Wow! Beat Hazard Ultra for iPhone has come in at number 2 for the best games of 2012. Check out the list of great review scores: Here's the top ten list:
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Introduction My little Indie game has grossed $2,000,000! I’m completely blown away! Thank you so much to all those players out there that bought the game!. Where did all that money come from? Read on, I’ll show you. Why? I recently did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit (You can read it here) and the most asked question from budding Indie Devs was, ‘How much money have you made?’. I remember having difficulty finding sales data for Indie games when I started out, so I thought I’d share mine now. Some Background For those that aren’t familiar with Beat Hazard, it a music driven twin stick shooter. It takes tracks from your music collection and uses the power of that music to drive game play. It looks a something like this: If you’re thinking, ‘Wow, I need that game now!’ you can pick it up here. I’m a 1 man indie developer. I was made redundant a few years ago after 15 years working for main stream studios. At that point I wanted to give indie development a go. So far it’s gone amazingly well! Beat Hazard is coming up on its 3rd birthday and is now available on XBLIG, PC, Mac, PS3 & iOS. It has also just been released on Android (Details here) Given that the game has been out for so long and is now on quite a few platforms I thought I’d share some sales comparison data with you. I know how scarce this sort of information is so I hope you find it useful. So onto the good stuff... Total Revenue This is the total revenue for Beat Hazard over the years. There are spikes and bumps all over, so let’s break it down... Separate Platforms So here we have the revenue for each platform. We have Steam, XBLIG, PS3 and iOS. The first thing that jumps out is how Steam just kicks ass! Not only does the Steam version dwarf the income from other platforms, it keeps coming back to life like some lovable cash making zombie. Let’s look at how Valve helps developers make that happen: The Mighty Power of Steam Each spike on the Steam chart relates to a significant event: (a) I added an iTunes support a few months after the game came out. You can see that the extra exposure gave the game a good kick. (b) Beat Hazard was on sale during the Steam Xmas sale 2010. It was 50% off with one day at 70%. Also, Valve were giving away prizes for collecting special Xmas achievements. I added a survival achievement especially for the sale and that’s where a lot of the sales came from. Huge numbers of players bought the game at 70% off just to get the special achievement. (And a lot of those players went on to become true fans of the game) (c) To get the game approved for PSN I had to add extra features to the game (new modes, enemies, perks, weapons etc). I released these changes as the Ultra DLC on Steam. Just after this Valve had a summer sale where I added a Gold Ship to the game as a special sale prize. The Gold Ship was hugely popular and generated a lot of sales. (d) Another special Xmas sale involving collecting achievements to unlock prizes. This time I added an achievement where you had to survive 5 minutes while playing to Christmas music (Mwhahaha!) I think it drove some players up the wall with that one. (e) The last summer sale. This was just a normal discount sale without special prizes etc. What’s amazing it just how successful Steam sales are. They are just awesome. With a little extra work and a special version, Valve turns a normal sale into a buying and playing frenzy which everyone can enjoy. An important thing to note is that sales after a sale aren’t affected, if anything they go up due to the extra exposure. Ok, let’s have a look at the other platforms: Platform Split Here you can see the split over the life of the product between the different platforms. However, each version has been out different amounts of time, so here’s a normalised view: Normalised Platform Split With the normalised breakdown it’s interesting to see how lucrative XBLIG can be. It made nearly as much money as the full blown PSN version. And don’t forget, the XBLIG version was the base version, no extra ships or modes, no multiplayer, no leader boards or achievements. It shows you can get great sales on XBLIG. Seeing Past the Steam Here’s the separate platform graph again without Steam sales so you can see the differences between the other platforms more clearly. You can see that being featured on iOS gives you a massive boost, but sales quickly drop off compared to the other platforms. Sony EU vs. Sony US And for those that are interested, here’s the relative income from Sony US and Sony EU.
