Category: business

I read an interesting, I may even say *insightful* post on a website recently. No wait! stop! I really did!

It was a debate about a new game, which had been released as ‘Free To Play’. There was some comment along the lines of how this was great because it meant there was no barrier to trying the game in this case, and that posters A and B would check it out. And then came the genius of poster C, who said something like this:

“So? Free isn’t a big deal any more. There are too many free / very cheap games. I have to weigh up whether the game is worth my time, rather than care about the cost”.

And I think this is going to be an increasingly popular view. I don’t blame people who put games on 90%-off sales. and I don’t blame people who immediately impulse-buy a game they haven’t even seen a video of, because it’s 90% off and sounds like it might be fun. I know how we have got where we are.

But where we are may not be sustainable.

A lot of gamers now complain about a huge game ‘backlog’. Games they bought for $1.99, which claim to have 30 hours of gameplay. There is this big thing of ‘backlog guilt’ where people try not to buy new games until they play all the ones from the past sales. It hasn’t happened to me, I’m very critical of games and only buy maybe 6 a year. The last two games I bought I played for maybe 8 hours combined. I do, however have absolutely no feeling that I *should* go back and *finish* them. I got my moneyworth, it’s not like I ‘owe it’ to the game makers to finish them. Most portals 2 buyers don’t finish the game, according to valve.

Clearly I’m a freak, and atypical, so going back to all these people with a big backlog of games and not enough time to play them, I think (hope?) we may see a change in mindset to this:

“I have limited free time. I enjoy games. I want to spend my limited free time getting the highest quality entertianment as possible. The fact that some games are very cheap is not an enticement, if I can afford to spend my limited free time playing the non-cheap stuff, and still have enough money to fill my free time in this way”.

It’s the way I think about food. I can afford to buy good food, and I know that there is only so much food I can buy, so I tend to spend more money than I have to on food. I don’t agonise about the economy / luxury decision when it comes to a chocolate cake (mmmm cake), because even if the economy cake is mega-cheap, there is only so much cake I can eat, so it may as well be good cake.

Do you think like this? or are you still drawn towards a game because it’s $0.99, even if you know it’s not as good as the game next to it, for $5.99…?

Given that amazons hosting systems recently fell apart (who really knows why), and now we hear that sonys playstation network has leaked customer details, possibly including credit card information, to hackers I think it’s time to clarify something that I’m very pleased is the case.

When you buy a game from me, I don’t see your payment details. I never handle the payment, and I have no database with your payment information on it. Nor do I want one. It’s all handled by a third party, either BMTMicro or Fastspring. Both of them are US companies.

Positech can’t be hacked and broken into and put your payment details at risk, because I never even see them. A dedicated company that takes this stuff very seriously handles it.

But better than that, we don’t rely on one-click ordering or customer purchase accounts. Nobody can steal your positech account and take away your games. Nobody can prevent you from getting at your games, launching them or running them.

I bet there are a ton of people who are absolutely furious at sony right now. To be safe, they should all ask for new credit cards. There are 70 million accounts. This is like an entire country being victim to identity theft. Scary stuff.

I have a problem. It’s the same problem most people selling stuff have. I cannot be sure that my adverts actually work. I can be *pretty* sure they do, but I really would benefit from some hard statistical data. Using technical means to track visitors and sales with cookies has failed me. I tried the google ecommerce tracking stuff, but frankly it was chaos.

One method, used in the newspaper industry, is to use coupons. You print a 10% off coupon on the advert, and then every customer who uses the coupon must have seen the ad (directly or indirectly). This could work, but of course it relies on people actually using the coupon. Because game demos are generally tried, and people play them for hours, if not days, the chances are people forget all about the coupon when buying. I suspect this method is as leaky as any other.

I could mitigate that by removing the game demo link entirely.  This is something I have never done, and am not keen on, but it would be possible.

Another method could involve having a special version of the demo which writes a file to disk. When the full game is first run, it could check for that file, and if found, report to my server that an ad-driven sale took place. Ideally, the demo installer would have the ad-click referer embedded in it somewhere, but at this point things start to get uber-involved.

I’m very interested to know other peoples experiences and tricks. How do you know whether an ad campaign, or a website review or link, or other traffic source is actually generating sales?

Me? I failed. But to be honest, it was an insane demand for me to go 24 hours. I did go the first half of the day without problems, but then I gave in and plugged my router back in. However, I hardly used the net for the rest of the day, and didn’t bother with instant messaging, any forums, or any non-urgent email.

So it was a partial success in those terms.

However, in productivity terms, it was pretty awesome. I got way more done in the first 3 hours of the day than I normally would. The fact that I had no email to answer,l share prices to check, sales to analyse, or  forum discussions / twitter chat to think about kept my mind 100% focused on some particularly evil bugs and getting some new features into the mystery next game.

What is truly sad, is how when I did relent and checked news sites, forums, twitter etc…. I hadn’t really missed much. There had not been any major events that I was missing out on, I just got to read a few emails 6 hours later than usual. Given the pretty significant boost in my productivity, i think this shows there is something in this.

As some have noticed, my self-declared no-inetrnet day also took out amazon and the PS3 network. Such is my POWER.

I think what I may do is try to implement no-internet mornings on Monday-Friday, when I am at my most productive. This is certainly worth an experiment. On the downside, that means American customers emailing me while I’m asleep get their replies 6 hours later, but they are asleep till then anyway.

I’m at the ‘proper production’ stage in my next game, which is no longer code-named ‘LB’. It might be code named ‘GTB’, or ‘OTT’ or something else. I haven’t decided 100% yet. Proper production is when I’m putting final art assets into the game, and coding big chunks of it. It’s too late for major design changes, but releasing screenshots is still a long way off.

How productive would you be if you didn’t have

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email
• RSS readers
• Instant messengers
• *Insert name of timewasting website here*

I reckon VERY productive. I get increasingly distracted by this stuff myself. So I propose a solution. Let’s make a pledge, readers of this humble blog. let us declare next thursday (21st April) as NO INTERNET DAY. On the day before, you will unplug your router/modem, and it will not be touched for the whole of NO INTERNET DAY, and can be re-connected on the friday morning.

Whether you are a software developer like me, or a student, or anyone who doesn’t 100% rely on day to day usage of teh web for your work, you are likely to get more done on NO INTERNET DAY than a typical working day. What have we got to lose? If you are going to join me in this experiment, reply, and say what you do for a living that you hope to be more productive at. or maybe you will be doing it to spend mroe time with pets/children/significant others. Then on the friday we can all see how we did, and how long it took before you gave up :D

Spread the word, lets see how many people can go cold turky webwise on April 21st…