SteamBirds: Survival - By The Numbers

Well! I'm back from the Game Developer's Conference and the Flash Gaming Summit, where I spoke about how SteamBirds is doing and let all my cats out of their respective bags. I think it's time for another by-the-numbers gig!

When I last left you, my very popular SteamBirds: By The Numbers article let you know that SteamBirds had made approximately $34,000 USD (gross).  This article was so popular it was pasted into two different magazines! (score!) I suppose that means you guys want more?

So let's start by getting caught up.

SteamBirds: The Original

Since last writing, SB went on to make an addition $11K in various sitelocks and licenses, and to this day is still generating more business (did 3 sitelocks in January alone!). I'm fairly confident that the original SB is going to make money for a loooong time.

SteamBirds has now made approximately $45,000 USD.

Here's a popular chart: breaking down the sources of all revenues for the original SB:

piechart-old

I really like this graph because it visually represents how much I loathe advertisements.

I say this a lot, but there's no harm in re-iterating: I hate ads, I'm really bad at deploying good ads, and I have no advertising strategy other than "tack it on hastily." You can see it really paid off;

4-5x more revenue than CPMStar and Mochi combined?? Why does anyone even bother with advertising anymore?!

And even then: All advertising combined is hardly 10% of combined revenues. It might be worth it, but only in this larger-scale economy. I don't think I'd bother with advertisements at all if I had a game that was expecting to make less than $30K.

As far as traffic and popularity goes:

sb-orig-plays

It seems like traffic is dwindling off to nothing, but it's been nearly a solid year of 50,000 plays per day (and trended up to 150K/day around the time of Survival's launch). That's more web traffic per day than I've ever hoped for with a personal blog, so I call it a success!

But that's enough whinging on about the original SteamBirds. Let's jump into the fun, new stuff!

SteamBirds: iOS

The wonderful fellows at SemiSecret Software (Eric and Adam) worked hard at making an iOS version of the game. They launched two separate SKUs - one for iPhone/iPod Touch ($0.99), and an HD version ($1.99) for the iPad.

The iOS version of the game was identical to the original flash game, except:

Here's a total sales graph:

Screen shot 2011-01-09 at 1.16.36 PM

The iPad sales were fairly consistently around half the volume of the iPhone sales, which was surprising - considering how many more iPhones there are in the world!

What was super interesting, though, was this zoomed-in portion:

Screen shot 2011-01-09 at 1.21.01 PM

(ignore the dip around Jan. 5th - error in the data - sales were consistent)

I love the big spike at Christmas time. Shows people reveling in proper Commercial Spirit! But even more interesting was the App was on an "introductory sale" for December. We bumped the prices up $1 on January 1st ($1.99 / $2.99), and there was no affect on sales at all! Interesting...

I have to say that the iPad edition of the game is, hands down, my favorite game experience. SteamBirds feels like it wasdesigned to be on that platform, and I love it to bits. I bought an iPad just to fawn over it.

SteamBirds: Android

Victor's team at FlatRedBall created an Android edition of the game for us. This version of the game was again, identical to the original SB, except:

I don't have a fancy graph of Android sales, but I know the performance was approximately 20% of the iOS counterpart in terms of gross revenue. I know Android has a vast install base, but not every Android phone has the Marketplace (as opposed to 100% appstore penetration on the iOS), so I have no good feel for how much of this is luck, how much is market, how much is user response, etc... It's very difficult to feel out the numbers.

20% is still a big chunk, though - but much like the advertising revenue - only if you expect the game to push over $30K or so.

I have a huge problem with Android's default "Sort by all-time sales" market, and content discovery is hideously broken, so that could be a huge contributing factor here. Hopefully Google will fix that.

The one huge saving grace here was the Android edition's winning of the IndiePub Game of the Year award. The cash prize (and other perks) that came with that made it all worth while!

Mobile Edition Summary

Both mobile editions were "featured," and both rose in ranks quite quickly. In terms of 72-hour sales, SteamBirds rose to a peak of #12 on the iPad "Games" category (#25 overall, if memory serves), which was really nice and super exciting. Sales didn't hold, though, and tailed off rapidly.

Not hating on the tail at all, of course - it's nowhere near launch-day-numbers, but they're still generating cash. :)

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would target Android still - just because I like supporting the platform. Even with a featured, popular application with backing from Penny Arcade (two or three times now!), it hardly paid for it's own development.

That said: Both mobile editions were done via contractors working for revenue split (50% each, which I think is generous!), and the resultant windfalls from both devices was, essentially, free money.

All in all, iPad/iPhone/Android split out to be a fairly even pie: around 33%/33%/33% each.

The mobile market has a fairly long tail, though - and that tail is pretty thick and lucrative, especially for Android.  I believe these figures will round out nicely in the coming year, but they were only launched near the beginning of December, so we don't have a lot of data yet.

Let's move on to the NEW game!

SteamBirds: Survival

SteamBirds: Survival wasn't a gigantic technical change from the original, but it has very different gameplay. I've blogged about the specifics previously, so I'll let you go read that (or just play it!) instead of updating it here.

