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Holly
Joined: 15 Nov 2002
Posts: 109
Location: Sheffield, UK
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 Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 10:38 am Post subject: |
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Pirate Princess update coming soon!
Watch this space ^-^
New game also in development (shhhh it's a secret!) |
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Kaptin BarfBeerd
Joined: 23 Apr 2010
Posts: 6
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 3:45 pm Post subject: |
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When can we know the secret?  |
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codergames
Joined: 20 Apr 2010
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2010 9:56 am Post subject: |
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| Poo Bear wrote: | | We've both had to take on other work to keep the home fires burning so things are running at a slower pace round here than we'd like. Making progress just in your spare time is slow going. |
Same thing here, I spent whole year developing the game (in my spare-time) in a hope that I'll be able to stop working as a freelance developer and dedicate meself to independent game development. And although the game is new, no large sales visible on horizon. |
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Poo Bear
Pod Team
Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 4107
Location: Sheffield, UK
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| Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 9:33 am Post subject: |
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Have you got a good marketing plan? To make a living at it you'll need to dedicate ~40% of your time to selling it I'm afraid. There are lots of tips on the net, here are a few of mine. I don't do some of these and I kick myself when reading it
1. must work on a wide range of hardware, PCs are a compatibility nightmare so do lots of testing. If it is remotely possible then get a Mac version working, this could see sales rise form 50-75% if you are lucky. Once it's working on a Mac it's a small jump to iphone/ipad.
2. upload to all the shareware sites. You can even get cheap software to help automate the uploading as there are an awful lot of sites.
3. contact the press, be warned though, consider each contact carefully as they won't be interested unless it fits their audience i.e. ign/gamespy won't care unless they think you are one of the top indie developers, indiegamenews will take the story even if you aren't.
4. make a blog and write regularly in it about indie related topics, google will pick this up and bring in new related traffic.
5. make a forum and moderate it so it stays nice and friendly and free of spam. Use this to try and learn what people want.
6. consider making the first game(s) free and use them to make contact with the public and draw them to the forum to help get to know what they want. For instance, shootemups are a dying genre (from commercial perspective), but there will still be a good nice audience out there. If you can find them and work out what they are looking for then you can make some money and keep going.
7. monthly newsletter, consider running a few competitions or polls to get feedback.
8. on uninstall kick people to an email form so they can tell you what is wrong/right.
9. make regular small updates based on what you've learnt, release them each month so you can talk about them in the newsletter. People will learn that you are listening and it's worth their time to post on the forum or email in feedback. Updates can turn a sales disaster into a sales win, it just takes longer.
10. know when to move on. If people really don't like it, then learn the lessons, move on to the next game and don't quit! |
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codergames
Joined: 20 Apr 2010
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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The best tips I ever heard! Thanks man!
I dedicated a whole month doing SEO, but no matter how well its done, most of the search engines still did not crawl my site properly ... seems that they're doing it 2-3 times a year regardless of "revisit" meta tags.
I'm not able to dive into Mac, its a mystery to me, I don't have money to buy it ... nor time to dedicate.
What I did so far, will try to be as honest as possible and to write it all:
1. Browsed your reviews, went to all sites you got reviews from and submitted request for review there. The result is ... most of them did nothing or rejected me.
2. Google AdWords ... I got keywords suggestions from Google which seem good enough ... I'm spending $2 per day on it, its set to auto, so its eather less than $2 or a bit more. I'm getting 2-5 clicks per day.
3. Listed on Upload.com, Brothersoft.com ... the Upload.com has an offer $9 for 1 month for the audience of 38 million people. Its a good deal, however, they took money from my credit card and then I got message that the scheduled processing date is next month?!?! ***!
4. Listed under couple of directories, but rejected from general type of directories, like linkdirectory.com and similar.
5. Fixed the game, so its working fully under Windows 7 and Vista, no need for compatibility or anything else. I've noticed serious performance improvement under Vista.
That's all.
I'm keeping track of how much downloads have improved since all of the above and I'm getting 20-30 download per day, probably most from Brothersoft.com and AdWords and a couple of from searchengines and directories. And of all of those downloads, under 1% total sales so far.
I'm getting a lot of harassment messages because of high price ... $15 is high? How can that be high, people don't even know through what I went making the game!
... also, the site was attacked by some guy from China, making the script to auto-download non-stop my game. Fortunately, I did think about that before writing the script, so it was auto-detected and blocked, but still ... |
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Konedima
Grammar Police
Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 12:28 am Post subject: |
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| codergames wrote: | | I'm getting a lot of harassment messages because of high price ... $15 is high? How can that be high, people don't even know through what I went making the game! |
Welcome to capitalism. As a general rule, people don't care how much effort is put into making something, they'll pay what they think it's worth (and while I won't harass you, I definitely think that $15 is too high). Try thinking about it this way: if someone wants you to pay $10 for a single apple, and say "Do you know how hard the farmer worked to grow this?" - if someone said that to me I wouldn't care, it's still far too expensive for an apple.
