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

Category: business

The maths of unskippable piracy warnings

Posted on June 20, 2012

I bought a new blu-ray movie DVD and sat through three long, boring unskippable anti-piracy notices at the start of the movie.

Lets assume every person who watches DVDs / Blurays puts up with a similar inconvenience approximately once a week on average

Assume a total therefore of twenty seconds of time wasted per week, per viewer. 52 weeks a year is 17 minutes of wasted time per year, per consumer.

Assume 200 million US consumers + 200 million more from Europe, Japan, Australia etc, as a conservative figure.

That’s 56 million hours wasted per year by people watching this stuff. (6,392 man years)

at an average wage of say $16 an hour (src: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=773)

that means pointless unskippable copyright notices cost the global economy $896,000,000 a year, enough to create maybe 18,000 decent paying full time jobs.

Looked at another way, the lost time equates to (assuming average life expectancy of  78.1 yearts according to google) the lives of 81 people.

I hate piracy, but I hate stupidity too. And unskippable piracy warnings are not only stupid, they are wasting the best part of a billion dollars a year.

Pass it on… :D

The entrepreneur/cautious war inside my head

Posted on June 7, 2012

Ok, I admit it, I wanted an excuse to type war inside my head. But there really is one.

There is half of me that looks at the games industry, and Positech, and Gratuitous Tank Battles, and reads books on how big big companies (google, amazon etc) got where they are, and thinks:

“We are literally INSANE if we aren’t taking at the very least a third of our profits and throwing them madly into expanding the business by way of advertising spending, promotional activities (conference appearances and promo stands etc), stuff like T-shirts and posters and hiring a proper PR agent to grow the public awareness of the company,

The other half of me thinks:

“Those ads are not converting at a rate that makes any economic sense. It’s money burned. Plus this partnership with X or Y is not as profitable as if I did it myself, plus I can do all my own PR, plus we live in turbulent economic times. If we have $X in the bank, we should definitely leave it there, as an insurance policy against having a really bad year. better safe than sorry”.

It’s a constant battle, which means that my google adwords budget can swing madly from £150 a day (first half of brain is victorious) to zero (second half is winning).

My pet theory is that a lot of entrepreneurs I admire (Jeff Bezos, Duncan Bannatyne) just don’t have the second part of the brain at all. They see no downside, no need for caution, no possibility of failure, and never consider the companies money to be for anything other than growing the company.

Maybe that last sentence is the true key. is positech’s income mine? In a legal and practical sense, it is. But should I stop thinking that it is, and think of it as positech’s? Maybe if I did, I’d be free-er with promotional stuff, and spending in general. I could tell you amusing, fairly embarrassing tales of the stuff I’ve done on my own (badly) because I was too cautious to pay what amounts to quite small amounts of money to get other people to do it.

I may experiment with the idea of thinking that positech and me are different things. Ommmmmmmmmmm……

Indie game advertising strategies

Posted on May 28, 2012

If you are a lone-wolf indie game dev, you probably don’t spend ANY time thinking about grand strategy when it comes to advertising. Don’t worry, I think about it enough for both of us :D

Which strategy works best for you, really does depend on your game and your overall business model (paid-app, DLC, micro-trans, subscriptions…). However, there might be some benefit to brainstorming different approaches…

#1 SCATTERGUN

You advertise EVERYWHERE, on different ad networks, with different ad types (text / image / video…) you try print ads and newsletter-mentions, sponsored blog posts, etc etc. Then, you look at the data and pick the one which converts the best. Problem is, with 20 different advertising approaches, you need to spend at least $20,000 to get anything vaguely usable in terms of stats.

#2 CHERRY PICKING

You set up your ad campaign to exclude almost everyone. Nobody above a certain age, nobody from countries that aren’t buyers, nobody on a platform that isn’t your target, nobody at the end of the month (broke) or when they are at work (9-5), nobody that isn’t on one of the hand picked websites that you think best represent the people who will buy your game. You then bid some silly amount like $1 a click, to make sure you get those high-converting visitors.

#3 PRODUCT PROFILE

You don’t care about clicks. You engineer things to get the lowest CPM (impression cost) you can. You definitely let google show the same ad to the same visitor ajn infinite number of times. Your ads don’t even really say much, they just have your logo as big and as bold as possible. Nobody will click them, and you don’t care. You just want name recognition for when your game is in a list on steam, or mentioned on kotaku, that makes people pay attention.

