Defender's Quest II's "UnKickstarter" approach to crowdfunding

Kickstarter is the go-to solution for crowdfunding these days, but I'm a control freak so I designed a custom solution for our upcoming game, Defender's Quest II: Mists of Ruin.



No solution is one-size-fits all; we're in the unique situation of developing the sequel to a critically acclaimed title, namely Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten.

The pre-order page for DEFQ2 looks like this:



This is heavily influenced by starbound's preorder page, and it solves several key problems I find with the way Kickstarter displays rewards.

Visual Clarity

First of all, what you see is what you get. All of the rewards are represented by visual icons, and cumulative rewards from previous tiers can be added. For example, our book tier includes a digital art/story book, as well as all previous rewards: the game's soundtrack (from the music tier), and games (from the game tier).



Just by looking at this tier, you know immediately what you're going to get -- everything in the box. And if you want detailed information, you can click on the "more details..." box which will expand and lay things out explicitly:



And just to be super-compulsively clear, when you click "buy now," it takes you to a new page with a Humble Store pre-order widget, puts all the details in a box below, and replaces the "all of the above" line with the actual descriptions from cumulative tiers.

Compare this to a typical kickstarter reward tier.

This example is from the awesome upcoming RPG Cosmic Star Heroine, and is a commentary on Kickstarter itself rather than their game or rewards.
The developer has to cram the reward text into a narrow box, and has no formatting options whatsoever. You can't separate important information in a smaller box under "more details," you can't put the "Note" in italics or a smaller font, and you can't even create a proper title for the tier and set it in bold. It all runs together.
Worst of all, relating how cumulative tiers work is confusing at best, which is why the "...and all of the above" convention has become so popular, and thus expected.
You can't always follow the "all of the above" model (especially for more expensive limited tiers), and developers who break with that format are then reduced to creating charts to explain exactly what each tier provides:



I'd like to reiterate that I'm not knocking Cosmic Star Heroine or Zeboyd Games for this. Not only am I a big fan (I totally baked CSH), but this is pretty much how you have to explain things if you use Kickstarter.
CSH clearly isn't hurting from using Kickstarter --  they made their goal and then some. I just think there are much simpler and clearer ways to present rewards, and Kickstarter's format kinda locks you in a box.

"Comparison is the thief of joy" -- Teddy Roosevelt

Kickstarter campaigns don't exist in a vaccuum, so backers tend to compare campaigns against one another. Given KS's standardized pitch format, this makes it very easy to line up A vs. B, and thus puts a lot of pressure on you to standardize your pitch accordingly, even if that pitch doesn't play to your strengths.

For instance, the "Talking Heads" video format, complete with professional lighting, editing, and sound, has become quite popular and even expected (even if some developers eschew it). If you're launching on Kickstarter, the video takes center stage.

But what if you don't want to make your pitch that way? Videos are important, but I'd rather let my actual pitch do the pitching, and make the video a simple, direct, summary, sans talking heads:

Of course, this option is only really available to us because we've already released a successful game. But given the fact that our second game's chief "social proof" is our track record from the first one, I won't spend time and money on a super-deluxe promotional video. Not only does designing our own site let us frame the expectations, it also serves as it's own social proof, since it proves we're at least competent enough to build and run our own pre-order site.

My wife is fond of pointing out "social inflation" -- for instance, weddings started as simple ceremonies but now have expensive dresses and rehearsal dinners, brunches, etc. Kickstarter started as a simple crowdfunding format, but then professional videos, complicated reward schemes, and stretch goal after stretch goal got added to the mix.

There's many sane video game Kickstarters, for sure -- I just want to avoid the inflationary pressure of that environment entirely.

We also aren't interested in doing any physical rewards, given the massive boondoggle that has been for other developers. The whole point of this is to make the game happen sooner, not later, and therefore all rewards are either directly related to game production (such as naming a monster in our special "ending credits" bonus battle after you), or at least by-products of it (such as the digital art&story book).

And don't even get me started on "stretch goals." Suffice it to say, we won't have any.

Fulfillment

Kickstarter can make fulfillment a bit of a chore, since it's not really a content delivery platform.

Humble Store definitely makes fulfillment easy, since they're all about delivering digital content. As soon as something's ready, we just upload the bits to their servers, and the backers get their stuff.

