Conversion Rates, Improving

#1 I would love to see an article about this. Jay is especially adamant that creating a great demo is an artform all its own. I agree.

Jay has a bunch of ideas, but all games will be different. Maybe we can brainstorm at IGC, and then get an article that is posted in the resources section so it doesn't be buried in the forums.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#2 Very good words Jeremy. We are all learning how to stand and walk using our own two feet and I will say from personal experiance with Dark Horizons Lore that what you think will work out best for demos doesn't always work or work well at that point and time. I am not sure if I will be given the opportunity to talk about this at IGC or not, if not I (or someone else from Max Gaming) would be more than happy to work with you on this article if at the very least to give it another example.

Logan

#3 With ThinkTanks. we tried quite a few things.. the first thing we did was not only look at other games, but other shareware. We looked at the software we actuallu purchased and what was it about it that made it worth it to click the buy button.

We came up with a few things, the main one seems like common sense.. but maybe it is not so common. Main point.. the game must be perceived as a value to the customer. We took the approach of showing them not only the game.. but by making it really apparent what you do NOT get in the demo but you do in the full game, so they can see with their own eyes what they have with the demo and what they DON'T have.

First off, we force the demo players to enter their name every time they play. Annoying.. yes. Right off the bat, it tells them, nothing you do will be saved. Then we let them choose a tank.. we offer them all the choices.. show them the tanks, and right in the selection screen they see the tanks they can't drive.

We then take them to the play game screen and they see in the server list all the games.. including half of the games in the server list which are 'Not available in demo'.

We let them play for a few minutes (approximately 7 minutes actually) and then kick them out of the game to a 'nag' screen.. reminding them where they can buy, what they get when they buy. they can then rejoin the game.. but their score is not perisitent. Even if they join the same server, their score is back to zero.. It drives home a key point, which is.. as a demo, you cannot win a game.

These things all start to add up.. I can't win, I can't save my name.. I can't play on the other maps.. can't play team.. as a demo, I am a nobody..if I like the game, I need to buy it to become a 'somebody'. No one thing really convinces them ThinkTanks is the game to get..it is all the small things that remond them the demo is a DEMO and not a game.

We also want to re-iterate that we think that there is no formula for this, that each game is unique and what works for one may not work for another. The demo is a sales tool for presenting a propostion to the prospecitve user. See how cool this is? don't you want more?

I will add more later, but I wanted to get some stuff out here and get this thread up on the list of 'hot' topics.. as it is a super valuable discussion that needs to be taking place that affects all those who actually want to make a living making games and shipping them online.

#4 From my post in Jeremy's .plan:

"Conversion rates" are a new concept for me and I really appreciate you sharing your insider info about how it plays into the current title released. Learning about this stuff from actual developers in the trenches is incomparable, and it's not knowledge or info you have to share. So thanks and keep it up!

As a specific tip, I know one of the reasons I purchased Orbz was because it had a time-delay lock on it. After the time had elapsed, I couldn't play it anymore (unlike Marble Blast where you can play it for as long as you want, but only certain levels). So that's what "converted" me into an Orbz purchase (that and knowing I was supporting GG + an indie developer). I know when my game is finished in a year, I will insist on a similar time-delay lock on the demo. Some people will be happy with one free flavor so they'll never buy the rest, and I don't want that; I want to tease them with a taste, then take it away. The best film trailers do just that.

###

Thanks for the additional info on the ThinkTanks demo, I can see now that showing unusable tanks was not just lazy programming of full game to demo but an intentional marketing angle. I can see how valuable a tool that is and would never have thought to do that. I would love to hear more about this at IGC and/or see an article on it.

#5 Just about everything in the demo that is disabled is intentional.. this is to give them a taste of all the things they could do , if only they had the full game. The idea here was to show them things they have now but don't work (saving the name for example) and giving them a hint of what will work.. such as the create game screen with the configurable bots..all the levels they don't get to play.. the fact that 'team' play is off limits..

conversion is all about convicning the demo that the full game is all that the demo is and MUCH MUCH more.. anything that helps that perception is a good thing.

Time locking is good, as long as the individual has enough time to get used to the program and want more of it.. when to cut them off is something worth testing.

I think a combimation of time locking, feature limiting, and obvious nagging (in different mixes) is a good approach.. as opposed to just time limiting alone (no feature linmiting) or feature limiting alone, as some can have fun with a free feature limited game without ever purchasing.

Personally, I am not so sure about stats tracking in terms of an upsell point. I can see how any value add is a good thing in convincing the player it is worth purchasing, but alone I am not sure it is a compelling reason to purchase unless you can express to the player how having score persistence is a good thing to them as a player of the game.

#6 This is a great thread, and the good thing it doesn't just cover games as well, it can be applied to applications too.

