Studios selling a title for the first time usually start from production cost: six weeks of work, so six weeks of money. Buyers do not think that way at all, and the gap between the two is where most of these conversations stall.
What a buyer is actually paying for
Time. A finished, tested game exists today. Building the same thing takes them a quarter, and the quarter is worth more than the code.
Reduced risk. The game works. It has been through QA, store review, real devices. Every one of those is a thing that could have gone wrong and did not.
Proven numbers, if you have them. Retention and ARPDAU from real players turn a guess into a model. Without them the buyer is buying a hypothesis.
What raises the number
- Clean IP. Everything in the project is yours to sell, or documented if it is not. See why Asset Store licences do not transfer — this is the single most common thing that kills a deal late.
- A build that compiles today. On a current engine version, with a README that works. Projects that need a week of archaeology get discounted for it.
- Live metrics, even modest ones. A small real number beats a large projected one.
- More than one platform. A title already running on web as well as mobile is worth more than the same title on one channel.
What lowers it
- Third-party assets with unclear licences
- A dead engine version, or dependencies that no longer resolve
- No analytics, so no numbers at all
- Reskins of something recognisable
- Hard dependencies on an SDK the buyer does not use
Before you quote anything
Audit the project for licence problems, confirm it builds from a clean checkout, and gather whatever real numbers exist. Doing that before the conversation is what separates a negotiation from an unravelling.
This is what we do day to day — game development and porting at Factorial Studio.