For instance, we give out free copies of Defender's Quest I with every pre-order, so the basic game tier represents a savings of about 57% off the two games bundled together at full price. With Humble store, people who preorder Defender's Quest II today will get their DEFQ1 keys immediately.

Final Thoughts

Aside from the above concerns, Kickstarter is really designed for a specific kind of campaign - one where you won't do the project if you don't get the money, and you are raising money for a limited amount of time.

Not only are we committed to Defender's Quest II's development regardless of how much we raise, we see no reason to limit pre-orders to 30 or 60 days. Furthermore, Kickstarter's payment options are limited because of their unique "all or nothing" system.

There are some cons with running our own site. You have the burden of making your own custom front-end, and Humble Store is not (yet) as feature-rich as Kickstarter (letting backers upgrade their tiers by tacking on X$ is technically possible, but not automated), and various other minor issues.

That said, I like having a closer relationship with our fans. No muss, no fuss, simple and direct -- Defender's Quest II is happening, and if you want to get a discount or some exclusive early backer rewards, you can pre-order it today.

Freeloadable content - an alternative to paid DLC

Cross-posted on gamasutra.com

A lot of developers/publishers sell expansion packs and other discrete add-ons to their games as "downloadable content," or "paid DLC."  This model has problems, for both players and developers.  The problems for players have been covered exhaustively, so let's leave that aside for the moment.

Here's my perspective as a developer.

Let's say that the upcoming version 1.0 launch of our game Defender's Quest goes well, and some time down the line we release an expansion pack.  Will it earn enough money to justify working on it?

There are a couple of facts that influence this decision:

1. It's impossible to sell more copies of DLC than of the original game
2. DLC's price must be substantially less than the original game's
3. Many people in your audience will never experience the DLC content*

*Only issues 1 and 2 are relevant from a financial perspective, but I'm a softie, so number 3 is important to me for other reasons.  One of the biggest reasons I make games is so that as many people can enjoy them as possible. As long as I make enough money to keep doing my job, I don't like restricting and fragmenting the experience, which is exactly what paid DLC does.  Free2Play is certainly an alternative, but I want to leave that for another article, this one is mostly about fixing DLC from within. 

So let's assume 25% of our audience buys our DLC (an optimistic estimate), and we sell it for 25% of the base game's price.  This gives us 6.25% of our original gross revenue.  Not bad - and if we spent less than 6.25% of the money, time, and effort it took to make the original game, we just got a raise! 


The problem is, it's all downhill from there.


First, it's a law of human nature that every purchasing decision has "friction," so fewer people will buy each subsequent DLC pack than the one before.  Second, it's a law of human business that day one is the most profitable day for DLC, which is why so many AAA games these days push day-one DLC.  The frightening corollary to this second law is that each day you wait after launch to release DLC means fewer sales.  Combine these pressures of time and friction, and you're looking at ever-dwindling revenue.  


What this means is that your first expansion pack will almost certainly be your best seller, and thus paid DLC can't sustain prolonged development.  Is there a way to fix this model without abandoning it for subscriptions or free-to-play? 


I think there is.

I call it "Freeloadable Content," or FreeLC.

How FreeLC Works

First, let's assume the DLC I want to create must make $5,000 to justify working on it.  So, with paid DLC, if the base game cost $7, we might sell the DLC for $2 and hope for at least 2,500 sales.  That's the traditional model.


Under the FreeLC model, we instead start a small Kickstarter project to raise the $5,000 we would normally expect to make through sales.  Now that we've covered this cost, we release the expansion as a free update to everyone who has already purchased the base game, even if they didn't contribute to the Kickstarter.  Hence, freeloadable content. 

Implications

Although the idea of FreeLC is quite simple, it has some interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive consequences. 

For one, FreeLC can be less adversarial than paid DLC.  Even if a player legitimately enjoys Mass Effect 3 and its $20 day-one expansion, it dampens her enjoyment when she has to wonder whether EA is just trying to find a sneaky way to raise the game's price to $80 (EA's Peter Moore has essentially admitted to this).

So that's one benefit.  But besides not having to nickel-and-dime, or more accurately, ten-and-twenty-dollar our players, we can let all of them have the extra content and still get paid to develop it.  We don't have to fragment the game's shared cultural experience into high- and low-paying tiers.


Furthermore, there's one final benefit that deserves special attention:

We just increased the value of the original game!

