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.

I read (I can’t remember where) that it’s as hard to sell a pair of shoes as it is to sell something more expensive. The work is the same, but the sales commission is much greater.

Unfortunately we developers have little influence on the price of our games (except for our own sites). Keep in mind that it is better to make a bit better game to sell it for a bit more than make it look cheap and sell it cheap. Your efforts to market the game will be as hard or harder to promote cheap looking game, but revenues will be much smaller.

Just 31 days in the queue.

Feel free to buy it for a bargain price of $2.99 or post reviews and comments on BFG forums.

Just one more day to check out the effect of this deal. Some games seem to do very good, the others not. Just like with launching games for the first time.

Anyway, my list is short this year:

1. I will play more games
2. I will release a game every 2-3 months

The first one is quite easy to achieve, just needs a bit of balancing. You can’t play too much because you won’t be so productive anymore. And if you don’t play enough you just miss on all those great ideas that come to your head when playing others games (and a lot of relax).

The second point sounds a bit crazy. It takes usually more than 3 months to create a decent game. So how I want to achieve that? It’s possible because I want to finish 2 games I started in previous years (and one is 3 years old, but luckily the art is still up to date). But that’s just two games, so only 6 months out of 12. For the other 6 months I plan to be very uncreative. I was quite creative for the last 3 years and it didn’t pay out that much, so I am going to create a bunch of clones. Or spin offs of our own games. This way I can save a lot of development time and probably some in development budget.

Will I see 4 more games in my portfolio by the end of 2010? Time will tell, but I strongly hope so. I started to believe that I can’t risk 9-12 months projects that don’t sell well.

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.

So imagine my surprise when I saw that Tales of Monkey Island hit #7 in Top 10 PC games.  I mean, if a right click is too much for casual players how did they manage to move Guybrush around?

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)

My sales have dropped, but that’s not surprising to me. I focused on development on a new game and completely abandoned marketing and if you do so your revenue must drop. Still it didn’t drop so much. Even portal sales hold still and are still above the level I expected them to be after a year of my game release.

My sales dropped by expect them to recover once I make a new release. The question is, will that be enough at this current state of the market? I would say so. I play at stock exchange and stock markets keep recovering since February so I would be surprised if casual games don’t recover soon. Still all those price wars, etc. make me wonder.

Two days ago Darek Rusin made a comment on my blog and because I haven’t heard from him for a while I went to his website to check out what he’s up to.  He started Orchid Games and released Heartwild Solitaire.  So far his website is dedicated to just this one game and that made it easier for me to spot the thing that made me mention his website. Right under the title he put Author’s Edition. That made me very interested and I immediately wanted to check out what is so special about this version. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any info about it. Too bad. It could help “steal” customers from portals.

When we worked on Runes of Avalon we had to remove very nice feature in my opinion - Amulet of Spells. We had to remove it because it didn’t work so great and we didn’t have time to find out how to fix it, but I really believed in Amulet of Spells (you don’t earn money by having great ideas, but by releasing games). This made me thinking about releasing developer’s version of Runes of Avalon. It never happened in the way we know it from movie industry. It was much better for us to release this version as Runes of Avalon 2, as we figured out that amount of changes is too big to make it “just” a special edition.

So you see, it’s worth commenting on blogs. You might get a link to your website for  free ;-)

Before I went to the shop I browsed hundreds of reviews. I didn’t want to buy high end stuff, but I also didn’t want to buy crap, and I didn’t want to pay for power that I won’t need. And it had to be silent!

Finally I decided to buy AMD Phenom II X3 720 processor with GeForce 250 GTS, 4GB of RAM, 300 GB HDD. I also got Be-Quiet DarkPower power-supply. Processor came with box cooler, but it was too noisy and I decided to replace it with Scythe Ninja II. It is a huge monster and can operate in fan-less mode. After replacing processor cooler the next noisiest thing was gfx card… it had built in dynamic speed cooler, but even at the lowest speed it was too noisy for me. I replaced it with the one that came with Ninja cooler (12 cm).

Now the noisiest element is HDD… but only when it’s reading or writing stuff  and it doesn’t do it often :)

It probably wouldn’t be worth investing 1000$ only to get more quiet working space, so let’s talk about performance. How does 10 times faster  sounds to you? It exceeded my expectations. I was killing myself developing Pony World Deluxe with over 10 minutes compilation times in debug mode and now it’s less than a minute. I hesitated to add music to my games because decoding ogg’s took to much time when loading the game 100 a day, now I don’t care.

Will it help me sell more games? I don’t know, but for sure I increased comfort and performance of my workplace.