Sell More Games

It’s mid January so one can say it’s a bit late for New Year Resolutions. Actually I was very surprised when I checked Indie Gamer Forums on Jan 2nd and found out 24 posts already. Maybe most people fail to keep their New Year Resolution because they don’t put enough time to think about them, about what’s possible and what’s not.

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.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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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.

(No Ratings Yet)

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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?

(No Ratings Yet)

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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)

(No Ratings Yet)

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