Top 3 portals by friends count:

1. PopCap with 126.896 friends

2. GameHouse with 55.911 friends

3. iWin with 44.647 friends

What? No Big Fish Games on the list? Yep, they have only 20.742 friends. Still, it doesn’t stop them from being #1 source of revenue for portal games.

A lot of things happened I couldn’t keep up. In the middle of 2008 I started development of GabCab with Reflexive and Russell Carroll. This game took a lot of my time and I said to myself that I will focus on it and don’t blog or improve my website until it’s done. I’ve learned a lot during development of GabCab and I don’t regret it, but meanwhile, while world moved forward, my site moved backward. Now, once GabCab is done, I have a time to think about what happened and you can read few of my thoughts below.

There are few things that make portals preferred source for games instead of developers site. Let’s call them Unique Selling Points (USP) and let’s take a look at Big Fish Games (biggest portal at the moment).

* A New Game Every Day –  365+ a year. Yes, BFG releases more than a game a day, sometimes even 3 games a day.
* Online games – and that’s right, a new game every day too.
* Exclusives – and BFG provides a lot of exclusive games for 7 days or more.
* Daily Deals – Every day new deal, for just one day, for as low as $2.99.
* Forums – where you can chat not only about the games.
* Catch of the Week – similar to Daily Deal, but a game is available for full week.
* Tomorrow’s Game Today (TGT)- available only to Game Club members.
* GameClub itself (if you sign up you get TGT and games for $6.99 instead of $9.99)
* Very good support (and Live Chat for Game Club members)
* Top 100 charts
* 1 minute movies for each game
* Game manager
* Over 1000 games in catalog

Did you count? That’s 13 unique selling points! How many of those do you have on your site? Do you even release your own game exclusively on your own site for a week? Do you have at least 1?

What do you have that BFG doesn’t have? Walk through? Think again. More screen shots for your game? Longer text description?

Other portals may not have the same USP (their unique for a reason) or have some of those points but with a different name (that’s called marketing and trying to make it unique). GameHouse has all you can eat subscriptions, iWin has Steals & Deals and Cash Games.

And that’s not all. BFG sends newsletters two times a week. Do you send it at least once a month? Portals also do a lot of marketing. When you have so many USP you can invest a lot more into Pay Per Click ads (or any other ads). They don’t have to recoup that investment from the sale of a single game, they can and do repeat business.

Now you know (if you haven’t already) why some portals sell tons of games and why you don’t. But seriously, did you really expect to do as much as 300 men army of portal employees? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against portals selling so much, I’m just trying to find out how we can sell more.

Is there something we can do to fix this situation? To sell more without hurting relationship with portals? I really hope so.

I typed “casual games recession” in google and one of the articles that appeared on the list: Real Games executive tells how the recession will affect casual games. It’s old article from February 11th, 2009, but at least there’s a possibility to check whether it was true or false.

One thing that I noted I wanted to repeat is this line:

“The market has the opportunity to be ten times the size it is today,” Barbour stressed. “Why don’t we do something to build the bigger market?”

That’s the words of John Barbour, CEO of Real Games (at least of the time of writing mentioned article). Mister Barbour, what can we do to make it bigger?

So we’re certainly not 10 times bigger today. I hear that most portals noticed a drop in revenues, not only we’re not in bigger market, but  we’re in smaller. I make more money from my games than I did, but I don’t feel like market in general is growing. There are places dedicated to casual games that please me with their revenues and places that make me disappointed.

I just hope that we, as casual game industry, stopped price wars, and prices will eventually rise.

Being portal friendly limits our ways of catching customers. We can’t do much beside the trial version. We can’t even let users create and share content for our games (at least you can’t do it with portal versions).

To raise the prices portals invented premium / collectors editions. Those editions have extra content, which urges customers to buy those games, but there is very limited number of games that can be released as premium editions.

Any ideas how to bust your sales for “standard” games?

