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

Category: business

Back to work! (Unless you work for the US government)

Posted on October 1, 2013

So Eurogamer is OVER, and the longest sustained 4 days of my gaming existence spent standing up is now over. Hurrah! It was fun for the first half day, then a bit tiring, then a bit exhausting then OH MY GOD WHEN DOES IT END. Not helped by the ‘DAGGA-DAGGA-DAGGA’ of incredibly rubbish arcade music blasting at 900 decibels nearby. Plus £7.50 for a pizza smaller than a Democracy 3 promotional badge. Bah humbug.

I never know what to think about the economics of trade shows. I don’t like the whole idea of them in principle, but i understand the purpose they serve (for those lucky enough to live nearby) and I can see how it makes the job of games journalists much easier, although frankly, I still think the best games will emerge if everyone could just send simple polished betas of their games to the press, without insisting on demonstrating them in person, with a lot of hand waving, excuses, blagging, and offers of free champagne to any journalists as they try to form an impartial view of the finished product. But ho hum…

Eurogamer is now behind me, and I can look forward to not one, but TWO (yes…count them..TWO!) games releases in the next few months -> Democracy 3 and Redshirt. Reaction to both at the show was great. We will be showing Redshirt at ComicCon in London soon, and if you are staggeringly wealthy and want to see me talk about games marketing (and who wouldn’t?) I’ll be talking at this event.

I’ve also managed to squeeze in a new patch for democracy 3 today, that fixes and improves and tweaks all kinds of things, so that’s rather good.

In the last few hours, something fairly rare has been happening, in that the US government has done it’s best to re-create season six of The West Wing by actually shutting down, although I don’t think there was as much dramatic music and Josh Lyman shouting in this case. Every cloud has a silver lining though, it means I can now run ads like this…

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Yay?

Come for the pizza stay for the Pie!(charts)

Posted on September 25, 2013

The Positech Games Eurogamer Expo 2013 booth will not have booth babes, or even booth kittens, but it will have Strategy! Sci-fi Puns! PIE CHARTS! What is not to like? Plus it’s cunningly near to the pizza express bit apparently…

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Anyway, here’s hoping this proves worthwhile and lots of people enjoy trying out Democracy 3 and Redshirt. We have badges and fliers that we are literally giving away, starting tomorrow, for four days. I will have lost my voice and be unable to stand by Sunday, I’m sure.

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Do those monitors look small to you? they do to me. I am itching for an excuse to replace both my home monitors with big silly ones. If I hypothetically did a Gratuitous Space Battles sequel, I’d definitely plan on showing it off with big ridiculous 40 inch monitors if I ever did any shows to promote it.

I know there are some of you people out there that amazingly do not live in the UK and will not be able to come try out the games, so my honest, considered opinion is that you should just PRE-ORDER THEM NOW, and then you can play them immediately at home without having to pay £10 for a sandwich in central London.

Yay?

Analyzing advert effectiveness. (Where did all my clicks go?)

Posted on September 22, 2013

I ran an ad on reddit recently on the /games subreddit. it’s the place for fairly serious gaming debate, and I thought it would thus be a good match for my very serious political strategy game Democracy 3. It was a ‘sponsored link’ right at the top of the page. First things first, don’t let all that information on reddits ad page about ‘how ads work’ fool you. That’s an old comic they drew years ago and is completely wrong. they just sell impressions at $0.75 CPM. they really should update that…(I think this is a recent change).

Anyway….normally $0.75 CPM is a bit high for indie game advertising, but it was targeted, and a good experiment in a potentially rich new source of players. I put $250 into it, which lasted about 3 days.

According to the traffic stats provided by reddit I got:

stats1Which says 1,140 clicks. On the face of it, this isn’t too bad at all, 22 cents for a quality-traffic click. However, if I check google analytics for that page and its source I get this

stats2Only 199 views? that’s insane where are all the other views? Let me check my webalizer server logs instead… I see about 2,200 hits from reddit/r/Games for the month (which is almost certainly all this ad, as I have been listed only in /indiegaming until this. If I look at different logs from awstats I get 1,000 visits for the month from /r/Games.

