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

Category: business

Your Sales Guesses and a nice chart

Well….

You guys seem to have some pretty widely varying guesses as to how many games I sell. Be aware that i am only talking about DIRECT sales. By that I mean someone who comes to the positech site and buys the game direct through BMT Micro (my payment provider). That excludes all the casual portal sales through sites like arcadetown, bigfishgames and so on, plus the other portals such as GamersGate and Stardock’s Impulse. It also excludes retail deals, and it excludes stuff such as sales of the Apple Mac ports as well.

Some of you guessed around 25,000. I would be very happy with that :D. if I disregard my advertising costs (which are BIG in my terms), then I’m earning around $20 for Democracy 2 and $18 for Kudos 2. That means that 25,000 copies of D2 would have earned me half a million dollars (almost £18*)

Ha!

I wish. I REALLY do. I’d be working on Democracy 3 right now if I had earned that amount from just the direct sales. The real number is a lot lower than that. There HAS been a bit of a sales spike recently for D2 thanks to the US elections though.

Unfortunately I can’t really tell you the figures for Kudos 2, or the exact Democracy 2 figures, because that information is what they call ‘commercially sensitive’. In practice that means that while I’m negotiating with several companies (many of whom may have people who read this) it’s not in my interest to ‘reveal my hand’ as to how much money I make from my games. However, suffice it to say that i don’t *need* any of the portals, publishers or people I do business with. I can pay the rent and food bill with my direct sales. This is l33t because it means I don’t have to answer to anyone and can make the games I love to make.

Because I predict lots of cross blog readers wanting some juicy stats, here is a chart instead…

One day when I’m feeling less stressed about sales and have some decent figures behind me, I might publish some more sales figures.

*joke

Thoughts about sales volume

When I was on holiday, i was flying over some big city, looking down at all the tens of thousands of buildings, and thinking  “This is just one city, in one state, in one country, in one part of the world, and yet if I could sell a game to just one person in every street in this city, I’d be doing much better than I am”.

Of course, it’s not as easy as that. But That’s how I think. I hear that Fable II sold 800,000 copies last month. That’s pretty awesome, and that’s at a higher price, and just one month. Surely overall, the game will shift 1.5 million copies, maybe 3 million in total. Equating it to copies of Kudos 2, it’s like maybe 5 million copies. (huge congrats to everyone I know back at LH working on that game btw)

Now obviously I haven’t sold 5 million copies, and obviously I only need to sell maybe half of one percent of Fables II’s sales to make the same ROI (which would be very nice) , given that it’s mainly just me. But even taking this into account, it occurs to me that it would be entirely feasible to sell double or four times the number of copies I’ve sold so far.

Some people assume I sell hardly any copies of my games. A lot of the people who admitted to piracy who emailed me gave me helpful hints on how to sell a few copies a month if I did X. Thanks guys! Some other people assume I sell a LOT more than I do. These tend to be people who see my games on sites like Stardock and yahoo, and assume all games on such platforms make people rich. My Mother is convinced I drive a Ferrari, because I gave her a boxed copy of one of my games. All things that get into shops make people rich according to her. (no they don’t).

So I’m curious. How many copies of Kudos 2 do you think I’ve sold so far? How many copies of Democracy 2? (It’s been out a year).

82% of World Of Goo players are pirates?

According to World Of Goo makers 2DBoy:

http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

And yet, despite this, I’ve been reading comments on the web where people are hurling abuse at them. These are likely from people who pirated the game anyway.

So these guys worked hard over 2 years (AFAIK) to make one of the best original indie games of the year, released it with a demo and no DRM at a good price, and then happened to mention in a comments thread once that 82% of the players stole their hard work, and yet they get insulted and abused for mentioning it.

I’m sick of the attitude of some PC Gamers. Carry on pirating if you insist, but don’t have the cheek to hurl abuse at the people you are stealing from. As usual for daring to suggest something be done about piracy, I got a load of sarcastic insults and abuse from internet trolls today too.

Seriously kids, grow up and get a job, then see how you feel when people take your work for free…

Upsell

I’ve spent part of today tweaking the upsell for Kudos 2 today. The ‘Upsell’ is the efforts the demo makes to get you to buy the full copy. The original demo was pretty lacklustre in that there was a nag screen that had a default background with some screenshots from the game, and it basically said “please buy it”.

I figured I could do better than that, and in a flash of inspiration I replaced the default avatar on the upsell screen with the players actual avatar they used in the demo. Then, instead of the text saying ‘would your character have done well?” it uses their name, so it’s ‘would bill have done well?’ etc.

I also added a quote from a review of the game that was massively positive, to remind people how great the game is :D and I enclosed the upsell text in a nicer formatted white window so it looks much more polished.

Then I ditched the default, fixed screenshots and replaced them with 3 dynamic ones, where they constantly cycle through a total of 9 upsell screenshots, cross fading between them and thus adding some minor movement and animation (in some ways) to an otherwise boring upsell screen.

It won’t double conversion rates, but it can’t do any harm.

Also, I replied to an email about a potentially important deal for the game today. You have to make some pretty big guesses in my job. When people say “how much for the rights to X” you have to really stroke your chin and think about the right figure. At the end of the day, it’s a bit of a guess…

Cliffski.com

Ok call me “mr arrogant” if you like, but when someone I knew suggested I register cliffski.com, and noted it was available, I agreed and did it, hence the new blog header. Almost everyone on-line knows me as cliffski, so it’s probably worth doing. The last thing I want to do is become a megastar and find this happened.

Today has been (so far) a day of answering businessy emails and updating the website. The blog header is now a hyperlink to the newer, brighter, whiter site. It was a long time coming, but I am happy with the slightly newer look.

I got a lot of suggestions and advice for radical redesigns of the site, much of which I agree with. Some people don’t like the positech logo, and a lot of people think the layout of the main page needs changing. Plus a lot of my older web pages which I no longer link to directly haven’t been updated and are a bit crap still.

But the main thing is, the site is better this week than it was last week. Slowly but surely I make progress in such things!

I’m not writing any code right now, just doing promotion, PR and businessy stuff and negotiating various deals. It will be cool to jump heafirst into the next game, but I won’t be starting it for a few weeks. I’m mega busy with other stuff, still knackered from my holiday, and have damaged my arm somehow. Possibly through archery. I’ll get back into the swing of it soon I’m sure :D

Movie Tips from the plane trip: