Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Doctor Esker's Notebook project financial update

I've been doing a series of posts about the financial end of my game project, and I haven't posted an update for a while. I'm nearly to the break-even point, which is great! I'm at $-194 by my calculation, with revenues of $3,454 offsetting expenses of $3,649.

I have sold 386 games and sent out 35 as promo or reviewer copies. I have 134 in stock at Amazon, and another 525 or so at home (uh, I mean in my warehouse 😀 ). I make about $9 per game depending on the sales channel, and I am not incurring too many new expenses at this point - the major expenses were printing and development, and I don't have many ongoing costs (other than the cut Amazon and PayPal take from each sale). So, I could make up to about $4,000-$4,500 on this if I just sell out the print run and don't do anything else.

Sales have taken a little bit of a hit over summer. I'm at about two sales a day, where from February to April I was at more like three a day. I hope that's just seasonal and not a trend. Nearly all sales now are through Amazon.

Here's the info in graph form. First, expenses and revenues by category:

The picture above shows revenues (above zero, climbing) and expenses (below zero, mostly flat). Time progresses along the bottom, but not evenly - initially I was updating every day or two, but now I'm updating less frequently.

Next, net revenue (income minus expenses): 



On this one, the time axis is properly scaled. I'm almost back to zero, as you can see.

Of course, I'm not including the time I've put into this project. My hourly wage is something like negative fifty cents an hour. So, this isn't (yet) a good way to make a living, put food on the table, or pay for health insurance. It's not even a good investment relative to a good solid mutual fund, although it will be if I sell out the print run by the end of the year, which looks likely if sales pick up a little around the holidays.

Anyway, looking good. I should hit break even sometime later this month.

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