Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Everything is changing

cliffski

It’s been a busy few weeks. The whole debate over piracy basically swamped me for days (and it’s still having repercussions now), and it’s lead to all kinds of positive changes. Obviously the big one was taking DRM out, and the kudos price drop, and this will be followed by some demo changes and similar stuff later on. One of the other changes was that I got a lot of (brutally honest) feedback from people who had one or another criticisms of my site, my order process and my games.

To be honest my site isn’t anywhere near as good as it should be. I’ve been tweaking it the last few days (I’m the web designer and webmaster too), starting with the main page, and I think it’s a bit better already.

I also changed the site from sharing a server to having its own dedicated physical box, which took ages and involved a lot of learning some linux stuff to set up the site properly, debugging email problems etc. That all takes time.

Then finally, there was attempting to address the issues people had with my order process. I basically have 2 problems here:

1) People don’t trust the payment provider because they haven’t heard of them before and

2) Regardless of fraud protection, legitimate customers are annoyed at the occasional processing delays in ordering games.

Now I *thought* I fixed this today, because I found a new payment provider which seems to entirely address the second point. HOWEVER, I now hear that my current provider may be working on implementing amazons one-click payment system (complete with using amazon accounts). This is VERY tempting.

So right now I’m undecided, whether to switch to the payment provider that offers smoother fraud checking, or stick with the one that will put amazon in. Of course, the problem is, all of this waffle takes TIME, and none of that time is going on game design and coding. So tomorrow, I’m going to ignore it all, and just work 100% on testing, coding and design for Kudos 2.

12 thoughts on Everything is changing

  1. I think trust is a huge factor in online purchases. A familiar face like Amazon would be good, but there’s also the ordering experience to be considered.

    Take your ordering process for Democracy 2 for example: the looks between the “Buy Full Version” page (register.html) and the next step in the checkout process are fairly jarringly different, and there’s really no “friendly face” on the order form page to reassure customers that “yes, this is the form you want, it’s safe, etc.” Things like that change of look/feel to the site can really mess up the momentum of a purchase.

    I’m curious, I see you’ve got Google Analytics set up there, have you set up a goal funnel for purchasing so you can tweak the pages to minimize abandonment?

  2. indeed, good points. I’m working on making the pages look much closer, but being undecided about payment provides has put a spanner in those works right now. I have got analytics set up, but there isn’t much of a funnel to define, its just the democracy page, register and then thats it, there isn’t a long process involved which is where I assume the funnel comes into play.

  3. On the main page redesign, I’d probably add some more padding to the top of the page. The first thing I see is Rock Legend, then Kudos when it should/ is probably meant to be Demo 2 (perhaps this is also to do with the shape of the link).

  5. Because of the so-called USA PATRIOT Act, I’ve had a number of unpleasant anomalies with the “fraud protection” of online payment providers. For me, seeing Amazon’s name is not merely reassuring, it tells me I can do business in the first place. The root issue seems to be PATRIOT’s requirement that the bank know the physical street addresses for individuals. It took a great deal of time for me to establish a (US government!) PO Box as my billing address.
    “Fraud prevention” systems seem to favor a demand for physical premises, only to bounce any transaction that doesn’t match whatever their view happens to be (and they’re not tellin’).

    With computer games, my major limiting factor is TIME. I am unlikely even to download a free demo; after all, if I don’t like it, I will have to uninstall it and remove all the gunk from my system. If it appears likely that I will like a game, I buy it; if it turns out I was wrong, the price of the game is still less than the cost of my time spent noodling around and uninstalling it.

    So the idea of online payment systems for one-time purchases which require me to renegotiate a 20 year-old banking relationship is a non-starter. To me, the company is trying to make me pay the price of its fraud prevention by the
    witless expenditure of my time.

    On a more positive note: You only entered my universe because of Ars Technica’s article on your dialogue with pirates. Your “Democracy 2” looks like the kind of game I might enjoy. I would likely not have heard about it (this year, anyway). I’m 53 years old, and I don’t get out much.

  6. Hi Cliff,

    Thanks for colating all those emails and writing your “Talking To Pirates” article – it was an interesting read. While I have never played your games, I know of them well – I think I may even buy one off you :)

    I’ve had all my software pirated (DrewFX Skeleton Pack and StarFighter:D’Yammen’s Reign) and it drives me nuts, but what can you do? I just ended up giving StarFighter away for free because people started to sell it without my permission.

