Leadwerks Game Engine Reaches 10k Paid Users | Hacker News Reader

Leadwerks Game Engine Reaches 10k Paid Users

marketwired.com

27 pointsPillowPants8 comments

The article was pretty unclear about what's going on here. I've pieced together the following, please correct mistakes if any.

10.000 sales at $100 each is 1m in revenue. Steam keeps 30%, so it's closer to 700.000. The product has been for sale for only 2 months, as far as I can tell. So 350k a month.

The company has been working on this product since 2006, and according to wikipedia they launched version 2.0 to the public in May 2008. Two years ago their kickstarter only raised 40k.

So they've been building a customer base for the last decade. They've got hype and people who love their game engine. Which means the sales of the last two months consist mostly of preorders. Once they've converted these core customers to the new version the sales will plummet. Therefore the revenue for Leadwerks Game Engine will be around $3M a year. That's a lot of money for regular folks, but not for a studio that has to make payroll every two weeks.

I've always loved games, but when I look at the numbers the market looks so unforgiving.

edit: looks like the company is tiny. Just a couple of people. So that means they're doing pretty well. Congratulations to the team.

Also it is an interesting business model. Get on steam with no 'greenlight'? I am going to check it out...

> Get on steam with no 'greenlight'?

Where does it say that? If that's true, it would bring the overall quality of Steam indie titles down even further, so why would they do that? Don't get me wrong, there is some great indie stuff on Steam right now, but there's also a long tail of exceedingly bad "games" that make you wonder how they even got on there.

From what I can tell, Leadwerks has a "Game Launcher" application on Steam, and you can upload your game as a workshop mod for the Game Launcher App.

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/tutorials/_/publishi...

So, its not like its actually a title on steam, but its available to be played through steam if that makes sense.

There are insane competition in the gaming scene, so if you are very good at the technical side you are probably better off making engines then actual games. And it's probably easier to have developers as customers then to have (teenage) gamers as customers.

Has anyone used it? How is it compared to Unity or UE?

I remember when LeadWerks was just a GUI editor for Blitz Basic 3D. These guys have shown a lot of determination and persistence to take it this far, hats off to them!

This looks like a press release.

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