Sell More Games

This blog was inspired by article I was going to write for GameProducer.net. I planned to write about my experiments with Google Website Optimezer. I sat down and started to write ideas that I could talk about. Within 60 seconds I had ideas for over 20 articles. No way I could publish it all at GameProducer.net. And because Juuso talks mostly about producing games and I am going to talk mostly about selling them I decided to give this blog a chance.

Writing all those articles will take a while, so here’s my list of article ideas (selected few):

• working with Google Analytics
• working with Google Website Optimizer
• marketing that works
• marketing that doesn’t work
• mastering Google Adwords
• case studies: my own experiments analized
• improving sales
• newsletters and getting subscribers
• press release
• working with portals

And that’s just the beginning… Feel free to propese article idea or to share your experience with me.li

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In my previous post I wrote:

To get $10.000 (gross) you need to sell 500 units at $20 price tag. To sell 500 you need 50.000 downloads if your CR is 1%. To get 50.000 you need 100.000 visitors if your site conversion is 50%. To get 100.000 visitors you need to either be lucky or spend $5000 in advertising.

This may sound good, but boy, how this will sound to you if I say that numbers above are optimistic?

If the fact that 99 out of 100 people doesn’t pay for your game and quits after 60m play or sooner wasn’t bad enough I can tell you that so called 1% industry stundard is still an optimistic figure. At least for untargetted traffic.

Let me tell you that it’s hard to believe that only 1 person out of 100 will buy your game. It’s even harder to believe that it will be worse than that. Your site is small and you get a lot of new visitors. If you don’t advertise those are mostly people that come to your site by accident. Even if they dowload your game it doesn’t mean that they intend to buy it (even if they like it). It happens even to big portals, though they have more visitors that are customers… and customers are more likely to buy multiple games.

Your goal should be to get as much targeted visitors as possible. I will try to show you how to do that in next articles.

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$10.000 a month my sound high for some of you and it really is especially if you are just starting. Though it’s hard it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

To get $10k selling games you need either to sell $1000 per game for 10 games or $10.000 per one game. Getting $1000 per game a month is much easier than selling one and getting $10.000. The problem is that when you start you have just one game.

The  math is simple:
revenue = price * orders
orders = CR * downloads
downloads = site conversion * unique visitors

Finally:
revenue = price * CR * site conversion * unique visitors

To get $10.000 (gross) you need to sell 500 units at $20 price tag. To sell 500 you need 50.000 downloads if your CR is 1%. To get 50.000 you need 100.000 visitors if your site conversion is 50%. To get 100.000 visitors you need to either be lucky or spend $5000 in advertising.

This may sound good, but boy, how this will sound to you if I say that numbers above are optimistic?

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Juuso posted sales stats for Su Doku Live. The guys behind Dead Pixel Games were lucky enough to get $27000 income with $13000 profit. But did they succeed in online sales? They sold only 50 copies of Su Doku Live – 47 for Mac, 3 for Windows – and earned $2000. That’s not much for a game that is online for over a year. So where all the money come from? They managed to get publishing deal for $25k that saved their butts.

It’s hard to tell why they failed online with so few data that they delivered to us, but I’ll do my best. There are plenty of Sudoku games online so getting attention is difficult. They spend $1000 on Google Adwords and $200 on banner advertising. That would give them $800 net profit in online sales. But my guess is that the money invested in advertising didn’t convert into sales. Based on the sales stats and my own experience, if they sold 47 units for Mac and just 3 for PC Windows, I am 99% percent sure that almost all sales come from Apple.com.

Unless they advertised towards Mac market, they had only 3 sales for $1200 investment. That’s terrifying! It’s harder to sell PC games, that’s why you need to advertise, but when you do, you must be sure to check if advertising works for you. It’s easy to invest $1200 in advertising and get no sales from that. It’s really hard to make advertising to work for you!

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