Glass Canon - Issue #1: Can a Solo Dev Make Money?

Hey all! This is the first issue of Glass Canon, a weekly newsletter about indie game dev, culture, and writing. I’ve released 10 or so visual novels under the name Yoss III, so my focus will be on narrative-driven games (specifically ones made in the engine Ren'Py), but I’ll also look at broader trends. Basically, if you make games or enjoy looking at them critically, this newsletter could be for you!

I figured I’d start issue #1 by looking at the #1 question every visual novel dev has: how the heck do you make any money?

To do that, I decided to look back at my first commercial project, Sex Robot Road Trip, released four years ago (and which, not coincidentally, is getting an expansion and releasing for the first time on Steam today!)

If you’re wondering if it’s possible to make money solo-devving a visual novel without putting any money into it, without having any artistic talent to speak of, and with only double-digit Twitter followers, the answer is yes. Kind of. Not really. 

In 2017, I released Sex Robot Road Trip, a comedy about a friendly psychopath who meets a runaway sex robot and decides to steal a car with her. Development took place in late 2016 and early 2017, mostly between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., when my brain was mush and every idea felt like a good one.

How big is Sex Robot Road Trip? Gross profits so far are $222. Subtract $20 for some Creative Commons music from Bandcamp. Subtract $100 for a Steam license that I’ve procrastinated on using for four literal years. That leaves $102 dollars,  which Quora.com tells me is enough to buy 40 cheap cheeseburgers, 90 candy bars, 2 or 3 oil changes, or a cordless drill.

I share these numbers not to discourage other aspiring solo devs but actually to encourage you. The thing you have to remember is that Sex Robot Road Trip is a niche game that looks like it was drawn by a 9-year-old. If you have a good idea, you might make more money than I did. And if you don’t, well, then I share these numbers as proof that even bad ideas make some money.

I should clarify that when I call Sex Robot Road Trip “dumb” or “a bad idea,” I mean it affectionately. It’s like taking Latin as a foreign language in high school. Do I wish I spoke something useful like Spanish? Sí, but at least I’ll always have the memory of the time I went to regional LatinFest and watched four kids in togas beat the shit out of an HP printer with baseball bats yelling “Mori, mater!” (in a reenactment of the printer scene from Office Space).

Overall, I’m happy with how things have gone with Sex Robot Road Trip. In an era of increasingly homogenized multi-million-dollar games-as-service, I get a weird enjoyment out of making games with a target audience of about 20 or so internet strangers. But that doesn’t mean I’m not also interested in expanding that audience, so I wanted to use this post-mortem to look back on some of the choices I made during development, explaining the rationale that went into them so y’all can learn how to (not) do what I did!

Pricing is an issue for a lot of visual novel creators and indie game devs in general seem to struggle with. To crudely generalize: pretty much every dev agrees indie games should cost more, while pretty much every player agrees indie games should cost nothing. 

I went with $6.99 for Sex Robot Road Trip, a price that I thought suggested something more substantial than a cheapo mobile game but less substantial than an indie epic that took a team of people years to make (which according to market forces is about $15, lol). 

To date, only about four people have bought the game at regular price. Total sales on launch day were literally zero. My first thought was, oh shit, I’ve seen the graphs — games do well on launch day, and it’s all downhill from there. I spent time on promo materials, I sent press releases, I did the whole social media thing: nothing. Welp. 

Things picked up after a week or so. I’m assuming the first month of sales was mostly from people who’d been following development, since they all came with tips. This was a nice surprise — TBH, The Discourse on games pricing had led me to assume that everyone would always pay the lowest price possible.

After that, there were no sales until the first discount. Figuring out how price cuts worked was fun — itch.io’s sales were the first promotion I’d done that actually had a noticeable effect. I still wasn’t moving nearly as many copies as any of my free games… but also, money. Everything’s a tradeoff!

About a year after release, the page views on Sex Robot Road Trip spiked by a literal order of magnitude in a single day. I looked into it and found out a writer at PC Gamer had randomly included it on a list of Summer Sale deals — he’d never played it but liked the title. Sales doubled in a week (i.e., from about 20 overall to about 40 overall).

Finally, near the beginning of COVID, I did a brief 100% off sale, and the game jumped from being my 10th most downloaded to my 3rd in a single day. I think I made $2 in tips, but it was probably the most fun $2 I made in the game’s life cycle. 

So was $6.99 a good price?

I think probably? I know for sure I wouldn’t go much lower. Even at the lowest tier of indie games, sales are a great way to increase visibility on a storefront, so you want to leave some room to go down.

