Porting to the PC - What should I expect?

[NuclearNova]

Hi,

Someone else has offered to help port my game GL Golf to the PC (He is probably browsing this forum too) and I am wondering what I should expect.

GL Golf - http://nuclearnova.com/glgolf.php is second shareware game and is doing pretty well - 8 months and 375+ sales on the mac alone. If I get this game ported to the PC what should I expect, considering it is promoted like a normal shareware game and I pay my download.com + other fees.

Also, what percentage of profits should the porter get, he will be doing mostly GUI and mac specific conversions, hopefully the math and game logic will stay mostly untouched.

Any ideas, can someone share their past experience?

[Sirrus]

Remember that the PC market is much more competitive and only top quality products do well...

Red Marble Games may have a better idea for percentages, but depending on the work, I'd say 30-40% for porter (this is a guess though).

In any case, good luck, but remember that it may be difficult to get going with a PC product.

[luggage]

Not sure about sales wise or anything but we usually go 50-50 on any conversion work like that. It all depends on how much work you'll have to put in, if all you're doing then is sending off the source code and art assets then it's a no risk situation so. Think of it like free money. :)

If you've got to put a fair amount of time and effort in as well then adjust the percentage accordingly.

[Sillysoft]

My game Lux was available only for the mac when it was first released. About 6 months ago I ported it to Windows. Lessons learned:

It's a lot harder to get a PC game noticed then a mac one. You must have some idea of how you are going to get people to find your game and download it. This applies even more so if you have established competition (have you scoped out the available windows golf games?). Download.com has not been a big traffic driver for me. Search engines, google adwords and word-of-mouth have been the biggest source of PC users for me. All of the stuff written in this forum about marketing and getting visibility for your game applies much more to PC games then mac games.

The 95% windows market share does not exist in shareware games. I am currently at a level where downloads of the windows file is almost 50%, with the mac file still being the majority.

I did the port myself, so I cannot say what percentage you should pay. I think it should depend on what exactly they are going to do for you. If they are going to port it and then sell it from their established website to their past customers then I would give them more. If they are just doing the technical port and the selling will be left to you then I would give them less.

[Vectrex]

Sillysoft: out of interest what are your download/conversion rates between the different platforms? Do linux people buy games?

[NuclearNova]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I think I am going to go ahead with the port and hopefully my porter will help get some downloads on the PC side, because I have no experience except for macs.

What is the average conversion rate for a PC user compared to a mac user, I can only assume that its going to be lower, is that true and if so how much?

[kevryan]

I don't have conversion rates, but that Mac sales for Marble Blast (http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=15) have been roughly equal to PC sales. So going cross-platform resulted in a doubling of sales.

[Reactor]

Whatever the conversion rate is for a golfing game, I'd lower it even more for yours. I'm not sure about Macs, but your golfing game looks a lot like a lot of freeware golfing games on the PC. I'm mean, I could be wrong, and it could sell really well, but knowing PC gaming as I do... I'd personally be surprised.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I thought I should mention it. If you'd like me to elaborate, I'd be happy to.

[Sillysoft]

Sillysoft: out of interest what are your download/conversion rates between the different platforms? Do linux people buy games?
I don't have good stats on the difference in conversion rates between the platforms. I use the same serial number system, so I just sell it as one product.

I have seen some Linux sales, but there are just not very many people looking for linux games. Linux accounts for about 3% of my downloads.