#4 THE SUBSTITUTE_REVIEW

You realise that nobody has a clue what sort fo game your’s is, or what you do, or how much it is, or that it’s on sale, so you concentrate on fitting all this information into BIG ads and plaster them all over the place. It doesn’t matter if sites won’t cover your game, because you can force your name onto their front page using your ad dollars. For added effect, you set up streaming ads to play video of your game.

#5 BARREL SCRAPAGE

You bid hilariously low on a huge number of ads, knowing that now and them, you are the only bidder. Your ads run for some laughable price like $0.01, and the traffic isn’t targeted at all, but given the amount of visits they generate. you figure that you are playing the law of big numbers and all will work out. When you are selling a cheap game, this may work for you, because you can’t pay $1 for a visit when your game is $2.99.

#6 COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

You don’t advertise your game, but your site, with all 10 games you have made. For added impact, you affiliate some other indie devs games and suddenly your website looks like steam. An ad may well bring a disinterested clicker, but now he has ten opportunities to be interested, and you might suddenly be able to afford a higher cost per click. (This is the basic principle behind when I’ve run ad campaigns for www.showmethegames.com).

amusing ad break…

I don’t know which of these strategies is overall the best, but they are all worth considering, if not necessarily gambling $20k on :D

Humble Store

Posted on May 24, 2012

I’m experimenting with using the humble store for my direct sles, on two products: Gratuitous Space Battles, and the GSB collectors edition. The buy page, for those interested, is here:

http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/register.html

I’m still using BMTMicro there for my credit card payments. I’ve been with BMT a long time, so it would take a lot to move me, but I know that the humble bundles are very popular and I’m guessing there are a lot of people out there who ‘trust’ the humble store as a brand, whereas they may not have encountered BMTMicro before.

In any case, it’s an experiment to see if it affects sales up or down :D

Also… Patch 1.009 for Gratuitous Tank Battles has been released. Here is the changelist:

1) Fixed crash when attempting to save out a unit that had a * in the name.
2) Setting windowed mode, whilst also matching your desktop resolution will result in borderless window mode now.
3) Game now explains to player that they won't see any challenges until they are logged in.
4) Online challenge browser now shows complete two-line descriptions rather than cropping them at one line.
5) Fixed bug where the game would hang sometimes on playing custom or online maps as defender with 'scenario units' where a small number of units was included.
6) Fix for occasional crash bug on saving units (in some circumstances)
7) Fixed bug in non-steam version where the default sample units could not be deleted from within the game.
8) Balance:Laser carbine cost up from 3 to 5.
9) Balance:Heavy Pulse laser damage up from 6 to 8
10) Balance:Rapid Pulse blaster damage up from 4 to 5
11) Balance:Light pulse laser damage down from 9 to 6
12) Balance:Salvo interval for incendiary rockets up from 300 to 2000
13) Balance: Heavy Missile Rack damage down from 68 to 52
14) Balance: HEAP Missile thrower fire interval up from 1400 to 1700
15) Balance: Light Missile launcher damage down from 38 to 31
16) Added new map : campaign map 12.
17) Fixed bug where sorting by class on the unit design load dialog sometimes did not work entirely.
18) Balance: Changed the difficulty of a number of scenarios.

More fixes and improvements to come…

Gratuitous Ad Campaign

Posted on May 20, 2012

People tend to keep this stuff to themselves, but I’m not really sure why, unless you are WPP or Saatchi and Saatchi, worried about the competition…

Anyway, I’ve been running a few ads since the launch of GTB. The game is on big name portals such as steam, which is where it gets a lot of visibility, but I don’t think there is any harm in promoting the games website direct, my company, and the idea of direct sales.

My ad campaign has been fairly low key so far. I have exclusively used google adwords as my ad provider in this case (I’ve used other companies for other campaigns, but adwords seems to be a good ROI).

The ads have been running for 4 days so far and the stats are:

446,851 impressions
901 clicks
Average cost per click: £0.15.
Traffic bounce rate: 71%
Ave visit duration: 25 seconds. (vs 1 min 09 for all traffic)

Interestingly that makes for a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of £0.30.

Even given MUCH better quality traffic, that’s why I laugh at the CPM prices quoted by many big name sites.

I can’t help thinking that the scale of my ad campaign is laughably small so far (I might double it right now…) and that the average visit duration is really low. Roughly 10% of my adword-sourced visitors spend >60 seconds on my site, which I consider to be a fairly good quality visitor. That means £1.50 to get a good visitor that way, which seems pretty poor, if you consider they still might not buy the game (although they may still mention it to others, or buy it later).

However, comparing it with 2 other recent ad campaigns shows me that adwords certainly beats them, in terms of price-for-quality-visitor.

I’m definitely going to go double my daily ad spend…