Category: business

An idea as old as stonehenge, is that indie game developers should band together and start up an ‘indie portal’. The idea goes to discussion, then argument, then an obsessive ranting over the topic of what is considered indie, and then devolves into a sort of kibbutz-style hippie-love-in where no decisions ever get made because everyone had to agree on everything, which never happens, because we are, as a tribe, very independent.

So after watching this spectacle about 100 times over the last decade, I decided that what was needed was someone to just bulldoze ahead like an egotistical dictator* and say “this is what we are doing, take it or leave it”. I also thought that a full blown steam-style portal would never happen, so thought it best to start smaller. And this is how ShowMeTheGames got started.

Here is the website in question:

www.showmethegames.com

It was a domain name that was free, and reminds me of Jerry McGuire, which is, after all, a story of a guy quitting his corporate job to go indie…

Now I know what you are thinking, “why haven’t I heard about it then?” isn’t it usual form for me to go on a publicity blitz? When am I going to punch Keith Vaz on live TV? The whole point of SMTG was to prove 2 basic concepts:

• You can get almost 20 indie game developers to co-operate, and actually pay money into a mutual project
• You can make advertising work for indie developers, it we club together. (this is why we tested it as an ad-driven site at first)

I think SMTG proves both, but you’d have to ask each contributor if its working to get an unbiased view. Basically, we have been running google ads that point to that page, on the basis that if you see an ad for defcon, come to SMTG, you might try out defcon, but you might also like GSB, or Smugglers IV or Castle Vox… That way, it’s like having the advertising and catalog clout of a portal, yet we all still independent, all taking 100% of the sale price. The site is php and randomises the order of the games, so nobody has a better slot than anyone else.

I think there is some future in SMTG. We might start running competitions to win games, or have discount bundles of our stuff, or post up interviews and previews of new games. I just don’t know yet. So far, it’s just an experiment. One decent outcome from it so far is this:

If you are trying to explain to someone what an indie game is, you no longer have to point them at a single example or wave your arms saying “Stuff like World of Goo”. Just point them to showmethegames.com, it has a whole bunch of the best indie games I could find. If you can find it in your heart to tweet a link to the site, hashtag #smtg, that would be awesome.

*can you guess who that was?

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

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’.

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