Bigfishgames Commission - 65%

[dypaul]

Hello all,

I found out that Bigfishgames charges 65% to list your game on their site, and they claim that this rate is fixed for all developers (including, if you take their word literally, Gamehouse and Popcap, which seems farfetched). I wonder what other big portals charge as well (such as Yahoo and RealOne). Given this exorbitant fee, maybe we indie developers can come up with strategies to bypass these big portals -- at least initially. What do you think?

[Jack Norton]

Welcome to the portals world ;)

Reflexive takes 60% (5% less, still better than 65%).

[Dan MacDonald]

Garage Games only charges a 35% charge to publish your game. As far as I know that's the best in the business.

[Ricardo C]

Welcome to the portals world

"But 35% of something is better than 100% of nothing. Surely you see the benefit in this!"

Just getting the standard portal justification out of the way. Carry on.

[Andy]

Reflexive takes 60% (5% less, still better than 65%).

Woo-hoo! Dan! Please stop me when I'll be out of the rage :-)

60% of Gross Jack. Plus amount of so-so (stupid) additional requirements. Plus their rating in Alexa is equal to our own and they promote their own competitive products at their site and act as Bill Gates at the sites like GameTunnel (what is the differense guys?) ;)

What I'm meaning really? - Big Fishes are the best you've met so far dypaul. Paul! Are you reading this? - I hope so!.. ;)

[BongPig]

Reflexive do not take 60%. I think you've got it backward.
Lets not bash reflexive armed with mis-information.

[Jack Norton]

Bash? read this then, posted by the owner of Reflexive...

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showpost.php?p=8528&postcount=35

[BongPig]

oops. Sorry.
My bad. :)
I was thinking of something else completely!

( I need to give up these various substances. :confused: )

[Dan MacDonald]

You know, I personally like talking about portals in terms of "Commission" as opposed to royalties.

It seems we are often told about the great "25% royalties!" or "30% royalties!!!"

I like putting the "65% Commission! :eek: " spin on it. It reminds you not to get too excited :)

[Evak]

the developer only gets about 20% - 30% most of the time for non exclusive deals. Garage games are 50/50 for non exclusive deals which is pretty good, but they are very picky in regards to which games they will publish.

And these days they are looking for cross platform Mac and PC games almost exclusively.

[KNau]

If you are dealing with a portal that can put your game in front of hundreds of thousands of people daily, then I think it's worth it. The problem is that I know of a few lower end publishers that also take the same commission rate. The brand name portals set the bar and the wannabes follow along.

Garage Games has a fraction of the traffic of the major portals but with the Mac audience I'm willing to bet the conversion rate is better. But like they say, you gotta be cross platform.

[ErikH2000]

Take a look at what Home of the Underdogs is offering (http://www.the-underdogs.org/store/whyus.php). If your game is chosen as a "top dog" by a team of volunteers, then you can sell from the HOTU store. They handle payment processing, will host downloads, basically the whole order process, and that is for a 10% transaction fee. That is the only thing you pay them.

Home of the Underdogs has been around for a long time and collected many users. I don't think they are really oriented so much around selling games, but more towards being an interesting place for gamers to come. You should also read the Scratchware Manifesto (http://www.the-underdogs.org/scratch.php) to get an idea of the philosophy behind the place.

-Erik

[papillon]

and in the past year and a half, how many games have they added to their store? Oh, that's right. NONE.

It sounded like a good idea, but HOTU apparently decided not to go through with it.

[ErikH2000]

I'm not sure how many games were added to the store in the last year and a half, but I see 8 games listed there now. HOTU doesn't seem to be terribly good at getting games listed in their store, but they are good at getting users onto their site. I wouldn't worry about being one of the early gamesellers there. It doesn't look like they ask for any rebranding work, so for a measely 10%, and a real site that attracts gamers, it seems worth a shot to me.

-Erik

[papillon]

I'm just saying, they haven't added any games since the month after the store was launched, and have generally ignored any requests to get into the store, speaking from personal experience and anecdote. They pretty much dropped the idea.

It *seems* like it would be a nice place to sell games but someone would have to convince them to actually bother doing it again. :)

[Diodor Bitan]

I earn $6.8 for each affiliate sale of my $20 games (I use Regnow: 20% for their fee, 40% for the affiliate bonus, 6% for the extra affiliation fee). That amounts to exactly a 66% commission :D

And I love when people affilliate my game too :)

[Mark Fassett]

Sounds like you need to use Plimus - you could get 16% more out of the deal...

