Category: business

One of the really boring bits of my job which doesn’t involve explosions (all the best bits involve explosions), is the tedious process of working out which people who saw an advert or website coverage bought a game. Big companies have an army of calculator-brained accountant/web developer geek hybrids to worry about this nonsense, while the game designers do more important stuff like eat canapes and quaff champagne. In my case, I have to do it.

Bah.

(The sales tracking, not the quaffing)

Double Bah.

People who know me well, will realise that peversely, I love this sort of stuff. However, getting it working properly is a nightmare. I use google as my analytics provider, and BMT Micro as my payment company. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get it all to work properly. In theory this is what happens:

• Visitor comes to the positech site from a google advert, google analytics drops a cookie on their PC.
• Visitor buys the game(yay!) and is redirected to the BMTMicro site.
• Javascript on BMTs site notifies google all of the data about the transaction, and who made it
• Analytics ties this together and lets me congratulate myself on a l33t advert.

In practice, this is what currently happens:

• Visitor comes to the positech site from a google advert, google analytics drops a cookie on their PC.
• Visitor buys the game(yay!) and is redirected to the BMTMicro site.
• Javascript on BMTs site treats all transactions as UK Pounds, regardless of currency. Lets hope nobody in zimbabwe buys the game or the stats are useless,
• Analytics denies all knowledge of the fact that it’s the same visitor, convinced that everyone who buys the game must have appeared magically on BMTs website by beaming there direct from Tatooine.

I may have fixed this, by completely re-doing all of the javascript for the analytics on all the pages on the site I’m tracking, but it will take a few days for me to see if that’s really the case. To add confusion, I don’t have access to the code on the actual post-buy page, because that’s a secure page hosted by BMTMicro, so debugging this takes longer than usual. Google have written dozens of articles on how it works, almost all of which is contradictory. Thanks guys!

To really hammer home how clueless I am at that, I have picked up a stalker.

My stalker is an advert for an iiyama monitor that I looked at once, which follows me everywhere. It’s the digital equivilant of a girl you smiled at in a bar once who then follows you everywhere for the next 30 days. Creepy, and annoying, but more importantly, it’s evidence that everyone else has their customer tracking down to a fine art, and I’m still acting like some newcomer blundering about in clown shoes wondering who buys his games.

Bah.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people targeting indie developers, for all platforms, with support services.

By this, I mean all those things that big development studios have dedicated staff for, but for which you can’t possibly employ full time people for as an indie. I already employ quite a few people on small or partial contracts to do this stuff. Such as:

• An accountant
• A company to host my websites
• A company to host the domain name registration
• A musician (often a different one for each game)
• Several artists (also different, depending on the game)
• Advertising management companies (google adwords etc)

I’m obviously pleased with having other people do all this stuff, because frankly, if I had to do all the art, my accounts, compose the music, run a linux web server, etc etc, then my games would be of much lower quality, or take even longer to make.

Like many ‘semi-successful’ indies, I’m now in the position where the bottleneck in terms of future game quality, and sales and success is quite simply ME. I just don’t have enough time to do everything. On the flipside, I don’t vaguely have the money to employ people full time. Nor do I have the inclination to deal with the myriad of bureaucracy and nonsense that the UK govt wishes to burden all companies with (sick-leave, employers liability insurance, pensions, national insurance zzzzzzz….)

However, I would be interested in making use of more people for some stuff in the next game. I’m a long way off needing anyone now, but as that game gets closer to completion, I can see myself seeking out and employing more people, short term to do additional stuff that I’d normally do myself. It just surprises me that there aren’t more companies providing a sort of ‘a-la-carte’ service for stuff like playtesting and balancing, web forum management, website design, art production, platform-porting services etc. It seems slightly inefficient to have to find all these people myself and deal with them individually. How come there aren’t indie-support companies yet?

I’ve worked as first, second and third line tech support for IT companies, and I also run an indie games biz and handle my own support, so I’m in a reasonably informed position to dosh out some handy advice here to people who run into a tech-support brick wall. here goes:

1. If sending email, ensure there is a subject line. I’m serious. blank subject lines aren’t going to leap out from someone’s inbox. I get quite a few of these.
2. Make sure you state up-front and clearly what product or service you have a problem with. In my case, that would be *which* game. It saves a lot of guesswork on time
3. State anything unusual about your setup. I get a lot of people who only mention they are running the game on Linux (officially unsupported) under WINE after about 6 emails. That’s silly. Let the tech support guy be the judge of what is relevant to the cause, don’t assume.
4. Find out your rough system specs first, and state them in the email. Everyone will need to know what version of windows you have, and for games, what video card. Find this out *before* you email them, because they are going to ask you anyway.
5. Don’t get abusive. Especialy not in the very first email. People who are there own boss, like me, will just delete those emails. At the very  least, you go to the back of the queue.
6. Don’t write a novel. The guy scanning tech support issues is busy. Don’t include too much fluff.
7. Include any previous correspondence, quoted below or attached. In an ideal world, all tech support staff can instantly see a log of your problem and previous emails. In practice, esp for small companies, we don’t have a system like that. And even when we do, scrolling down an email to see what was said is quicker anyway. This saves us a whole bunch of time.
8. Understand the problem from the other guys POV. Every consumer computer on earth has a different combination of hardware and software and configuration. It’s not ‘stupidity’ that has resulted in a software crash. They are likely more annoyed at the software having bugs than you are so remember by default, they are on your side.
9. Use email if you can, and there isn’t a dedicated support form. Email is easily stored and searched. I get tech support requests by forum PMs, by twitter, facebook messages, blog posts and everywhere else. At least try to find the contact email address for support, as this will get the quickest response. My email is cliff@positech.co.uk. Good companies do not hide their email address.
10. Don’t assume you are being ignored. It’s a big world and tech support may be asleep while you are awake (I’m in England). They may also be investigating the bug before getting back to you. Some problems are fixed in 2 minutes, some take 3 months.  If you need to chase up a problem be polite, and remember 7.

Of course, this doesn’t always work. Some companies, which I won’t name, but they are global internet companies, ignore all communication that isn’t by phone. *Sigh*. But you certainly can’t be *worse* off for keeping this stuff in mind.