Sell More Games

We all heart it – recession. But has it affected our sales? I don’t know and that’s why I’m making this post. You tell me this time.

My sales have dropped, but that’s not surprising to me. I focused on development on a new game and completely abandoned marketing and if you do so your revenue must drop. Still it didn’t drop so much. Even portal sales hold still and are still above the level I expected them to be after a year of my game release.

My sales dropped by expect them to recover once I make a new release. The question is, will that be enough at this current state of the market? I would say so. I play at stock exchange and stock markets keep recovering since February so I would be surprised if casual games don’t recover soon. Still all those price wars, etc. make me wonder.

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Have you ever heard of director’s cut version of your favorite movie? I’m sure you did. How many developer’s cut versions of games have you heard of? Not too many? If at all.

Two days ago Darek Rusin made a comment on my blog and because I haven’t heard from him for a while I went to his website to check out what he’s up to.  He started Orchid Games and released Heartwild Solitaire.  So far his website is dedicated to just this one game and that made it easier for me to spot the thing that made me mention his website. Right under the title he put Author’s Edition. That made me very interested and I immediately wanted to check out what is so special about this version. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any info about it. Too bad. It could help “steal” customers from portals.

When we worked on Runes of Avalon we had to remove very nice feature in my opinion – Amulet of Spells. We had to remove it because it didn’t work so great and we didn’t have time to find out how to fix it, but I really believed in Amulet of Spells (you don’t earn money by having great ideas, but by releasing games). This made me thinking about releasing developer’s version of Runes of Avalon. It never happened in the way we know it from movie industry. It was much better for us to release this version as Runes of Avalon 2, as we figured out that amount of changes is too big to make it “just” a special edition.

So you see, it’s worth commenting on blogs. You might get a link to your website for  free ;-)

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Sales stats are always interesting to watch. This time I decided to repost sales stats of Pure Sudoku from Mochek (he posted them on Indiegamer Forums). Highlights are mine. Comments below.

Pure Sudoku was released in January 2006. Initially it was a completely free game, I added functionality and then I made a deluxe version for sale (the old school shareware model!). Simultaneously I have made improvements to the free version, maybe this has harmed overall sales but I think it made marketing easier.

I’ve made several versions over the years, the latest being released in December 2008.

It’s sold 640 copies over it’s life, mostly at the price point of $9.99. For the next few weeks I’m experimenting with a $5.99 price point.

The Free Version of the game has been downloaded around 250,000 times over the years (mostly from download.com where I host the file, and another 50,000 from various download sites and the early days when I hosted the game on my site.) Currently it is downloaded about 2000 times a week.

The original version took me about 1 month to make part time with Game Maker. Add another month, maybe 2 months of part time development work for improvements over the years.

My marketing efforts have included putting the game on as many download sites as possible and sending so many emails to get the game reviewed or linked to it’s unbelievable. On Google.com if you search for Free Sudoku I’m in the top 10. Add another 2 or 3 months (part time) for this marketing effort.

Of those who download the free version about 2000 to 2200 appear on the deluxe (purchased version) information page. Hence the price reduction experiment.

In January the game sold 21 copies and February 27 copies. It generally hovers between 20 to 25 copies each month at this point and seems pretty consistent for a while now. I guess this consistency is an advantage of being popular for a half decent search term.

I also make a little extra money using Google Adsense – worth maybe the equivalent of 2 or 3 extra sales each month.

And finally if any body wants to exchange links please email. I’ve learned that marketing efforts never really end.

The most important thing in the whole post I marked red. Marketing never ends and if you continue to do it your game will continue to sell. His post also shows that it’s better to have something small finished then something big in production forever.

(1 votes, average: 1.00 out of 5)

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When Reflexive announced price drop of all games to $9.99 (or less in some cases) I was really curios how will that affect sales. $9.99 price point is nothing new in casual gamas market. Some portals sell for less and outsell Reflexive by volume, though not necessairly by revenue (at least not that much). After few days Russell Carroll reported that Reflexive observes much higher conversion rates. That’s great to hear, but does it make up for the loss of revenue?

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(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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