Sell More Games

I made a look back at my resolutions for 2008 and a lot of things I planned to do didn’t happened. One of my friends said that I don’t achieve my goals. Well, that’s partially true, but the goal itself is not the whole purpose. My goals evolve and change during the year so the plan at the beggining of the year isn’t the same as in the middle of the year. The world changes instantly and so should probably your plans.

Though I haven’t achieved a lot of goals on my list I still achieved a lot in 2008 and so far it was the best year in my indie career. I hope the year will be as good as old one, but hopefully less crazy :D

Happy New Year 2009 to all of you!

It’s good to be back online and my 3 goals for Sell More Games blog are:

– write at least 2 articles a month
– bring more traffic (like 10 times)
– get PR 4 at google

And for ANAWIKI GAMES… I feel like making no resolutions, but then how would I know if I succeeded? My plan is to release 3 games in 2009 and all of them has been started in 2008 so there’s a high chance I can succeed :)

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It was announced today. I am quite surprised, but I think it’s good for casual game business. Amazon.com is a huge outlet, so hopefully it will boost Reflexive’s sales and bring more competition between casual game portals. Here’s a few lines from Reflexives press release.

At Reflexive we have always prided ourselves on maintaining good relationships with everyone in the industry, and are excited that Amazon shares that philosophy. We intend to provide the best distribution platform anywhere, and to continue working openly with all the participants of the casual games space. Together it is our priority to continue this inclusive attitude going forward.

What this means for all you developers is that it’s time to get excited about your future with Reflexive. We can’t talk about everything yet, but we’ll be in touch shortly with more information. All of the features that you know and love about GameCenterSolution will still be available to you now and in the future, and you can continue to submit games through the Reflexive site. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at developersupport@gamecentersolution.com.

We look forward to continuing our commitment to offering a broad selection of casual games for customers and to providing the best support to all our partners. We are unbelievably excited to continue working to enhance the online casual gaming experience, for both gamers and game developers.

This is a very exciting day for the entire Reflexive team and community; we are thrilled to be joining the Amazon family. Thanks for your continued support and stay tuned for great things to come.

Sincerely,

Lars Brubaker
CEO
Reflexive Entertainment, Inc.

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I haven’t post an article in my blog for 55 days. No, it’s not because I lost my passion or that I didn’t know what to write about. It’s because I wanted to try if you can survive in the on-line world going off-line.

I went off-line on September 1st. The first days have been quite hard. I had to finish couple of on-line tasks but without access to Internet it was very difficult. I could check email via dial-up and GMail but answering emails was very time consuming due to low Internet connection speed.

After few days it was clear that without faster Internet connection I will waste time and money. You have to answer support emails and maintain regular business communication. I decided to get ADSL 256kbps, but instead of unlimited access with flat fee I signed up for per hour charge.

Now it’s clear to me that you can survive, but you have to forget about on-line tools. Forget about GMail, about reading forums, doing a lot of guerrilla marketing. It’ll be easier for you if you focus just on game development. Going off-line will increase your productivity a lot (that’s why I tried to go off-line).

I will not be on-line until mid December… at least until that day I won’t have unlimited Internet access. Hopefully my sales will not dry more that they already did.

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Last two months has been really busy and I haven’t put much attention to advertising. Actually, I haven’t done it at all. Until yesterday.

I hate advertising because I always feel like the only one that earns money is the Ad Server.  Even if clicks or impressions are not soo expensive it is hard to turn them into profits. Why? Games are either too cheap or too expensive.

But I read a book about AdWords and it gave me some inspiration. I also noticed that Pony World has quite good visitor to download ratio – over 40% of visitors download the game. With that ratio maybe it will not to that hard to turn AdWords into profits?

I created two ad variations for selected keywords and set up a daily budget of a little over $10. And today I got the results (that’s what I love about AdWords – almost instant results).

My ads received 90 clicks total: 51 for ad variation #1and 39 for ad variation #2. CTR for those ads: 1.55% for #1 and 1.22% for #2. Not so bad,  especially one you show it by keywords: the best CTR is 10.38% and the lowest one is 0.77%. The lowest one represents most of impressions and clicks.

Because that’s just 90 clicks I don’t know if it’s profitable yet or not, but we can do some estimations. Let’s go to Google Analytics and check if those clickers download the game. This is where we face first disappointment. Only 19.48% of clickers downloads the game. It’s still much better than what I had for Runes of Avalon campaign where only 11% of visitors downloaded the game.

If Pony World Deluxe has 1% CR (download to sale) then I need 100 downloads to sell one game. And I need 513 clicks to get 100 downloads. 513 clicks will cost me over $68. And I get only $17 out of each sale, so each sale makes me a loss of $51.

Judging just by those numbers you can for sure say that advertising is a waste of money. And it is if you do it wrong. It is if you aim short term. It is if you don’t tweak your ads, your game and your game description web page. It is if you don’t increase your visitor value.

It takes time to turn advertising into profits. Most people are not patient enough.

I made some tweaks to my ads and will do for at least few more days. If I can see improvements then I’ll keep advertising until I make a profit or run out of money :D

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