Category: business

Yay! At long last, you can now control an ENTIRE COUNTRY through your finger tips, whilst idly sitting on a sun lounger on the beach! (glare-permitting of course). That’s because the worlds favorite neural-network powered turn based strategy game about politics is now available on the ipad! Check out this incredibly exciting screenshot of the store:

Here is a list of the locations you can buy the ipad version of the game:

1) The apple app store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/democracy-3/id882525717?ls=1&mt=8

That’s it.

I have to admit, I am rather pleased with the way the game translates to a small tablet, it works pretty well. It doesn’t have a sprawling GUI like the PC version does on bigger monitors, but I think that is made up for by the convenience of touch controls and the ‘take-it-anywhere’ nature of the ipad. I hope it will do well. Annoyingly apples sales reports seem to lag by two days so I have no idea if anyone bought it yet.

I’ve priced it at a BARGAIN price of $9.99. This is cheaper than on PC, but then its fixed resolution, no mod support etc, so I suspect it’s reasonable. I really don’t care about anyone on the app store complaining about the price. You can basically fuck off and die in a fire if you think the game is overpriced. That’s the official developer & publisher position BTW. People who think $10 is overpriced for a game should go play angry birds of flappy birds, or similar fare and stop whining :D.

I hope it does well, partly because I like money, but mostly because ever since I bought an ipad, it’s sat and gathered dust, with far too few decent involved strategy games for the platform. If D3 does well, I’ll tell everyone so they can see it as a viable platform for more ‘serious’ strategy gaming. That would be a *good thing*.

Please help me spread the word. I am totally new to iOS gaming, so if you run a HUGE website dedicated to iOS games and haven’t got a review copy, email me at cliff AT positech dot co dot uk.

Did you know that 95% of the money an indie game makes comes from when that game is on sale and highly discounted? Some pundits put this at more like 97%, although I do hear that other people claim it be 98%, which is nonsense because we all know that 99% is the real figure right? After all, we’ve all seen those exciting steam charts with those big spikes haven’t we? And sales are just GREAT, people on twitter and other social media go bananas over them. they have mini-games and memes. Everybody knows that the way to make money is to put a game on sale! sale! sale! not just 95% off, how about 99% off…etc.

Exciting stuff, which is slightly undermined by it being dead wrong. Like most slightly autistic numbers geeks, I can’t help but crunch the data. Lets look at Democracy 2 sales on a large online portal.

The game was priced at $19.95.  Clearly this is total madness for an iconic, old, 2D strategy game, so presumably nobody bought it full price?

Actually 52% of it’s money came from full-price sales. And that’s a low-ball figure because there was a launch discount (which I don’t even do any more). I suspect it could have been higher. This was an old game, already sold for years from my site, so the real hardcore fans already bought it, yet 52% of new customers grabbed it at full price.

At 25% off, 15.5% off the income was generated

At 50% off (bargain!!!) 17% of total income was generated

at 75% off (amazing!!!!!!) 14% was generated

I see those big exciting spikes in sales reports as much as the next person, but it terms out we humans SUCK at making sense of charts like that. We also get lured by the thought of lots of players, rather than actual income.

Another thought worth considering is that at price X, you sell copies to everyone who would be happy to pay X or more. So what that means is that when a game is 75% off, a fair chunk of those buyers might have bought at full price. They aren’t going to donate the other 75% of the money later. Maybe only a few of them are in that position, but you need four sales for each of them to match the revenue…

Sales make money. Sales are good, they allow you to sell to people on the fence, or with less cash. I’m not knocking sales. But when your entire marketing strategy is based around discounts and sales and shoveling your game out as cheap as you can go, you have to ask yourself if you actually ever checked that strategy was working.

So I recently released democracy 3 extremism, complete with it’s lovely trailer…

And how is it doing? Well it’s going ok. It isn’t selling as well as social engineering, but that is to be expected, as it’s the second DLC and these things always have declining sales as you do more. It’s also very early days, and so far it’s been 100% only for sale at full price, which is obviously to be expected as it’s only a few days into being on sale.

Anyway, my stats (which are partial, not complete) show me that my current profit from the DLC is $3,901. It’s probably higher than that, as I haven’t updated it today. The reason that profit is quite low is I’ve been channeling a big big chunk of the income from it back into promotion. My facebook ad which looks like this:

Is currently being shown at $600 a day, and has chalked up 1,291 clicks to the web page so far, at $0.49 a click. That doesn’t include the visits to the facebook page, the extra facebook likes and of course anyone with anti-tracking or noscript turned on. $0.49 is a lot, but I am targeting men of a certain age (sorry ladies, but you just do not buy this game, according to my stats), with an interest in certain games, in certain countries, so it should be very targeted. My target demographic on facebook is 2,600,000, which I reckon is quite small, having shown the ad to 171,000 of them so far (6%). I’m running the ad for a few more days, so should hit about 25% of that demographic, but I may supplement it with another reddit ad placement too. (I’ve already spent $2,450 on reddit ads).

The result of this has also pushed sales of the base game. Extremism released on 13th may. if I look at Democracy 3 steam sales from 13-17th and compare to the previous week in the same days, the difference is a boost of 134%. This is something I should definitely take into account when calculating if the expansion is a success or not. This also means I have greater freedom to re-invest in the game. I’ve already propelled Democracy 3 into the top 50 strategy games on steam again. Might another $2k on ads push me up a few more places? and might that be self-sustaining? It might be worth basically spending the whole DLC profit in PR in order to promote base game sales (which in turn may eventually lead to more DLC sales).

Of course it’s all guesswork, and tbh marketing and business is just a game I enjoy playing. I did start playing GalCiv III alpha, but its very very alpha (no space battles yet!) So I might just sit on that for a bit.

That doesn’t make sense unless you read it to the tune of ‘kung fu fighting’. Anyway…

Enough of that.

I’m very close to releasing Democracy 3 on the ipad. I’ve pretty much decided it will be $9.95 on there. Let me waffle about the decision…

• It can be argued that this is painfully high and nobody will buy it. I suspect this is an over-reaction and not true. It’s not angry birds, it’s a complex and deep strategy game, and I suspect players of those games are more prepared than the average ipad customer to pay $9.95
• This is less than 50% of the PC price. Granted, it has no mod support, fixed resolution, and it’s on a tiny little ipad, not a nice kick-ass PC, but really there aren’t many compromises being made to play it on ipad. In other words, this is very competitively priced vs the PC version.
• Theoretically a $9.95 game can set a decent benchmark price and maybe be discounted later, yet still be actually worth having on sale, unlike a 50% off on a $0.99 game.
• It’s not the sort of game you buy on a impulse to play on the bus for 10 minutes once. It isn’t flappy birds. My impulse purchase market is probably zero.
• Democracy 3 is in profit, even if I lose money on the ipad (I paid to have it ported), then it’s not a disaster, I could absorb the loss.
• I think it’s in the greater interests of gaming (yes seriously) if we can establish a wider range of price points on IOS. There is no actual technical reason for that form-factor to be for cheap shovelware. There is no real logical argument for saying you shouldn’t be able to have a business selling $39.99 games on IOS, exclusively. maybe this will be a tiny nudge in that direction?
• The sadist in me looks forward to the violent frothing at the mouth of the kids who complain about game prices. Deal with it! :D

So am I nuts? or is this GENIUS? or should it be priced at $24.95 like the PC version. Only time will tell, obviously. BTW if you work at apple, or know someone who does, and might be interested in promoting and featuring a non-casual game on IOS, please get in touch, I’m a PC gamer primarily so my knowledge of the ipad gaming market is very scarce.

I may have to buy that song on itunes now…