Read about it here. (http://puppygames.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=176&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=)

The reason I'm tellin' y'all is because you might be amused to read the dev. diary which will start in a couple of days. Mike Boeh might be especially interested to read about the Java dev. bit seeing as he caused about 3,000 blitz basic users to swarm over my site the other day.

Is this press-release-worthy or shall I just stick to announcing it on the few forums I frequent?

Cas :)

Cool! I look forward to it.

With regards to the press release, unless it's a well known title I think editors are a little wary of announcing something that's not released yet, because so many titles (including many aaa) never make it to the market. So you could do one, but you probably won't get too much attention out of it. I wouldn't spend a lot of money on one. Might be worth a try for some extra exposure if it's not expensive.

Ha! Spend money on a press release? You've got to be kidding! We write our own :)

Cas :)

Hehe :-) Yup, I did send them there, just to show what could be done with Java, as I am considering switching dev platforms.

Anyway, it's going to cost a fiver? All my experience shows that 10$ games sell no better than 20$ games. Bugatron was $7 at one time, and the number of units sold actually increased when I raised it to $20.

I used to sell BP! for $7.50 at one point. Every time I made a revision, I upped the price a little. One time I just upped the price, no revision. Each time, my sales got better.

David "RM" and I talked a bit about this at ICG - there's some sort of 'sweet spot' for game prices where it's not so cheap that people assume it's junk, and not so high that they think TOO hard about buying it.

Originally posted by princec
Ha! Spend money on a press release? You've got to be kidding! We write our own :)

Cas :)

I write my own too, but I don't have the lists of thousands of editors press release services have, and nor am I interested in maintaining such a list for a few hundred bucks savings every 3-6 months when I do a release. I'm primarily a developer , so I'll let people who specialize in press releases do most of that and I'll focus on development.

Any particular service you use, Svero, that you would recommend to others? That could be quite handy :-)

Originally posted by Midnight Ryder
Any particular service you use, Svero, that you would recommend to others? That could be quite handy :-)

I've had some good luck using Al Harberg's service DPDirectory which has been mentioned here a few times.

http://www.dpdirectory.com/

Just as an example.. I had a mahjongg game selling 3-4 copies a day and then I did the press release with al and got a 1/4 page blurb in smart computing magazine. Suddenly sales jump to 20-25 games a day for a while. That more than pays for the price of the service IF you get coverage. Of course there's never any guarantee that someone will write something about you. I guess it depends how pressworthy editors feel your stuff is. But for me it's a pretty good 130$ risk. It's paid off more than it hasn't.

You might want to try using more than one. The weak side of Al's service for us is that it's not game specific, but tends to focus more on mainstream press like smart computing, or pc magazine etc...