Under the paid DLC model, the base game stays the same, while any additional value the developer creates is locked up in discrete expansion packs, each of which has additional purchasing friction.  With FreeLC, each expansion makes the original game better, and since we've already made our "DLC money," we're free to sell the whole collection for the same original price.

I'll illustrate this effect with an example.

First, let's assume for the sake of argument that you can actually reduce the value of enjoying a game to some number.  So, say the base game is worth 10 units of fun, or "funits," (whatever those are).  Then, we make a small expansion, worth 2 funits.  Together, that's an experience worth 12 funits.  All together, we eventually release 1 complete game worth 10 funits and 5 DLC packs worth 2 funits each.

Then, we load all our merchandise into our digital wheelbarrow, and cart it off to the internet for sale.

Here's how it looks under paid DLC:

  Game: 10 funits,  $10
  DLC:  2 funits,  $2
  DLC:  2 funits,  $2
  DLC:  2 funits,  $2
  DLC:  2 funits,  $2
  DLC:  2 funits,  $2

And here's how it looks under FreeLC:

Game+DLC: 20 funits, $10

Which would you rather buy? 


The second option provides the exact same content for half the price.  We've already recouped the cost that we would normally have to make through DLC sales, so we don't have to charge the extra $10.  


Even better, there's one, simple low-friction purchasing decision - "Do you want to buy everything for one low price?"  Sounds like a good deal to me!  That's a much easier sell than, "Do you want to buy this? And how about a little more for this? And this? And this?"


Now, let's look at all the potential problems with the FreeLC model and see if we can address them.


1) Freeloaders

James actually has one of these

Since everyone who's already purchased the game gets the FreeLC, there's less incentive to support the Kickstarter drive, and just wait to get the content for free. This is the biggest risk I can think of (though we certainly have nothing to lose by just trying it and seeing what happens).  

First of all, you have to buy the original game to get the FreeLC, so it's not as big a concern as if it was just free for the general public.  That said, here's some possible solutions to the problem:

• Exclusive pledger rewards
  We create special stuff for high-dollar pledgers, such as exclusive bonuses and vanity items, putting their likeness into the game, etc. The only way you can get these things is by supporting the Kickstarter drive, so people still have an incentive to contribute besides just getting the FreeLC.
• Sell the basic game
  The lowest pledge level lets you buy the original game at a reduced price, so the Kickstarter drive doubles as a kind of sale.  If you already have the game, you can gift this copy to a friend.  If you don't have the game yet, now's your chance to buy in at a reduced price.  Not only do you get something right now, you've now bought into all current and future FreeLC.
• Count on goodwill?
  Perhaps this crazy idea will drive people to support it out of the sheer goodness of their hearts.  I wouldn't count on this alone, but it's a real thing that happens, and the amount of resentment players have for DLC suggests many would welcome an alternative that gives them more respect.

2) Lost "potential" sales

The next concern is that by giving away the updates for free, you're losing sales.  "Never leave money on the table," as the saying goes. 

First of all, if the Kickstarter drive succeeds, it doesn't really matter if you "lose" sales because the money you would have gotten through DLC sales is already in the bank.  Everything after that is just gravy. 

Second, and as I've said above, people now have more incentive to purchase the original game, which sells for a higher price than a DLC pack and can reach a larger potential audience since it has the lowest possible purchasing friction.

Third, although it's impossible to know the precise number of DLC sales you'd have made otherwise (and thus ask for too little in the Kickstarter), we have enough information to set a reasonably accurate upper bound.  DLC requires the original game to work, so you simply won't sell more copies than you did of the original game.  Furthermore, in the articles I linked above, we saw that AAA titles with huge marketing budgets like Mass Effect 3 had a 40% attach rate for day-one DLC (again, the best day for DLC sales), so it's safe to assume that we mere mortals would get substantially less than that.    

Finally, the FreeLC model opens up an additional revenue stream - dedicated players with deep pockets.  Free-To-Play developers call these "whales," but under the FreeLC model, I'd call them "patrons."  These players are the game's biggest supporters and are often looking for ways to spend more money.  Rather than just getting their money, this method includes them as pillars of the game's community.

3) <Insert complaint about Kickstarter>

The next issue is that of Kickstarter and crowdfunding itself.  

