Sell More Games

Even if you are indie, you may consider working with a publisher to bring your next game to life. There are many pros and cons, but today I’ll list top 3 pros. It’s all based on my experience.

1. Cash advance
It takes a lot of time to create a great game… and time is money. Publishers are ready to pay you in advance against future royalties. If you work together with a publisher on your game, then you can get advance paid in parts for each milestone. Getting “constant” flow of cash can make life of independent* developer much easier. It can also speed up development of your game, because you’ll get the cash to invest into better art resources or development tools.

* some will say that if you work with a publisher then you are no longer independent, but as long as you are creating your vision you are independent enough for me.

2. QA
Do you have the time and resources to provide great QA service for your game? In the end of development process I am sick of my game and don’t have the passion to put the level of attention needed to testing all those little details. I am also so used to my game that I don’t notice a lot of issues. QA stuff that works for publishers very often does an awesome work and not only catches a lot of bugs, but also gives you ideas for improvement of gameplay.

3. Getting into the markets
Today everyone can setup a site and put a game on sale, though not everyone is able to catch peoples attention. Publishers either have established online sales channels or know how to reach them. They have established retail sales channels and can get your game into boxes or jewel cases and sell it in stores you would not be able to reach. What more, publishers have a lot of products and can make bundles of them to increase your games life. At the end, it can sum up to the great amount of cash… and that you sold more games than you would without a publisher.

What you have read above are my personal top 3 reasons to work with publishers, but don’t be fouled… it doesn’t mean that there is no cons… in the next post I will give you my top 3 reasons to not work with publishers :)

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Yeah, I know it’s odd to post New Year resolutions in the beginning of February. My thinking is that if you post them so late then actually they are worth anything.

Year 2007 was not a very good one for me. I had great plans in the beginning, but in December I started to wonder why it didn’t happen? The first half of the year wasn’t so bad, but the second one was devastating to all my plans.

• We released Pony World… and then received request to translate it to 6 different languages. We had a contarct and we couldn’t deny request and each translation took so looong, because Pony World is a complex game with a lot of written and rasterized text. If you ever want to translate your game, make sure it doesn’t use rasterized text or make it data driven. Each menu, caption, buttons, icons should be defined in a file that you can change without the need to recompile the game.
• We started 2 or 3 game projects and run into cash-flow issues… I didn’t expect that getting money from released game takes so long.

Well, there are other minor things that made it difficult, but 2008 looks much different.

Year is very long… and it’s very difficult to predict in detail so I decided to split my predictions into 3 parts: short term (first quater), medium term (first half of the year) and long term (second part of the year).

My main goal is to improve company efficiency at making games and selling them. Making games is time consuming so when I written down all our projects I was shocked. If I want to finish them as I plan I should release a new game almost every 2-3 weeks. Yep, it’s sounds unbelievable… though we create games in a way that we can easily make add-ons and sequels.

So here it goes:
• Pony World Deluxe – should be released in Feb
• Runes of Avalon 2 – should be released in Feb
• JigSaw Quest: Avalon – scheduled for release in March
• Alice Adventures – scheduled for April
• … and 5 more games to be released in the first half of the year
• … and 2 more in the second half of the year

Sounds crazy when I look at it… though first four titles on the list are in production or near completion at the moment. We just have to focus on finishing it one by one instead of making little steps in each game. In the second half of the year we will release only two games. If game development is your business, then monetizing comes first and if you have no games to monetize you run out of the business.

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Your website and company credibility is very important. If your website looks cheap, if your customer doesn’t feel secure, he will not buy your games.

One of the most important steps in building your credibility is contact page. It’s a must to have support email address written, as well as contact form. Contact form is important, because sometimes spam filters block emails from your customers and mark them as spam. If you don’t have a contact form, there is no way they can reach you.

The other important part is to put your real address and name on your contact page. If you’re not so big, your photo adds a lot too (and some ebay sellers say that putting voice message improve sales too).

If you want to go further then you can use Google Maps and point it to your company address. Don’t worry, it’s very unlikely that someone will visit you. If you are one of the lucky ones, you can use Street View – new feature in Google Maps. You need to have your office in one of the main USA cities and on one of the main streets. You can present real street view at your office… it’s really awesome. Unfortunately Europe is not covered yet.

Take a look at those two You Tube movies that present this new feature:
Google Maps from The Vacationers
Official Google Maps Street View movie

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It took us more than a year to create Pony World, about nine months to create Runes of Avalon. How about you? The trick is that those number state only start to finish dates. The real thing is here (posted originaly by Cliffski on IGF forum):

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him. “It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

I really like that legend. Yep, nine months, but I started creating games when I was 15 (and thinking about creating games when I was 10). Now I am almost 30. It took a lot of time to learn all that little tricks to make great looking and fun games. Entire life seems about right. Keep that in mind next time you negotiate publishing contract.

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