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

Category: business

Identifying profitable ads

Posted on April 23, 2011

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?

No internet day. How did you do?

Posted on April 22, 2011

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.

 

No Internet Day

Posted on April 15, 2011

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…

When is it fair for the game servers to switch off?

Posted on April 13, 2011

Here is a question for you. For how long after the release of a game do you think there should still be support for online features to that game?

I’m not talking MMO games here, obviously that should continue all the time any sort of subscription fee is being charged. I’m talking about games where you buy it once, and you own it, but part of the game is online. Like Guild Wars (although that’s all online) or, to a smaller extent: Gratuitous Space Battles.

Gamers are rightly angry when they suspect the servers for a game get shutdown just to encourage you to buy this years copy. EA are great at that, as I recall. The thing is, we can probably agree that if a game hasn’t sold a single copy in ten years, turning off the server is just fine. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. We also all know that most evil EULAs indicate the servers can be turned off when they fancy it, so it’s not a legal issue either.

What we lack, as an industry, is any sort of expectations or standards for this. If I buy Guild Wars today, and the server is turned off in 6 months time, is that just tough for me arriving late? Or is it understandable?

We could argue that as long as one person has bought the game in the last six months, the game should still be running, but what if that person bought the game in a steam sale or pay what you want deal for just $0.10. Still reasonable?

I guess to me, one benchmark would be profitability. If the server costs $100 a month to rent, and the game isn’t bringing in $100, it seems fair to axe it, although even then, what if 8 people bought it yesterday for $10 each?  It seems right now a long way off for me to worry about that. GSB made much more than $100 yesterday, let alone this month, and as a fraction of the server costs, it probably doesn’t cost $100 a month to run anyway. Also, the server is busy:

New challenges posted in last 24 hours: 48
Challenge victories in the last 24 hours: 143
new survival mode scores in the last 24 hours: 6
challengevictory: 170

This will not last forever though. When sounds reasonable to you as a gamer?

****Note: I can’t see the GSB server being shutdown deliberately before 2015 at this rate, so don’t panic :D****

 

constant password changing silliness

Posted on April 8, 2011

And I quote:

Use the form below to change your login information.
* Make your password something you can remember and difficult for others to guess.
* Your new username/password will be effective immediately
* Password should be at least 6 characters long and should contain at least one capital letter and one digit
also, your password must start with a letter. (legal characters: a-zA-Z0-9_\-?!@#&$%^*()|)
* Password expires every 90 days.


You get no warning it will expire, and when you are FORCED to change it, they demand you reply to an email which they haven’t sent, as of ten minutes later. I can effectviely no lonegr use their service.

Somewhere, some flipping idiot at Plimus thinks this makes their system more secure. it doesn’t, it just means I switched to BMTMicro.
Dorks.