Many people have raised concerns about pie-in-the-sky Kickstarter campaigns for games that promise the moon and ask for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, which then take years to materialize, if ever.  Most of these concerns don't apply to FreeLC. 

First of all, if you're a developer kickstarting FreeLC, you've already made your base game and established your track record. 

Second, you already have a basic reward that you can deliver to pledgers right away - a discounted copy of the original game, which entitles them to all current and future FreeLC.  

Third, since it's just an expansion pack and not a full-fledged game, even a relatively large and expensive project can ask for a modest sum of money and still cover the cost of development.  

Fourth, developing an expansion pack is much less risky than creating a game from scratch, and it takes a lot less time to boot. 

This should result in an attractive Kickstarter campaign that's easy to fund without making outlandish promises.

Future Work

Let me emphasize that the entire FreeLC model I've just laid out is a hypothesis.  I'm not sure if anyone's actually tried this before, and I don't know whether it will actually work in practice any better than paid DLC.  These are the effects and implications I can foresee, but nothing beats actually trying the thing out. 

So...when are we coming out with FreeLC for Defender's Quest?

Right now, we're still working on our big free update to Defender's Quest, version 1.0, followed by a release on all the big digital download stores that will accept us.  This should happen in a month or so if everything goes according to plan.  If I had been smart, I would have thought of this FreeLC idea back in February and used it to fund this huge update, but our financials are in reasonable shape and we should still be able to squeak by, and hopefully new sales will give the game a future.

I'm not sure what the future holds for us, but I can say for a fact that if and when we release an expansion pack for a game, it will be FreeLC.

Further Reading
If you're interested in my other musings on games and economics, try my Piracy and the Four Currencies series.

The Holy Grail of Digital Distribution

Cross-posted on Gamasutra. Twitter handle: @larsiusprime

The challenge of being an independent developer is that so much of your game's success is out of your control. There's no Department of Internet Money where you can present your neatly wrapped Cool New Thing and be justly rewarded with crisp thousand-dollar bills.

Instead, you can either self-publish or work with one of the many third party stores.  Either way, you're still going to have to do a lot of marketing work yourself - and even if you get onto a major platform like Steam, success isn't guaranteed.

Perhaps one glorious day, an online store will descend from the Heavens that lets anyone submit a game, immediately approves it, presents it to an enormous audience, and lets the game succeed or fail on its merits alone.  Brother will no longer fight against and brother, the lion will lay down with the lamb, and a bright new age of meritocracy will shine down upon us all.  Also chocolate ponies.  Amen.

Until that magical day comes (if it ever does), marketing, networking and all those other "businessy" skills will be just as important to a developer's success as the quality of her game.  Furthermore, the perception that you have to sit at the same lunch table as the Indie "in-crowd" to succeed will persist (regardless of whether that perception is true).

Will this glorious day ever arrive? I wouldn't count on it.  My advice to any would-be developers is to stop asking for permission to succeed.  Don't wait for someone to come along and fulfill your dreams or make you the next Cinderella stories - make games, share them with the world, learn some business stuff, and do your best to make it work.

But you know what? It's nice to dream. What if this magical store really is possible after all? I'll give you a hint: there's already something out there that's not too far from the dream, and chances are you've already used it.

What We Want

First, let's talk about what we're looking for.  This magical dream store must:

1. Have a low barrier to entry
2. Reward merit with financial success
3. Connect developers to a large audience

Sounds great! However, these goals might not be compatible. Let's look at today's landscape.

Steam

Curated stores like Steam have a small number of hand-picked, high quality titles that are lavished with individual attention and promotion.  This is beneficial for both developer and customer - customers get great games, affordable prices, and excellent service, while developers get a huge audience both ready and willing to pay for their games.

The downside, of course, is that everyone wants to get onto Steam and there's simply not room for them all.  Even if Steam could reliably sift through their mountain of submissions, separating the undiscovered gems from the thousands of Minesweeper clones, there still wouldn't be room for all the great games that want to get in.  Steam is pretty close to our magic dream store in many aspects, except for the fact that you have a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting on there.

The App Store

On the other end of the spectrum, you have services like the App Store, which accept just about anyone who applies.  Not surprisingly, the App Store is flooded with games. Even worse, Apple shows no interest in fixing the store's fundamentally broken discovery channels. This forces developers to compete for slots on the "top app" charts, and leaves customers poking around in the dark, passing over countless games they would have loved.

