quote: Original post by Siebharinn
I guess my problem is that I don''t understand the "budget" model. I don''t understand how a 7 year old Win 3.1 game can still be generating a couple hundred dollars a month. Who buys these?

Steve mentioned doing research to find out where a niche is. Where do you look for that info? I''ve been too brainwashed into just going to Best Buy and browsing the aisles. Where does someone even buy budget games?

Personally I play a lot of different types of games. A recent favorite was Halo on XBox, which I beat at the hardest setting. My favorite game of all time was Ultima IV. But it doesn''t matter what I like -- what matters to me is what players want.

One problem we game developers have is that we''re too damn smart -- in both right- and left-brained thinking. I can''t say I''ve ever met an accomplished game developer who wasn''t essentially a genius when compared to the rest of society. Very few of us can relate to the wants and needs of the average person on the street. So our intelligence becomes a handicap when we try to understand the market as a whole.

Developers too often outsmart themselves by thinking a certain type of game won''t sell because they wouldn''t buy it themselves. We all expect a game like Halo or Starcraft to be a huge hit, but it deeply irks us to see Deer Hunter do so well. Games that that should flop, shouldn''t they?

The reality is that there are millions of players around the world looking for games on search engines and download sites. They want a quick fix of fun, perhaps a break from work. They don''t want to spend $300 on a console. Their PC is 3 years old and came from Radio Shack. Many have no idea what DirectX is. They would rarely even enter a software store -- it makes them feel uncomfortable. Exploring 3D environments makes them naseous. Violence turns them off. They''re attracted to card games, puzzle games, and simple arcade games -- the kinds of games they can figure out in 5 minutes or less. They want games that relax and soothe them with some relatively easy gameplay, not something to frustrate them with a complex set of commands they must master before they can get to the fun part.

And the truth is that there''s a lot more of these people in the world than there are hardcore gamers. And they have credit cards just the same....


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

quote: Original post by ktuluorion
It totally convinced me that I would like to submit my game there, although they say they generally like puzzle-type games and not 3d shooters. I''d be interested in whether it is possible at all for it to be accepted or not, if you could let me know Steve. If so, i''d try submitting it to you, because I must say, your site sold me on wanting to have you guys selling my software.

We are publishing a 3D shooter game (Strayfire) later this summer, so we''ll see how well it does. I don''t think this type of game will be our bread-and-butter, however.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

Another thing that helps casual games sell is word of mouth. Our referral sales are about 20-30% of our total (i.e. customers referring other customers). People often install these types of games to play during their breaks at work. Their coworkers stop in for a chat, and they get curious. They go home that night, search for the game on a search engine, find our web site, download the demo, and come back later to buy it.

Search engines also pour in a lot of traffic. "Games" is one of the most popular search terms in existence (after "sex" of course). If you look at our home page, for instance, you''ll see that it''s just riddled with game-related keywords and few graphics. You won''t find any flash intros or graphic-rich intro pages. I agree that fancy graphics can make a site look really nice, but they kill search engine rankings.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

In a freak occurence, I couldn''t agree with most of what the article says more.

Bet some of you never thought you''d see me post something like that.

quote: Original post by Siebharinn
That''s a good point. I wasn''t trying to say that the rest of the world wouldn''t (or shouldn''t) buy Dweep because I wouldn''t, just that I don''t understand the market that does buy Dweep. That market is so outside of my realm of experience that I have a hard time getting my head around it.

I know I''m thinking too mainstream. And I''m trying to figure out the other side. Where do people get $10 card games? I found a few shareware download sites last night and looked at the top downloads for each one.

What bothers me is that I know you''re right about the untapped market, I just know very little about it. So I''m doing some research and educating myself about it. I''ll probably end up joining the ASP, since they might know a thing or two about shareware.

Thanks guys, this has been an interesting and enlightening thread.

Take care,
Bill

Oh, I gotcha now. I misread the intent of you earlier post. I totally understand your position now. It may be hard to bend out thought stream toward the casual gamer due to the fact that we, as a group, tend to be smarter than most. I think Dexterity put that into wonderful focus in his last post.

I think it is kind of funny how the folks on this board can be ripping each others throats out in one thread and having such a wonderful and useful discussion in others.



