Sell More Games

Your website and company credibility is very important. If your website looks cheap, if your customer doesn’t feel secure, he will not buy your games.

One of the most important steps in building your credibility is contact page. It’s a must to have support email address written, as well as contact form. Contact form is important, because sometimes spam filters block emails from your customers and mark them as spam. If you don’t have a contact form, there is no way they can reach you.

The other important part is to put your real address and name on your contact page. If you’re not so big, your photo adds a lot too (and some ebay sellers say that putting voice message improve sales too).

If you want to go further then you can use Google Maps and point it to your company address. Don’t worry, it’s very unlikely that someone will visit you. If you are one of the lucky ones, you can use Street View – new feature in Google Maps. You need to have your office in one of the main USA cities and on one of the main streets. You can present real street view at your office… it’s really awesome. Unfortunately Europe is not covered yet.

Take a look at those two You Tube movies that present this new feature:
Google Maps from The Vacationers
Official Google Maps Street View movie

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

It took us more than a year to create Pony World, about nine months to create Runes of Avalon. How about you? The trick is that those number state only start to finish dates. The real thing is here (posted originaly by Cliffski on IGF forum):

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him. “It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

I really like that legend. Yep, nine months, but I started creating games when I was 15 (and thinking about creating games when I was 10). Now I am almost 30. It took a lot of time to learn all that little tricks to make great looking and fun games. Entire life seems about right. Keep that in mind next time you negotiate publishing contract.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Google Adwords is an extremely popular place to advertise. It’s also extremely hard to do it right. When you’re indie, you don’t want to lose a single penny from your advertising budget. Here are 3 tips that can help you get more from Adwords.

1. Create different campaigns for content network and search ads or turn off content network. You’ll get a lot less clicks if you do so, but you may get much better conversion rates.

2. Use negative keywords. As a game developer you don’t want your ads to show up when someone is searching for serials, cracks or warez. You may also want to add free or freeware to your negative keywords. You want paying customers, not lurkers.

3. Test, test and once again test your ads. Use Google Analytics and ad variations to get the most out of your money.

And one more tip… use those 3 above. Act! reading only won’t get you far.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Your game is your best marketing tool. If can, make one by one and you’ll be rich. The problem is, that most of us don’t have resources to do so.

One of the ways to obey this is to release a freeware game to promoto your site. Freeware game doesn’t require the same amount of polish and content as a commercial game. This means you can finish it faster. If you treat this little freeware game as an experiment to check if your game mechanics and ideas work, you may get great feedback and promote your site. Later, based on the feedback collected from your players you can build top-notch quality commercial game.

Amanda Fitch from Amaranth Games made her first game available for free. It was RPG game and was downloaded 1 millon times. She builded her site credibility and user base. And when she released Aveyond she had a lot of players waiting for game.

We, at ANAWIKI Games, try to do it a little different. We wanted to learn some new stuff and decided to create a little JigSaw game with artwork from our other games. The game is called ANAWIKI Puzzle Game and is available for PC and Mac Intel. The trick is that the name and game content promote ANAWIKI or our commercial games. The game was just released so I cannot say how popular it will be, but we’re planning to do commercial version of this game with a lot more artwork and game play modes. By the time we reach beta stage I hope to have enough feedback from our players and beta testers.

Take care and have a happy New Year 2008!

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...