Sell More Games

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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Have you ever heard of director’s cut version of your favorite movie? I’m sure you did. How many developer’s cut versions of games have you heard of? Not too many? If at all.

Two days ago Darek Rusin made a comment on my blog and because I haven’t heard from him for a while I went to his website to check out what he’s up to.  He started Orchid Games and released Heartwild Solitaire.  So far his website is dedicated to just this one game and that made it easier for me to spot the thing that made me mention his website. Right under the title he put Author’s Edition. That made me very interested and I immediately wanted to check out what is so special about this version. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any info about it. Too bad. It could help “steal” customers from portals.

When we worked on Runes of Avalon we had to remove very nice feature in my opinion – Amulet of Spells. We had to remove it because it didn’t work so great and we didn’t have time to find out how to fix it, but I really believed in Amulet of Spells (you don’t earn money by having great ideas, but by releasing games). This made me thinking about releasing developer’s version of Runes of Avalon. It never happened in the way we know it from movie industry. It was much better for us to release this version as Runes of Avalon 2, as we figured out that amount of changes is too big to make it “just” a special edition.

So you see, it’s worth commenting on blogs. You might get a link to your website for  free ;-)

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After probably seven years since buying my old PC I decided to get a new one. I really don’t like to put money into hardware, but since my HDD started to report bugs every time I turned on my PC it was probably the final moment before loosing some critical data like source codes.

Before I went to the shop I browsed hundreds of reviews. I didn’t want to buy high end stuff, but I also didn’t want to buy crap, and I didn’t want to pay for power that I won’t need. And it had to be silent!

Finally I decided to buy AMD Phenom II X3 720 processor with GeForce 250 GTS, 4GB of RAM, 300 GB HDD. I also got Be-Quiet DarkPower power-supply. Processor came with box cooler, but it was too noisy and I decided to replace it with Scythe Ninja II. It is a huge monster and can operate in fan-less mode. After replacing processor cooler the next noisiest thing was gfx card… it had built in dynamic speed cooler, but even at the lowest speed it was too noisy for me. I replaced it with the one that came with Ninja cooler (12 cm).

Now the noisiest element is HDD… but only when it’s reading or writing stuff  and it doesn’t do it often :)

It probably wouldn’t be worth investing 1000$ only to get more quiet working space, so let’s talk about performance. How does 10 times faster  sounds to you? It exceeded my expectations. I was killing myself developing Pony World Deluxe with over 10 minutes compilation times in debug mode and now it’s less than a minute. I hesitated to add music to my games because decoding ogg’s took to much time when loading the game 100 a day, now I don’t care.

Will it help me sell more games? I don’t know, but for sure I increased comfort and performance of my workplace.

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There’s constant debate about piracy on forums. It’s hardly moving us forward, but there is an argument worth discussing and it applies not only to software. It’s about how hard it is to get software legaly vs stealing it.

Stealing is always easier option and it doesn’t matter if we talk about software or phisical goods. Suprised? Well, keep in mind that if you want to buy something you need to either earn enough money before you can buy it or you need to worry about your credit score, fill out all the papers, agreements, blah, blah. For some goods like cars you need to wait couple of months before they arrive… and you’re paying customer… wtf? You could just walk out of your house and break in to the car of your choice. That’s just 30s job if you got some experience in it.

Just because thiefs have easier life doesn’t mean you have to steal. I don’t say we should make the life of paying customers harder, but it will always be harder to aquire goods legal way than stealing them.

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