2023 Year in Review (by numbers)

Contains money stuff, if you're into/opposed to seeing that. It's at the bottom and highlighted, you can ignore it if you want.

Hi there! It’s that time of the year again. I’m going to go through what/how I did this year and try to draw conclusions.

Releases and Other Projects

This was a big year for releases! As far as big ones:

• APOCALYPSE FRAME v1.0 in January (finally).

• Valiant Horizon itchfund-version in July.

• Celestial Bodies in November.

And for smaller ones:

• NANO (Pamphlet game based on Firelights) in April.

• Machinations of Amirus (1/3 of a visual novel, made in Narrat) came out at the very end of July.

• Residential Registration Form in April and The City Breathes in August. (Cards designed for Tiny Library Modern Fantasy.)

• The Dormant Sentinel (A Hunt for HUNT) in August.

• Liminal Void Quickstart 2: The Graveyard Buckle (a much more compact quickstart module than the original) in September.

• APOCALYPSE ReFRAMEd (a tiny little minimalist-jam original supplement) in December.

I also have the stuff that wasn’t releases that I worked on and various events:

• I did like 5-6 months of Dungeon23 for ANOINTED! Got 5 pretty neat Regions written in my little notebook until I got hard-stopped by life events.

• Liminal Void’s full version got about 100 pages in. (I’m probably going to rewrite large chunks of it though, see below.)

• EXPLOIT was going to be a Minimalist Jam project based on LOOT and Total//Effect to do while I waited for Valiant Horizon editing/illustration to finish. It was 37 pages in on google docs. It got hit by the bus that was Celestial Bodies. RIP. (It might come back as a pure-LOOT-like or DOLL or whatever Spencer’s calling those at some point, but more importantly, I’m going to strip it for parts and put those parts in Liminal Void because I was using a lot of the same resource-tech but I think EXPLOIT’s was better.)

• I ran Minimalist Jam again! 41 entries, which is great because I barely advertised it. I’ll probably make a post running them all down because there’s a lot of real bangers/bangers-in-the-making in there. (Jam 1 was also banger central, including one game that got a non-minimal release, which is very exciting!)

• Celestial Bodies was my first from-start collaboration! I enjoyed that aspect of it, definitely different of course.

• I was in a bunch of charity bundles this year, because stuff keeps being extremely bad in the world! Happy to contribute in this fashion.

Busy year for sure! And it paid dividends.

Views and Downloads

Had to do some spreadsheeting to get numbers for legacy stuff from last year. But here we go. (Noting, as last year, when something was PWYW or launched with a bunch of community copies.)

• 36th Way SRD (PWYW): 668 views, 635 downloads

• ANOINTED: 347 views, 64 downloads

• APOCALYPSE FRAME: 21,252 views, 10,340 downloads

  • The Infected World: 2,284 views, 439 downloads

  • Ballad of Industrial Gods: 902 views, 157 downloads

  • ReFRAMEd: 676 views, 215 downloads

• Celestial Bodies (1000 CC's at launch): 10,015 views, 2,177 downloads

• Liminal Void Quickstart (PWYW): 390 views, 141 downloads

  • Liminal Void Quickstart 2 (PWYW): 157 views, 73 downloads

• Machinations of Amirus (PWYW technically, free in-browser): 356 views, 155 in-browser plays

• NANO: 733 views, 41 downloads

• NOVA: BURNOUT: 390 views, 64 downloads

• Residential Registration Form (free): 246 views, 77 downloads

• The City Breathes. (free): 204 views, 43 downloads

• The Binary Atlas: 1340 views, 422 downloads

• The Dormant Sentinel: 436 views, 27 downloads

• Total//Effect SRD (PWYW): 573 views, 134 downloads

• Trespasser: 419 views, 83 downloads

• Valiant Horizon: 4663 views, 305 downloads

An extremely good year! (Compare to previous year’s.) No big surprise though, last year was my first full year publishing, this was my second.

The Money Stuff

Let’s get to the green. These are all based on money/payments made in 2023, not cumulative.

• 36th Way SRD (PWYW): $59.69, 7 payments

• ANOINTED: $30, 3 payments

• APOCALYPSE FRAME: $3352.66, 190 payments

  • The Infected World: $718.50, 48 payments

  • Ballad of Industrial Gods: $125.50, 25 payments

  • ReFRAMEd (PWYW): $25, 6 payments

  • (Total AF + supplements): $4,221.66

• Celestial Bodies (1250 CC's): $4605.50*, 269 payments

  • * Technically double this, but we split the project 50/50, so this is my share.

• Liminal Void Quickstart (PWYW): $50, 5 payments

  • Liminal Void Quickstart 2 (PWYW): $0, 0 payments

• Machinations of Amirus (PWYW technically, free in-browser): $0, 0 payments

• NANO: $6, 1 payments

• NOVA: BURNOUT: $150, 16 payments

• The Binary Atlas: $192.50, 17 payments

• The Dormant Sentinel: $30, 6 payments

• Total//Effect SRD (PWYW): $0, 0 payments (which is fine)

• Trespasser: $21, 4 payments

• Valiant Horizon: $2885, 102 payments

• All Bundles: $825.74

Total revenue* for 2023: $12,556.99

*Revenue is an important qualifier here. This is before itch’s cut (5% to 10% depending on the project, I lowered it during itchfunding) and I had significant overhead in the form of APOCALYPSE FRAME hardback cost (~$1600) and Valiant Horizon illustration/editing (~$3400). Both of those will absolutely pay off very shortly - VH v1.0 is coming out soon and AF hardbacks will be on sale soon - but right now they’re negative on the balance sheet.

