Sell More Games

I haven’t post an article in my blog for 55 days. No, it’s not because I lost my passion or that I didn’t know what to write about. It’s because I wanted to try if you can survive in the on-line world going off-line.

I went off-line on September 1st. The first days have been quite hard. I had to finish couple of on-line tasks but without access to Internet it was very difficult. I could check email via dial-up and GMail but answering emails was very time consuming due to low Internet connection speed.

After few days it was clear that without faster Internet connection I will waste time and money. You have to answer support emails and maintain regular business communication. I decided to get ADSL 256kbps, but instead of unlimited access with flat fee I signed up for per hour charge.

Now it’s clear to me that you can survive, but you have to forget about on-line tools. Forget about GMail, about reading forums, doing a lot of guerrilla marketing. It’ll be easier for you if you focus just on game development. Going off-line will increase your productivity a lot (that’s why I tried to go off-line).

I will not be on-line until mid December… at least until that day I won’t have unlimited Internet access. Hopefully my sales will not dry more that they already did.

Last two months has been really busy and I haven’t put much attention to advertising. Actually, I haven’t done it at all. Until yesterday.

I hate advertising because I always feel like the only one that earns money is the Ad Server.  Even if clicks or impressions are not soo expensive it is hard to turn them into profits. Why? Games are either too cheap or too expensive.

But I read a book about AdWords and it gave me some inspiration. I also noticed that Pony World has quite good visitor to download ratio - over 40% of visitors download the game. With that ratio maybe it will not to that hard to turn AdWords into profits?

I created two ad variations for selected keywords and set up a daily budget of a little over $10. And today I got the results (that’s what I love about AdWords - almost instant results).

My ads received 90 clicks total: 51 for ad variation #1and 39 for ad variation #2. CTR for those ads: 1.55% for #1 and 1.22% for #2. Not so bad,  especially one you show it by keywords: the best CTR is 10.38% and the lowest one is 0.77%. The lowest one represents most of impressions and clicks.

Because that’s just 90 clicks I don’t know if it’s profitable yet or not, but we can do some estimations. Let’s go to Google Analytics and check if those clickers download the game. This is where we face first disappointment. Only 19.48% of clickers downloads the game. It’s still much better than what I had for Runes of Avalon campaign where only 11% of visitors downloaded the game.

If Pony World Deluxe has 1% CR (download to sale) then I need 100 downloads to sell one game. And I need 513 clicks to get 100 downloads. 513 clicks will cost me over $68. And I get only $17 out of each sale, so each sale makes me a loss of $51.

Judging just by those numbers you can for sure say that advertising is a waste of money. And it is if you do it wrong. It is if you aim short term. It is if you don’t tweak your ads, your game and your game description web page. It is if you don’t increase your visitor value.

It takes time to turn advertising into profits. Most people are not patient enough.

I made some tweaks to my ads and will do for at least few more days. If I can see improvements then I’ll keep advertising until I make a profit or run out of money :D

Photo by: Simon Davison

Or do you develop games that you want to play? I know a lot of indies takes the latter aproach. I do (or actually did). We hope that games that we want to play and develop are also the games that sell. And once those games are done and hit the market we end up disappointed that they dind’t reach the top 10 charts.

Do you want an example? Here’s one: Runes of Avalon 2. This is one of my games that is highly rated by reviewers and developers. It’s chellenging, forces you to use your brain, has a lot of particles… all the stuff that developers love. But what masses think? It was just a #32 on the top 100 chart at Big Fish Games. (but there are still customers that love my game though I don’t know how to reach them without losing money).

So if you want to sell more games, then make games that sell. Russell Carroll made a great post on Indie Gamer Forums and here’s a quote for you:

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Life is strange. When I least expected it, it happend. It did not happen with Tom’s Hen House. It did not happen with Runes of Avalon, though I was sooo sure it will make it (and not only I). It didn’t happen with Runes of Avalon 2, though I didn’t hope for it.

And now, Pony World Deluxe made it. On the first day after release.

It’s a great feeling to see your game in the top charts. A lot of portals is skeptical about Pony World performance due to choosen theme. Hopefully when they see how our game sells on iWin they will be much less skeptical.

UPDATE: It’s #5 today :)

From all the portals I know only Big Fish Games adds gameplay videos to every game. Reflexive does it from time to time. There must be a reason most portals don’t bother with it.

But I am not a portal and I want to check my chances. I want to know if and how it will affect my downloads. I can’t create videos for every game, but I already have one for Runes of Avalon 2 (please don’t check out the game site just to see it so you don’t screw up the test). To be honest, I was initially very skeptical about it. I thought: once they saw the video they might have another reason to not download the game, since they already know what’s inside. Fortunately, it looks like it’s the other way.

I’ve set up Google Website Optimizer experiment a while ago and here are preliminary results.

(click to enlarge)

It’s to early to give final statements, but if in the end improvement will be in that range it will be really worth it. When your marketing budget is small and every download counts then it may be the one thing that will let your ads break even.

I was checking Runes of Avalon 2 performance on Big Fish Games yesterday (well, not good at all) and was very surprised by what I saw in the top-10 list.

First of all, I stopped checking the TOP 100 chart becausemy games are no longer there and I don’t think it’s going to change until I release Pony World Deluxe. I went straight to match-3 chart and saw a new game - FISHDOM on #1 place.

Well, #1 in match-3 genre is not something amazing, but breaking into TOP 10 is (#8 on June 19th). It’s even more amazing because FISHDOM is not BFG exclusive and because it was done within one day of launch of the game.

