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

Category: business

Game sales & marketing analysis over 14 days

I’m dumping my brain here in case it’s interesting to review strategy, from a business POV. I’m looking at the last 14 days of positech, as if I’m playing a strategy game.

The income over those 14 days is roughly $60k, taking into account direct sales, Steam GoG and the apple app store. there are some other relatively trivial sources too. This is pretty high, because obviously Democracy 3 is relatively newly released, and was just coming out of a sale.

Spending on marketing & PR during this period is relatively tiny. about $2,600 in adwords, another $1,000 ish on another network, and some PR costs, put the whole promotional cost at about $4,600 or roughly 7% of revenue. I could clearly spend more if I saw a decent opportunity to grow the customer base for my games. With this in mind, I just plonked down another $2k today for a splurge on reddit ads coming up.

So how does this all translate into growing the direct-sales juggernaut? well… Direct traffic at positech.co.uk over this period is 54,000 visits compared to 71,000 visits to steam (you get to track this data now). The average steam visitor duration is 31 seconds compared to 82 seconds on my site. This suggests steam is pretty leaky.

In terms of those users I get coming to my site, what are the best sources? The biggest chunk is ‘organic search’ which you don’t have much direct control over, other than trying to get more reviews and doing some SEO, which is a nebulous goal. The most analyzable category is ‘referral’ which is 24.6% of traffic, so quite small. They ‘convert’ in terms of hits on buy pages etc at 11.7% compared with 52% on organic search….interesting. If I narrow this down to people who show up on the Democracy 3 homepage, that figure goes up to 23% of referral visitors converting.

Luckily I can analyze further…

if I look at the Democracy 3 search campaign on adwords, that cost me £266 in that time, or roughly $441. For that, I got 618 clicks, at £0.43 a click ($0.77). This resulted in 72 confirmed buy page hits. I doubt all 72 bought the game. If we assume half of them do, and split the direct & steam takes to get roughly 80% of the money, then I got maybe 36*(0.8*24.95) which is  $718, or a profit of $19 a day. Pretty pathetic.

However, if I assume of the half who didn’t buy the game (but had visited the buy page), two thirds of them are prepared to buy the game next time it’s 50% off, then I can add on another $9.50 a day, which is still kinda crap, but better. Further to this, there is the viral effect, where word of mouth from those buyers might lead to additional sales. This involves even more guesswork….and there is more stuff I don’t know…

So the key variables I need to juggle here are:

  1. Percentage of people who bought the game directly attributable to this spending (some of this is known, but with considerable error margin)
  2. Percentage of people whose exposure to the game ‘stores up’ a purchase at a later date.
  3. Percentage of people whose exposure to the game ‘stores up’ a purchase at a lower price.
  4. Virality multiplier from new purchasers of the game.
  5. Potential upsell from new customers for future games.
  6. Cross-promotional effect of people visiting for Democracy 3 but buying GSB./Redshirt/GTB etc…
  7. Sales income through all channels from people who saw the ad, and had the brand re-in-forced, but did not click, or whose clicks were not tracked due to privacy settings/javascript disabled.

The trouble is there are just too many variables here, and this is where it becomes alchemy. My gut feeling is that I am underspending on promotion. Possibly massively so.

P.S.If you are an indie dev and read all this, and you are new to the industry, I wonder if you noticed the big amazing factoid buried in all that, that defies general assumptions by almost everyone in the industry? Let me type it again: Direct traffic at positech.co.uk over this period is 54,000 visits compared to 71,000 visits to steam. Yup, this is doable. it takes a lot of time and effort and patience and risk.

 

 

Capitalizing on the portal effect

My website looks more like a games portal than many indie developer sites. the reason for this is simple, I have more games. Depending on your screen resolution, you currently see images of GSB, GTB, Democracy 3, Redshirt and Kudos 2 on the front page. This is a huge advantage for an indie. It basically means I have five times the chances to capture a gamers interest if I can get them to my site. If you have ONE game, and you run an ad, or have some PR that drives traffic, you need to be 100% sure that visitor is interested. Sometimes they don’t like the look of your game, and they leave. In my case, if they see that big GSB image and think ‘meh’, they might be attracted to Redshirt, or to Democracy 3. That makes the site less leaky, and that’s awesome.

This is why it makes sense for indie like me to fund a game like Redshirt. I’m also hoping to fund another game. It basically doubles my output, and means each year Ideally I get two new games up there. This means halving my leakiness, and potentially doubling the return-per-click on any marketing efforts. My stats show me a lot of people bought redshirt after visiting my site direct from the main menu of Democracy 3. And vice versa. This is awesome. It’s also another reason why Steam is a billion-dollar success.

