Hi guys..

Well, after a few months of work we (lemonade productions) have released an major update of our game Light&Shadow
- In this update we have addressed all of the issues from the feedback we got of the early version, and made a few enhancements on that aswell..
- the downloads are not that fabulous, but we got over 500 so far and only ONE sale...
Now,were at the end of our wits here, and dont know what have we done wrong?

We realise that the game is not a "super colaps"- learn it in a second play it for days- type of game. It requires more effort to understand it and to play it well, but people are playing it- that much we know.
We know it will never be a super saler, but one buy in 500 downloads?- that just sucks!:)

so any ideas on how to up that number of sales would be greatly apritiated!-

here is the game web site URL

www.lemonade-p.com

if you have the time, visite the site, snoop around, download the demo- maby the site sucks?


thx.

I remember that game from way back, and finding it fun at the time, even though that's not usually my genre... but 500 downloads seems like an awfully small amount to me - even a great game couldn't get many sales out of that.

Once I found the play button to start a game (perhaps it could be a different colour?) I quite enjoyed playing it.

Your screenshots are very bland in comparison to the actual game. Why not grab a couple while some of your nice alpha effects are onscreen? Perhaps that'll convince more people to download?

SC

papillon:
We know that 500 download is an extremely low figure, but our concern right now is the even lower conversion ratio. Unfortunately, we ran completely out of funds here, and simply can't afford to promote the title heavily unless we know it will convert at least half-well.
We *know* that a percentage of people are enjoying the game - we had a nasty little mechanism that embeds some info about how much the player has played the game in the "buy now" url (it's temporarily back on for a few days, but we disabled it because of ethical mumbo-jumbo - if anyone wishes to comment on that, please start a new thread), there are people that played the demo for hours, playing through all levels for 5+ times, and they're still not buying. We have a major flaw somewhere and we simply can't identify what it is. We are now trying to limit the demo to 1 hour of gameplay, but it's too early to tell if it helps or not.

escotia:
Suggestions noted, thanks. We'll probably change the play button right away, but I'll check how the alpha stuff looks in stills before changing the screenshots.

i don't know if this is really an issue, but on the website there's nowhere mentioned why someone should buy the game. just 2 choices: get it for free or buy it. on the in-game nag screen however, you have a list of features what people will get in the full version. if i were you i would put that info also on the site.

the game itself is really cool, i love the slick design and the animations. i wonder why you only got 500 downloads so far.

1 sale in 500 downloads is unfortunately for you statistically irrelevant! It says almost nothing about your conversion rate.

When you've got 5,000 downloads and have 10 sales you could more realistically say your conversion rate is poor.

Your main problem, then, is simply exposure. Without a bean to your name you can still get that game listed on 200+ sites and submit it for review to at least 10 game review sites. If that doesn't get you another few thousand downloads then you're going to have to spend $80 on Download.com (which has so far net us 9,000 downloads in 2 months).

Cas :)

I agree with Cas. You don't have enough downloads yet to get a good idea of your conversion rate. You need a few thousand downloads at least before you will start to get a good feel for what the game will do.

Good luck!
-Scorpio

Originally posted by aspiral
i don't know if this is really an issue, but on the website there's nowhere mentioned why someone should buy the game. just 2 choices: get it for free or buy it. on the in-game nag screen however, you have a list of features what people will get in the full version. if i were you i would put that info also on the site.To add to this, the very first thing I noticed when going to download it was that both the full version and the demo are the same size - immediately the thought "the full version mustn't have anything more than the demo" came to mind, despite that I know it's an incorrect assumption. Without any information about the difference, I wouldn't be suprised if a number of people are making the very same assumption that I did.

Perception is everything in marketing! :)

First of all the game is good! Graphics, gameplay, performance, idea... By the way is the game idea an original of yours?

I cannot say much about 500 downloads, but I think the price is a bit high since there are so many games in the category. As I have observed, the first versions of a game shall have slightly lower price. Did you see Dope Farmer of Weapon Studios. The game is new and is 8$. The game is successful as I know by now. Don't take this as an advice, but just consider.

ergas

Nice little game you have there. But I could not help but notice that the 'nag screens' are almost impossible to read. I found the text hard to distinguish from the background. At least, the current layout did not really invite me to read the thing.

I just tried your light & shadow demo and on my PC (P4 2GHz, GeForce4 MX460, DirectX 9) the screen flickers alot. Sometimes about once a second and sometimes less (both in a window and full screen). It's like part of the screen is sometimes drawn at a random location for one frame.

I disabled all hardware accelleration and then it worked fine, so it might be something with my card. But normally I can run just about any game without problems and I haven't seen other games do this.