Talking points for the year in review

So let’s talk about this. I’m going to italicize points that I’m repeating from last year.

• Supporting your games works. Repeating this point from last year. APOCALYPSE FRAME made double what it did last year, for a game that basically everyone who’s bought one of the big charity bundles owns. A large chunk of that was supplements, but in almost all cases I barely did anything and they just continued to make money.

• Supporting other people’s games works. NOVA: BURNOUT and The Binary Atlas continued to make decent money this year even though I barely did much of anything with them. (I’m probably going to add a bit to the latter based on that Dungeon23 work.)

• Bundles are great. The effort:reward ratio will never stop paying off.

• Charge an appropriate amount for your work! I am not kidding about this, do it. Celestial Bodies sold well at $25 for an unfinished base game, which is astronomical (haha) by itch standards.

  • But also, it can be ok if you give it away free. Celestial Bodies absolutely smashed itchfund records even though we gave away 1000 copies. I’ve been way less stingy with community copies this year and I’m going to be even less stingy going forward.

• Other people with platforms talking about your games works REALLY WELL. Aaron Voigt, 11Dragonkid, and Spencer Campbell releasing videos contributed significantly to the continued successes of APOCALYPSE FRAME, Valiant Horizon, and Celestial Bodies. (I should really get on more podcasts/streams/etc and talk about my games.)

• Capitalize on something big related to your project releasing. APOCALYPSE FRAME sold a LOT off the back of Armored Core 6 coming out, in no small part because I posted it on Tumblr as such.

• Substantial projects pay off. 3 projects made like 80% of the money for me this year. All of them are 60-100 pages. People are willing to throw down money for something they can chew on.

  • Conversely, some of my small projects didn’t do much of anything… NANO landed with a wet thud and The Dormant Sentinel didn’t blow anyone’s mind. (Pre-bundles, NANO did not make its $15 budget back, which is a wild thing to say but it’s true.)

    • …and that’s totally fine. It’s ok as long as you’re proud of what you made! (And I am, in both cases.) Both of them helped me get better at layout, which is mostly what I was hoping from them anyway. I also want to get better at both pamphlet and adventure design. Sometimes a goal isn’t monetary.

• Itch pays off. A TON of my traffic came internally from itch, or from emails (which itch sends to people who follow you when you release a new thing.) I can substantially track the value of sending emails to the list of APOCALYPSE FRAME owners. Don’t neglect the value of either of these: Every follower is someone who will get an email whenever you make something. (But with great power comes great responsibility. Don’t spam your email list. You get unsubscribes every time and they will go up if you’re annoying. Don’t be annoying.)

• Itchfunds pay off. So I didn’t take my own advice last year: I made two itchfunds that looked like a traditional crowdfund, but limited to digital-only rewards (i.e. no overhead). In both cases, I made a playable, looks-good version of the game first. And you know what? It worked REALLY WELL. At time of release, Valiant Horizon was the 5th biggest itchfund (now the 7th biggest!) and Celestial Bodies is the biggest itchfund by a wide margin.
  
  Now if this were my primary income I’d likely want to do a more traditional one (and we will for Celestial Bodies, this was just supposed to be a little one to get a little pre-crowdfund funding, we were expecting VH numbers. Oops, haha). But for my scale of projects and for the amount of profit I’m trying to make (i.e. not a huge amount), this is perfectly feasible. I can reliably make a profit off of an itchfund like this because they’re digital-only, which reliably pays for the expenses I do have (illustration/editing). And honestly, over time I could see this paying off even more: we’re just getting started.

  • We did nearly everything “wrong” with the CB itchfund and it was fine. We didn’t spend a cent on ads and we barely advertised on social media and we soft-released like, Sunday night. It absolutely destroyed our expectations (and itchfund records) on day 1 anyway. The small stuff is nice but don’t sweat it. If you’ve got enough of a track record and the project is there, people will come.

    • Before anyone asks (and following up several people asking), I have no concrete idea how the hell we did those kinds of numbers. As far as I can tell, we just made stuff that captured people’s attention and it worked.

• Collaboration’s pretty cool and I should do more of it. Had a great time doing that! And it pays off: Celestial Bodies was my only major collab and, well, the numbers don’t lie. (I have a few other less substantial things coming up that I hope materialize.)

• Projects that don’t finish/immediately make money are investments into the future. Sister point to “some of my stuff didn’t do well and that’s fine”: EXPLOIT is probably never going to see the light of day but it’s going to be a major contributor going forward in how I feel about certain Total//Effect supplements and games. Machinations of Amirus didn’t make a cent (nor was I expecting it to) but it helped me prove out that the game that’s going to be based on (Machinations of Court and Frame, coming eventually), has legs.

So there it is. I hope this was helpful for you.

See you next year!