Occasionally I've seen indie games have a "pay what you want" sale - the one I can best remember is World of Goo did it a few months ago - not necessarily a great way to make money (almost 17,000 people only paid a cent, results here and here), but it could be a way to see what people are willing to pay, and possibly to get noticed. Lots of people are willing to get something for a dollar (or less) just to see how it is, because at that price, you're not out a lot of money if it's not great. More importantly, anyone who buys it and likes it is more likely to tell their friends, and you can't pay for the sort of advertising (although I've seen developers try retweeting contests, that always seemed rather lame to me). |
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codergames
Joined: 20 Apr 2010
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 12:45 am Post subject: |
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What you're saying makes sense, but what to do with people who already paid $15? Refund?
World of Goo is definitely worth more than 1 cent ... if people don't want to pay, maybe its time not to make more games  |
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Konedima
Grammar Police
Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 2:05 am Post subject: |
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| codergames wrote: | What you're saying makes sense, but what to do with people who already paid $15? Refund?
World of Goo is definitely worth more than 1 cent ... if people don't want to pay, maybe its time not to make more games |
Okay, maybe you should wait a little while to try not to ****** off anyone who's already bought it at full price too much.
And yes, it's a sad fact that many people either aren't able or aren't willing to pay much for good indie games that deserve attention - they'd rather just drop their cash for the new CoD game every year and think that's all their is to gaming.
If you don't want people to mooch off you at 1 cent (and I couldn't blame you), then try having sales at set prices ($5, $7.50, $10) at various times a few months apart and see what generates the most sales - if you see one generate a lot of sales, then that's your sweet spot and you should consider keeping it at that price.
I hope you weren't expecting releasing a game to be a get rich quick scheme - it can take a while to get noticed. Just don't give up if you're not earning as much as you'd like. |
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Poo Bear
Pod Team
Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 4107
Location: Sheffield, UK
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 8:02 am Post subject: |
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Be wary of paying any money to sites like upload.com, unless they are going to put you on the front page or include you in a newsletter it isn't worth it. A few test runs at ~$10 here and there is OK just to see what sites are like.
Same thing with google adwords, there are tons of websites out there purely designed to take adwords money. Usually they are plastered in free flash games, so they know they will pull in a lot of casual traffic because it's all free. So google sees a high traffic site with lots of games related key words so it bangs your ad on there. Only problem is that people going to a free flash gaming site aren't going to give you any money  Sites that review indie games or have articles about games or the important gaming forums, you aren't going to get on there unless you specifically tell google and turn off auto bidding. However, everyone else is doing the same thing so for the ad to get shown you need to bid high. I've found bidding more than ~10c for a click just isn't worth it. You really need something amazing to spend that kind of money on click i.e. something that >5% of people are likely to want to download.
After saying all that, you are doing the right thing spending a little bit on google on auto (but only a little bit). It helps google recognise your site is important and should help slowly build a bit of traffic. I only know 3 or 4 people who make google ads work and they have really really awesome games to advertise. When google works is when you spend $500 - $1000 a month on it and track at least double that back in direct sales. |
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Poo Bear
Pod Team
Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 4107
Location: Sheffield, UK
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 8:12 am Post subject: |
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In one way I'd somewhat disagree with Konedima, I think people either want to buy or they don't and when it comes to games the price just has to be within reasonable limits. Not only does that mean "not too expensive" but also "not too cheap", because either way will put people off. You just need to work out what people "expect" to pay. Which brings me to...
However, I'd totally agree with his other suggestion - run some sales. Prices I'd try are $19.99, $15.99, $9.99, $4.99 - although you might not be able to do $4.99 depends on your ecommerce costs. Run it for a week at each price and see what happens. One thing to be careful of is the sale factor - I know some people who ran sales at low prices, saw increase in income and so stuck to that price, but then over time they actually saw sales fall quite low (presumably people see a low sale price as fine, but if the normal price is that low permanently then maybe there is something wrong with the product?). It seems a strange way to think, but kind of understandable. After a month you should have a better understanding of what a "good" price is.
And don't worry about people getting upset about price changes, I've ran similar tests and it is very rare any old customers even notice. Plus, you could always promise them an invite into the new game's beta if they do complain and if you explain politely then most people are fine. |
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codergames
Joined: 20 Apr 2010
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 11:19 am Post subject: |
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I reduced the price to $9 to see how it will go. On next game I can't spend one third of the time I've spent developing this game, no way, its not worth it! Plus I'll have to put on hold some of the great ideas I had for a long time, too bad people won't be able to enjoy originality anymore, from me.
I thank you guys for all advices, such honesty is rare to find! You're obviously a great professionals. |
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Konedima
Grammar Police
Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 1:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Poo Bear wrote: | | In one way I'd somewhat disagree with Konedima, I think people either want to buy or they don't and when it comes to games the price just has to be within reasonable limits. |
There are really two sorts of games I buy - something I know I'll want, in advance, I usually keep track of all the updates during development, often I'll preorder it, and am willing to pay full price for. Me paying full price is pretty much only reserved for sequels to games I like, and games by developers whose games I like - very rarely will I read about an upcoming game and think "hey, I REALLY like the looks this, I better get it when it comes out", unless it's related to something I have played.
