How to shoot yourself in the foot?! No, I’m not talking about us, developers. I’m talking about portals. It looks like we are going to face another war between the key players in the casual game market. And it starts to look like some portals want to become evil.

Market review

Big Fish Games is one of the biggest, if not the biggest casual game portal. It’s one of my favorite portals. It’s easy to navigate, delivers wide variety of games, is great to work with and very responsive. They’re not afraid to risk the launch of new genres or not so casual games. There’s just one problem with BFG – their game club which offers games at discounted price of as low as $6.99. But is it really a problem?

It looks like other players in the market starts to think so. What’s more, Big Fish Games is very successful at getting exclusive deals, mostly short-period. And that’s another thing that bothers other players. Some portals start to send threats to developers – if you give even short-time exclusive to BFG we won’t launch your game. You can read more about it at The good BIG bad FISH exclusive GAMES… in Maciek’s blog. Initially I was very upset about it. But let’s take a closer look at possible scenarios.

The end of exclusive deals?

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That’s right, you can save 90% on ANAWIKI GAMES. How’s that possible? Well…

Due to increasing piracy and development costs we decided to rise prices of all our games by 1000% (so it’s 10 times) since April 2nd 2008. We understand that the price rise is quite big so I decided to give you the last chance to buy our games at regular price and save 90% of what you would pay tomorrow. Here’s what you can get:

Runes of Avalon 2 & 1
Pony World
Maggie the Gardener 2
Tom’s Hen House

Don’t wait until tomorrow. This might be your last chance to buy one of our games.

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Yesterday I had to run to my post office to pickup a parcel. I had about 10 minutes to find the nearest ATM machine, withdraw the money and comeback to post office. I did it, but man, I was soo tired after all this running. The thing is I haven’t run such a long distance for 5 years or so.

I noticed one thing – before I started to run I said to myself – man, that road is so long. But when I made my first step, then another, then started to run I realized that it’s actually not so long and that it’s getting shorted with each step.

I wish I could say the same about game developmet. Sometimes I believe it takes forever to complete a game. Especially, when your game looks like ready, when all you have to do is just add a popup or two, polish one or few things, adjust levels difficulty. Each day I say: just one more day. But then it happens that we missed the deadline by 40 days. Or more. It is so demotivating when you can’t say it’s ready, but it looks like it is.

The problem is – you cannot skip it. You either get in top 10 on portals or die.

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It’s been a month since my last post. Some could think that I dropped the idea of blogging… and I am here again to tell you that there will be few very interesting posts coming in the nearest futere.

First of all, I haven’t been blogging for one reason – I was focused on Runes of Avalon 2. I was also working on Pony World Deluxe. Getting the games ready for launch is very time consuming, but I’ve learned a lot and I will share my experience with you.

Here’s what I will talk about in the next few posts:

– From 0.8% to 3.6% CR – how I improved CR from a crappy one to a stellar one
– Are you ready to be picked by Apple? I was not!
– Get in top10 or die! Big Fish Games Top 100 analysis inspired by Jake from Grey Alien Games.
– Importance of beta testing

So see you soon.

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