Sometimes I think I understand the scale of a viral indie sensation like Vampire Survivors or Peak taking Steam by storm, selling millions of copies in a matter of days or weeks. Then I look at the numbers from another angle and it hits me all over again: Jesus, that is a lot of money.
This latest mind boggle comes courtesy of Meccha Chameleon, which, as we reported over the weekend, has sold more than 10 million copies in the three weeks since its launch on June 9. That’s a whole hell of a lot for a game developed by two Japanese indie creators, but becomes borderline incomprehensible when you learn how fast the game came together. According to an interview with Japanese publication GameWith, Meccha Chameleon was developed in just two months.
Let’s math that out a little bit. At 10 million copies sold as of June 25 (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s now close to 11), Meccha Chameleon has earned somewhere in the region of $60 million, priced at $5.99 per copy. That’s before Steam’s cut, taxes, and so on. In the interview mentioned above the two developers said they didn’t spend any money on promotion, so up-front costs were effectively zero.
The actual revenue would be a bit lower than $60 million on those 10 million sales, since Meccha Chameleon launched with a first week discount bringing the price to $4.79. And a decent chunk of its sales are surely from countries other than the US, including its native Japan, where the price often comes out to less than $6—you can see that breakdown on SteamDB.
Still, it’s fair to say that Meccha Chameleon has been raking it in. The daily volume of user reviews didn’t really pick up steam until after its first week, so more of the total sales have been at full price than not. And of the 36,810 total reviews on Steam as of this writing, 20,712 are in English. Sales in the west have clearly been very good.
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Meccha Chameleon has likely already made enough money to graduate from Valve’s 30% cut of sales to the 20% it takes on all revenue above $50 million. Once you factor in the extremely strong dollar-to-yen conversion rate right now, the Japanese indie devs have earned what is scientifically referred to as “fuck you money” for two months of work.
If we estimate that continuing sales since June 25 have been strong, developers Lemorion and Haganeiro should have retroactively earned a day rate of about $1 million for Meccha Chameleon’s total dev cycle. If you really want to despair about your own wages, that’s about $1,667 per hour, figuring a 10-hour work day with no days off for those two months. When the check clears, I hope the duo treat themselves to a very nice sushi dinner.
The secret to such lightning-quick development, according to their GameWith interview, was getting a barebones mockup built and then iterating. “We found that creating the entire thing first allows us to hit the finish line more efficiently, and the reassurance that ‘at worst, we can still release this as is’ to be a great motivator,” they said, as translated by Automaton. OK, so that’s more a principle than a secret; the secret was reusing assets from earlier projects, which themselves took 2-3 months to develop.
Meccha Chameleon is the second hit of the summer to earn bonkers amounts of money for fast work. Horror film Obsession, filmed in 26 days on a budget of $750,000, has now made $371 million. That figure, however, is getting divided up between a whole lot more than two people.
Despite coming together so quickly, the hide-and-seek game is a genuinely great time. “Even with its blemishes, Meccha Chameleon’s game of competitive camouflage is a multiplayer experience that exceeds its friendslop trappings,” Lincoln wrote in our 82% review.
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