Among other problems, the store is plagued by "race to the bottom" pricing. The only reliable path to success is to get on the charts, the most important of which are "most downloaded" and "most sold." Your game can't be "most downloaded" unless it's free, and your game can't be "most sold" unless it's 99 cents. There's no "most revenue" chart, so there's no chance of selling half as many units at three times the price and still staying on top. (Apparently there actually is a "highest grossing" chart, at least on iTunes. My mistake)

 This design pushes developers towards the free-to-play business model.  Free-to-play is fine and good, but it stinks that the store intentionally excludes a wider range of pricing models (The situation is somewhat better on the iPad, which can actually support games at various different price points).

There's also no way to sort the games by user rating, and search functionality is awful.  Given Apple's obsessive attention to design, there's every reason to believe these decisions are intentional.  Apple treats games like commodities, which drives developers to compete for visibility, which in turn drives down prices, which provides customers with a pile of affordable, disposable apps.  Every once in a while, Apple hand-picks a new "featured App" to be the next Cinderella Story, keeping hope alive for the next wave of developers.

The App Store falls far short of our magical ideal - it's easy to get onto the store, but success has a lot more to do with chance than merit, and game design choices are limited by Apple's preferred business models. Those that succeed despite these challenges usually have a focused marketing effort outside of the App Store itself.

A Different Way

It seems like there's some fundamental trade-offs at work here.  A strongly curated store like Steam or Xbox Live Arcade can be good for both customers or developers, but the bigger the store's audience, the harder it is to get accepted.  On the other hand, open stores like the App Store or Android Market will take just about anybody, but it's up to the developer (or the winds of fate) to actually reach that store's audience.

Couldn't there be some store that lets pretty much anyone submit a game, without drowning customers in a river of shovelware, or leaving developers up a creek without a paddle?

I think there is.

It's called Kongregate.

Full disclosure:  The lead designer of Defender's Quest, Anthony Pecorella, also works for Kongregate.  We started working together when he was looking for a programmer, and found a popular game on Kong that I had written.  

Now, as I said before, the magical store from the heavens doesn't exist yet.  Kongregate falls a bit short of the ideal, but it's leading the way.

What is Kongregate?

Kongregate is one of many free flash game portals on the internet.  Flash developers (like me) make games, and then distribute them to the public through these portals - the biggest ones being Kongregate, Newgrounds, and Armor Games.

Most portals run ads to make money, some of which they share with developers.  A few portals support games with microtransactions, which lets developers sell virtual goods with a small cut going to the portal.  Developers can also make money from sponsorship deals, where a portal pays a flat fee to brand a game with their logo.  Kongregate has the best developer support in the business - they were the first site that I know of to share ad revenue, they have the best microtransaction system, and their support staff is both friendly and helpful.

Even so, there's not much to see here.  Flash portals have been around a long time and most of the scene's developers aren't rolling in dough.  Here's what makes Kongregate different.

Discovery

Kongregate has, hands down, some of the best discovery in the business.  If you create a game that Kong's audience will enjoy, it will succeed, because the players that love it will find it almost as soon as it's uploaded.  This is not the case on the App Store - there are lots of iOS games that the audience would love, but will never find.

Kongregate's excellent discovery consists of a simple and powerful user rating system, excellent search functionality, lots of categories, and an easy-to-navigate website.  In stark contrast to the app store, the user rating is the primary way in which games are sorted and displayed to the player.  These ratings come directly from players, who can only vote once each, but can change their vote at any time.  By tying visibility chiefly to "how much players like this game" rather than any other metric, Kongregate gives each game the best possible chance of succeeding on its own merits.

This makes many undiscovered gems rise to the surface that any curated platform would dismiss.  A good example is Shopping Cart Hero, which can only be described as "ugly as sin," but has nevertheless earned a loyal fan base and over five million plays on Kongregate alone.

(To be perfectly fair, Newgrounds created an excellent discovery engine first. Kongregate built on the idea and laser-focused it on games.)

Sifting out the Crap

Since Kongregate will accept pretty much anything, a whole lot of crap gets uploaded to the system.  This includes outright broken games, plagiarized games, and semi-interactive slideshows of pornography or disturbing images.  The worst of these are pre-screened by site admins, and anything that doesn't violate the terms of service goes into a holding pen with minor visibility.  These games are held off of the main site while they are "under judgment" until they get enough user ratings for an initial score.  In this way, Kongregate itself imposes as little value judgment on submissions as possible.