That said, I’m skeptical of widely shared claims that higher-priced games actually sell better, especially for someone with a small audience. More games are being released than at any point in history. The biggest AAA games are getting better than ever at monopolizing players’ attention for more and more hours — to say nothing of Netflix, YouTube, etc. Younger gamers — the ones who are most likely to have the free time to try new, unfamiliar games — are also the ones least likely to have extra spending money. It makes sense that average prices have gone down, particularly for new creators trying to stay competitive. 

IMO, high pricing might be a nice gimmick if you’re Vlambeer or J Blow, but if you’re not, then there’s no need to play 4-dimensional chess with your pricing: just identify a few good comp titles and charge something similar. I’m just a hobbyist, but if I was serious about making games as a living, I’d definitely look into sources of income beyond pure sales: Patreon, Kickstarter, ko-fi, freelance work, merch, finding part-time work with health benefits, etc., etc. 

As I mentioned above, the only real “exposure” Sex Robot Road Trip got was almost completely random. This has been true for pretty much all 10 of the VNs I’ve released. When I do press releases, send review copies, and all that traditional stuff: nothing; when I just sit and check itch.io for a few months: random sudden download spikes. 

I think the lesson is if you’re too small to get any sort of media attention, your first priority should be to focus on storefront discoverability. 

To be clear, I don’t sit around and crunch numbers to optimize SEO or any of that BS. But I do try to create a page with a nice blurb, quality screenshots, accurate metadata, etc. FWIW, I’ve noticed most of my favorite indie games keep store page descriptions short and informal, and would bet that the overall style of a page is probably more important than anything it actually says.

Probably you should be more proactive about promotion than I was if you’re looking to make the big bucks. At the same time, I’m hesitant to recommend anything that takes time away from a solo dev’s main task: actually making the damn thing. Yes, the indie games economy is fucked and the furthest thing from a meritocracy… but I’d still like to believe that on the whole, it’s easier to sell a good game than a bad one. Which means sometimes the best promo decision is just to focus on the quality of your product. (And quantity — releasing more games means more opportunities for sales. Math!)

I always envisioned Sex Robot Road Trip as basically just an upgraded version of my earlier, rougher VNs, and I think for better or for worse, it succeeded. To date, it’s probably the most “kinetic” thing I’ve released — the one that looks and sounds the most like a cartoon.

In particular, I think the more ambitious scope (by my standards) forced me to learn more about the advanced features of Ren’Py (the game-making engine I used). Taking the time to learn these skills during a big project made my subsequent smaller projects go a lot smoother.

For the most part, I’m happy with how Sex Robot Road Trip turned out; for any parts that didn’t work so well, I’d rather move on and do better in a future project than go back and fix them.

That said, if your goal is to make money or build an audience, I think these are some factors that held the game back:

•The title limited the audience/was misleading. While Sex Robot Road Trip sounded like a great title in my head , in practice it had some problems. Putting “sex” in the title automatically turns off some potential players — particularly in the visual novel–playing community, where people can have strong opinions about whether or not VNs should have sexual content. You might think sex would also draw in people, and it is true that I got some page views from people who searched “sex” in itch.io. But I’d imagine many of them left disappointed: there’s technically sexual content in SRRT! but it’s extremely un-erotic. I mean, am I glad I can tell my hypothetical grandkids I made a video game called Sex Robot Road Trip, absolutely. But if I wanted to GET THAT BREAD, I’d do things differently.

*The backstory was too complicated. I always intended SRRT! as a standalone title, but I used characters that had appeared in three previous VNs. While I tried to keep things accessible to new players, I suspect some of them felt like they’d be missing part of the story by starting with SRRT! Even if they didn’t know about the previous games, I think SRRT! has a casual surrealness that can make people think they’re missing part of the story. For example, one of the main characters dresses like a 1920s flapper; there’s no good explanation for this, it just felt right. Obviously, people on the internet like absurdity, but I think certain strains of it can be alienating.

*The art wasn’t polished enough for a commercial game. When it comes to writing and music, I’ve put in the time and the work and the practice, etc., but when it comes to art, I just haven’t. It’s not that I don’t take the art seriously — a lot of thought and revision went into all the character designs. But at the end of the day, I’m less “Renaissance Person” and more “Writer Who Draws Sometimes.” IMO, having an appealing art style might be the single most important factor for catching the attention of new players.

*I didn’t have momentum before launch. I think long term, you absolutely can make pocket money by releasing a commercial game with no fanfare and then just letting the long-tail do its thing (as I did for SRRT!). But as others have noted, having a good launch will get your game onto the charts where it will hopefully be seen by people outside your core audience. So then how do you get momentum? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Each issue will end with some tangentially related piece of digital ephemera (video, gif, tweet, song, etc.). To end this Sex Robot Road Trip post-mortem, I present my personal favorite robot: