Today I received email from Google that my ads are disapproved. The reason:

Gabling Certificate Required

What? What the hell? Do I look like casino? Here’s my ad:

Avalon Legends Solitaire
Restore the Deck of Nature and save
Avalon. 200 hands. Free trial.
www.Anawiki.com

I guess that’s the last time I use Adwords, unless until they seriously improve their service. Too bad, as working with adwords was a good way of improving your ad copy before going “world wide”.

Having the game released as exclusive at BFG gives a bit of stabilization for me. There’s no rush to reach all the portals at the same time, no need to prepare 10 builds for each of them. I can slowly get ready for release on other sites.

This release is also our deeper jump into Facebook. For long time I try to avoid this medium, but at the end of the day I thought, that even if I don’t like it, there might be people over there that want me to communicate with them through Facebook. We will see how it goes. Anyway, I would appreciate if you like this idea and click “like it” button for our FB page :)

With 25 likes we can apply for shorter URL.

Cradle of Rome 2 is a big disappointment for me. Maybe I would enjoy it more if I haven’t played Cradle of Rome 1, but I have, and CoR 2 was nothing new to me. Also, matching mechanic seemed aged.

Bejeweled 3 looks pretty nice and has few new twists. I enjoyed it much more than CoR 2. I also noticed all the hard work PopCap put into promoting B3, giving out netbooks for best photo of your jewels is one example of that. Because of that it was funny to see that PopCap was late to deliver B3 download on their own site. GameHouse and iWin (maybe other sites too) offered the game on Dec 7th, but PopCap was late for some reason and delivered download links a day later.

Playrix launched their newest match-3, Farmscapes, exclusively on their own site. Initially I was disappointed that I had to go through another “I want to be a HOG but I am match-3″ scene, but luckily it was short and part after that was a bit more of point and click adventure than HOG. Still, it was surprise that I had to wait so long to play regular match-3 mechanic, but overall I liked the game, probably the most out of 3 mentioned titles.

The world has a lot of holidays and you can’t keep the track of each of them, but it’s good to know at least the most common one (for the world) or the most money squeezing ones.

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Basically, people go out to retail stores and malls to buy things. Cyber Monday is online world reaction Black Friday. People spent their money from home.

It’s good to have the list of those holidays and make your marketing up to date. We indie’s don’t need to follow big companies, but at least we can try to get best examples of them. It’s also good to know about holidays because they may get in face of your game launch. I started the launch of Dress-Up Pups last week. I was about to send press release about it until I realized that it’s Thanksgiving day and either nobody is at work or gives a damn about my games. If I sent my PR that day it would probably got lost in dozens of emails by Monday morning when everybody gets to work.

That said, today is Cyber Morning, if you want you can take advantage of it and save 25% on your order of Anawiki Games :D

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?

Let me say few words about the game. Soccer Cup Solitaire is a card game with soccer theme. Some say it’s not solitaire, because you just match similar cards like two Jacks or two 8’s. The mechanics are similar to Heartwild Solitaire and some bonus features are inspired by Fairway Solitaire (thanks to Orchid Games and Big Fish Games for creating those two great games).

We knew Soccer Cup Solitaire won’t be a top seller game, but we wanted to develop it anyway, to take a break from GabCab development. GabCab has been in development for second year and we had iddle moments from time to time that we wanted to spend creatively.

What went right:

• short development time – the game from start to finish took 4 months – it could be shorter, but we haven’t been pleased with the art assets from the first art team.
• smooth integration of soccer theme into solitaire game.
• great music – it was a tough decision – we knew that the theme will probably kill interest of female audience, so we at least wanted to please male audience as much as possible. Rock songs from Saint of Silence did awesome job when it comes to adding tension to the game.
• not wasting time on prototyping and place holder art – we had natural deadline (World Cup 2010) so we decided that there’s no time to prototype things. We also had top priority project in development (GabCab), so we decided that we will work on SCS only when we get final art. It shortened development time very much.
• constant passion for the project – working with final art during short period of time kept motivation and efficiency of development on very high levels.
• we signed deals with new portals – Alawar and GameHouse. RealArcade was very picky about games they launch and I thought that after the merge with GameHouse it will be the same at GameHouse, so I was pleased that the game was accepted for distribution.
• development of SCS prevented possible burnout for GabCab.
• SCS has great CR (but that’s probably because of low download ratio)

What went wrong:

• not enough time to play test the game – Sport events and Holidays are strict deadlines, if you release the game after them you lose a lot of possible interest in your game.
• we missed the deadline by few days, but at least World Cup lasts 30 days, not one day like xmas or Halloween.
• we had to cut some nice features to be able to release “on time”.
• not enough downloads, which leads to…
• though it wasn’t expected to be a top seller, it sells below expectations.

Overall I was happy with the project. It proved to us (again) that short development times are necessary to keep high motivation and passion for the project and that switching between projects increases development efficiency while “delaying” release of each project just a bit.

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.