Making games, selling games.

#1 The other problem is how to sell your games. I have used some publishers to sell games for me, but I will never do that again, and let me explain why.

A publisher usually want you to make an exclusive agreement with them, and you will not be able to sell your games separately. They promises you to make a promotion for your game in exchange of some percentage from the profit. And usually they offer from 30 to 50% of the total profit to game developers.

What publishers actually do, they are offering your game to the major portals (Reflexive, RealArcade, Trymedia, and so on) and they make non-exclusive agreements with them. Also, they offer your game to some retailers who sell games on CDs in some regions. Now just imagine, that the portal get their comission from each sale, then the publisher get his comission, and the rest is goes to your account.

And after some time, publishers just put your game to the backdoor, because they are interested to promote only those games which sells well. Most publishers have the "hit" games which they promote, and lots of other games that are waiting for the random visitor who will reach them.

The only advantage of publishers is that you don't need to spend your personal time on promotion.

But you can make the non-exclusive agreements with the major partols by yourself, and to not share the profit from them with some publishers. Even if a publisher is the owner of a major portal, why to share the profit from other portals with them? IMHO, the best strategy is to make the non-exclusive agreements with portals and to search for retailers by yourself, without involving some publishers in this process. You will not lost much sales, but you will get more profit. And also more visitors to your website, where you can place some affiliate games and make additional profit on them.

This is also a good topic to discuss, I guess. I have shared my opinion here, and I would like to hear your comments. I hope it will help everyone (including me) to develop the right strategy for themselves.

Sorry for the big amount of text and thanks for your time!

--
Best regards,
Kostya Teterin
Emotion Rays Entertainment Group

http://www.emotionrays.com

#2 I have noticed as well that these games have been popular ever since the arcade games first started.

PacMan. You had to be on constant alert. Tetris, same thing. So many more. And it shows even today that this really is the way games should be done.

The Battlefield series. You are always in the heat of battle, no matter where you are. Geometry Wars, insanely addicting. Burnout Revenge, you CANNOT take your eyes off for a second.

Your idea could be a very strong and notable consideration on what makes a successful game.

As for publishers, agh. What a nightmare. You never know what to expect from them. I think it's best to finish your game, and then focus on a marketing strategy. Create some trailers, release some screenshots, send out some press releases, form some relationships with people who would like to advertise your product. Try and build a small foundation for marketing your games, if a publisher can do it, I think you can do just as good if not better than them.

#3

#4 I guess success of games like Collapse and Bejeweled where there was no constant pressure doesnt count then? ;) I think you guys are picking the "right facts" to fit some kind of universal theory when there really isnt one. Different people want experiences of differing intensity.
In retail equivalent would be Myst, sales of which were at least comparable to those of Doom - completely different, frantic experience.
You can sometimes try to marry both of worlds by offering different modes, look at Chuzzle or new Collapse. I am using just bestsellers for examples to try to get across my point, but it is applicable to anything.

#5 I've always had an idea that you shouldn't go to publishers, but publishers should come to you.

#6 Heh. Starving painters and unpublished writers have about the same idea :)
Seriously though, ideally publisher would offer more than just access to their portals contacts list. They might give valuable feedback that makes business sense, testing and quality assurance, promotion.
Having said that - its not like you are forced to use them. Portals are approachable directly, there are devs that are doing business that way. I dont think the exclusivity (or limited period exclusivity) is actually an industry standard- assortment of games in portals is actually pretty uniform, almost any game you can find also in other portals.

#7 "I guess success of games like Collapse and Bejeweled where there was no constant pressure doesnt count then?"

Can't agree with you. Collapse had a HUGE time pressure, and all the clones of Collapse that didn't had that, had no sales. I am the author of a Collapse clone, so I know what I am talking about :D

The pressure in collapse was mostly created by music, and also appearing bricks on the bottom (like you count before your "death" 5-4-3-2-1).

As for Bejeweled, it doesn't have any time pressure. But the clones of Bejeweled do have it. When Jewel Quest blows the market, just few people still purchased Bejeweled, and as far as I know, Bejeweled 2 wasn't too successful game.