At the moment I'm going through several plans of action with my marketing guy as to ways we can deploy an application to the indie market (and possibly other markets if the opportunity arises). However, I've been unsure as to how to approach the topic of creating a demo, whether I should release an editor for free, and how much the should API should cost (if at all). There have been several options discussed, but at the moment I'm still unsure as to which direction to pursue. I'm hoping things will become clearer as the application develops and we brainstorm ideas for marketing directions.

I just don't want to make the wrong decision on our first product. I have no sales experience, so I'm consulting with as many people as I can. Does anyone have any experience with demo and shareware applications in this respect, and how they achieved a decent conversation rate?

Cheers,
Paul.

#7 There is several articles over at Dexteriry about conversion rates, how to improve them etc. Also a few other good articles for indies to read.

www.dexterity.com/articles/

Read the "How to permanently increase...." article

Not all articles are great, but a lot of them contain fantastic "yeah - that makes sense" information for indies and others.

Great thread. Continue discussion please

#8 I followed that "How to permanantly increase" one. That's what got me started on the time limit and tons of buy now buttons throughout! After I followed it sales dropped ... hopefully it was just due to the summer starting ... sales picked back up the first week of college.

Darn, you know what I think now is one of the best ones ... I totally forgot that Think Tanks only lets you play for 7 minutes! That's a good thing. I think it's better to content limit and then time limit actual gameplay than to limit total gameplay or number of tries perhaps. In Aerial Antics we've done total time limits and in Market Value now we've got 5 "try" limit. Think Tanks has the highest conversion rate right? I think that's a key aspect to it's success ... just as you start to get into the game ... you get booted to a sale screen. Additionally, this doesn't involve any kind of tracking outside the executable code base. I like that idea and may implement it in the future.

Also, very good to keep showing them what they're missing in the demo. I think one thing about Market Value which can help if people really want to compete they have to register and get the full game because they can clearly see the top scores are way beyond what they can achieve in the 4 level demo. Since the game is single player it's not frustrating ... just a reminder that in order to really play you need the full version.

I also think that some form of multiplayer goes a long way. Even if it's just an online rank table ... I think that makes a big difference. I've noticed that some games like Bejeweled don't actually let you enter your score. I'm not sure if that's good or not but I guess it works for them. I chose to let people participate in ranking their scores because it's nice to see it work ... however like I said they can't beat the top scores so it'll only encourage their competitive spirit more.

#9 I was reading some of the articles on dexterity.com - here's an interesting excerpt from one of them. I'm curious as to what the views are on this:

"One approach is to offer a money-back guarantee. I've been offering a 60-day unconditional money-back guarantee on all my products since January 2000. If someone asks for their money back for any reason, I give them a full refund right away. So what is my return rate? Well, it's about 8%. Just kidding! Would it surprise you to learn that my return rate at the time of this writing is less than 0.2%? Could you handle two returns out of every 1000 sales? My best estimate is that this one technique increased my sales by 5-10%, and it only took a few minutes to implement. When I suggest this strategy to other shareware developers, the usual reaction is fear. "But everyone would rip me off," is a common response. I suggest trying it for yourself on an experimental basis; a few brave souls have already tried it and are now offering money-back guarantees prominently. Try putting it up on your web site for a while just to convince yourself it works. You can take it down at any time. After a few months, if you're happy with the results, add the guarantee to your shareware products as well. I haven't heard of one bad outcome yet from those who've tried it."

Interesting read, particularly where he talks about it's effect on his sales.

#10 The Zelda promotional disc for GameCube included the full versions of Zelda 1 & 2 for NES and Zelda Ocarina & Majora for N64, and ALSO included 3 levels from the newest Zelda Windwaker with a 20 minute cap on each. One level was a city island, another level was a dungeon, another was a "stealth" mission in a castle. Anyway, what Jeremy was saying about getting into the game, then getting booted is right -- you start to get into the dungeon, then without warning BAM you get booted. I think it's also interesting that they put you at 3 different points in the game, not just 1 point from the beginning, so you get to sample what the game is like throughout. You can play for 20 minutes at a time for as long as you like though, there's no "permanent" lock out afterwards.

I agree that different game types require different strategies. I guess with conversion rates you have to really know who's downloading your game in order to know who's not buying it. If it's a bunch of indie developers (or dev wanna-be's) just downloading it to check out the competition and they don't buy it, that's a lot different from your target demographic downloading it and not buying it. I wouldn't give out my email address to download a demo, but if you asked me 3 simple non-invasive questions (age category, gender, # games purchased monthly?) I wouldn't mind radio-dotting those before hitting "download" and it'd go a long way towards understanding your conversion numbers.