    I’m surprised you can’t get your games on Steam because there are a lot of crap games that made it there, and I don’t think yours are crap. Is it a political thing with Valve perhaps?

    I really enjoy casual games, which is weird for me because I want epic fantasy to get immersed in and while there are games like KOTR, Oblivion and Mass Effect I just don’t have the time to play them. So I really enjoy the quality of content casual games provide – keep that up and sell them for $10 to $20 and you should easily be able to compete with BigFish. Casual games are where the market is at it’s highest.

    I’m going to check out a few of your demos now. Good luck.

  7. I loved your talking to Pirates thing. Real bold. Great blog article. I tried Rock Legend and enjoyed it. The demo is a bit short though. Sort of makes me feel like there might not be enough other stuff to justify me spending 20 bucks on. !0 and probably would have gotten a sale. Not sure why that is a mental limit I guess for me? I too enjoy the casual games, but when you get beyond 10 bucks for me, I got a lot of BaseBall sim and Hockey Sim and more games with far more content etc for about that price so its hard. Not that this is a bad game, I thought it looked pretty good.
    Hope that helps you figure out what to charge.
    As for the Kudos and the Democracy etc, not for me unfortunately.

  8. Just use 2 payment providers. I do that, and sometimes people who failed ordering with one, manage to successfully buy the game with the other one. Surely can’t do any harm.

  9. Just a personal choice and nothing against your particular games but they aren’t my type of games. (although my girlfriend might like it)
    I’ve bought many games I’ve even bought games I’ve pirated and finished before ever going to the store. I have had many consoles and modded them and still gone and bought games for it.
    I’ve downloaded movies and then gone to the cinema to see it.

    The biggest thing for me in the whole piracy debate is respect, on both sides. Consumers don’t respect the company’s making these games and the company’s don’t respect the consumer. They NEED the game to be piratable otherwise they wouldn’t constantly give leeway on their games.

    Many things go into spending money on a game. Can I afford it? Is the money I spend worth more else where? Value? Quality. What do I really get for my money?
    Games like World of Warcarft where I keep spend money per month just to play, yet I save money because I go out less, eat out less. I still like to go out with friends and have a good time, but less often which means more money being saved.
    Give content after the product is registered is the key in my opinion. Let people have the full game for nothing, and keep adding more but if they want that “more” they need a legit key registered in their name like a world of warcraft account.

    All in all the way games are bought and sold, made and expire need to change.
    I hope everyone see your blog and learn from it, big and bad.

  10. Can I make a suggestion for Kudos 2? Please, please, please do NOT mess with the system volume level. On my audio interface with my speakers, about 2 bars on the volume level is “quite loud”. When I launched the demo for Kudos, I almost blew out my speakers, my ears now REALLY hurt, I’m getting a headache, and my cats can’t be coaxed out from the upstairs hallway. I’ve never seen a game do something quite that obnoxious before.

  11. Thats definitely a driver bug. No way does the game deliberately change the system volume for windows. In fact i don’t think that’s even technically possible using fmod.

  12. Your talking to pirates article was interesting and a nice summary of the communication you have seen. I would like to add my 2 cents.
    Many people are not honest about their reasons for piracy. I strongly believe that many people who say that price is a problem will continue to say that no matter what price you set.
    But, I also believe that more barriers that people have to paying the less likely they are to pay. Do you have in game purchasing? If someone has downloaded the demo do they have to return to your site, or can the purchase and upgrade the game while they are playing. I condone your move to DRM freeness, but that doesnt prevent you from checking whether or not the player has paid. If they player has not payed why not give them the ability to pay in the game. By doing that you have removed several steps from the process. Essentially you would be creating nag ware, people who play the game a lot can be gently reminded about it, and those who pirated the game but only played it a few times wont be bothered.
    Finally, think about adopting a business model in which piracy ( aka free ) play is central. Give players the opportunity to play all the way through the game, but with limited options, and sell them upgrades in game, essentially unlocking parts of it on demand. This is somewhat similar to episodic play, except that players would be buying new aspects, rather than new scenarios. In Kudos this might take the form of activity packs for example. This also gives you a vehicle for ongoing expansion.

Comments are currently closed.