Recently I found interesting post on BFG forums. Picman050967 tried to explain why BFG decided to have CE (picman is not just regular forum mod, he is most probably a man from BFG headquaters):

Why we offer Collector’s Editions

The nice thing is that this is totally optional, you have a trial version, it does not count as the New Game when it is released and you always get the normal game like before. Having a collector’s edition allows the budgets for future games to almost double. One of the big benefits is early access. The bonus features are there to reward folks who purchase for early access.

People complain a lot about how short games are lately. This is a way to allow the avid gamers to pay for early access and some extras to increase budgets without hurting those who are on tight budgets. These CE purchasers now help fund half the budget of future games so they can be longer and higher quality. Then in turn, the folks that wait for the regular game actually benefit from the larger game budgets paid for by the CE purchasers.

So if you wait for the regular version, that is fine for you, but realize that those buying the CE are allowing developers to increase their development budgets without going bankrupt! This game was developed with a budget that assumed the additional revenue from the Collector’s Edition…without it, the game would have been shorter or of lower quality to make it for less costs.

If we simply raised prices (like to $7.99), not only would there be a customer revolt, but we would sell proportionally fewer games and thus the developer makes no more money. Also higher prices would also hit those that are in tough economic times to be able to play less games. While some may not like to wait, this does solve a very real problem for both developers and economically hard hit customers.

So if you can’t afford it or do not like it you should not buy it, but you should also respect those who do, as it benefits you!

Just trying to share BFG’s and developers’ perspectives.

Picman

I highlighted most of the interesting sections. You can find the whole discussion at this link.

I’d also want to quote a post from govegirl, as she made very interesting points too:

I do not know Playponds financial status but I do know that Big Fish is not in danger of going bankrupt and 2 of 3 CE’s monies are for Big Fish.

What I wonder is this- those that pay $20 for a Collectors Edition- do they still buy the same amount of $6.99 games or do they forego those games to save up for 1 or 2 more expensive games a month? The importance people are putting on 3 punches indicates to me they buy fewer games for the same result of a free game. I can see smaller developers games getting even further ignored whilst the already large and successful developers charge extra for their games.

Unless all games launch with a $20 edition first then it cannot be equally fair for all developers. Those that only charge $6.99 are not getting the money for further development so does that mean they have to continue to develop short and inferior games? It sounds to me unless we pay $20 originally then those developers cannot make better games. It has to apply to everyone – not just the developers who suits them to cry poor.

Collectors Editions may be the first step on the road to increase average game price. Some portals sell games on premium price with success. Hopefully we can see the trend of falling game prices reversed.

Anyway, if you haven’t noticed, Big Fish Games started to launch 2 games a day. Not every day (lucky we). But unfortunately our game was launched with another one – Virtual City. It’s hard enough for games to get noticed when you have to compete with all the top 10 games, yesterdays release and tomorrow’s release. Imagine that we had to compete with all that and another tomorrows release and a day later with another 2 releases. Too bad Big Fish doesn’t display all “Tomorrow’s Game Today” releases.

Our game was noticed probably only by hardcore forum readers (when your game is launched a dedicated forum for it created). It was very quiet there until next day when we moved to “Today’s release”. Still, we’ve been below Virtual City and as you could find out on forums not every one noticed that there are two games launched.

So I’m thrilled to check top 100 today, as that’s the first day we will be listed (hopefully). Keep your fingers crossed for me.  I hope your game won’t have so hard times during launch.

Airport Mania was made by Reflexive so I had to check if it’s just with their games or all games. Of course I don’t have the time to check all games so I downloaded just one more – Tales of Monkey Island.  And it has 80 minutes trial too.

Doesn’t it make your life harder? When everyone had 60m trials you could optimize that first 60 minutes and set a tipping point around 60 minute to get a better chance of getting a sale. Now you either leave it unchanged and let Reflexive customers get past that point or make two versions. Eh….