As for Myst - I am not talking about RPG games, but about small shareware games. I don't mean that RPG cannot be shareware, but it takes an incredible amount of time to write it, so many people prefer to make simple puzzles of arcades because it is faster.

RPG makes players live in their world. If the RPG world is badly created (bad storyline, unbalanced skills, extremely poor graphics, and so on), then nobody will play that RPG. As I said, we sell feelings. If the player can feel himself like a "God" in RPG, then he will buy it, because he actually purchase a feeling of his "mighty", which he can't have in the real world. I am not sure that puzzles or arcades can create the same feeling, but they can create a strong frustration feeling in case of game over or trial over. A feeling like "I almost DID it", and a great wish to try again.

Nauris:
"I dont think the exclusivity (or limited period exclusivity) is actually an industry standard- assortment of games in portals is actually pretty uniform, almost any game you can find also in other portals."

This is because the publishers who made an exclusive agreement with developers are publish their games on those portals. For example, Snowy game is exclusively published by Alawar, and it is appears on many portals under the trademark of Alawar, but it was developed by Aliasworlds. Same with Diner Dash, which was developed by GameLab, but is known as the game from "PlayFirst". Both Alawar and PlayFirst have great benefits from those games by getting more visitors to their websites and offering them other games (affiliate or exclusively published). Developers have nothing but the percentage of profit.

As for the betatesters, I bet that if I will place an ad on my website like "Become a beta tester and play games for free!", I will have 1000 good betatesters within a month ;) Its not a problem to find them, actually.

As for help from publishers, actually I have found much more GREAT advices on GarageGames forums :)

As for promotion, as far as I know, publishers just offers the game to other portals and CD retailers. There are not too much ways to promote shareware games. At least many people said, that all you need to have good sales is to make your game published on RealArcade :)

Ok, let me correct myself. All I am trying to say is that exclusive agreement is a bad way to deal with publishers. It is MUCH better to have 5 publishers with non-exclusive agreement with each of them, then to have 1 publisher and to be tied by an exclusive agreement.

#8 I think you are making too many assumptions just to prove your point. Quick checking of two portals (bigfishgames.com and Reflexive arcade) that allow sorting of games by various criteria, including their popularity (copies sold to be exact) will show you that Bejeweled 2 is still in top 10, ranking as 9th and 6th, respectively, while Jewel Quest is 17th and 9th respectively. Draw your own conclusions.

I must have played some other Collapse version, without time pressures, wouldnt surprise me, since there were so many clones. How they sold, I have no idea, but I am afraid you are making the same assumptions here, proclaiming that versions without time pressure did not sell. Only evidence you have is the fact that your clone did not sell, which I think is not enough to make an educated guess :) There are many reasons why game might or might not sell, including presentation, promotion and pure, dumb luck too.

About Myst- not to be nitpicky- but Myst is not RPG at all, it is a point and click adventure, completely different genre with completely different goals, audience and mindset. Which does not matter at all in this discussion anyway - the point is, laid back, no-pressure gameplay can sell very easily, there were enough people who like it to make Myst one of the most impressive bestsellers for years, plus creating a whole sub-genre of Myst-clones. If you are trying to devise some more or less universal recipe, you can not have too many exceptions of the rule- if there are too many of them, there must be something wrong with the recipe :)

About the whole publishers vs no-publishers debate- that is purely a question of preference and depends on how your company is set up. If you are a lone wolf, making games in your basement, I personally would say that using publisher would be a smarter move, since you dont have to waste your time on stuff you probably are not good at, diverting your resources from making new games. On the other hand, if you are planning on having a sales force, that will be occupied only with promotion of pushing of your game, you might want to cut the middle man. But as I said, its a matter of preference- there may be many things wrong with the current way portals are set up, but at least they are flexible enough and will deal with individual devs if product shows promise. I think there are only a handful of portals that work exclusively via publishers.
Btw, I dont think you can that easily contact portals like Pogo or Yahoo as an individual. They prefer working with publishers who do the filtration for them.
Which means you would be missing quite a lot of exposure.