[Diodor Bitan]

Original post by Mark Fasset
Sounds like you need to use Plimus - you could get 16% more out of the deal...

Considering the Regnow affiliation cookie detection script, I would be able to do that without causing my affiliates to lose sales, so now I only have my outrageous laziness to blame for sticking with Regnow. :o

[svero]

Well look.. Bigfish is making a profit selling games. Maybe a pretty good profit. But they have a lot of expenses and they're the ones putting the money and risk in. They have a full-time staff, they have significant advertising expenses, they have transaction, bandwidth, and mailing expenses. They pool those expenses and charge a fee to list with them and collect the difference. And a fair price is what you're willing to pay and they can offer which is good enough for them to get games. They seem to be offering enough to get a game a day. The market dictates the commission. If another portal comes around that has their traffic and offers 50% people will have a choice. Right now there aren't many choices and commissions are similar.

[James C. Smith]

For what it’s worth, if you want to use Reflexive’s payment processing service and DRM the fee is less than 10% of gross plus COGs. In other words, Reflexive keeps part of the sale to cover the cost of goods (credit card processing fee of about 4%), and charges a fee of less than 10% on the rest of the money. That comes out to around $2 or $3 dollars per $20 sale being help back and $17 or $18 paid to the developer. This is not for putting your game in Reflexive’s distribution network and on our web site. This is for doing the equivalent of what Softwrap and Trymedia do. Or like what Plimus and RegNow do plus Reflexive gives you a DRM system to use similar to Armadillo.

If you want Reflexive to distribute your game that is another storry. In that case 20% goes to Reflexive, 40% of the money goes to the web site (Reflexive.com or one of it’s affiliates) and 40% goes to the developer.

My point is that comparing the fees or commissions Plimus and Big Fish Games is like comparing Apples and Orangutans. One is a payment processor and the other is a retailer with a big audience. They are completely different services.

[Greg Squire]

and in the past year and a half, how many games have they added to their store? Oh, that's right. NONE.

It sounded like a good idea, but HOTU apparently decided not to go through with it.

Um, according to this page here (http://www.the-underdogs.org/year.php?id=2004) it appears they added about 124 games last year. Mostly freeware titles though, but I did notice that Hamsterball, Gish, and Zuma Deluxe were in the list. However, the site's a popup and banner nightmare though. I guess they need make up the difference in ad revenue.

[James C. Smith]

...their rating in Alexa is equal to our own...

The power of the Reflexive Arcade is it's vast affiliate network. The Alexa rating of Reflexive.NET is not very relevant when the majority of the sales are not generated there. But I am still glad to see that Alexa ranks Reflexive.NET at #12,479 which hardly seems equal to rank of #54,983.

[ErikH2000]

Um, according to this page here (http://www.the-underdogs.org/year.php?id=2004) it appears they added about 124 games last year. Mostly freeware titles though, but I did notice that Hamsterball, Gish, and Zuma Deluxe were in the list.
I believe those are just games they added to the site, not games added to the store.

The total number of games on the site is huge, and they all have good reviews, screenshots, cross-referenced to other games, categorized by genre and theme. The content is the strong point of this site. It is a great place to discover new games. You can explore based on games you know you like and find new ones easily.
However, the site's a popup and banner nightmare though. I guess they need make up the difference in ad revenue.
I agree about the popups--they are terrible and I wish they could go.

-Erik

[Jack Norton]

Considering the Regnow affiliation cookie detection script, I would be able to do that without causing my affiliates to lose sales, so now I only have my outrageous laziness to blame for sticking with Regnow. :o
I think you can do a check and use multiple system. I don't exactly know how to do that because now I use mostly Plimus, but ggambett does that in his myserystudio website, you might check with him :)

[Andy]

The power of the Reflexive Arcade is it's vast affiliate network. The Alexa rating of Reflexive.NET is not very relevant when the majority of the sales are not generated there. But I am still glad to see that Alexa ranks Reflexive.NET at #12,479 which hardly seems equal to rank of #54,983.

Great for you James. Seriously!
But when the proposal was done yours was lower than our. ;)

Again. I'm not against your portal in common. And amount of guys here like it. But contract terms appearing very questionable at least for us personal.

