Information about sales and revenue (digital especially) is pretty hard to come by in the games industry, so this blog post from Hitbox Team makes for some interesting reading:

http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures

As expected the first couple of days and the following promotions make up for most of the sales, with the Humble Bundle being responsible for the biggest spike in both sales and revenue:

Aside from the stuff in the graphs it details some other things about Dustforce's development for those interested. It took around 15 months and $100,000 to make by four people, for example.

Dustforce was one of my favorite games from last year and I'm very much looking forwards to Spire, so it's good to know the devs are doing well. Plus for a change it's sales figures that weren't disappointing and below someone's expectations

Interesting. Thanks for posting.

Dustforce is very underrated game. I very much enjoyed playing through it. Game holds up really well under speed running conditions too, which speaks to the quality of their design.

I expected a bigger spike for the humble bundle. I assumed there would be relatively low sales, with small spikes whenever there was a midweek or weekend sale, and a huge spike with the humble bundle. The bundle was their biggest spike, but its not disproportionately high compared to the rest of the sales.

Pleased that I was wrong, its good to see indie games having legs outside of the humble bundle. I'm not a big fan of dustforce, but its good to see indie devs doing well in any case.

Maybe my numbers are off but... This is kind of depressing?

The final figure for our income after exactly one year of sales is $489,404 USD (from a total of $668,490 in revenue). Of course, there are also costs to running the business: legal and accounting fees, software licenses, server costs, and some travelling expenses have added up over the past year to take a good $36k or so out of our total income. When you take that into account, along with personal income taxes, we are left with around $295k. In the end, this means that for every $10 copy of Dustforce sold, $4.41 of it ended up in our pockets. We then split this between the four of us.

At about 75K per "employee", this would seem to be barely enough to survive the year(s) between design and release*.

*I know they give the number of 20K per person for living expenses, but that's living frugally, and from personal experience, that's not sustainable.

@gaff: $353,404 more than they say they needed, seems like they did pretty well for a game that didn't sell very well all things considered.

It's interesting data, glad they shared it.

Now go buy more Dustforce!! I'm just going to say that I personally enjoyed it many times more than Super Meat Boy.

@chibithor

Steam takes 30% so that about sounds right, $153K from 243,000 copies. Still that doesn't sound like much, it's just profitable. I don't know how to feel about this.

Oh wait, that Midweek Madness sale! And then the Humble Bundle! Thanksgiving sales!

Just goes to show, those sales periods that sound piddly actually bring quite the amount of revenue.

Shit, I didn't know there was marketing for indie games like IndieViddy. They're also marketing for Apotheon which looks amazing. Makes sense, while developers are working away, who's making the great trailers for Super TIME Force, Broken Age (Double Fine), or Papers, Please to get onto Steam and other places?

I'm so excited for Spire.