in

YoYo Games: 50 Employees and £18M turnover in 2012?

In an article on the Scottish Development International website relating to the Scottish Governments grant to YoYo Games more details are revealed about YoYo Games’ future plans.

If the details of YoYo’s publishing process didn’t already seem ambitious enough there are plans to increase staff levels to 50 with a turnover of £18,000,000 (~€20M, ~$29M USD) in 2012.

“YoYo Games moved to Dundee thanks to support from Scottish Development International and a Regional Selective Assistance grant of £220,000 to support the creation of 24 new jobs – a number which Sandy Duncan intends to see rising to 50 by the end of next year…”

“…Two percent of the thousands of games uploaded to the ‘Game Maker ‘site are considered to be financially viable, and go on to be professionally finished by YoYo’s publishing team.

Most of the publishable games cost only £2000 to produce – just a fraction of the minimum £25,000 which most design studios would spend on a game. This makes the company’s financial model ‘unique and financially disruptive’.

“We want to publish more games than anyone else,” said Duncan of YoYo’s rapid expansion. “By 2012 we hope to have published more than 500 games – all at a low cost.”

“YoYo Games fast facts

  • 95,000 games appear on the website to date
  • 100 new games are uploaded every day
  • Two percent of the uploaded games are considered to be ‘financially viable’
  • £18 million – the company’s projected turnover in 2012″

– YoYo Games joins Dundee’s vibrant games industry

What do you think?

10 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Yes James, YoYoGames have gotten their head too far in(or too far out, depending on how you view it), forgetting their flagship product.

    It seems they don’t care about their original customers who use GameMaker.

    So rather fix/update it more often(including adding stuff like 3D support) like naively), they are moving into other media/platform/devices.

    The only thing that keeps them going is developers those like that on the forum, and those extensions.

    *sigh*

  2. Utto, I pity the tax payers in Scotland.

    I knew about the hurrendous debt of YoYo Games. I wondered how they could keep going! Ah, so they got £200,000, and with that it seems they’re just surviving.

    Before anything big can happen, they need to sort out some massive problems. You can’t run before you can walk. Sometimes you have take a step backwards to take a giant leap forward.

    By that I mean sort out Game Maker. It’s their flagship product and yet they ignore it completely in favour or iOS and PSP, etc.

    It looks horrible, the runner is slow and it’s pirated like nothing else.

    Fix that and you can start on other things Sandy. You don’t have a market where you’re the leader and are guaranteed to be so for even a year. Anyone can work on a rival to Game Maker if they have a computer.

    So I pity the tax payer …

  3. It’s hard to make the figures add up

    They want to publish 200 titles a year and generate £18m revenue

    That means the average title has to generate £90,000

    Selling an iPhone game at 59p where they get 35% (20.65p) would mean an _AVERAGE_ game would have to sell 435k units.

    And that’s an average selling game.

    Now compare and contrast gamemaker titles’ quality to the quality of an AVERAGE iPhone game.

    Or go and read up on the average $$$ take or sales for an iPhone game.

    Doesn’t add up.

  4. I agree with FredFrederickson, YYG is going over quantity rather than quality. If they release a ton of games, people are more likely to buy one of the games published because YYG has a bigger portion in the market. If they were also developing games, then they would release “quality over quantity” games. But here they are unlimited because most of the labor of creating a game is taken out of the equation, so they have in effect lowered their standards in order to push out as many games as they possibly can.

  5. 2% seems a wee bit optimistic. I also don’t get how they are going to be able to publish a new game basically every day, let alone market it with any kind of legitimate push or longevity.

    • I think the longevity comes into play when they have a massive stream of games coming out, all featuring those ridiculous YYG green borders in the screenshots. Basically, they will thrive in the long term by focusing on a large amount of games in the short term.

      It’s anyone’s guess as to how well that will pay off for developers… but it might not be in YYG’s interest to become known for chewing up and spitting out dev’s and their games a day at a time.

    • 2% is probably an underestimate for this business model, to be fair. Quality and financially viable aren’t the same things by a long chalk.

      In a nutshell, it’s looking like a publishing model from 1983 with terms from 1983 only in 2010.

      I expect when YYG reach 50 games, we’ll all get a free calculator watch.

One Ping

  1. Pingback:

Leave a Reply to theweirdn8 Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Game Review – Vijfentwintigspellen (Erik Leppen)

YoYo Game Store Base Line Spec Revealed