From start to completion: How long before that first sale?

[NothingLikeit]

Hello, I'm a newbie developer and I'm working on my first game. I had a few questions about How I could increase the chances of success of the product and what kind of milestones should I expect to encounter.

1) In your past experiences, how long did you have to wait after releasing the game before you recorded.

2) What factors helped increase sales? (market research? Mailing Lists? releasing on shareware portals?)

3)Would it be any different if it were a portal release? I'm asking mainly out of curiousity and also I want to know what to realistically expect...

[svero]

1) In your past experiences, how long did you have to wait after releasing the game before you recorded.

< 1 week in the past as I was able to get it up on download sites and start seeing sales right away.

2) What factors helped increase sales? (market research? Mailing Lists? releasing on shareware portals?)

All of the above really. There's a whole lot to look into there. You should just read through the posts on this board for more ideas.

3)Would it be any different if it were a portal release? I'm asking mainly out of curiousity and also I want to know what to realistically expect...

Well with a portal you'll usually have some delay getting into their release queue. Anthing from a few weeks to a few months. And then they'll cut you a check after ther first month or so of sales usually. So expect a delay from submitting to a portal and being accepted to getting a check of anywhere form 1-3 months depending on the portal and how quickly your game goes up. Also note that different portals have different policies and procedures. Some may only pay quarterly etc...

[Coyote]

1) Less than 24 hours.

2) A lot of pre-release marketing push more than anything else. I wish I knew for sure what magic thing worked better than the rest.

3) I released on portals as well. Because my game wasn't in-line with the audience of those portals, I guess, my sales were never as good on the portals as my own site.

[Mark Fassett]

1) Do you mean "first sale to someone I don't know?"

In that case - it was less than three days. Less than 6 hours if you count people that I know personally :)

2) The right download sites, talking about the game everywhere...

[NothingLikeit]

part of me is glad to see that these just aren't casual games (not that there's anything wrong with those). I was thinking that if I wanted to see sucess especially quick success, that I would have to make a game like that.

[Sharpfish]

In fairness, they said they had some sales - not "success". Sucess lies somewhere between Xthousand sales and Xhundred thousand sales within a specified timeframe and dependent on each developers individual expenditures and development costs.

I would say it's fairly hard to NOT get a sale within a short period of time, it's sustaining it that is the hard part! :)


re: Pre-Release activity. How long before a games ETA would you experienced devs consider a good time to start showing previews and talking "all over the place" about the game?

[princec]

Somebody was so eager to buy Titan they bought the 0.5 beta version before they even got hold of the final release! I had to tell him there was a new version.

Cas :)

[Mark Fassett]

re: Pre-Release activity. How long before a games ETA would you experienced devs consider a good time to start showing previews and talking "all over the place" about the game?

I would say as soon as you're pretty damned sure you're going to finish it. Some people, though, talk about their games in an effort to give them a reason to finish. Cliffski might have other ideas, though. He's talked about Kudos since pretty much the day he started working on it.