What %age of games submitted to portals are "Top ten" material?

[zoombapup]

As a follow on to my thread about subscriptions, I wanted to discuss something else thats niggling me a bit.

I.e. if the majority of sales for portals are from the "top ten", barring some oddities like Brian's site, then what percentage of games submitted actually are "top ten" material?

i.e. what turnover of top ten quality games is there? Does this mean that there are a few really "top" and a few not quite so good and wouldnt it make sense to work on the almost-top-ten ones in order to cultivate thier developers?

I get the strong feeling, without any real work from my part in knowing the reality mind you, that the optimisation process at portals has gone down the path of optimising sales of the games they get submitted more than optimising the developers who submit them.

Think of it as optimising turnover of sales rather than optimising turnover of supply.

The reason why I ask, is because it seems to make more sense to me to actually optimise the supply more? If instead of a "top ten" that sold, you have a top 50, or a top 100, surely it would be better.

[Snooker]

Does this mean that there are a few really "top" and a few not quite so good and wouldnt it make sense to work on the almost-top-ten ones in order to cultivate thier developers?

<snip>

The reason why I ask, is because it seems to make more sense to me to actually optimise the supply more? If instead of a "top ten" that sold, you have a top 50, or a top 100, surely it would be better.

It absolutely makes sense to cultivate developers towards moving them into the Top 10. We do it as much as we can with our published games - in fact just a couple of weeks ago we had both published titles released that week (Pat Sajak's Trivia Gems and Aztec Ball) hit the Top 10 on their first week out. Looks like they'll stay there for at least another week. That's one of the benefits of publishing your game with Real (and hence, a reason for the split the way it is, per the discussion on the "Subscription" thread) - you get to tap into our expertise in developing a game that successfully targets our audience.

As far as the Top 10 vs Top 50/100, that's a marketing decision. I believe 10 is used over 50 because people will actually read 10 items. They won't peruse through 50, though. We just started including the Top 30 in our quarterly developer newsletter, so those devs that work with us do have access to that info.

[zoombapup]

Hey Jeremy..

Actually, I wasnt thinking in terms of the top ten list on the site.. I meant in terms of the quality of the games.

Let me re-express myself a little.

Take 10 games.

The top 2 sell.

The second 2 COULD sell, but arent so hot

The remainder are pretty poor.

You sell from your site, you put up a top X, where X could be any number, but for the sake of argument, you put 2.

Now, clearly, the top 2 are fine, the second 2 are POTENTIALLY top 2 material, given some work. What would this thing look like, if instead of a top 2, you had a top 4 and worked with the developers on the lower 2 games to raise thier quality.

I guess the problem is that it ends in a quality "arms race" where in order to break into the top X, you have to achieve a quality thats at least as good as the topmost seller and that topmost seller has spent a considerable sum of money on development.

I also suspect that in some resepects, thats already happening. We already are seeing the casual game "arms race" with newer flashy graphics etc.

That suggests, that at some point, portals would have to move from a "lots of submissions and cherry picking the best" mentality to a "fully funding the top ten ourselves" model, as smaller devs get squeezed out of the content arms race and simply no longer compete for those slots.

I dunno, I still have a lot of personal baggage from dealing with publishers in general, so maybe I've got it skewed.

[James C. Smith]

What you are sugesting does happen already. It is very common for games to be submitted to portals and the portal says, “this is okay but it could be so much better if you change XYZ”. Or it simply isn’t good enough and here or some reasons why. Many times those issues are addressed by the developer and the game is re-submitted. Sometimes the corrections are good enough and the portal launches the revised game.

Most casual games portals receive at least 30 or 50 games submitions per week. Some portals launch the beast 3 of the week and some launch the best 7. Most don’t launch more than 7 per week.

In the case of Real Arcade, they only launch 2 or 3 per week and 50% of those end up making it into the top 10 sellers list. About 30% or 40% make it into the top 5. See the fallowing charts on www.Game-Sales-Charts.com

New Vs. Top 10 (Real Arcade) ( http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=47)

New Vs. Top 5 (Real Arcade) (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=48)


This shows how many new games Real launches each quarter (about 40) and how many of them make it into the top 10 or top 5 sellers list.

Big Fish on the other hand releases 7 games per week and not nearly as many (as a percentage) make it into their top 10 sellers list.

[arcadetown]

We're very busy here and sometimes take time to give feedback when spot something that has rough edges could use smoothing out. Sometimes it's put to great use and have seen sales impact. I wish more developers would do this but unfotunately many are often already busy on something else, but we do see some ideas pop up in later games.

As for picking the right titles to help with, users are the ultimate decider so if it looks like it could hit with our audience we'll try it and will be more apt to give feedback if it's a personal favorite or looks like it has more potential. That is if we even have ideas for improvement.

[Dyno Kid]

I haven't been on the indie/casual scene long but what really suprised me on the portals was the lack of original games as they seem to be all match 3 and diner dash clones and surly the customers need new refreshing titles?

Also how companies get away with making a complete rip off of the original diner dash for eg, i wonder if sony or sega made diner dash would anyone of tried to copy? nah:P so how do these other companies do it? Maybe they have a share of the royalties for the clones, I don't know lol.

Maybe 1-2 in top 10 deserve to be there and i would guess probably 10 games from the whole list that are actualy worth buying as for the rest....forget it.

Maybe a bit harsh but as many of you know i hate clones and just want to make/see original games.

Ohh i dont mine clones like FizzBall that take an idea and push it to the max.

Darren.