I tried to do a free thing for indies to get the same effect. It’s here. it didn’t take off. Indies are very interested in ‘someone else’ doing stuff like this, but by definition, we are indies, we like to work alone. This is a pity, but it means it’s even more important for me to continue building my own mini-portal of positech-published games. I reckon I need a game a year to stay even, as older games will eventually lose their appeal.

The maths of this are very interesting. Even assuming the ‘I was here for X but bought Y’ effect only works in 25% of cases, then previously me bidding $0.30 for a click means I can suddenly bid $0.37 instead, if I have one extra game. If I have 4 games, then I can double my bid. That’s a huge bonus. It also explains why, if you have a single niche indie game, and advertising isn’t making an ROI for you, that you may lose faith in it. Each year my PR budget goes up and up, and each year the stock of games it’s selling goes up. they are clearly related.

So I’ve just dusted off the trusty old Google adwords campaign for my site which I experimented with years ago, and will try again. Not for any specific game, but for GSB,D3 and Redshirt combined. I suspect it will do well.

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Build Management Hell

This is part of indie life nobody warns you about. In your mind, you create a game, test it, upload it, then sit in front of windows showing the sales figures and the bug reports. That’s what happens right?

Not quite. The modern indie game, even one that is a pure-desktop (not mobile/tablet) experience can end up with a scary amount of build-management. If you are really organized and clever (clearly I’m not) you can manage it without too much stress. If you don’t plan ahead, you end up like me.

Democracy 3 has, primarily it’s ‘direct sales’ build on PC. This is the ‘master build’. It then has a separate build for steam, which is uploaded through valves tools. That’s 2 builds. Then there is a build for GoG without steams API in it. Then there is the build for the humble store. And also there is the secure copy uploaded for reviewers. That’s five builds. That’s no problem. Then each of those has a mac and a linux build. Ouch, that’s 15 builds now. This is a pain, but doable. Then it gets translated into French and German. Ok, that means 45 builds now. Yeah, 45 builds.

No big deal right? But don’t forget each one is about 40-50MB in size. That’s 2 gigabytes. No big deal? Try uploading that with 45k/s upload speed out here amongst the sheep. You can see why I don’t get to play any online games around ‘democracy 3 patch days’. Also, you can see just how infuriating it is when you find a bug that needs patching. 20 minutes debugging,  an hour fixing and checking, 12 hours uploading.

And because I’m so dumb, all of those builds are entirely separate, even though 95% of the files are shared across them all. Learn from my mistakes, get your build process sorted out beforehand!

OMG I am an entrepreneur

I’m only half-joking, but I’ve only recently realized this. I know that the french have no word for it, but it seems I do! The thing is, the whole ‘being an entrepreneur’ thing creeps up on you. I know that people often describe themselves as entrepreneurs, especially in silicon valley, but I have a stricter definition that most, along these lines:

To be a true entrepreneur you need to have actually started a company that has made a profit. you need to have more than one successful product, and you also need to have managed a product where the work is done by other people.

The reason I say that, is there are a lot of people who are really talented, and very successful, and that comes from their ability in that specific skill, not specifically skill at running a business per-se. In other words, you can be an awesome artist, and do well from it, despite being a pretty poor businessperson. That’s not a criticism, in any way, it just gets rolled into being an entrepreneur, which at least in my mind means something else.

The reason I say this, is redshirt. I didn’t design the game, do the art, write the code or any of that sort of thing. Mitu did. I was the publisher, so I made strategic decisions and invested money, in the hope that I’d get that money back and make a return on my investment. That’s how entrepreneurs work, and how they can invest in your coffee shop* without knowing the first thing about making coffee. They probably need to know good coffee from bad coffee, but more importantly they need to understand business/marketing/finance and the most important thing of all: picking the right people and the right business model.

The reason I’m suddenly happy that I’ve had a success at this, is that it’s one of those very intangible skills that I like to challenge myself with. It’s the same reason I trade on the stock market. Judging my my recent performance there, I’m not so good at that :D. Both stock-picking and entrepreneurship are things that NOBODY KNOWS how to do. Studies have shown monkeys picking peanuts can do as good a job as many pension fund managers. There is no mathematical formula for beating the stock market or investing in a business. None. Some people get lucky for a long time, but there is no absolute formula. It’s a combination of research, a lot of gut feeling and a lot of analysis.

In other words it’s a game!, and I unlocked an achievement. Woot. Wheres my little steam badge?

*I drank coffe 20 minutes ago, and this is the reason this pops into my head. That is exactly how advertising works, subconsciously but incredibly powerfully.