Sell More Games

Yes, you hear it right. The Perfect Tree was released a couple of weeks ago on our site, but just recently was released on Big Fish Games. A lot of credit for such a quick release goes to Big Fish Team - Thanks! Other portals didn’t even bother to reply, but I didn’t expect them to launch our game anyway - it was almost December 10th when I contacted them.

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.

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Reflexive launched Tales of Monkey Island chapter 1. I couldn’t resist to try it. I read nice reviews, but nothing is better than personal experience. The game is very nice and the adventures remind me the great old days. Still, I’m not a huge fan of 3D in this case. And whoever invented that steering model should go to Footsam jail for a long time.  Yes, you can get use to it, but not being able to move Guybrush just by clicking on the destination point is beyond my understanding.

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?

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60 minutes trial is a standard in casual games. It’s accepted by customers, developers and portals. We got so used to it that we don’t even check it. Imagine my surprise - yesterday I downloaded Airport Mania First Flight from Reflexive. I played it for a short while and when exit reminder appeared I thought that it’s wrong when it said that I have 74 minutes left. It took a while to notice that the full trial is 80 minutes long.

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)

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We all heart it - recession. But has it affected our sales? I don’t know and that’s why I’m making this post. You tell me this time.

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.

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