#9 Narius:

Well, I've made my "assumption" from the statistics of my website, which I run for 4 years :) I am selling games from it, and I have lots of sales of Jewel Quest and no sales of Bejeweled 2. I also want to say, that once I spoke with some other portals owners, and they said that their "top" list is not actual, but it suits their marketing needs. They aren't owners of RealArcade and Reflexive, but they are also well known, and they told me that many portals do the same trick. So I afraid, top games list on portals is not actually true :( That is why I pay more attention to my own statistics.

Each portal has own internal statistics. And I believe it is different for the different portals. Lets say, that I just try to make a rule like "if you will make it in the game, you chance to have a good profit from it will grew up". That is why I checked only the famous hits like Diner Dash, Mystery Case Files, Luxor, Zuma, Jewel Quest and others - they are not just have good sales rate on my website, but they have been promoted on major portals for a long time, which means that they had good sales on those portals too.

As for collapse game, I just said that my clone also didn't sells, and I have tried many collapse clones. In fact, collapse itself didn't sells now as well as few years ago. Time have passed, and market demands were changed. I hope you will agree that the game with bejeweled 1-quality will not blow sales :)

If you have another examples or ideas, it would be great to hear them. Actually, I am trying to understand what feelings are usually purchased by players. I believe, that the game must attract player much enough to make him forget about everything else, and if the game can do that, it will be the next hit on the market. Of course, graphics, music and gameplay must be well-balanced. Not perfect, but they must create some kind of atmosphere. In other words, if we want player to feel himself into the dark and scary cave, then no matter if it will be 3D detailed cave, or just draft scatch, but graphics + music + special effects must create the quality dark scary cave, to make player believe in it. And if the game will have a good atmosphere, the player will start to live in the game and he will not have time to take a rest, he will be busy by making decisions in the game world.

I think, a good example of such game is Luxor. It has average graphics, but great theme music and special effects. It makes hard pressure on player, because he always need to make decisions. And when it was added to my website, I sold an incredible amount of it.

Of course, promotion is also important. But I think that it is much harder to promote retail games then shareware games. For shareware games, it is enough to add them to major portals and to offer the online verison (some portals didn't take the game if it is not have the online version).

As for publishers, yes, I agree with you. If you make games for fun, you should use them to not bother yourself about promotion stuff. But if this is your main source of income, then exclusive publishers can be a big pain. As for Yahoo and Pogo, I believe that if you have the quality game + online verison of it, you can open all the doors. Besides, you can discuss with some non-exclusive publishers the exclusive rights to publish your game to Yahoo under their brand, if it is really necessary. But as far as I know, RealArcade brings much more sales then Yahoo.

I am glad that we talk about good and bad sides of working with publishers and selling game without them. Yes, each way have own preferences and bad features. I guess, it also depends from the publisher. Lets say, what I've got is that 2 of my games are not promoted anymore, and I can't push them by myself because of exclusive agreement. It ties me, that is why I prefer to not work with publishers anymore. This is my decision, and I hope that our conversation will help to other newbies to make their decision.

"If you are trying to devise some more or less universal recipe, you can not have too many exceptions of the rule" -
I am just trying to make a rule for simple puzzle and arcade games, not for big games like Warcraft, Doom 3 and so on. Actually, I am not sure that there are lots of independent game developers who can handle such complex projects. Something like Bejeweled or Diner Dash seems more realistic :)

And excuse me please if I accidently hurt you or say rubbish. I am very tired right now, have been working for a long time and need to take some rest, so this is probably my last post today. Thanks for the good conversation.

#10 Just my 2 cents.

@Kostya: you have a good point about best selling semi-action games, and I believe that there is a good deal of sense.
There are always exceptions in every niche, but most of the small indie games sold on dynamics. Definatly, games sell emotions, that's should be the target of an indie developer. The storyline is expensive to develop, we should leave it to the Big Brother :)
I'm quite interested in your research, Kostya, and would like to talk more about it. How can I contact you besides the public email on your profile page? You can drop me a line on my email (in my profile).

