I believe Reflexive was last one of the big players in the casual market that sold games for $19.99. Yesterday Reflexive announced EXCITING new pricing strategy… now I am really excited to hear for who it is exciting? But lets hear the official message first:

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

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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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Gaming industry is global. That’s why we create games in English. To maximize the chance that the person that plays your game will understand it. But just because people can undrestand what your game is “saying” doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer to play it in their’s native language.

If you haven’t already localized your games, then start doing it now. While we still get most of our sales from English speaking territories, it looks like German, French and Spanish speaking territories can earn you a few more bucks. The good thing is that Big Fish Games will help you translate your game into German, French, Spanish and Japan (for free, but it’s up to them to decide whether they’ll do it or not). Casual games are not text heavy so it shouldn’t be that hard to get your game translated.

Those markets are not soo crowded so it is much easier to stand out and get into the Top 100 or even Top 10 charts. Runes of Avalon 2 launched on June 9, 2008 on BigFishGames.de and made much bigger impact on the site than it had on global BFG website. Some say they like match-3 games in Germany, but my guess is that it is smaller market and new games due to the spike of sales during launch have it easier to get high positions. Runes of Avalon 2 got into Top 10 and reached position #9, while on BFG.com it has reached “just” #32.

Another good thing about European versions of your game is that those games are sold to game club members for 5.99 EUR which converts to a little bit more than 9 USD (instead of 6.99 USD) so actually you’re earning 30% more. Most probably you would not be able to get into those markets on your own (do you have a dedicated website for each language?) so it doesn’t hurt your own direct sales.

I don’t know yet how much you can earn on those language versions, but I am sure it’s less than you can earn on English version (global vs local market). Still, it’s worth getting those extra bucks.

Another good thing is that once you get translated version of your game it can be much easier for you to get a retail publisher for that market.

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If I would have to name developer friendly portals, Reflexive would be on one of the top positions. Now, after release of Runes of Avalon 2 I can say that they are not only a portal that let’s you earn quite good percentage of sales price.

Do you need an e-commerce provider? Well, if you sell on your own for sure you need one. I use eSellerate, some use Plimus, a lot of developers uses BMT Micro and many others. But this may change… because if you set up affiliate account and sell your own game through it you can earn 90% of sales price, which usually is $19.95. That’s one of the lowest rates in the industry.

But that’s not all. Since they wrap your games (without putting Reflexive splash screen) you don’t have to worry about DRM. Forget about home made solutions, forget about Software Password.

And last but not least, you can use it as hosting service. No more worries about bandwidth.

The best thing about using Reflexive?

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