By the way, that "money back guarauntee" thing is true across most industries, service or sales. That's definitely good advice.

I love this discussion; keep it going...

#11 One thing that I was wondering Jeremy.. What is your sample size? 1.4% is fine, but if thats from 10 or even 100 sales, its not a significant enough sample.

Whats the average conversion rate for the different GG released games?? is that NDA? seems suitably vague so we can discuss.

Joe: About the ranking/score thing. Actually, it might not be a selling point initially, but the persistant rankings, or more specifically the league/ladder system from Worms Armageddon was one of the most attractive features from the feedback I got. So much so that when we took them down (hacking) we were VERY badly mauled by the community.

I agree its not necassarily a selling point for your initial sale. But one thing that it IS good for is word-of-mouth selling. That is, someone playing long enough that they manage to convince thier buddies to try it, form a team etc.

Now I'm not saying thats going to happen for every game. Far from it. But I would hope it would give a ROI at some point to include those things for most multiplayer competative games.

#12 On the subject of demo's, one of the features I have planned for the non-demo version is a "human builder" mode, which lets you make up your own combination of humans. (Just FYI, my game is a bit like populous), I think customisation features like that are important to getting someone to buy. Now you have to do what Joe has mentioned and actually get that across in the demo that "here is what you WOULD be able to do" sort of thing.

Customisation features are one of the key attractors I can see for games. So things like including a world editor. For instance, in worms, one of the selling points for that, is that you could name your worms in your team. You could choose a custom speech bank (the things the worms say when hit), you could choose custom colours, custom flags (things on the health bar) etc. In fact we probably went over the top with game options (we had too many like how many seconds to fire a specific weapon etc). Basically, make it so that people can customize NON GAMEPLAY items. Colours of things, sounds or whatever. That allows them to mould the game in thier own image.

One other thing, is to provide a mechanism for including user-generated content (i.e. provide a way to allow users to upload thier levels) etc. I know it happens a lot in games like halflife where people make mods. But even thinktanks has this same thing. Not perhaps by design. But its happened.

#13 Oh, another thing, Mark and I were just discussing..

I dont think there is one single *correct* solution here. It will have to go on a game-by-game basis.

Case in point.. most of our games idea's are aimed at short play sessions. 10-30 minute sessions tops. Now having a limit on number of attempts in this case might have a better feel than say our tycoon games which demand longer play sessions. Having some kind of short time limit on those kind of games would be better (time limit, or maybe funds limit?).

Anyway, my point is that you cant just take what another game has done and use it blindly. You have to think about the specifics of your game. Its intended term of a play session, how many features you see in a given game, how you show them the features they havent seen yet etc.

#14

Quote:
One approach is to offer a money-back guarantee.
...
surprise you to learn that my return rate at the time of this writing is less than 0.2%

Actually it wouldn't. I read somewhere that for items < $20 (which is a safe price zone for most indi games) most people don't "bother" with returning something that has a money back guarantee even if they feel ripped off. (There are exceptions of course) So I would expect your return rate to be really low. Also be wary of the "19.95 TV Item that too good to be true so it has a money back guarantee" It most likey is too good to be true and they are just betting that most wont return it. :-)

Quote:
I would love to see an article about this

Me too. Hope it happens.

#15 The timing of this thread couldn't be better. I'm working on the demo version of Void War this week, and there have already been a couple of ideas suggested that I'm going to take advantage of.

The major portals are pretty adamant about having a time-limited demo, because those sell the full version better. However, some indie developers have done A/B split tests and found that this actually isn't always the case. Some types of games sell better without the time limit.

Specifically, games where players tend to consume content and are not very "replayable" tend to do better without a time limit. Multiplayer games MUST have a time limit, or players will simply play the demo version with limited content forever.

#16 Phil:

At this point that 1.4% is very unreliable, I'll just say that ;) After our marketing kicks and we start seeing serious downloads I'll know for sure and post another .plan. I fully expect it to do better than Aerial Antics ... because it's playable for anyone whereas many people seem incapable of playing AA. All our beta testing seemed to indicate that Market Value was more enjoyable for people right off the bat.

Aerial Antics from this site ... I don't know the actual conversion but I think in general it's about a .1% - .3% from our site. At first I thought this was good (I know now that 1% is considered the baseline) because another publisher told me that their best seller had a .1% conversion and that was the norm. Apparently though they didn't care about their online business much because that game was Platypus which has now gone on to become one of the biggest sellers on Real Arcade in the hands of Retro 64. Actually, that's a great example of how to take a game with a low conversion, tweak it a bit and then make it a best seller. There's hope for any game really ... you just have to hit the right buttons.