(BTW. No need to rush to Reflexive Game Center Solution – Tales of Monkey Island are not available to affiliates)

It might be too early to tell, but my revenues (developer sales, not affiliate sales) are higher. Here are the numbers:

Revenue:
January 2009 – 100%
February 2009 – 250%

Sales:
January 2009 – 100%
February 2009 – 500%

Numbers for February could look better – it had only 28 days and new price point wasn’t announced until February 3rd or 4th. Still, I hope that the numbers will look similar in March (or better) comparing to January. One thing that you need to keep in mind is that I sell only one game on Reflexive at the moment and it is 7 or more months “old”. In this case new price point worked, but would it work for new releases? I hope to find out soon. Also, note that January may be not the best month for sales. Most people probably spent all their cash on Christmas presents.

I can’t comment on my affiliate sales. I didn’t do any promotion for new price point, I didn’t send newsletters at all in February and that really skews results. Lets see how it will look in March.

But if you are interested in others results, most developers says that their revenue dropped with new price point. Maupin is probably one of the few that can report increased revenue. His sales were 93% higher in Feb that in Jan and revenue increased by 6%. Yes, six %, not that much in comparison to sales growth. You can read more reports at Indiegamer Forums.

If you talk about portal sales then you talk about membership sales. No matter if it is BFG, iWin, Real Arcade. They catched customer with membership programs and full price sales are scarcity.

We can cry that Reflexive dropped the price without bundling it with membership program, but lets think for a second. Did they have a choice? Do you think that BFG Game Club members will go to Reflexive to buy games for $6.99? No they won’t. The only hope for Reflexive is to catch all those people that don’t want to commit longterm at all or anymore. If Reflexive does not adjust their game prices to their competitors it will lose market share.

Now, you may say that developers will not benefit from it, because it is just about the marketshare. Let’s do the math. 40% of $9.99 (less COGS) is still more than BFG royalty rate of $6.99 (or even $7.99) (still less COGS). So even if it is just about marketshare shift, if Reflexive steals BFG/PlayFirst/iWin/etc. customers then you actually earn more revenue. And we need strong competition between portals so one will not dominate and lower royalty rates.

The only problem is that you still want to sell your game at $19.99. And I don’t know how to cope with that yet. Do you?

Hello Everyone,

We are happy to announce an exciting new pricing strategy for the games and products in the Reflexive game catalog. The prices of games in the GameCenterSolution catalog now reflect a more competitive position which we expect to represent an attractive offer in today’s marketplace. This compelling pricing strategy is intended to empower you to sell more volume, have greater customer loyalty, and ultimately increase your monthly earnings. By offering games to customers for under $10, we are anticipating higher conversion and better customer satisfaction resulting in better overall sales volume for you.

If you have any questions or feedback please contact me: …..

Michael Mei

BFG sells your games for $6.99, iWin for $9.99 and now Reflexive joins the party. I believe this would not happen if not for Amazon deal, so lets hear more:

Reflexive Games are now available through the Amazon Game Downloads store

Developers and publishers, greetings. Today I’m excited to share news that Reflexive is now providing games for the beta launch of the Amazon Game Downloads store, www.amazon.com/gamedownloads. This is Amazon’s first step into the downloadable games space. This means that all of Reflexive’s developer and publisher partners now have the opportunity to make their games available on Amazon.com, in addition to Reflexive.com and our GameCenterSolution affiliate network.

Here at Reflexive, we’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time. We believe Amazon will really help to expand the audience for your casual games, by introducing all the great games you create to millions of potential new customers. Your games can now benefit from customer reviews, recommendations and all the other features shoppers are familiar with on Amazon.com.

For more details about the beta launch of the Amazon Game Downloads store, check out the Amazon.com Video Games blog post.

If you have any questions about the games currently offered through Reflexive or about submitting new games to the Reflexive network and the Amazon game download distribution channel, please contact us at developersupport@gamecentersolution.com.

Thanks for your continued partnership and support as we enter this exciting new chapter in Reflexive’s history.

Sincerely,

Lars Brubaker
CEO
Reflexive Entertainment, Inc.

That’s actually a good news and I was really looking forward to Amazon stepping into downloadable market. The new pricing strategy makes sense at Amazon – those downloadable games have to compete with all retail games prices at $9.99 (cd or dvd case).

Now if you are Reflexive’s affiliate then go change your game prices… and forget about ~$7 per game sold earnings.blockquote