2012

Here is my vision of positech industries in 2012.

There is one full time employee, and it’s still me. Most of the personal stuff relating to the core business is still done by me. It’s still me on twitter, writing this blog, and designing the games. It’s still me making the big business decisions, and I still own the company 100%

The Positech Engine is now much bigger than before, and takes up a larger chunk of each games source code. Some code is being written by contractors, such as all of the editors and mod tools.

The positech website is completely outsourced, with a web developer and designer paid to update and improve the site. The developer also doubles up as a server admin, and handles coding all of the php and database stuff required for positech’s games. Possibly the same person is a community manager, forum admin and moderator, and in charge of replying to tech support emails. Either the same, or another person runs showmethegames.com

Specially written client software handles all of the business data for everything, integrating sales data from all the different sales channels, and tying it in with multiple advertising agencies to produce simple, accurate charts showing how everything is going. Ad budgets and management is all handled automatically, occasionally emailing a contract artist to request some new variants of existing adverts to keep the campaigns fresh. Every single buyer of the game can be tied, as much as possible to the way they heard about my company or games.

A large portion (at least 25%) of the profit for the company still comes direct from sales to gamers, not through third parties.

Positech has multiple games selling on steam.

There is a contract assistant game designer who helps with level balancing and design, and some back story stuff. There is also an artist employed on a contract basis, but working probably six months a year. Pre-release testing is handled by a dedicated tester, employed on a contract basis. New games are tested out on actual gamers in meatspace, and they are filmed whilst playing the game so I can analyse facial expressions as they play.

Positech has diversified slightly, just in case, maybe by buying a part-share in a large wind turbine, or maybe buying some woodland, or investing in a non-games tech company.

Oh and I nearly forgot. I celebrate New Year 2012 by finally getting planning permission for solar panels.

HA!

like THAT is going to happen :D

Here is my wishlist for google adwords:

1) Hire some more people to approve image ads. They don’t need to be google engineers. Anyone who can click a mouse could do it.

2) Add the ability to copy image ads from one ad group and campaign to another without uploading them again. If I need a separate campaign for the UK, then I need to upload everything again. That’s madness, and makes 1) worse.

3) Allow the ability to have ads within a single campaign or ad group that are shown only to specific countries, ditto with kerywords. The word ‘obama’ isn’t as relevant in Birmingham as it is in new York. Creating a copycat campaign is overkill and pointless.

4) Allow us to edit the destination URL of an ad without re-uploading it.  That check is already automated so there is absolutely no excuse for not doing it.

5) Allow me to easily view which conversions were triggered by which ads or keywords. Right now I can just see ‘conversions’ as opposed to an easy break-down by type.

6) under networks, allow me to set up groups of target sites which I manage individually. I’m only allowed ‘managed’ and then ‘everyone else’. I’d much rather be able to set up groups of sites, especially ones I could then transfer to another campaign with just one mouse click.

and now the big one

7) Allow us to set a spending cap for a campaign and stop it when it runs out. Come on, this isn’t rocket science and everyone using adwords thinks your ‘adwords is designed for ongoing ads’ is bullshit. If we want a fixed budget for a certain ad, you, the ad provider should let us do that. It’s a cynical and cheap ploy to get us to accidentally overspend, and it’s infuriating and silly.

That’s about it for now :D

I thought I’d blog these in future. I’ve been trying out this page:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/index.html

Vs this page:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/index_var1.html

To compare what percentage of people click the demo button. The second one has some missing content, and I theorised that fi there were less distractions and fluff on that page, it might push more people to hit the demo button. In fact, I was wrong:

Still, it was worth a try :D

EDIT EDIT EDIT

See the comments section below, plus zero-g games have contacted me to resolve the matter and send back payments of royalties. It looks like the real villains of this piece are the casual ‘portals’ who increasingly screw the developers, and guys like zZro-G out of paying on time. I should point out that steam pay within a month, so anyone who is taking a lot longer than that is just hoarding other peoples cash.

Anyway, anyone looking for something newsworthy here should probably look towards the causal games portals rather than the spat between me and zero-G.

EDIT EDIT EDIT

oooh did I really type that?

I guess I did, and it would be a disaster if a well trafficked blog became a prominent search result for the casual games publisher zero-g games wouldn’t it? But then… That’s what happens if you stop replying to your developers emails, and stop paying them, and 3 other fellow developers I’ve spoken to.

If you work for bigfish games, or any other casual portal that stock these titles:

Kudos

Kudos: Rock Legend.

You will want to check your inbox for my email. Basically you are selling a game you don’t have the rights to any more, so I strongly suggest stopping that. As for anyone who wants to buy those games. DO NOT BUY THEM, unelss you buy them direct from me, or from impulse, gamersgate or direct2drive. Everyone else is depriving me of my share, and I made those games, so that hardly seems fair.

Also if you see a game called ‘oval office’ don’t buy it. It’s a cut down bastardised, casualised, americanised version of Democracy 2, which is much much better. Buy that instead.

And lastly, to any of the many publishers who keep spamming me wanting to sell GSB or my older games, and annoyed I’m not replying. Give up now. I’m never replying, I route all your emails to the bin.

Selling direct FTW!

I love making and playing games, I hate the liars and thieves in this industry though…