So what value do I believe?

Well in a sense, who cares? All I care about is how many of those people bought the game, but so far I am suspicious about the tracking I have in place there, although it seems to work very well for other games so…arggghhhh!. Can I conclusively say the ad was worth it? I suspect not. Something I can definitely say from all this is that google analytics is CRAP at actually tracking the number of hits you get from a site. It could be php acting up, maybe people have javascript turned off or ad-block software turned on that blocks google analytics? All of my online research has given me long lists of reasons a few clicks might be missed, but not 90% of them. If we believe awstats & reddit 9and I’d be surprised if any site selling ads had the cheek to lie about them, they WOULD get caught by someone, and then the site is toast overnight), then it means that all of my google analytcis data has to be taken with a huge helping of salt.

Would I advertise on reddit again? Maybe, but I have other methods I’m experimenting with for now. (BTW don’t bother with google video ads, total waste of time and money).

Eurogamer Expo, press & public come see our games!

Posted on September 19, 2013

This is a public service announcement aimed at both press and public alike who will be attending this years Eurogamer Expo in London at the end of this month:

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PLEASE COME CHECK OUT OUR GAMES.

We obviously have 2 of the most interesting games at the show! I’m pretty certain we will have the ONLY turn-based deep political strategy game based on a neural network at the show…

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And also I’d wager that we have the only comedy sci-fi life-sim game at the show too…

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And when I say ‘We’ I mean me (Cliff Harris / Cliffski) the designer and programmer of Democracy 3, and Mitu Khandaker, the designer/coder of Redshirt. Come talk to us! Try our games! and if you are press, even just-starting-out youtube let’s players or bloggers, then don’t be shy, come say hello. We are happy for you to book interviews or meetings in advance (just email me), or just show up and tap us on the shoulder. We look roughly like this:

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We will be in a big indie booth collection near prison architect and hopefully lots of nice places where you can actually sit down. We will even have FREE BADGES. How can you turn that down?

Press people be aware that these are two new games currently in beta and both heading for release soon on Steam/GoG, so get in early and write up your impressions NOW!

Some marketing thoughts

Posted on September 10, 2013

I’ve been reading this book:

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Which is a bit old, but kinda interesting. I’ve always been impressed by the guy’s marmite theory of middle east peace. Anyway, part of the reason for this was for me to challenge my own thinking, and led to be scrawling all kinds of stuff over that big blackboard in my office. I was trying to re-evaluate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, F2P is the absolute perfect example of lateral thinking. It’s a totally different way of running a games business, as is pay what you want and kickstarter. All massively successful. Sadly, I did not reach a similar epiphany. However, it does open my mind.

I recently, out of curiosity, found myself adding up the total development cost (excluding my time) of Democracy 3. I then compared it to my proposed marketing budget for the game, and got a figure of 33.96%. In other words, for every dollar I spent on artwork/music/other stuff for the game, I was planning on spending $0.33 promoting it. This is lower than games like Call of Duty, where historically the marketing budget has dwarfed the mere development cost, but I can’t bring myself to do that :D.

However, with my lateral thinking-expanded mind, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a sensible way to analyze the optimum marketing spend anyway. In the back of my mind, if I’m thinking about what would be a suitable ROI, and looking at my costs, that’s probably the wrong metric. If I assume (conservatively) that D3 sells as well as D2, shouldn’t I really be looking at the marketing budget as a percentage of the projected revenue? not the costs? If so, then that 33% figure shrinks dramatically. As a result, what in my mind I can consider a reasonable marketing budget rises dramatically, because if I’m being rational, and I was happy to spend 33% I still should be, but of the larger (revenue) figure.

Now I know what you are thinking. In a perfect world the marketing budget expands infinitely as long as the ROI on each marketing dollar spent is positive, but that’s in a theoretical world with perfect information. If I spend $100 today, I might not see the ROI for six months, so do I halt my spending entirely tomorrow? Obviously you have to guess what’s going to happen and budget accordingly.

I find analyzing and managing this stuff fascinating, but am not aware of any games built around it. Gratuitous Marketing Battles here we come!