Sell More Games

New Years resolutions (and all plans) are worthless if you don’t check later if you achieved what you planned. 2008 was a very exciting year for me, with a lot of life changing decisions. It was a bit strange in terms of what went wrong. A lot of things that initially did look really bad turned out to be good or replaced by better. Here’s a short list of what went good and what went wrong.

Good:

• Pony World Deluxe released – that was a huge game and I was really happy to get it out of the doors. We developed it almost for two years. It has proven that we are weak game designers, but by trying hard and reiterating you can actually make a good game. I just wish we could spot more design flows sooner.
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• Runes of Avalon 2 released – honestly I didn’t expect to release this game, but after seeing such a positive feedback from Path of Magic we decided to make one more step in Runes of Avalon franchise. This time we had more creative freedom and some extra time to polish the ideas we had for the first game, but didn’t have the time to put in (like Amulet of Spells). This game showed how important is game balancing and testing… and that you have to be careful with what feedback you listen too. A lot of people complained about long storyline and too easy levels in Runes of Avalon 1, but once we shortened story and increased difficulty it didn’t help much if at all.
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• Anawiki Puzzle Game released – an experiment to promote ANAWIKI and our games. Very simple freeware jigsaw game that we made in our spare time with art used from other games.
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• Made over 200 sales a month two months in a row – released games mentioned above really helped, but thing that made the biggest trick was featuring Pony World Deluxe by Apple. In one day we had 4000 downloads (and that was for Kids and Learning category).
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• Teamed up with a great game designer and started a great new game – as I mentioned before, I am not as great game designer as I thought I am. The are two ways to get better: learning through your own mistakes or watching masters at play. I prefer to play with the masters.
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• Bought a new apartment (almost 1000 sq. feet / 91 m2) – it turned me into a bedroom coder again, but I don’t mind, because there’s not that many people in my hometown that know what a casual game is, not to mention how to make them (and I don’t need an office to work with guys from the other side of the world).
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Wrong:

• My team members left ANAWIKI in June – I thought that it was a disaster for me. In my opinion one man studio is not capable of making quality games in short period of time. But then I changed my thinking – I don’t need employees to create a team. I was always good at finding great people to work with. This time I searched worldwide. It turned out to be one of the best things that happened to ANAWIKI. So why I put this into “wrong” category? I really did like to work with my ex-team members.
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• My secret Jigsaw game project was put on hold – Anawiki Puzzle Game was very well received and we wanted create a full commercial title, but… it has to wait for better times.
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• Alice Adventures puzzle game put on hold – I was really passionate about this one and we’ve been working on it like crazy until we stopped and then I couldn’t decide which direction to go. I still can’t.
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• From September to December I was able to work only at 10% of my effectiveness – buying a house is exhausting exercise. Not only you have to negotiate a good deal, but also have to check all the details about the buying property. And then you need to decorate it, decide whether you want paint or wallpapers on the walls, what kind of TV set you want, how to set it all, etc. It really eats your energy especially if you want to move in ASAP.
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• No-Internet experiment didn’t work out – I unplugged my computers with the hope to be more productive and for a short period of time I was. But you can’t do so much being off-line that my traffic and sales dropped horribly.

2008 was not a bad year, not bad at all.

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OK, I don’t have that much time at the moment to post comprehensive sales stats, but the thread at Indiegamer and Jakes post at Grey Alien Blog got me inspired to at least post a short info about my sales. I am far away of what Cliffski earns, but it looks like it’s nothing to be ashamed of ;-)

My sales stats for 2008: $21,650.09 and 1152 units.

I have released 6 games so far on PC, Mac and Linux (not all of them have Linux versions). Two of them have been released in 2008.

Note that those sales stats are only from eSellerate – my primary e-commerce service before any fees, affiliates commissions and discounts. I did make some money selling other games as affiliate and earned even more on portals and through retail distribution.

Be sure to check my blog later for more comprehensive sales analysis.

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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.

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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

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