In June 2023, I made a budget for Dawnmaker that projected the game would cost a total of 520k€ to make. A year later, I can announce that the total budget is around 320k€. Why such a big difference? Because we never managed to secure funding, and thus had to cut a lot of what we wanted to do. We did not hire a team for the production of the game, did not even do the production of the game, did not pay ourselves, and reduced our spending to the minimum.
I'm writing that the budget is 320k€, but that does not mean we actually spent that much money. The amount of money that transited through our bank account and was disbursed is about 95k€. The remaining 225k€ are my estimation for how much Arpentor Studio would have spent if Alexis and I had paid ourselves decent salaries for the whole duration of the project. So in a sense you could say that Dawnmaker only cost 95k€, and there's some truth to that, but it's also a lie. Our work has value and needs to be accounted for in budgeting. Because in the end, this is money that we lost by not doing something else that would have paid us.
Where did the money go?
So we spent 95k€ over the course of 2.5 years. Here are the main expense categories we had:
Even though we barely paid ourselves — we did for 4 months at a time when we thought we were getting a bunch of money, but ultimately did not — salaries are still the biggest category. If you include contracting, which is also paying people to work on our game, that makes up for 60% of the game's budget. The rest is split between Company spending (lawyers, accounting, etc.), events and travel (like going to the Game Camp every year), regular fee for online services (hosting, email, documentation) and a touch of hardware. Plus all the remaining small things that don't fit the other categories, like an ads campaign.
The financial outcome of Dawnmaker
320k€ is an incredibly big sum for such a small company, especially if you compare that to how much the game made. At the time of writing, about 6k€ made it into our bank account. Our players seem to really enjoy Dawnmaker, according to our 94% positive reviews on Steam, so I guess we can call it a critical success. But financially it's far from one: we need another 314k€ to break even!
One metric that I'm thinking about those days, as I prepare the next project, is the revenue per working day. On Dawnmaker, as of writing, Alexis and I made about 6€ per working day. That's less than one tenth of the minimal wage in France, and that's without counting the money that came out of our pockets — otherwise our revenue per day would be negative.
If you're reading this and you're thinking of starting a game studio, here's the biggest advice I can give you: start by making small games. Reduce the risk — the financial cost — by making games that are small, but take them to the finish line. You'll gain experience, you'll make yourself a portfolio that will be helpful to raise funding later, and if you will have a much better chance of having a decent revenue per working day. But I'll discuss this in more details in a future post.
Dawnmaker is 20% off!
Yesterday we released a major, free update for Dawnmaker, our solo turn-based strategy game. We've added 3 characters, each with their own deck and roster of buildings, as well as a ton of new content. To celebrate, we're discounting the game, 20% off for the next two weeks. If you want to experience our city building meets deckbuilding game, now is your time to get it!
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