#17 This is a very interesting thread. I can only contribute from a gamers standpoint, most everyone here seems to be developers.
I'm also not in the market that most here are striving for although I represent the biggest market of game buyers(18-25 shooter crowd) but I also watch the smaller games for Gems.
I bet there isnt a developer here that would love to grab a little bite out of the market Im in with a game they made and I think a couple have come close here.

I just gonna go over three games mentioned here and post what I like about them and what sold me or didn't.

1) I'll do Jeremy game first since this is his thread.
Aerial Antics - First off I love this game,
I have nothing bad to say about it.
Its fun to play the art fits the game, it's all good.
So the only thing I guess I can come up with off the top of my head of not buying the game is replay value. I would play thru the game mabey a couple times then be done. It just doesnt seem to be enough to make me grab the credit card.
What would make me grab it?
I don't think no matter how many hooks it just wouldnt get me, if it was multiplayer and I was flying around competing with others online??
SOLD!! That would probably get me and I'd buy. Add some shooting too in AA2, hehe just jokin.

2)Think Tanks - SOLD!!! Tried the demo theres players online playing it, it's fun for me period, I had to have it. It has life to me that everytime I log in and play it will be a new experience, so I dig it.

3)Lore - SOLD!!! except one little problem. =(
There's no one online playing this game and I don't know why. Everytime I fire it up theres no servers running and nothing going on.
What would fix this??
Promotion of course to create what I like to call the snowball effect. This is where the demo get's in lots of players hands and 1 kid logs in and during that moment a few others happen to log in see a server with some players, join in, and thus begains to snowball and the game gets popular. When I refresh I need to see servers with players or I close and exit.
Period.
The problem here for the smaller game builders is the budget isnt there to let all of us gamers know what a great game you have.
We are bombarded everyday by UT2004 DOOM 3, FAR CRY, and on and on.
So we go out and drop 50 bucks every couple months on these new techno bang whiz gadget games from the big dev houses.
When a game like lore could be way way funner to play, but most gamers don't here about it enough to be grabbed and Sold.

I think multiplayer is the key to success for indies, because it adds replay value.
And there has to be a way to let more users know about the game.
Thats the thing you guys need to zero in on. If its fun and goes boom the shooter crowd will play it, it has nothin to do with the games even being smaller.

Shit, I don't even play half the game types in UT2004 that came on the book of CD's with the game. Alot of it is just bloat as far as im concerned.

If you build it, they will come!!!
Well once they find out about it.... =)
Thats the key.

#18 Exodus:

That was some very good feedback! We've been planning multiplayer for Aerial Antics even before the first game was done ... we didn't include it in the first version for various reasons. You can be sure that we won't leave it out again! Thanks for a useful perspective!

#19 Promotion is a big factor in selling games for sure. But the main point under discussion is how to convert eyeballs to payments.

Once you have a good stream of people coming to your site. The biggest issue is to convert them from playing the demo, to actually buying the full version.

Experience has given me a few pointers:

1) Make sure the demo is stable, installs professionally (i.e. allows the user to choose where, works properly when installed, has an icon, works with service pack 2 etc etc).

2) Make sure there is an obvious way to start the game. I.e. try and make it a very simple route into the game.

3) Once they start the game, show them something of the gameplay VERY EARLY. I mean like compress it down into the first 3-5 minutes. You might not get any longer. If your demo starts off with a long walk to some action, your doing something wrong.

4) As Joe mentioned, make sure the people playing the demo know what they ARENT getting. Make it as obvious as possible.

5) Make it easy to go from the demo to buying the full version. Reduce the steps it takes to buy the game to as few as possible.

6) Show them that other people bought the game and really enjoyed it. Show them what they WOULD be getting if they bought it.

I guess the point is, Joe basically hit on it, how do you get it into the head of the prospect (i.e. potential customer) that they MUST purchase your game.

#20

Quote:3) Once they start the game, show them something of the gameplay VERY EARLY. I mean like compress it down into the first 3-5 minutes. You might not get any longer. If your demo starts off with a long walk to some action, your doing something wrong.

That's a new tip and very good advice. I've been thinking a lot about this topic. Similar to how the Zelda GC promo disc has a demo of Windwaker on it that drops you in one of 3 different points of action instead of starting you from the beginning, what do you think about a demo with a CUSTOM level (or levels) in it made specifically for the demo?

I'm thinking of having a "blank" area where you can practice gameplay movements for an unlimited period of time to master the controls, then 1 "mini" level made custom for the demo that can be played to completion, but only a certain number of times.

Another note -- screenshots, screenshots, screenshots! I was re-looking over the ThinkTanks demo, and I don't think it had enough screenshots of other levels in it. Heck, actual 3d fly-thrus of the other levels would be even better -- though make the file size too large and perhaps give too much away. Or not?