The way to success

[mattisl]

Hi,
I recently started an Indie Game development company with a friend and we have just published our first game.

However, sales are going bad ;)
We only had 1 sale after the first 600 demo downloads.

Me and my partner had some discussions what features our game/website may lack. The only thing we could think of was that we only support payments through PayPal. We are currently working on to add BMTmicro (http://www.bmtmicro.com) as another option.

A few questions:
1. How do you market your games? Which sites will boost your demo-download-o-meter?

2. How many sales do you get compared to the number of demo downloads?

3. Which money transferring systems are most used by your customers? E.g PayPal, BMTmicro, Esellerate etc.

It'd be greatly appreciated if you would like to share your experience as an Indie Game developer. :)

Thanks in advance!

[Sergey Komar]

Hello, a few genuine tips :)

1. The web site looks really good, but it is a pain for search engines to index it. Don't use session ids. Though you may ask around - I am not a SEOpro, just read it in the book "SEO for dummies".
2. There is not enough text content on the web-site. Search bots love text.
3. You violate gamesbanners rules: the banner should be seen with 800*600 resolution :)

The game RotMos is nicely done! Just a few comments:

1. 60 hz is really bad for eyes.
2. I would add mouse control.
3. Ctrl as a fire key is good, but spacebar is even better!
4. The balls in the game a really small, it is difficult to play and your opponent plays really well and it is not too pleasant to watch it. Noone likes to be a looser.
5. Make a quick start, it takes a while to start playing, people like fast ins and outs :)

Best of luck!

[Sillysoft]

If you have not done so already you should go and read these articles. They have some good advice:

http://www.dexterity.com/articles/

[Black Hydra]

Learn from others...

Thats my major tip. Look at successful shareware developers and see what they do to attract customers. Having a great game is really only a tiny fraction of the equation. There are many things you can do to improve your sales here are some I have seen others use:

1) Offer refunds. Few people will bother getting a refund for only 20$ or so, however, offering refunds for any reason will make people secure in the knowledge that 'if the game sucks I can send it back'. It gives them security. If people are worried when buying, then you will lose sales no matter how good the game is.

2) The demo needs to be easy and intuitive. This is something people rarely do. The demo needs to be painfully easy. At the start, they are trying to learn the game, so even if a monkey could beat it, they will still feel accomplishment for beating that section. If the demo has any confusion or real difficulty they won't like it.

3) Limit your demo. The demo should be played in less than half an hour. If you let them play longer than that then they might get bored. It may sound sleazy but you want them to get bored AFTER they buy the game. Face it, just about every game you stop playing after a little while. If they encounter this during your demo, then they have played enough to enjoy the game and will not bother purchasing it. Ideally they should be having tons of fun when it cuts short.

4) Make buying incredibly easy. Some things I would suggest: i) Get a e-commerce provider to handle finances. While I'm no expert, something like esellerate (www.esellerate.net) allows them to use all major credit cards and handles all that crap like VAT and stuff. (ii) Allow them to mail you the money directly for their CD-key. Why don't people do this more often? As long as you have a mail box, this allows those especially internet paranoid people and those without credit cards to purchase your game. Unless their is some legal issue I'm not aware of this seems like an obvious purchase method as it requires no setup.

5) Your webpage is too cluttered. If I don't instantly know what game your selling, where I can try it, what it is, what feel I should get (i.e. your website should scream of the atmosphere of the game), and where I can buy it, you've failed. Now, any idiot could easily find it on your webpage, but I don't feel you did a great job of doing these things. Remove clutter. Organize it so that it looks simple. There should be a bright button with Try and Buy on your site. Along with an overly enthusiastic description of the game.

6) Look at what others are doing. Most the people here with games made will have links. Look on their pages and see what good ideas they have. Of course, some of them might not be doing better than you, but its usually easy to recognize good ideas to increase sales from others. Heck all I know I noticed from other sites.

I don't have a lot of firsthand knowledge, so I can't give you much technical advice, but I can give you some knowledge from a buyers perspective.

[Indiepath]

Looking good. I also would like to see mouse control. My fingers are clumsy :)

[mattisl]

Thanks for your suggestions, exactly what I was looking for to hear :).

I'll get onto it right away.

You violate gamesbanners rules: the banner should be seen with 800*600 resolution :)
I didn't realise that, I think it's called the large-screen-resolution-syndrome ;). Fixed now.

Thanks again :).

[mahlzeit]

Your website doesn't appeal to me at all. My attention isn't being focused on the thing you are selling. What's worse, there are lots of things that draw my attention away from it. Don't make me scroll down the page to see the screenshots. Don't make me read all that small text to figure out what this site is about. Shove all the important information right in my face. If I can't figure out what is going on the second I lay my eyes on the site, I'm gone.

Some tips on how to improve the site:

So much space and you only use a fraction of it.
I don't care about Gamalog Media and what it brings me. Tell me about the game. What is it about? "100% puzzler action" is not nearly enough description.
Put the screenshots near the top of the page.
Drop the spotlight logo. Put the name of the game there.
What is the guy's head doing there?
Make the page less busy. (Right now it looks like your typical portal site, which is nice if you're a portal but not if you're selling games.)
Use a larger font.

