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

Category: democracy3

Democracy 3 collectors edition: 50% off right now

I haven’t mentioned this on here, so I feel I must. The collectors edition of Democracy 3 is 50% off this week on steam.

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Tell your friends, and also buy a copy, if bizarrely you don’t have one already :D The collectors edition is the base game plus all the DLC. What could be more fun! Plus its on Windows, mac & Linux, which seems to be less common on steam than it used to be. Ho hum. Anyway… I’m promoting this a bit on reddit and facebook, and hoping to have a nice bump in sales. Games like D3 can keep selling long after release, and its been a great last year for sales. Its my last hurrah before the release of GSB2, and then not *that* long afterwards…big pharma.

Things that I have done & learned lately

Soooo…I went to rezzed, which was cool for two days and then I just wanted it to ENDDDDDDDD. I get very burned out by shows. I could talk at length about how I was one of the chosen 0.00001% who got to try Valves new VR thing, and how it is just awesome and even better than the one I saw last year, but you know all that kind of thing anyway, and nobody will believe me until they try it…

I’ve been back working in GSB2 land since then, tweaking, adjusting, bug fixing and generally doing the 101 jobs you have to do before shipping. The current projected shipping date for GSB2 is April 16th. before then I need the trading cards set up, final bugs squashed, French,German and Spanish translations done and integrated, Linux & Mac ports done (hopefully), the final release trailer done, and some missing stuff like medium & hard difficulty enemies set up, plus default ship designs for every ship (only some are done so far). Plus those missions need some more interesting starting restrictions (something planned for today). With any luck, all that will be done by release day. Yay!

I’ve been advertising on twitter lately, with both GSB (a bit) and Democracy 3 (a lot). I got a few people complaining that they saw the ad too many time, which seems nuts because I have selected a very large group of people to target, and they shouldn’t really have seen it twice. I pestered twitter who said ‘you don’t need to limit frequency, our algorithm does that’ to which I had to refrain from replying ‘Sack your fucking programmer then’. The thing is, if you write an app that hooks into the twitter API they have a variable to set the frequency, so as usual, the front line customer service rep knows fuck all about their own product, and as usual (as with google, facebook…) I am more informed about their advertising delivery system than they are. Grrrr…

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Apologies if you see an ad from me too many times. You can always just click ‘dismiss’.

And on that topic…why do people get so annoyed at seeing a promoted tweet. Twitter is a business. Businesses need to pay their staff and server costs. If you really object to twitter ads, ask for a refund…oh wait.

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There is an argument that twitter should allow ad-free subscription service too, but they don’t, and frankly that isn’t my fault :D. Ho hum. I guess if people think they see too much promotion from me now they may have to go hide in a cave when I release GSB2 :D

Democracy 3: Clones & Drones

So, with great pleasure…after an incredibly long wait…I’m happy to announce we have a new expansion pack for Democracy 3, called ‘Clones & drones’. First…. the trailer!

A little explanation: This is an expansion that adds in the challenges of the near future. I’m not talking space battles and attacks by aliens, but more the kind of thing we might expect in 2020, 2030 maybe 2040. So we have to start worrying about stuff like Food Prices rising, rare-earth metals running out, technology causing unemployment, climate change (of course!) and the impact of stuff like driver-less cars, maybe even flying cars (oh yes…), longer lifespans and human cloning. Plus more depressing things like the collapse of effectiveness of antibiotics (we use them too much, basically), the danger of another, much bigger, flash crash. There is also the eventual problem of population rise (would we ever condone a one-child policy I wonder?) and hopefully one day, a trip to mars.

For deep tedious psychological reasons, I tend to be a pessimist about the future. I worry about climate change, the ease with which weapons of mass destruction (not so much nuclear, but biological) can be delivered by future terrorists, the almost inevitable erosion of privacy by technology, the further concentration of wealth and rise of corporate superpowers. For the record, I think Climate change trumps all of them, for the potential to really fuck us all over. However… your mileage may vary. Maybe you see an Iain M Banks or Star Trek future of abundance,  shorter working weeks and eventual lives of recreation with a robot workforce, extended lifespan and nuclear fusion providing limitless energy!

Whether your future glass is half full or empty, you will probably have fun trying to navigate the world of Democracy 3 through those years. Keep an eye on Food Prices and global temperature, it can be a real pain. I hope I’m around in 50 years to look back and laugh at what I thought would be the political issues of the year 2064.

The expansion works just like the others, so you can grab it direct from the developer(me!) here, which gets you steam keys too, or you can obviously buy it from steam, or the humble store, and soon, on GoG. It comes in Windows Mac & Linux flavors. I hope you enjoy it. ONLY YOU CAN SAVE OUR FUTURE!!!111ONEONEONE

Obviously the best thing you can do to save the future now is buy the DLC and the second best is to tweet about it, share it on facebook, or up-vote it on whatever social sharing site you people can access from your hover cars in the year 2050.

I will leave you with this:

Can I quote you on that?

“Cliff is awesome, but a bit arrogant, Would talk to again 4.5/5”

I’m shamelessly fishing for reviews. Not actually for ME, as I already have enough of an inflated ego to drown out any potential reviewed downsides. Nope, I’m after reviews for Democracy 3, from people who bought it. Just one-sentence reviews (or maybe 2) with peoples names and rough locations (Ohio! for example).

You know the kind of thing

I’m going to collect some and put them on the Democracy 3 page. They have to be genuine obviously, because I have ethics, like a vulcan. So if you bought the game direct from me, that would be awesome, because I can then look up your order and confirm it’s real. Maybe I’m being too paranoid there, I just don’t want people to think I’m being dishonest, which I’m not. Obviously there are tons of great steam reviews, but those are probably copyrighted or whatever.

Anyway, if you did like the game, pls email cliff AT positech dot co dot uk, with your review, and that would be fab :D

Fighting for app store ranks

Can you, by sheer weight of tweeting, facebook-promotion and general marketing and ‘oomph’ force your ipad strategy game into the charts?

Maybe not.

I’m experimenting with marketing efforts on the ipad version of Democracy 3. The game is already profitable, so I don’t *need* to make money from it on the app store, but I’m interested to see, if used as an experiment, whether or not you can catapult such a game into the top ten and then generate it’s own self-fulfilling sales momentum. It seems this is harder than i thought, even if you spend 70%+ of your profits straight back on marketing. Here are the charts. (click to enlarge)

charts

You can see that the game has a tough time clinging into any ‘top 10’ list, whereas I thought that it would pretty much stay there a while once it crossed that thresh-hold. It did that at the start of the chart, but getting it to bounce back in has been tricky, not to mention expensive. I’m currently trying to push it back in again, hence that climb (and my complaining wallet).

My guess is that it takes about $1,000 a day in marketing spend to get a game into the top 10 strategy or sim categories for the UK, presumably MUCH more for the US. I might concentrate entirely on the UK (as my ads are currently UK/US), so it might be possible to jump into the top 10 for less ads than that. The problem is, that seems to equate to only about 140 sales a day, so about $980 on a 70% cut of a $10 app. In other words, a net loss. Which of course makes sense in a completely perfect market, because if it was an easy win, those ad prices would just climb to eliminate the surplus. The people making money here are apple and advertising sellers, not the app developer.

Still, it’s all good fun :D