Note: Sony US pay per quarter and Sony EU pay per month. For these graphs I’ve averaged out the quarterly payments into monthly ones. The US version has done marginally better than the EU one, but the difference isn’t huge. Conclusions Of course this is data from just one game, so I’d say don’t assume my data is general. It’s easy to see how successful you can be if you get on Steam. Steam sales are not just the only thing Value do well though; I feel that a big part of their success is how well they treat their developers. For those that don’t know, Steam has an excellent API which is very easy to work with, they don’t have a certification process and you can upload new version any time you want. They treat you with respect and you’re allowed to make your own mistakes (and are free to sort it out when you do). Console holders really need to take a leaf out of their book. They should lighten up and allow developers to more easily interact and respond to their community of players. Final Thoughts I hope you’ve found this breakdown useful. If you’re an Indie dev slaving over your love of labour, good luck with whatever project you’re working on. I hope you do well! Oh yeah, did I say Beat Hazard was out on Android? Grab it here Twitter: @ColdBeamGames If you have a Kindle Fire you can now get Beat Hazard Ultra for you device on the Amazon Appstore, just click the link below!
At the weekend I tried an AMA (Ask Me Anything) post on Reddit. It went a lot better than I expected. Lots of interesting questions. Check it out here Here are the top 2 questions and answers: Huge fan of beat hazard and ultra! Do you have any other games in the works at the moment? or maybe release beat hazard for windows phone? [–]ColdBeamGames[S] Well, here's a little scoop, my friends at D3T are converting Ultra back to C# for release on XBLIG ! (With multiplayer too!) I need to tidy up all my code so I'm going to do a small music driven puzzle game next. (I've got a few ideas I think will be cool) After that I'll start work on Beat Hazard 2 :D And I've got some really cool ideas on how to move it to the next level. Re Windows Phone: Possibly, not too sure at the moment. Hello there. I bought Beat Hazard for the iPhone a couple months ago and it is honestly one of my favorite games to play on it. My question to you is, how do you determine the density of enemies in the next "wave" based on the song? [–]ColdBeamGames[S] The game analyses the music on the fly. It uses the raw PSM data (amplitude) and the FFT data (Frequencys). All the parts of the game are derived from this data. Some parts respond instantaneously, e.g. your fire power. Other parts use a sum over time system so music power builds up and causes things to happen at certain thresholds. So the enemy density is based on a 4-5 second window of music power. The more powerful the music in that time the more enemies you get (and the harder the enemy types are) Even where they fly too is take from the music, of course this is not something as a player you can notice as you can't really see a relationship between sound and position. But it happens nonetheless. It's ALIVE!!! Beat Hazard Ultra is now out for Android (2.3 or higher)
Just click on the link below to start blasting away to your favourite music! Please rate it and help spread the word because word of mouth is so important. If you have any problems don't hesitate to contact me. The Android version of Beat Hazard Ultra is nearly finished. You can try the beta version, just click on the link below.
Let me know how you get on because this will help me iron out any remaining issues. If it crashes for you, please let me know, you can email here: betatest@coldbeamgames.com You need to be running Android 2.3 or higher. Some features are disabled in the beta version: - Songs stop at 50% complete - Perks are not saved - IAP will flag an error, but you will still be able to buy them at no charge - Some of the larger ships, bosses and games modes have been disabled EDIT: The full game is now live on Google Play - Get it here So here it is, the first screen shot of Beat Hazard Ultra running on Android!
The top tablet is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 and the phone at the bottom is a HTC Explorer. You will need Android 2.3 or higher to run the game. Hopefully it'll work fine on lower spec devices, but of course the higher the spec the better. Still a bit of work to do before I start a Beta, but it shouldn't be too far away. The XBLIG version of Beat Hazard has now dropped to 80pts - That's just $1
Fun for everyone! Join the music mayhem and grab it here. Beat Hazard Ultra iOS has currently got a Metacritic score of 90! That's so awesome!
Check it out here. Thanks to everyone out there who have bought BHU iOS! Beat Hazard Ultra has been getting some great reviews. Here's a round up! App Spy - 5/5 "Beat Hazard Ultra is a must own for action gamers, and fans of games that use their own music." Kotaku - Gaming App of the day! 'With the release of the iOS version of Beat Hazard Ultra your music is now a deadly predator, lurking in your playlist, awaiting the call to be transformed into explosive levels of eye-melting twin stick shooter action.' 4.5/5 - Feel The Beat! 'Beat Hazard Ultra is a unique arcade-shooter that offers almost infinite replay value.' 4.5/5 - It'll Blow Up Your Screen! 'It's a heck of a game, gorgeous, challenging and long-lived in turn. I've hardly been able to put it down, and listening to music without the game just doesn't feel as cool right now. ' 4/4 - Must Have!
' It is a unique experience with nearly limitless potential, and we just can’t get enough.' |
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