The other? When I see something on sale (or occasionally not) and think "hey, I might like that, good thing it's not costing me too much in case I don't", and my games list in Steam can attest to that - most of those games were bought on special, as for the others:
Audiosurf: REALLY liked the demo.
BioShock 2: loved the original, sequel isn't as good, but with how good the original was I can't hold that against it.
Left 4 Dead: I've always liked games by Valve.
Left 4 Dead 2: see above, liked the original.
Sam & Max Season 3: the first two seasons are probably the funniest games I've ever played.
...and that's it. Well over 100 games in that list, and those are the only ones I paid full price for.
To be fair... a much larger percentage of the games I have on my 360 fall into the first category. But we're talking about PC games here.
This is your first game, and I doubt many people would have heard of it before you released it - so most if not all of your sales would fall into the second category. If you release a new game, then there's a good chance some of the people who bought your first one will buy your second one (and if they like your second one, any others should they keep liking them). Just make sure they know when you release a new game - send them an email or something.
Also, don't worry too much about piracy - everyone (okay, the movie and music industries) seem to think every time someone downloads something, they've lost a sale. Not true - in my experience (not me, people I know of, so please, I don't want lawyers bashing down my door) people download things because they aren't willing to pay for them, so if they hadn't downloaded them, they wouldn't have bought them anyway. So, no lost sales. I have seen where someone will download something and they'll like it so much, they buy it, to support whoever made it. Or... they'll buy the next thing they make. I'm not saying you should roll out the red carpet to pirates, but games are just the latest industry where everyone's afraid copying things will ruin the industry (Tape recorders will ruin the music industry! VCRs will ruin the movie industry!), and... it doesn't. Music, movie and game sales continue to go up.
Remember, real fans will pay for your games - try to support them, give them something for being nice enough to pay for your game. What? I don't know... beta access to your next game? Desktop wallpapers or avatars based on your game? I don't know. Never said I was good at that part of it.
Note: These are my own personal opinions. Not everyone thinks like me, spends money like me, decides what games they want like me, and pirates like me. Please don't sue me if you blindly follow my advice to the letter - this is what I'd do, but only I'm responsible for risking it for me.
| codergames wrote: | | You're obviously a great professionals. |
Thanks! I'm actually a student (doing game development), and I've never tried selling a game . The only games I've released have been free and open source, mostly to get my programming skills up - probably being too harsh on myself here, but I just never thought people would be willing to pay money for War Pong. If I could get my hands on a REALLY cheap Mac I'd try making an iPhone port and selling it for a dollar, but I don't think it's worth selling as a PC game.
I guess I've just spent too much time in this forum, but I like to think I know a little bit about small business - I probably paid too much attnetion to my business studies subject in high school, and I fix computers for a couple of local small businesses, so I picked up a few things chatting to the owners. |
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codergames
Joined: 20 Apr 2010
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 2:26 pm Post subject: |
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I don't like games you listed, too aggressive/depressing/bloody/violent/shiny/etc. The only series I'm buying is PES. I recently bought PES 2009, it was on sale, cheap. A PC version, not console, I'm not having any consoles.
Now I regret spending $15 on it, since I don't have the time to play it. You can probably get it cheaper on Ebay, but this one is new (untouched virgin version), and while I was buying groceries, there it was, poking my eyes and wallet.
And now, that is the game I'll be playing for next couple of years, if I'm not too tired from work. If I'm too tired, I'll be playing my brainless Invader Attack, where you just go left and right while holding the button on your joypad. |
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Konedima
Grammar Police
Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship
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| Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2010 4:26 am Post subject: |
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| codergames wrote: | | I don't like games you listed, too aggressive/depressing/bloody/violent/shiny/etc. The only series I'm buying is PES. I recently bought PES 2009, it was on sale, cheap. A PC version, not console, I'm not having any consoles. |
That's just what I like. If you're going to develop games it's probably important to understand (not necessarily like, but understand) a decent number of games on the market to see what works for them, what doesn't, what you think you should do differently, and what you should shamelessly copy... err I mean "get inspiration from".
Although I am curious... if all you like is PES, why'd you make a shump? |
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codergames
Joined: 20 Apr 2010
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2010 5:59 am Post subject: |
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I'm aware of the mainstream forcing their views onto us, but lets try to make this world a better place.
I made game that I would like to play and hopefully there will be more people that like it as well. I played a lot of Galaxian, Space Invaders, Galaga, Phoenix when I was a kid, but they all missed diversity and AI and fun, physics and good graphics and animations and atmosphere. That's what I was trying to achieve in Invader Attack.
I'm still playing DOS games under DosBox, downloaded this, but had no time to check it out, probably never will:
http://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/sam-and-max-hit-the-road/
Not sure if I downloaded it from that site, I think it was more larger than that. So, is it any good? Does it require a lot of thinking, because I can't handle any more thinking, I'm thinking all day long. |
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