What's the Password? Is Now Profitable - Budget Breakdown
As of today, about 48 hours after launching, What's the Password? has made back its development costs! In this post I'll be breaking down how much it cost to make, and some factors that helped contribute to its success. If you haven't already, you may want to read the budget breakdown I did for Maze Mice first.
Daniel DiIorio
And once again, I'd like to add the disclaimer that this post is primarily for my fellow indie game developers. It is not for investors, shareholders, or publishers. I'm not trying to brag about sales in an effort to sell TrampolineTales as a company. For as long as I'm alive, that will never happen.
Now then, let's start with What's the Password?'s budget!
| Expense | Amount | Key Art | $1,000 |
|---|---|
| Soundtrack | $500 |
| Additional Art | $250 |
| Localization | $2,000 |
| Total | $3,750 |
A few takeaways:
- These numbers are in USD.
- I've rounded these numbers to their nearest increments of $250.
- The key art cost much less than Maze Mice's since I asked that no characters be featured in it. A lot of artists charge by the character, which makes sense.
- I once again didn't take programming or design costs into account, since I do all of that myself. To be clear though, I'm not working for free since I'll receive all the revenue from the game's sales for decades.
Sales
For context, What's the Password? costs $7.99 on Steam and $4.99 on mobile. It also launched with a 13% discount on Steam, making the price $6.95. About a third of the people who bought the game on Steam saved an additional 10% thanks to the discounted bundles I'm running with my other games and with The Roottrees are Dead.
So far, the game has sold about 1,000 copies on Steam and about 200 copies across mobile storefronts. This comes out to about $4,500 in revenue for me after taxes, discounts, regional pricing differences, and storefronts taking their cut. Taking away the amount I spent on the game's budget, I've profited $750 so far, and that number will continue to grow over the years. Not bad at all!
Marketing
As always, almost all my marketing comes from emailing press and influencers. You can read more about my methodology for that here:
Daniel DiIorio
I've also yet to pay for any sponsored coverage of my games. It might be worth it for games with bigger budgets, but it really doesn't make sense for what I'm doing right now.
I originally was going to hold off on releasing the game until August of this year so that I could accrue enough wishlists to guarantee a spot in the Popular Upcoming section on the front page of Steam (you usually need at least 7,000 wishlists). However, I decided that with the game's featuring in the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase it would actually make more sense to release the game with the showcase itself. Historically, the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase has a featured slot on the front page of Steam, which happened this year as well!
I figured the people who might be interested in What's the Password? would be browsing the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase anyway, so it made way more sense to launch with it rather than trying to just get wishlists from the showcase and launching in August.
I was also very lucky in that I just barely made it into the Popular Upcoming section of Steam after all! What's the Password? wasn't in the section leading up to its release date, but it appeared in the section about two days before I launched it.
I sent about 500 influencers prerelease Steam keys 3 weeks before the game's release date on the off chance that coverage would lead to more wishlists. The game had 5,400 wishlists on Steam when it was added to the section, and I estimate at least 1,000 of them came from influencer coverage. A lot of them came from two videos by 老Biu that got a combined 400,000 views on bilibili and YouTube.
All this combined has caused What's the Password? to break even very quickly. Thank you for helping me continue to live my dream. I can't wait to make even more games!