What is FISHDOM? It’s a classic match-3 game. It’s well polished and it has a little META game - you can build a tank and put in fishes. I would say it’s a straight Big Kahuna Reef rip off.

Which only proves that casual players don’t like too much innovation.

Three weeks after the launch I can say a little bit more about Runes of Avalon 2 performance, as well as Stoneloops! of Jurassica performance on the Big Fish Games top 100 chart. Both games for most of the time have been climbing up, but few days ago started to fall on the chart. That’s too bad when you prove one of your not optimistic theories with one of your games. We didn’t get into top 10, so it looks like our games will fade away. It’s just a question of time.

It may take a little bit longer for Stoneloops! because it still holds position #2 on marble poppers list, while ROA 2 moved from #2 on match-3 list to #10.

Interesting observations?

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Making the game is difficult, getting it on portals is even more difficult. Just look at two replies that my friends and I received from two different portals that we don’t want to name publicly.

While there is nothing technically wrong with the game (it is quite beautiful in fact), the core rotational mechanic makes the gameplay a bit unforgiving and stressful so we will be passing on distribution at this time.

The rotational piece mechanic to make matches is simple enough but as pieces are improperly placed the difficulty ramps up quickly and the game becomes much more difficult by orders of magnitude. This means that players can easily become frustrated though they are simply looking for a game that gives them a bit of relaxation during their normal work day.

That’s about Runes of Avalon 2. I always admire people that are able to say our audience is too stupid too play this game is such a nice way. I don’t blame them for it, but it makes me laugh.

The next one is even better, but sooo scarring

In fact we haven’t played your game at all and we know it could be of high quality. We just looked at how it performed on BigFish and decided that launching it is not worth the effort - especially if we can have plenty of better performing hidden object games to launch.

It’s about Stoneloops! of Jurassica. I read about it on Maciej’s blog.

You better contact all portals at once otherwise you’re risking getting same reply. You see, both games are great and would easily make it into top 10… but not today, when match-3 and marble-popper genres are not so popular anymore.

This was very interesting week for me. I could watch closely release of two games that I cared about: Runes of Avalon 2 (my own game) and Stoneloops! of Jurassica (game made by friends from Codeminion). Both games are of similar high quality, as you probably already know. Well, the week has passed. We haven’t broken into the top10…

At first, I thought we will struggle to hold in the top 100 chart, but it wasn’t so bad. Actually, beside one day both games have been climbing up in the top 100 chart. Runes of Avalon 2 reached position #45 today, and Stoneloops! made it to #56. RoA 2 made it to the position #4 in match-3 games, Stoneloops is #2 marble-popper.

What was interesting to see is the #3 position that Stoneloops have held for almost a week and a correlation with the top 100 chart. So while for all this time it was #3 marble popper, it was ranked between #117 and #63 position in the top 100 chart. No change in it’s own category, but a shift of 54 spots in the top 100.

Here’s the snapshot of match-3 top games. I hope that Runes 2 will continue to move up on this rank.

Runes of Avalon 2 also launched at Reflexive (same day) . So far it have made it to position #36 for PC Games and #14 for Mac games (browse by top sellers).

May the sales be with us, little developers :)

On April 15th 2008, Big Fish Games released Runes of Avalon 2 (RoA 2). This event led me to watch the top 100 chart even more closely than I did before and brought me to a few interesting conclusions. Now I am sure that whether you “get in the top 10 or die” is even less correlated with how high the production values of your game are or how polished it is. It is strongly correlated with… game genre.

Stoneloops! of Jurassica launched one day before Runes of Avalon 2. This game was developed by my friends at Codeminion so I watched both releases very closely.

Both Stoneloops! and RoA 2 have very high production values and are very polished. RoA 2 was put in the match-3 category, Stoneloops! in the marble poppers category.

The top 100 chart is updated daily. Stoneloops! debuted on 81st place. The next day RoA 2 debuted on 73rd place, but Stoneloops! fell out of the top 100 chart. After another day RoA dropped 8 spots to 81st place, but Stoneloops! made it back into the top 100 chart with a climb of 27 places (ranked at #90). One day later RoA 2 made it back to position #73 and Stoneloops! peaked to #81.

While I was happy that we stayed in top 100, I was wondering how high both games are ranked in assigned genres. To my surprise… they ranked quite highly. Stoneloops! is the #3 game amongst marble poppers. RoA 2 was #7 amongst match-3 games, then #10, and then #6. That was quite a shock to me. Games ranked at #3 in the marble poppers category can sell worse than games ranked at #7 or even #10 in the match-3 game category.

The top 3 marble games are (as of April 16):

The top 10 match-3 games (as of April 16):

While the #1 marble popper and #1 match-3 games are ranked on very similar positions, the #2 marble popper sells a lot worse than the second and third highest ranked match-3 games. Its potential is close to the fourth place match-3 game. The #3 marble popper sales are even worse… its sales potential is about equal to the #13 match-3 game. To make things look even worse, Stoneloops was the #3 marble popper on April 15, but was not even in the top 100 chart.

So lets check some other genres. The #1 brain-teaser game (IQ: Identity Quest) is ranked at just #51 on the top 100 (peak at #35), the second (JigSaw365) is at #65 (peak at #6), and #3 is… not on the top 100 chart.

Are you working on the best platformer game right now? I’ve got bad news for you. The #1 platformer game - Supercow - is not on the top 100 chart. #2 (Super Granny 4, which I have heard was a successful game) is not on this list either…

Hottest genres?
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