The Cost of Making a CIB NES Game in 2020

In November 2020 my first NES game, From Below, went up for sale for about $62 USD (I am in Canada so the price from my perspective was an even $80 Canadian Dollar).

Now, how did I come up with that price, and how much did I actually make off this game? This article will answer all those questions! All costs will be in US Dollar, but will be a rough conversion from Canadian Dollar today, so it won’t be 100% accurate.

Something else to keep in mind is that these numbers are specific to producing 50 copies of a game. The prices per unit drop significantly as you increase volume.

Cost Breakdown

You may notice that there are no costs for the actual development of the game. That is because the artist, and musician for the game did the work for free!

It’s a little awkward because originally I did not plan to sell the game, and they signed on to the project for free with that agreement. Later when I decided I wanted to try selling it, they were kind enough to give me permission.

So how did I decide on the final price? I basically picked a number that would give me enough buffer room that if something went wrong (like an unaccounted for fee) I would hopefully be covered, and wasn’t so high that people we not buy the game. I found that $60USD/$80CAD is pretty standard, and that gave me the breathing room I needed.

Profit

So, in the end I walked away with $500 USD, or $10 (17%) profit on each copy sold. I would consider this very poor pay for 6 months of work, but that wasn’t really the point.

Now if you are planning to release your own game, this next part is really important:

$10 per copy is less than what was offered to me from some publishers to sell the game for me. Not only would they have done all the work for me, I would actually have made more money from it!

They would have taken care of putting together the box/manual design, shipping, storefront, etc. This is really important if you are actually trying to make money off making NES games. It is how I will be releasing games going forward if possible.

In my case, my goal was not to maximize profits, but to simply release an NES game without losing money, and to learn how it’s done in the process. I’m very happy in that regard.

Selling on eBay

I have some thoughts on selling through eBay. Overall, it was a very good experience, and I would recommend it for anyone who doesn’t have easy access to a storefront.

Pros:

• Easy to set up and schedule a sale.
• Handles all transactions (credit cards, etc).
• Built in shipping calculator.
• Trusted and well known.

Cons:

• High fees.
• Sale limit for new accounts.

Most of this stuff is pretty obvious I think, but the shipping calculator surprised me in a good way. When you use eBay’s built in shipping system, at the end of sale it automatically provides shipping labels that you just print and tape to your packages. From there you can just drop them off at the post office. It was a great experience.

I kind of knew that eBay had high fees, but I didn’t know about the sales limit. Basically a new account (as in hasn’t sold much) is limited to $1000 and/or 10 sales a month! I didn’t realize this until the last minute, but was able to get someone at eBay customer service to raise the limit to $4,500 just a few hours before the sale went live! Check your account limits before going with eBay!

Key Takeaways

It’s hard to make any money on NES games without selling a lot of them. The profit margin is super small.

Go with a publisher if you don’t actually care about experiencing the thrills of “doing it yourself”.

If there is anything else you want to know about the sale of From Below, drop a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer!