Sell More Games

Does your game have downloadable content? Can your customers make new content for your game?

Games with downloadable content sell 114% more, says EEDAR. Research firm Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) have found that publishers have the potential to nearly double their profit on any given game through revenue generated by both purchasable and sponsored downloadable content. “…console storefronts represent a major opportunity to offset growing development costs and stabilize revenue momentum between major releases,” EEDAR stated.

After examining 180 downloadable games and 2,100 pieces of downloadable content for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, EEDAR found that Xbox 360 games offering downloadable content sell 129 percent more and PS3 games sell 16 percent more (Wii offers no extra downloadable content currently).

You can read the whole story here.

While EEDAR examined console games I am sure this can be applied to indie/casual games. My games don’t have downloadable content yet, but releasing a level pack for Runes of Avalon at least doubled my monthly income. Prof. Fizzwizzle has a lot of downloadable content and it is one of the best selling affiliate games on my site. Make sure your next game can have downloadable content. It’s one of the easiest ways to increase your revenues.

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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.

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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.

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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.li

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