As of this writing, Kongregate boasts "57,941 free games!"  About 1% of those have a score greater than 4.0 stars, and only 14% have a score above 3.0.  All of the games on the front page are among these high-scorers, and the site keeps things fresh by with weekly and monthly categories for top-rated new material.

The most important part of this procedure is that it is not  arbitrary.  Subjective taste is still involved, to be sure, and it doesn't mean some "good" game won't get passed over - it just means that the audience itself is the final arbiter of what's good or bad, not an accident of the platform's design, or the whim of a curator individually picking the winners and losers.

That said, Kongregate does give personal, curated attention to select titles by featuring them on the front page, and giving them "badges" for players to earn (when a game gets badges, it's swarmed with players).  Unlike the "featured" games on Steam or iOS, however, there's a degree of objectivity to these selections - featured games must meet a minimum rating score to qualify, and there's usually few enough of these that Kongregate can just pick the top three or four out of the latest batch of games.

Finally, Kongregate has started experimenting with a Netflix-style recommendation engine, where it uses your rating information to show you other games you might like, offsetting the mass-appeal bias of the global user rating.

Money

Kongregate has a huge audience, provides a great service to their players, and a top-notch discovery system. What more could you want?

Well, the one thing holding Kongregate back from being the store to end all stores is that... it isn't a store :)

Most of the games are free, and they've only recently begun experimenting with microtransactions. Furthermore, their focus is browser-based games, rather than downloadable titles or stand-alone apps. They have, however, expanded well beyond flash games, and now support Unity, Java, and HTML5.

Kongregate has been particularly successful with free-to-play flash MMO's, such as Spiral Knights and Realm of the Mad God.  The more traditional format that we see on Steam, giving away a free demo to sell a premium game - has only been used in a few Kongregate games so far. Successful examples include our own game, Defender's Quest, as well as the strategy fan-favorite Creeper World. While Defender's Quest did well with this model, we took a hit to our review score because some players didn't like the fact that it was a demo. Creeper World, on the other hand, managed to drives sales and avoid any backlash to their business model.

As these experiences attest, there's potential here, regardless of whether your business model is traditional or free-to-play. Given that Kongregate's parent company, GameStop, also owns the more traditional digital distribution platform Impulse (a Steam Competitor), I can see some potential synergy.

Summing Up

My magical meritocratic game store hasn't arrived yet, and it might not ever, but I think there's hope.

Today's stores each have their pros and cons - Steam is awesome but inaccessible, whereas iOS is open, but crowded and arbitrary.  Kongregate comes the closest by accepting everyone, and then dutifully sorting the wheat from the chaff and directing players to the games they'll love. The only missing piece - and it's a big piece - is turning it into an actual store.

Who knows what Kongregate will do - I have no idea if this business move would actually be good for them (although it would certainly be good for me!).  Furthermore, there's no reason someone else couldn't build the magic dream store, building on Kongregate's model just as Kongregate built on Newgrounds'.

There are a few "indie" alternatives to Steam like Indievania that are taking steps in this direction, but are still relatively small.  Kongregate's main advantage is that it already has a huge audience.

Regardless of who actually does it, however, the outlines of the blueprint have been drawn. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I don't think the dream is impossible anymore. Someday, someone might make an online game store that lets anyone succeed if their game is good enough.

A man can dream, right?

-Lars out

P.S.
Kongregate: if you're reading this, feel free to use these ideas. In exchange, please send one (1) billion of your Earth Dollars to my orbital battle-station, c/o the Department of Internet Money.

P.P.S.
Newgrounds: forget Kongregate! I always loved you best. Please send me a thousand squadrons of tanks, piloted by your witty and insightful Tank Men(TM). With them we will conquer the world and remake it in our glorious image.

Defender's Quest: By the Numbers

So, in case you haven't heard yet, Gamasutra posted our first ~70 days of sales stats as a featured article today:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/168303/defenders_quest_by_the_numbers.php


Read the full article for details, but here's the TL;DR version:

• ~$70K / ~14K sales in about 70 days
• Top revenue sources: Kongregate, Newgrounds, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
• 90% of revenue came from flash portals!!!!!!