[alfie]

hi mattis,

Glad to see you on this board.

I have tried Rot-Mos a couple of times and got a Fatal Exception error when I exited the end splash screen. It did not go to a webpage or anything. Anybody else have this problem?

[Ryan Clark]

I'm going to have to agree with mahlzeit here; your website confused me. I wasn't even sure I was looking at the "game info" page, so I clicked around trying to find it. The fact that the screenshots are way down at the bottom confused me.

Also, your links are black text... they look as if they are simply bold text (they have no underline), rather than links. And yes, as mahleziet said, the page is too "busy"... all of those awards down the side (and that animated ad thingy on the left) draw my eye away from the text. Having the awards info there is ok, but I'd put it lower down on the page. People can scroll down to read more if they're really interested.

Finally, "Rot-Mos" itself confused me... I guess a game name doesn't have to make sense, but I didn't even know it was the game name. I thought maybe it was some foreign-language name for that character whose head is shown in the top-right of the screen. If you had the name featured more prominently, I would've been less confused, I think.

So... hopefully you aren't upset by my comments, I'm just trying to give you my honest reaction so that you can improve your website. If you do make some changes, please post again so we can have a look!

[Pkeod]

I agree with most people on that you should try to do what others have done~ though still do it your unique way, don't just copy them! ;)

The website does look very good, but maybe it looks too good? I say make it a lot easier for people to look at.

Also I think your topic should include a question mark, too many people are going to think you have the way to success :D

[Yossarian]

I'd consider making the icon and name banner for the game incorporate an aspect of the game itself.

Right now, you look at the head and at "RotMos" and you have zero idea of what you are looking at. I know this is always an overly used example, but Bejeweled (http://www.bejeweled.com/launchpage.php?theGame=bejeweled2&src=big8) does this nicely (and I"m sure there are others that do it better), and you get a better idea of what type of game it is. Might try looking at places like Reflexive (http://www.reflexive.net) as well. As a quick example, take a look at Super Breakout (http://www.reflexive.net/index.php?PAGE=game_detail&CID=4381&AID=53&CAT=Puzzle&CATNAME=Puzzle&FLEXSTATE=Puzzle). The game could be named "Supercalifrageliciousexpealidocious", but you could still understand what its about.

Maybe making up some new banners that have some stylized balls dropping along with the characters could help with people recognizing what it is they are looking at.

Of course none of this answers the question on making the sale *after* the download...

[GBGames]

Looking at the link for Buy Rot-Mos, it doesn't look like a link. In fact, since the text is bold and not underlined, and the text to the left is not bold and is underlined, I was under the impression that I could click on Information and get more information. The Buy Rot-Mos link looked like it was saying that it was the page I was currently on. I was under the impression that the bold and underlines would switch when I clicked on Information.

I am using 1280 x 1024 and my immediate impression was that Rot-mos was that face, and my immediate impression didn't imply that I was looking at a game I might buy. I didn't even see the screenshots unless I scroll down, and most users won't use 1280x1024 so that's bad.

I agree with the idea about moving the screenshots up. Maybe have one bigger screenshot to give people an idea of what it looks like and then let them click on the others to see them in full glory. Seeing 100% puzzler action tells me nothing. Seeing a screenshot that describes what that action will look like tells me lots.

[Yossarian]

Some more impressions on gameplay:

1 Absolutley positively has GOT to have mouse control on the menus at a bare minimum. Making people use arrows will immediately turn off almost all users. I bet a lot of players couldn't even figure out how to navigate.

2. The game itself could use mouse control. The currrent button scheme is extremely hard to use, and the game is very hard initially because of it. I'd suggest letting players shift balls left and right with the mouse button 2 held down, and then fire with the mouse button 1. Or at least give mouse hittable buttons below (Shift Left, Shift Right, Fire).

These types of games REALLY need to be mouse playable IMHO.

While the overal production value seems good, the controls and menus are so bulky and hard to work with the keyboard that it makes the whole thing seem broken (even though it isn't).

3. Change menu highlight colors, the popping out is nice, but I still had a hard time figuring out which was active at first glance. This is leading to my overall sense of being lost in the game. Active should be brighter than inactive. Maybe put inactive as a light grey color, active is the yellow you are using, and the font size increased and bolded.

4. Definately needs to be a quickplay option that doesn't require setting up a user name. Just have a simple points game where the board clears every 1000 points or so, and slowly speeds up each new round. And make that game playable from the first menu. One click and I should be playing it.

[mattisl]

Wow, I didn't expect this much feedback! :D

I've updated the site a little and change most of the things you suggested, I hope it looks less cluttered now :).
The difficulty in the demo version has been changed too.

We have also started to completely re-code Rot-Mos to add Mouse compatibility, fix the messy menus and to generally improve on the gameplay.

Thanks for all your critique, it has been very helpful.