Sell More Games

If you live in one of EU countries you can double your game development budget. You need to send an application to MEDIA EACEA/17/07 program. First deadline passed on November 15th 2007, though there is second deadline on April 15th 2008. There’s plenty of time to prepare.

How does it work?

You need to send an application and if it wins, you get 50% of development budget refunded. 75% upfront and 25% after project completion. So you can either double your development budget or increase ROI.

I sent my application 2 days ago. It was one of the easiest applications that I’ve seen to gain EU funds. It has 26 pages, but most of them is filled with instructions on what to do or just an honorable declarations that you need to sign. But don’t be fouled. When I filled up and printed it all it weighted 730g! That’s because you need to send your project description in 3 copies and you need to attach proof of distribution of one of your games. In my case it was a publishing deal (13 pages).

The hardest part about it was creating a design documentation for upcoming game. You don’t want to spend to much time on it, because you don’t know if you win and you need to make it as great as possible, so you’re chances of winning are as high as possible. The problem is that you need to think about the game that you will want (and be able) to start developing in 6 months (that’s when you’re going to find out if you won). You don’t want to start unless you know that you received funding. Another problem is that you should include a lot of elements such as GUI concept, visuals or interaction description (and it takes time to create it good looking).

Each country has it’s own consulting agency and all papers localized. The agency was pretty helpful, though I was the first one that was applying for game development so in many cases they didn’t know what proofs or documents should I supply.

The whole thing looks very indie friendly. While you can’t be an individual (you need to be a registered company), there is a lot of restriction that don’t let big companies take part in this program.

One of the biggest advantages of working with a publisher or a big portal is the ability to use their beta test groups. They usually have a lot of people interested to play games and send feedback. What’s more important, those are not random people, but casual players.

You need your own army of beta testers ready to play your games. You need to hear honest answers from people that are not your friends and never played your game. This will let you catch a lot of stuff that is so obvious that you would never think of it ;-)

Start building your list today. It’s easy and once you set up this there’s little for you to do. By the time your game is ready you will have a lot of people ready to test your game.

It doesn’t matter if you use your own custom forms to collect emails or newsletter service provider. You need to make it automatic and collect: first name, email address and operating system (Windows, OSX or Linux). I use ymlp.com and it works great for me.

Setup a page “Become a BETA tester”, put a link to it on your website, give people some incentive (like a free game for valuable feedback or big discount). That’s it. But don’t forget, once your game reaches beta stage mail those people and listen carefully. If you mail them once your game goes gold then it’s too late.

I wish I started building my bete testers list when I started developing games. By now I would have 300 or more emails instead of 42.

This blog was inspired by article I was going to write for GameProducer.net. I planned to write about my experiments with Google Website Optimezer. I sat down and started to write ideas that I could talk about. Within 60 seconds I had ideas for over 20 articles. No way I could publish it all at GameProducer.net. And because Juuso talks mostly about producing games and I am going to talk mostly about selling them I decided to give this blog a chance.

Writing all those articles will take a while, so here’s my list of article ideas (selected few):

• working with Google Analytics
• working with Google Website Optimizer
• marketing that works
• marketing that doesn’t work
• mastering Google Adwords
• case studies: my own experiments analized
• improving sales
• newsletters and getting subscribers
• press release
• working with portals

And that’s just the beginning… Feel free to propese article idea or to share your experience with me.

$10.000 a month my sound high for some of you and it really is especially if you are just starting. Though it’s hard it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

To get $10k selling games you need either to sell $1000 per game for 10 games or $10.000 per one game. Getting $1000 per game a month is much easier than selling one and getting $10.000. The problem is that when you start you have just one game.

The  math is simple:
revenue = price * orders
orders = CR * downloads
downloads = site conversion * unique visitors

Finally:
revenue = price * CR * site conversion * unique visitors

To get $10.000 (gross) you need to sell 500 units at $20 price tag. To sell 500 you need 50.000 downloads if your CR is 1%. To get 50.000 you need 100.000 visitors if your site conversion is 50%. To get 100.000 visitors you need to either be lucky or spend $5000 in advertising.

This may sound good, but boy, how this will sound to you if I say that numbers above are optimistic?

My name is Roman Budzowski and I am CEO of ANAWIKI GAMES. ANAWIKI is a casual game development company. We’ve made some great games in the past and are working on some new great ones.

We always try to self-publish our games or the get deals that allow us to sell games on our site without much restrictions. For all the years I’ve been developing games I’ve learned that developing a great game is not the end of the process. When you start talking about monetizing the game, it’s just the beginning. Unless you do an exclusive publishing deal you should take care of your sales-force on your own.

Even if you want to get exclusive publishing deal always ask for possibility to sell on your site. Even if you sell just one copy, it’s a start to become more independent in the future. To get better publishing deals if needed. To get some extra income before royalties come in. To get in touch with your customers.

In this blog I will try to show you from my personal experience how to sell more games. It did cost me a lot of money to get the knowlegde I do have now. I still don’t consider myself an expert, but I am sure that my experiments can give you motivation and inspiration to improve your website.

Take care and come back to read more.