Category: business

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…

So Friday was world-of-love conference day for indies. It meant waking at 5.30am and banging my head on a metal railing in the dark. Bah!

The conference itself was worth going to, met a bunch of people from indie development which was cool. Alice taylor and Sophie Houlden gave some great presentations, and tak’s talk was interesting too. I did a sudden ’10 seconds-notice’ interview with radio 4 for a program about indie games which will go out in june at some point. I hope they don’t edit me out :D I probably sounded a bit nervous, and didn’t say anything wildly controversial, but I got through it, and I’m glad I said yes to it.

I had a few of those ‘maybe I should have business cards made?’ moments, but decided maybe not. Afterwards was pub, then pizza. Just like the last world-of-love there was no room in the pub for anyone, and nobody could hear a thing. Surely there is a better way?

The bad news, is when I got home, we realised the next day some scumbag had tried to break into our garage. Very unusual, apparently they tried everyones. It’s not like where I live is high crime. They cut the lock using boltcutters, so I had to go get a new one, and then got bolts that were too short. doh! Still, you learn a few knacks as a boatbuilder, and those screws aren’t coming out in a hurry. Plus, I’ve ordered one of these. Maybe it’s time for me to invest in a night vision attachment for my bow. I already have a night vision scope, but I need both hands to shoot someone. Bah.

Also, a casual game publisher has stopped paying me my royalties. I hate publishers, they are almost all a bunch of criminals. Another lesson learned I guess, and another reason to ALWAYS sell direct to the customer if you can. Maybe they will suddenly appear and pay me, if not, they just go on my list of people to get revenge on when I rule the galaxy.