Just my two cents of course.

[princec]

A deal with Reflexive is only going to cost me a buck more than any other affiliate I have. So good on 'em.

Cas :)

[KNau]

Trouble is, there is a glut of supply (saleable games) but it's trying to cram into a very narrow delivery pipeline (the top 3 or 4 portals). Even if there are enough soccer moms to support the quantity of products there are limits on how much can be delivered and how quickly. In the end developers will get squeezed by it.

The "game a day" schedule at Big Fish may work for their side (delivery) but it will severly cut the per title income. The situation for developers there will become the same as Real Arcade, if you aren't in the top 10, you're likely going broke.

Basically, the publishers have all the power and you either have to play by their rules or find another ballpark. Not a bad thing, it just "is what it is".

[sphinx]

at http://www.the-underdogs.org/store/devfaq.php you read :
How will I keep track of sales statistics?
We will send you a sales report (along with records of any fraudulent/theft attempts) on a weekly basis. Unfortunately our platform is not yet capable of real-time reporting, but we anticipate this will be available by the end of March, 2003.

March 2003?!!!!!!!!!

On the other hand and far from high % portal sites take and according to my experince I can say that Bigfishgames worked much better for me than Reflexive therefore I do not mind give high % to Bigfishgames for any of my current or future games!!

[Andy]

And I've heard the same (the message above) from another developers around - in private.

Don't think that I'm happy with this fact James - no way! I'm just trying to explain that not everything goes OK with your work at your own portal. There are amount of reasons really appearing in my mind right now - but that's too long story to write it here.

Big Fish "Game per Day" - yeah. This is another "pain in ..." about that portal right now. I suppose that it would be the same ten titles they are hardly promoting again and again on their site and almost no any chance for any visible income for upcoming titles.

I said that one hundred times before - we all compete on portals, and compete badly. And loosing badly for our specific case ;) What is the conclusion? - I don't know really. :confused: Make your job by the best possible way and work for your own customers - current ones and upcoming.

[Gmicek]

...their rating in Alexa is equal to our own and they promote their own competitive products at their site and act as Bill Gates at the sites like GameTunnel (what is the differense guys?) ;)

It's reached the point where people have started to just brush Alexa ratings off since it represents such a small segment of surfers who use the toolbar. It's very easy for a site to artificially increase their rank if they want to put the time into it, but there really isn't a point. Alexa is a waste of time.

[James C. Smith]

Again. I'm not against your portal in common. ... But contract terms appearing very questionable at least for us personal.

No worries. I totally understand that it is not for everyone. I am also somewhat picky about where my games can be distributed. In the early days I was MUCH more picky about it. I think I know how you feel.

I would never complain about someone choosing not to give Reflexive distribution. Everyone has different goals and preferences. But I do get annoyed when people list inaccurate reasons. I posted about the traffic number because I assumed you made a common mistake and looked at the traffic of ReflexiveAracde.com or Reflexive.com. Those sites do have the Reflexive Arcade content on them, but they are not where we drive most of our traffic. The heavy traffic is focus on Reflexive.NET.

[Andy]

Alexa is a waste of time.

I don't think so Greg. You are absolutely right that this is very easy to cheat and artifically rise your rating there. But when we are talking about serious sites like yours or James' I can trust to their results and compare them with our own. I've noticed that any our advertising efforts are highlighted at Alexa pretty correctly.

As far as we don't sell advertising space on our site I don't see any reason for us to cheat with that rating as well. :-)

So... just my two cents - should ask them from Alexa guys :)

[Andy]

I posted about the traffic number because I assumed you made a common mistake and looked at the traffic of ReflexiveAracde.com or Reflexive.com. Those sites do have the Reflexive Arcade content on them, but they are not where we drive most of our traffic. The heavy traffic is focus on Reflexive.NET.

I'm trying to recall James. That was somewhen in September or so. And I suppose I was checking whole your Reflexive Empire at that time. :-)

But this discussion really has no any sense on current stage. Nice growing James. :)

[arcadetown]

Not to sound like an advertisement but we're currently giving <edited> upon each sale. Personally think it's very developer friendly terms and our partners (Hipsoft/Retro64/MysteryStudio/etc) seem to agree. If you've got something good would like to see it, just use the contact link at the bottom of our site.

[Andy]

Still on BMT Brian or?.. :confused: