Nomad Games is a 14-person indie studio known for bringing tabletop universes like Talisman to digital audiences. It has one dedicated marketing person, and Design Director Carl Jackson pitches in on marketing too, so there was little time left for the sales numbers.
“We’re a small team… we’ve never really put enough focus into data analysis,” Carl said. Building and maintaining games comes first, and every platform has its own dashboards and reporting schedule.
They needed faster access to numbers they already had.
Every store in one view
Like many studios, Nomad Games relied on platform dashboards for sales insights, but those tools aren’t always built with indies in mind. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft each had their own dashboard to check, and each one reported the numbers differently.
That sometimes meant the team had to decide on partial numbers. As Carl put it: “Sometimes things get lost… I’d ask, ‘How did this game sell last week?’ and no one knows.”
When they started using the IndieBI Data Platform in January, every store they sell on landed in one place. A few weeks later, Talisman came to PlayStation. It had been on Steam for a year, and the team had weighed the port against what it would cost to make. From the day after launch, Carl could follow its sales alongside every other store.
“To see those numbers quickly, how well it’s done on launch, makes us think: OK, that was the right thing to do. It’s worked, it’s making its money back,” Carl said. The answer came early enough for the team to start looking at other platforms.
The sale that paid for the tool
With every store in one view, Carl could see sales for the whole catalog side by side. That’s how the team spotted a Nintendo Japan title that hadn’t been on sale for a year.
I put that on sale and it immediately made enough money to cover a few months of using IndieBI.
Carl Jackson, Design Director, Nomad GamesThe same view turned up a Steam title running at just 10% off while their other titles were at 40–60%.
“IndieBI highlighted it for us and we were able to quickly fix the issue,” he added.
What changed for the team
A question like “how did this game sell last week?” used to take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour of digging through the Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo dashboards. Now IndieBI shows the answer in one place, and the numbers are current.
It has been really helpful so far. I already recommended it to other teams.
Carl Jackson, Design Director, Nomad GamesSee what shows up in your own catalog. Connect your stores and the numbers land in one place, free for the first 30 days.
Tom Kaczmarczyk