Did you do the summer sale? Have you tried bundling it with other games?

 

So I am just wondering how you marketed the game? If no one knows about it then no one will buy it. You know there are marketing and distribution companies that you can work with to sell the game even after it's been released. I am assuming your game is at least OK. The average on Steam is 22,000 sales for an indie game at $9.99 (although $19.99 sells fewer but returns a bigger profit). It's not to late. There is a game written in town that sold 70,000 copies or so on Steam and then had bundles and sales and have sold about 140,000 more this year. That is for a game released in 2015. SO maybe one of those companies can help market your game. They take probably 1/3 but they pay the marketing expenses (ads).

 

It is good to hear that someone else here has actually made a game. Good job.

This has nothing to do with tacos or Atari. Please stop.

[Pink]

 

It is good to hear that someone else here has actually made a game. Good job.

 

There are lots of people here that have made games

https://www.atariage.com/store/

 

And not just games but other things too

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/250637-lynx-multi-card-preorders/

 

All without the crowdfunding and taking money in advance as well.

Edited July 7, 2018 by Pink