Speaker 1: Hello Turtles, I'm Tim Beaudet and today I will be helping you use market research to set a reasonable budget for building games as a business. You will figure out how to find games similar to yours, how to avoid biased information, and use box leader method to get a ballpark idea of the units sold. This process will allow you to set a budget for your game to compete with in that market. While research won't guarantee your game will sell enough to make a profit, it will inform you of the risks involved. If this is your first time digging through this information or considering the budget of a project, the following may be very surprising. You should not eat any hard candy or sip hot beverages while watching this video. Take a seat, buckle up, we're going for a ride in learning the truth about what it takes to make games as a business. I encourage you to join along and begin digging through the information relating to your game. You don't need much, just create a spreadsheet or place to track the data and a little bit of time. At the minimum, collect the game title, Steam URL, number of reviews, and price. Other data points may be interesting for you to track as well. Is the game in early access, single player, multiplayer, the art style, or even sub-genres? To find games similar to yours, you will need to know what key tag or tags to search for. Finding the key tags may be as easy as I make racing games and racing is one of the tags provided by Steam. When searching through the games with a racing tag, most of them tend to match what I am aiming at. However, if you are making a platformer, there might be more specific tags you need to apply to filter out all the platformers not like your title. Perhaps you need physics platformer, or metrovania, or any other tag combination. Your objective is to find 1, 2, or 3 tags that when combined find games reasonably close to what you are aiming at for a market. Now that you know your tags, open your favorite browser of the internet to store.steampowered.com slash search and use the tags to describe your game. This will show all the popular games by default so we need to do a little bit more. Your data will be very biased if you only look at the games similar to yours that sold well. This is known as, or similar to, survivorship bias. This will present you a false positive view that doesn't match reality. It's like saying Minecraft made billions so making a similar game will have similar results leading you to invest millions into the idea. Reality is unlikely to make that amount back so you need to look at both successful and not successful games to have a better picture. To reduce the bias, sort the search results by release date. This will ensure the algorithm isn't pulling the best sellers to the top or lifting up games that are more relevant in other ways. The list probably contains a bunch of DLC, music, demos, and other fluff that we don't want data for. There is another checkbox on the right under selected types that can filter only games. With this, the search is ready. This is a process I do every month for the racing games released in the previous month. This allows me to keep an eye on the racing game market. I recommend doing this regularly for your genre, but for a single research session I recommend choosing at least three different months within the last year and a half to collect all the games from. Collect all the games from each of the months chosen, not just the ones you've heard of or got popular. Now do the grind. Collect all the data you want from each of the games. You must have at least the game name, URL, review count, and price, but as you see here I'm collecting a lot more information. I tend to check if the game is multiplayer or single player and classify it as different types of racing games or what art style was used. This allows me to follow trends and see if racers tend to enjoy one sub-genre over another or what art styles might be more popular. Don't get overwhelmed with my process. The minimum information will allow you to find a budget for your project. For this we will use the box leader method, which I first learned of through Jake Burkitt's article linked below. Effectively, you take the number of reviews the game has and multiply it by some value to give an estimated number of units sold. Jake came up with a multiplier of 77, but this was years ago and perhaps may be outdated. The point here is to get a rough ballpark. This information is not meant to be super accurate and it does not need to be. I want to repeat that last line again as it's important to understand the data collected from this and calculated through this model or any model provides a rough estimation and is not extremely accurate. We only need large brush strokes to paint a valid picture and avoid getting caught up in the tiny details. It doesn't really matter if a game made $80,000 or $90,000. The rough ballpark is $75,000 to $100,000. Of course, these numbers are an order of magnitude higher than what I find to be the norms in the racing genre. The estimated units sold can be multiplied by the price to give you an idea of total revenue. Mind you, there is a cut for Steam, possibly a second cut for a publisher, and of course taxes to consider as well. Games are also most often sold on sale, but if we try to account for all the tiny details we are getting lost. Really, just focus on the bigger picture and ignore the smaller details. This should give you an idea of the revenue you can expect for the type of game you are making. I hear you shouting already that you have found a lot of games making little to no money. Yes, this is a serious concern and don't immediately think my game will be better. This is a risk and if it is unacceptable, turn around now. It doesn't matter what effort or money you have spent so far, if the risk of not making anything is unacceptable, think very hard about continuing. I also hear most of those games that made nothing are too low quality, too little effort or failed spectacularly in some other manner. Perhaps this is true. Many games are released every month and several are low quality or launched without marketing efforts. When sifting through the data, look at the presentation of the game page and dig into who made the game and what they have made before and where they promoted it. You want to get an idea of how much effort they put in and this can even help you find places to write about or review your game as you get closer to release. I find that the racing games come in about 3 different levels. Big hitters, either triple A, massive budgets or hit games. These are perhaps what we all strive to create but are unlikely to be a realistic target so I ignore them. Low ballers, that have very few reviews, not making any revenue worth speaking of. Then you have the mediocre line. These are the games that manage to make some number of sales but perhaps not in the millions and as you sift through the various pages, you can believe you can hit the same level of quality. This provides a reasonable budget cap for your game. For racing games, there are a handful of big hitters each year which I generally ignore. Many that make less than a thousand or so and a bunch that have a range of 8,000-15,000. Games in the middle ground can extend revenue upwards but my research leads me to aim at a budget of 10-15,000 which gives me a chance to make a profit on the other end. Remember falling into the pit of unnoticed games is a very real possibility and you have to accept that risk. Your time is valuable and you should know what cost it adds to the project and ensure you have a chance of hitting the budget. You can now find similar games to what you want to make, collect some data and get an idea of possible revenue. Keep in mind that the data is often changing, the multipliers might be different and it just gives you a vague idea of what might work. This isn't super accurate but you will get a feel for things. Please help support my adventure with a purchase of Accelerate or the new expansion and race around with an egg on your car. It is extremely challenging to drive fast and keep the egg safe but you'll be rewarded with better ranks on leaderboards to brag about to your friends. The winter expansion also has slippery snow and ice physics and 100 snowmen to collect. So grab a copy, have some fun and support an indie developer. If you wish to support me for free, you can share this video with others, do the thumbs up or subscribing thing and or leave a question below. Until later Turtles, have a good one. By the way, here is a video to help you calculate the cost of your time.