#11 Well, I amm not saying games with pressure element dont sell. That would go against all evidence :) I am just saying that "presure-less" sell as well and make just as good best sellers. Which just means, that whether there is pressing clock or not, does not really matter in the end. Players endorse games with their credit cards for loads of other reasons, not because there is or is not a clock in the upper corner.

Luxor, as any other Zuma clone, actually is not a correct example. Those are not puzzle games, they are action games, with action mechanic deep-wired into the basics of the gameplay. It would be silly to take pressure element out of action game :)

#12 Narius:

I guess, there can be another kinds of pressures, not just the clock on the corner. And the fact that you will place the clock is not mean that your game will have a good sales. Anyway, there must be some kind of motivations to make players purchase games. What kind of motivations you think it could be?

And, by the way, I still insist that arcade games like Diner Dash and Luxor have much more sales then puzzle games. There is 1 purchase of a pure puzzle game for every 15-20 purchases of Diner Dash-like games and MCF. I believe, this is because most of puzzle games are clones of other puzzle games, and these games are fresh, and people buy it because of fresh idea.

On your opinion, what you should include into the game play while planning the game to make it a bit more successful?

#13 I dont think its possible to devise some specific list of what needs to be in game to make it desirable enough for people to by it. I guess you just have to build from some core, adding things that feel organic until game feels right. Sounds very instinctive and unpredictable but thats how I see it. Perhaps I am wrong.

However, there are certain vague principles that IMHO could add that extra shine that convinces player that game is worth buying.
One would be feeling of progression. Sounds obvious, but there are many games out there that just dont give that feeling. When player succeeds, (s)he has to feel that the effort was worth it, has to be awarded with either new setting, music track, game element or most banal prize in the trophy room. So many games feel like rushed prototypes exactly because the feeling is that nothing will really change no matter how many times you win.

Other in my books would be the feeling that "there is more to the game than meets the eye". Give players some secrets to uncover, stuff to unlock, something that is not obvious at the first glance and thus gives greater satisfaction because player feels that (s)he is let on a secret. Playing games I often use my own mental Secret Test - I ask myself, if this game had an online community, a forum, would people trade secrets and strategies there, would they have anything to talk about apart from "cool graphics" or "sumwan gimme crack, plz". If there isnt anything, I think the game, although might sell and perhaps even well, but it would have a short lifetime.

#14 Well, looks like we still speak about the same thing, but from different positions. Let me explain.

I said, that the most important is to not allow player to take a rest while playing. It can be some kind of time pressure, or it can be a wide variety of moves, so he spend most of his time to find a right decision. It also can be new bonuses or items, or new mini games, or new prizes or artifacts.

To make a long story short, it can be everything that can take the player's attention, some kind of aim that (s)he want to reach. Also, the gameplay itself must not be too slow. Player must play the game, not just watch on something that is happened on the screen (especially in puzzle games).

As I already said, I believe, that games help many people to get feelings that are hard to get in real life. For example, it is hard to be an adventurer like Lara Croft, it is to run a real of restaurant, but you can easily do that in Diner Dash. Many people are unhappy of their life, and games is an easiest way to try to use their skills in some kind of virtual reality where they can be important and popular. That is why I said, that we actually sell feelings. And that is why trophy rooms are works in the games.

If I am right, then it is possible to set up a goal while creating game play to invoke such feelings in players. Not just to shape the gameplay, but also to add some motivations (from your list, for example). And it will increase the chances that the game will become another shareware hit.

What do you think about that?

Alexander:

My Skype name is kostyateterin, my Yahoo ID is emotionrays. I also have ICQ and AIM, but it is hard to find me there :)

#15 Ah, hehe, yeh, I understand. We have been talking about the same thing. Since I like keeping things simple, I would call it "Keep Player Busy" rule :)

If player has to look hard for fun things to do, something is wrong with the game. In that respect, we are back to the old arcade days, when you either were hooked or lost interest completely during that first coin.

#16 What about first/third person shooters?

I have about zero experience in the game development industry and I agree with most of what Kostya is saying. I feel that a game has to engage the player on an emotional level to be desirable. I also feel that a game can be engaging and slow-paced if done right.