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

Category: business

Domain Name Woes

Bah. I had all sorts of interesting plans for what work to do today, and they are all up in smoke.

My domain name registrar has gone tits up. I have about 10 domains there, including cliffski.com, so well done if you managed to still get here. Luckily the actual site hosting is with hostgator, and positech.co.uk is not affiliated at all with the useless incompetent muppets at my old domain name registrar. Also, thankfully my forums and the actual game server are thus unaffected.

It’s not *too* bad because hardly anyone types in the domain names, but I bet I’m losing some traffic now. I’m also possibly losing some email. bah.

I’ve been quoted $15 per domain to move them from my dodgy crappy cheap old registrar to the same company that hosts the site. That’s non trivial, but I guess it might be worth doing to avoid this mess. My real fear is that monday morning, the part time idiots that claim to run an inetrnet registrar won’t be fixing it, and I may be stuck in domain name limbo. This sucks :(

I wish I really understood more about DNS and the way it’s set up in WHM and stuff like that. Right now my sites are all a bit hacky, thats why going to gratuitousspacebattles.com just redirects you to positech. Ho hum. I guess it’s the games that matter, not this crap :D

The Indie Rules Of Acquisition

I don’t have time to annotate and explain them now, but I thought at least I could put up the raw slides from my presentation at the Indie World Of Love conference. If I get time tonight or tomorrow, I’ll expand this blog post with details, but for now here they are. For anyone actually AT the conference, this is what my slides were meant to look like, without my silly attempt to use the ‘open document format’.

Ad stats, and why people make DLC.

Sooo. I managed to keep my grubby paws from editing my ad campaigns for 30 seconds. I blogged a few days ago about how I took the top 25 sites for ROI (return-on-investment) and confined the Gratuitous Space Battles ad campaign to just them. Here is the results.

Over almost 6 days the impressions for the banners totalled 678,000. The clicks were 3,636 and the average cost per click was a whopping £0.10 (roughly $0.16). That cost me £366.94. Over the same period the income from gratuitous space battles sales was a total of $1,095.71, or roughly £684.

So in a crude sense, I spent 366 and got 684 back. In theory, a pretty good deal. However, I would have got some of those sales anyway, through word-of-mouth, and through reviews and so on. Plus some of them are people buying expansion packs for already bought copies. On the other hand, some of the visitors would have bought the game from impulse or steam or elsewhere, so I get that money too. Plus a bunch of them may buy the game in a week, or even in six months. It’s hard to tell.

If you look at it as £318 for 6 days, that’s nothing very exciting at all. Thankfully I have other games on sale, otherwise I’d be scared :D.

For comparison, I looked at the month of september too. $9,203 sales.  £2,532 ads (roughly $4,051) . That is heavily skewed by the release of the Nomads expansion pack. On the surface, my recent 6 day ad-driven experiment was a ROI of 186% and september gave me a ROI of 227%.

So one of two things has happened. Either the new ‘let google pick them’ strategy is not as effective as I thought it would be, or in fact adverts are just not in any way as good at generating income as new expansion packs. I think it’s probably the latter. Don’t forget that the expansion packs will continue to sell for a few more months, and also generate extra income from sites like impulse and steam (if they actually add the nomads :D).

I know some people hate games that keep releasing DLC, but programmers have to eat, and if I’m honest, the smart thing to do (from a business POV) is to keep doing them. I don’t think I will though, I think the campaign is the last one.

Out of interest, has anyone here ever seen a GSB ad? where did you see it?

Re-assessing adwords strategies

I advertise a fair bit on google, as well as other sites. I was getting annoyed with the system recently, carrying out multiple changes to my Gratuitous Space Battles campaign, and trying to tweak things to avoid having my ads shown on flash-games compilation sites that look horrid, and trying harder to get them on QuarterToThree, RockPaperShotgun, etc.

Then I say back and thought about all my tracking systems, and a book I read called supercrunchers, and zynga, and I came to a different conclusion about how to manage it all, a conclusion I am now testing out.

I have a system, whereby I know if a visitor from a google advert click ever hits the GSB demo download link, or the buy page. I consider these to be pretty good indicators of purchase intent, and what I do is to equate them to a monetary value as a conversion. I derive this basically by dividing up the income from the sales by the extent to which those events happen. It’s crude, but not *that* crude.

That means I can say (for example) that a demo download is worth $0.40. That means if I can get enough clicks from enough sites on google to generate that download, for less than $0.40, I’m winning. This is especially true given the potential long term lifetime earnings from a  new customer.

Anyway, google can already automatically handle all this crap for me. My analytics can crunch out the top 25 ROI websites for investment, over the last 3 or 4 months of advertising. These wont be the cheapest, or the most suited to my game, but the ones where the amount of clickers who actually go on to download or consider buying is the best value for money.

So as an experiment, I ditched every single site I advertise on through google, all of the hand-picked ones, like RPS, and various space games and sci-fi sites, and replaced them purely with the 25 top ROI sites for those ads, as judged by the google stats. In other words, I am binning my pre-conceptions and guesswork and opinions and ideas, and purely trusting the data. Because conversions take time to register, I reckon it will be a good 5 days before I know if this simple, and entirely data-driven process is working. If it is, I may never change it. Why would I?

So my new plan for ads is two phases:

phase I: let this run another 4 days at elast, without changing ANYTHING, and observe the data.

phase II: if the data suggests I am making money, double the budget. In a month, if the data still holds, quadruple the budget.

I’ll be sure to blog the outcome :D

Selling games and selling butter

I went shopping yesterday, bought loads of food. I noticed that butter seemed to range from £1.30 to about £1.60 in the store I went to (an average supermarket). This suddenly jolted my brain because I am pretty sure butter used to be about 90p – £1.00, depending on brand. What the hell has skyrocketed the price of butter? (it’s not like we don’t have enough cows, I can see some from my window :D).

Anyway…. It was quite unusual for me to notice that the price had rocketed up so much, and I started to think about my attitude to food pricing. It’s interesting to note that I didn’t notice the pricing of hardly anything else that I bought. Maybe I’m sensitive to the price of wine, and chicken, but that’s because I buy it a lot (also explains noticing butter), but what price should a pack of crumpets be? No idea. What price should 80 T-bags be? No idea.

When you think about it, the ‘seeing the price’ element of purchasing something physical is actually very minor. Even if you have little money, the price evaluation component of the shopping experience is tiny. With clothes, there is all the trying them on, seeing how they look in the mirror, feeling the lovely material…blah blah. You are aware of the price, for sure, but it appears only briefly when the checkout person mentions it to you as they hand you a big bag full of purchased stuff. If the price is reasonable, you can easily just breeze through the experience and forget what you paid for it, or never even acknowledge it. Like I did with crumpets. I didn’t see the price, I just saw yummy crumpets.

That doesn’t happen with online games purchases. The price is there in big bold letters, right next to the product

Gratuitous Collectors Edition            $24.95

They are given equal weight. The price of the item becomes as important as the item itself. Because we aren’t looking at some big physical thing, the products presence cannot blind us to the price of it. I wonder if having large images of the product, with a small price label under them on an order form generates more sales than having it all as just text? There is also no distraction. I don’t have to physically load my purchase into a bag, and I’m not in a  hurry because people are behind me in the queue. There is this big glowing PRICE in front of me, challenging me to be unhappy with it, and I know I can still back out of the deal at this point without anyone giving me a funny look.

Hmmmm.