Should You Make a DLC? // Indie Game DLC Revenue (+ Update on How Much Money My Game Made)
104Is making a DLC worth it? Should you make a DLC for your indie game? In this video I will go through the updated sales numbers for my indie game, Mortal Glory and see if the DLC was worth it. I will also give some tips for estimating indie game DLC revenue.
⚔️ Mortal Glory 2: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2216660?utm_source=yt
➤ Chambers of Devious Design: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1650860?utm_source=yt
➤ Mortal Glory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097530?utm_source=yt
➤ Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RedbeakGames
➤ Patreon - Support to gain perks: https://www.patreon.com/redbeakgames
How much Money my Game made in 1 year (Mortal Glory revenue): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th51QyN3avE
0:00 Intro
0:41 The Attach Rate
If you are thinking about making a DLC, your main question probably is: How many of your game’s current customers will buy the DLC if you make one? This is called the attach rate. I did a little bit of googling and found out some widely varying numbers. All the way from 5% to as high as 40%.
It’s understandable that there is a lot of fluctuation with the numbers as there are many different kinds of DLCs released in many different contexts. What does the DLC contain, is the content well-received by players, What is the price of the DLC, how quickly after the release of the base game is the DLC released? All of these and more will affect the attach rate and how much revenue the DLC will generate.
2:18 Mortal Glory DLC numbers
As of this date, Mortal Glory as a base game has sold 20349 copies and the DLC for it has sold 6942 copies. So 34% of everyone who has bought the base game, has also bought the DLC.
If we continue with the numbers, as of this date, Mortal Glory, just the base game, has sold 128999 dollars gross on Steam. So that is the highest of the sales numbers. I haven’t actually gotten that much myself - I wish! From that number you deduct returns, chargebacks, Steam’s cut and all the taxes to arrive at the sum that I have gotten myself.
For the DLC it’s 22564 dollars. This means that the DLC accounts for 14.9% of Mortal Glory’s total revenue. And actually… The return rate on the DLC is much lower, around half of the base game. If you account for the lower amount of returns, the DLC’s share of the total revenue is bumped up to 15.7%.
But what did it cost me to make the DLC? Well money-wise it only cost me 86 dollars to get some additional art for the new units in the DLC. It’s such a low sum that I won’t bother taking that into the calculations.
But aside from money, making the DLC also cost me time - and time is money. The total number of hours I spent for the game was 1681. Out of those, the DLC accounted for 276 hours. That is 16.4% out of the total hours.
Since I spent 16.4% of my total time on the DLC, I guess a somewhat fair statement would be that the DLC should also account for 16.4% of the total revenue. Otherwise in terms of hours spent, it hasn’t been worth it if you compare to the base game. Since the DLC share of total revenue was 15.7%, it’s 0.7% below the target and in result would earn the DLC a verdict of “not worth it”.
Well actually, it’s very close and that’s still almost 82 dollars worth of sales for each hour spent and that will only go up as time goes on. There are also some soft benefits that you cannot see in the numbers like maybe someone had stopped playing the game but started playing again when the DLC came out and as a result of that mentioned about the game to a friend or two, which then influenced those friends to buy the game - increasing the overall revenue. I would like to think that things like that bump up the actual share of revenue very close to the 16.4% target.
8:38 Estimating DLC revenue
You can estimate a DLC's revenue by multiplying your target attach rate by the number of existing customers in your base game multiplied by the planned DLC price. That’s the estimated revenue for the current situation. You can then make some projections for future sales to get an estimate for the lifetime revenue if you want.
The attach rate is affected by many things, but if your game is fairly recent, I think an attach rate of around 20% would be a good target to use in calculations. If you go over that, that will be a happy surprise then. And if you go below that, your DLC probably wasn’t that attractive to players. For older games the attach rate will always be lower.
9:51 Tips for improving Attach Rate