Sponsorship

The game went up on FlashGameLicense.com looking for a sponsor. We were fairly open to anything, but being the Christmas season with an non-thematic game: we had a fairly poor turn out. Several sponsors said they'd be willing to pay more in the Spring, but we didn't want to wait. Not to worry: in the end we got a really good deal.

Our primary sponsor ended up being AXE, the body-spray brand (pit, pit, chest). They paid just over $10K for the game. A hilarious conversation came out of this:

You see, typically a sponsor is paying for the traffic redirection back to their site. In this case, Axe didn't have a dedicated portal - they just wanted the ad space. This allowed us to retain and control our traffic, show our users exactly what we wanted to show them, place up-sell icons for the mobile editions, place our own blog and twitter feeds... That's worth an extra $10K of value any day!

And again: Much like the Original SB, sponsor and licensing requests for Survival keep rolling in, and I expect it to make us money for a long time coming.

Advertising

This go-around I learned my lesson from the original Steambirds: no advertisments. We didn't bother integrating with Mochi or CPMStar, and any revenue put forth by Kongregate was just a nice dollop of icing on this cake.

MicroTransactions

A new twist, however, was Micro-Transactions. To date, Survival has made an additional $10K or so in MTX - not too shabby considering there's a maximum limit on how much you can spend (there are no consumables, by design).

The airplanes in SteamBirds: Survival are so different from each other, that unlocking/purchasing a new plane is like getting to play a whole new game. Some of the planes have fairly straightforward changes, but some themed planes - like the SolipSkier, Canabalt, and AughtNine planes - drastically change gameplay into something entirely different.

So here's how we worked MTX:

Let's see how well each did:

mtxrev

Isn't that interesting? 70% of all sales came from the "Buy All" button. It almost seems like we shouldn't have put the microtransactions on the other planes at all! The vast majority of users would rather just hand us $15 than actually buy each individual plane... But of course, that was the plan all along: Tempt users with greater value. The "Unlock Everything!" button wouldn't have done so well without the other plans to compare against!

I love that people would trust me with an investment of that size, you know? It feels really good when a flash game player drops $15. Gives me hope for humanity, and the industry!

Free Plane!

We wanted to bait people with a free plane - just give us your EMail address, and we'll send you a free premium plane! Of all the total users that ever entered the game: 10% clicked on the newsletter signup button. However, only 1% actually made it through the signup process! Signing up for the free plane required you were already signed into a Gamersafeaccount, so we lost 90% of our potential email addresses because of this hurdle. BIG LESSON LEARNED!

Edit: As DanC pointed out - if 90% of people couldn't be bothered to sign into gamersafe for a free plane... how many didn't bother to sign in to PURCHASE a plane? I think the MTX really suffered because of the extra signup layer. Every payment provider requires a signup of some sort, though, so I wonder what could have been done to fix it?

The BlackList

One big problem with the original SteamBirds was certain shady sites (usually in Asian countries) ripping out my advertisements, breaking sitelocks, and preventing outbound links (and sometimes even erasing credits!) or otherwise hacking the game and posting it without permission. For Survival, I implemented a dynamic blacklist - that allows me to block any site from seeing the game on a whim.

Thanks to the first release, I had a lengthy list of ne'er-do-wells, and put them in right at the start of SB:S's launch. I also put in metrics to see who was trying to defeat my locks!

6 sites in particular were pretty bad, hammering away at the game thousands of times trying to make it work, to no avail. In the end, I had some interesting stats:

I'd say that's a success! 4 million plays that generate zero revenue and zero fan love is 4 million hits I'd rather not have.

What was super interesting is how this has skewed my stats of plays-by-countries; the USA is always #1, but the rest of the top 5 were always Asian countries in each of my other games. In SB:S, Brazil, Spain, The UK, and Canada come into the top 5. Now I know where to localize my games to first!

Other Interesting Stats

I cranked up my statistics tracking in SteamBirds: Survival, and got a bunch of neat figures out of it. Here's a few:

That last one is super interesting to me. Totally tells me that there is very, very little crossover from the flash to the mobile market. Maybe not worth ever including? (then again: if a single journalist sees it, it might make a huge sales difference)

Total Revenues

So how is the SteamBirds franchise doing, overall?

I estimate we've made around $200,000 USD so far, with all things included. Here's how I break it down:

piechart

"Old Rev" being the Original Steambirds, "Flash" being SteamBirds: Survival. Note that the original SB has an extra year headstart on Survival, and I wouldn't be surprised if Survival overtakes it in the long run.

A lot of people will look at this chart and say "Woah! There's so much money in the mobile market... Why are you bothering with the flash version?!"

My response to that is quite simple; the only reason we made more than $10 on Android is because we got Featured by Google.  It's a similar story on iOS.  The reason we were able to get featured so easily is because of the fame and endless praiseworthy reviews the Flash version got! If the Flash edition never existed, we would never have had an opportunity to get as much exposure as we did.

I fully plan on developing for Flash into the future. And I think what we have in store will turn the tables on where the biggest revenue lies. ;)

The Future

So what are we working on now?