God was my co-pilot but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him...
Landsknecht

quote: Original post by Dexterity

Original post by ktuluorion
It totally convinced me that I would like to submit my game there, although they say they generally like puzzle-type games and not 3d shooters. I''d be interested in whether it is possible at all for it to be accepted or not, if you could let me know Steve. If so, i''d try submitting it to you, because I must say, your site sold me on wanting to have you guys selling my software.

We are publishing a 3D shooter game (Strayfire) later this summer, so we''ll see how well it does. I don''t think this type of game will be our bread-and-butter, however.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

Thanks for the reply. I will attempt to submit it then, upon its completion. I just didn''t want to waste your time or mine if the chances were 0%.


If that doesn''t work out well, my next attempt planned will actually be more of a puzzle-type game, which i''m sure would fit more into your mold.

Mike

Hi,

I agree mostly also ...

Most of our own direct online sales for Dweebs (not retail of course) are achieved by word of mouth recommendations and random finds in search engines / reviews etc.

Adrian Cummings (Proprietor)
Mutation Software
www.mutationsoftware.com
www.dweebs.info

> My first shareware game, for instance, was a simple shooter game called BrainWave, released around 1995. I wrote it mainly because a friend kept begging me to make a Galaga-type game for Windows. I released it as shareware, doing only the most basic promotion for it, mostly uploading to some BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. I think it made only two sales in its first month, but in its second month it was placed on a shareware compilation CD and made $900. It eventually settled down to only making about $100-200 per month, but it hasn''t been updated in years, and it still keeps bringing in about $100-200 per month -- it''s been doing that for seven years. <

My game XOP has hardly gotten more than $100 a month. Yet you can sell that 7-year old game and still get more? I don''t understand. Am I really that bad at this? Is XOP really that bad of a game? Or is it just my marketing skills? Both?? It''s really dissapointing to work on a game for a year and watch it flop.

- Chris
www.toastsoft.com

quote: Original post by Udderdude
My game XOP has hardly gotten more than $100 a month. Yet you can sell that 7-year old game and still get more? I don''t understand. Am I really that bad at this? Is XOP really that bad of a game? Or is it just my marketing skills? Both?? It''s really dissapointing to work on a game for a year and watch it flop.

I actually was very curious about XOP (especially since I wrote a space shooter as well), but I could never get the shareware to run on my machine (just black screen). Did you test it on a lot of computers? If the game doesn''t run well on many machines, it might certainly account for the lack of success.



------------------------------
http://www.midnightsynergy.com

quote: Original post by Udderdude
My game XOP has hardly gotten more than $100 a month. Yet you can sell that 7-year old game and still get more? I don''t understand. Am I really that bad at this? Is XOP really that bad of a game? Or is it just my marketing skills? Both?? It''s really dissapointing to work on a game for a year and watch it flop.

There are many factors involved. For instance, let''s say that your sales for XOP are based on these factors:

Distribution / marketing
Popularity of the genre
Number of downloads
Quality of the game
Effectiveness of registration incentives
Effectiveness of the online order form at closing the sale

Your sales may be determined by the product of these factors. So, for instance, if you''re only doing 80% of optimal in each area, then your might expect your sales to be 80% ^ 6 = 26.2% of optimal.

However, when you consider the existence of competition, the reality is far worse. Players often download lots of games and may decide to buy just one (or none). A game that is 10% better than yours won''t get just 10% more sales -- it may get double or triple your sales. Consider the World Cup, for instance. The team that wins may only be 1% better than the others and may win each game by the slimmest margin. But the winning team gets 100% of the victory.

Another analogy: Suppose you read two books in the same genre, and one was just 10% better than the other. If someone asked you to recommend a good book in that genre, you might recommend the better book ten times and the other book zero times. This same word-of-mouth effect happens with movies and games too.

This is one reason why we don''t publish anything that we don''t feel is in the top 10% of indie games. The next 10% down may only get a quarter of the sales that the top 10% is getting. Even though most of the sales may be lost by a very slim margin, it all boils down to a binary result: either a sale is made or it isn''t. You still get $0 for getting the player 90% convinced that s/he should buy.

This is why when Pat Riley first took charge of the L.A. Lakers years ago, he had each team member focus on improving just 1% in each of five different areas (shooting, passing, rebounding, etc). But that cumulative 1% change in every area for every player made a huge difference overall.

So to generate a lot of sales, you don''t need to be vastly superior to the competition. You just need to have a slightly better game, slightly better registration incentives, a slightly better web site, etc. Like basketball, success in selling games boils down to getting the fundamentals right.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com