For me, my Google sales were steady from April, but web, iOS and Steam all took a dive. I know some of these marketplaces have been at those levels or near them in prior months, just never all at the same time, so it could be nothing more than a perfect storm situation.
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I just checked my data going back quite a few years.
This trend holds true far more often than not (barring release year anomalies.)
April and May are low months, followed by highs during early summer, then slow sales in August and September.
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I don’t see a consistent pattern in my sales. May is very slightly down on April, but I had much bigger drops in Feb, and before that in Oct-Nov.
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Rebirth sales by month over the years cut for spikes. The colorful years (red, yellow, green) are outliers (launch years, etc) but the bluish ones are fairly consistent, with variations.
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Raises hand 
@WinterKing If you do a search there are a few threads like this about. I’ve heard COG say that some games don’t even earn over $1000 total in their lifetime (and authors only get a cut of that given some needs to go to the stores and COG for hosting). Short version I can give you is write HG as a “hobby with benefits” and be pleasantly surprised if it earns more. 100% do not give up your day job assuming a game will make you more than minimum wage as the app stores are fickle and it can be hard to predict. There are certainly metrics that increase your chances though if you are going purely for popularity and profit (customisable protag, significant romance plots, fantasy, superhero or power trip genre, very long (although I’d also be cautious with that last one for a first game).
100%. One of my games didn’t appear to get an email on release and the difference in uptake from previous games in uptake was really marked. (Although genre also didn’t help, that part was totally on me). I’ve heard multiple people say it hasn’t been worth their while to do a lot of individual promotion compared to just the email list. Unless you have a built in audience already, it’s very hard to get traction in the stores without a company backing you for visibility.
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@Jacic thanks for the heads up Writing is a hobby for me, though I wouldn’t mind if it became something more
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I’ve been thinking about writing one since I’ve started reading these. I’d definitely not expect more than $100 in your pocket maybe every other month or so, or longer. I honestly wouldn’t upload it to HG. As a consumer I’m not a fan of how it removes saves. I’d post it on steam, Google play and itch.io. itch actually gets a lot of traffic and if other authors on there like your work. Then it’ll get recommended to others. It’ll show up on their page especially if they rate it. Everyone was scared certain titles would be hidden depending on tags, but from what I’ve noticed they never did that. Plus if you use the right tags then it definitely will be found. Patreon, I’m not a huge fan of. Especially since a lot of authors who use it won’t post for months if not an entire year or more. But still expect you to pay for their tiers. I personally am not a fan of side stories before the main story is finished. Especially if it’s been almost a year since you’ve posted any updates. I’ve got a list of over like 30 WIP that I’ve been waiting on since about 2022-2023. The best way to make the most of it in my opinion is first person pov, people like to feel immersed as if it’s actually themselves. Word count is a no brainer. No one wants to pay $9 or more for a super short game that can be finished in a couple hours. Genre is important too. I think people are actually tired of the same old stuff. Ones with romance seem to do the best I think. Don’t write your stories in play writing or script writing. It gets confusing on who’s talking. Especially when you decide to have two characters with the same name. Plus there seems to be no descriptions of anything going on or the environment. Also add saves. No one likes to have to go back through everything if they have twitchy fingers like me and accidentally tap the wrong response.
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Fwiw I disagree heavily with a lot of this as a reader. I find HG and CoG far more pleasant to deal with than itch (itch has an irritating habit of not actually giving me things that I search for using their own search bar and pretty much every IF there uses twine, which I find generally unpleasant), and am not a huge fan of 1st person narration (it has been the reason I didn’t buy things after playing the demo before)
I’m also skeptical of the claim that an author would make more money on average with steam/itch than with HG. Do you have any sources that could support the argument?
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I love saves.
You won’t be able to monetize it on steam or Google play, unless you get a commercial license from HG. (Note: the license requires a $20k upfront payment.)
itch gets a lot of traffic, but competition for said traffic is brutal, and the results have been uneven for me. I have 15 games on itch, and one game accounts for 2/3rds of the total traffic on my profile. A good number of my games have views in the low hundreds. If people rate your game and add it to their collections, it can be a good way to get views, but getting either of those is not as easy as it looks.
I’ve actually stopped writing VNs on itch as a lot of them struggled for views, and I felt that the ROI on effort wasn’t worth it.
Romance is a handy tag on itch. (Adult and NSFW tags will get you a ton of views.)
What sort of genres would you recommend we write? Genuinely curious.
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I’ve tried this recently! I have a parser game that is extremely well-received in the parser community. 350K words, top 20 in all-time game rankings, 28 5-star ratings and 2 4-stars, reviews saying it’s the game they always dreamed of.
It’s been commercial on itch for 3 years now and makes about $100/yr. I just added it to Steam and only get 14 sales total. There are a lot of reasons for that (including lack of marketing) but definitely ‘if you have a good game and put it on itch and steam, you’ll make good money’ is not true by itself. You have to be good at marketing and building a following if that’s the course you pursue.
Edit: It’s definitely possible to make money on itch, so I’m not saying ‘don’t use itch’, I’m just saying that like most things in life having a great product is half the battle, and the other half is marketing, marketing, marketing.
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…I want to see that game. What it’s called?
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Parser games can be a bit harder to get into, and this one doesn’t have a tutorial. There’s a walkthrough here, but the walkthrough’s pretty long, since there are 100 characters: https://plover.net/\~davidw/sol/n/never23.html
There’s a free version with complete text as well but it’s online only and doesn’t have the extra images and hyperlinks, and you can lose your save if you clear your cache, so I don’t recommend playing the full game that way: Never Gives Up Her Dead - Parchment
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