Originally posted by Mike Wiering
[B]I just tried your light & shadow demo and on my PC (P4 2GHz, GeForce4 MX460, DirectX 9) the screen flickers alot. Sometimes about once a second and sometimes less (both in a window and full screen). It's like part of the screen is sometimes drawn at a random location for one frame.This sounds like the tell-tale signs of the old nvida driver bug which effectly broke all pure 2D games that used system ram video buffers. Almost all 4.1.x versions exhibit this behavior (anything released between late 2000 and 2002 pretty much).

So yea, check your drivers. I'm using 4.28.x now and everything (including my own game!) seems pretty peachy on my GF4. :)

Thanks Jake, I though I had recent drivers, but it has probably been almost a year since I updated them. Now the game works fine.

Nice. Very smooth look and feel. I think you just need more downloads before you decide that there's something wrong with the game itself.

-Bruno

Trials of Werlin beta (http://www.bantamcity.com/files/ToWBetaInstall.exe)

Well, you said that users love and play your game, but they simply don't buy it !
I think that following may be the reason why they play it but don't want to use their credit card on your page:

1. Your Buy / Order page have totally different look and feel from your website ( you know what this mean ).
2. Order processing service that you use ( EMetrix ) is relatively unknown company ( users who buy a lot of games will notice this ).
3. Sorry, but I think that your company's name ( Lemonade productions ) looks a little unserious for some users, which together with the fact that you have only 1 game on sale, will turn back customers too.

If you see a lot of hits to the "buy now" page, I think that something is definitely wrong with the feel of "Safe buying" with your game.
But those are just my opinions, there are lot of more experienced members of this forum that may correct me if I am wrong.

Tnx for the feedback everyone. We'll implement the changes suggested, but I don't think they will help much - they don't feel like major sinkers to me (with the possible exception of the eMetrix ordering page thingy), even when you sum up all of them together. I guess we'll just try to promote the game more. If you don't hear from me with the results, that'll be because our phone got cut off due to us rerouting the phone-bill money into marketing. ;)

Few specifics:

Nutter:
Yeah, the same download size is new in v2.01. We'll add the stuff to the page, but I would kinda guess that the great majority of potential buyers would be people who actually tried the demo?

Ergas:
Eeks, I don't think that lowering the price below $10.0 would be wise. $9.90 games just scream "low-quality" to me, and I think a low of people feel the same.

Matthijs:
Thanks, you just gave me some ammo for the neverending pretty-vs-readable fight over here. ;) We'll make it "uglier". :D

Mike:
Brrr, I *hope* that's your drivers. :-) We CPU-blit everything (except backbuffer->frontbuffer blit), so it's *probably* the drivers.

Trixx:
We'll probably switch processing service to eSellerate (because of their integrated sellers), so that should help a bit.
Do you really think that "Lemonade Productions" is unserious? We're a game development company! How serious do we need to be? ;)

Anyway, tnx for the comments. I'd appreciate if someone could further comment the ordering pages/company name thing (we customized the ordering page since the first post, but it's a bit ugly IMO, and the artist are out of town for the day. Damn. )

I have zero marketing experience, but I like "Lemonade productions". Does "PoMPoM Games" sound serious ?
I also like your web site (even though the backgrounds are missing on my non-CSS browser).

I think Lemonade is a cool name.

Cas :)

Do you really think that "Lemonade Productions" is unserious

No, I also think that the name is cool, but as I said, I think that SOME customers ( more conservative, older ones perhaps ) may find it unserious. But maybe I'm wrong, of course ;)

BTW, your game is really nice, website is also nice and I'm also wondering what stops your users to register it. But, as others said, maybe things will change when you get more downloads:)

Tried the game and it's an interesting game. However, after finishing all the levels it really didn't leave me wanting more. It doesn't really have the popcap hook of wanting to play just one more game and the puzzle mode isn't too much of a puzzle mode with it being so easy (it only starts to be challenging on hard). Adding some new pieces that have broader effects might help but I think that won't solve the overall problem.

Also, on the options screen it would be nice if the sound automatically changed as I move the slider. You should also have a button to register on the main screen.

As for the downloads problem, you just need to get it on a bunch of download sites like download.com. Perhaps it's just as well you haven't done this yet with only one purchase.

Nexis - we're practically next door, i'm in Wilsonville ;-)

Keith

Haven't tried the game, but a few comments on the site:-

I think the site design is pretty good and clean, although possibly a little bit too spartan.

I expected to be able to click on the main headings in the sidebar - but they aren't links.

I think I'd put the feature list higher up in the game page, above the main block of text. I can't remember the stats, but supposedly lots of people never bother paging down - so make sure that the most important stuff is in the first screenful.

Cheers - Steve

Originally posted by Uhfgood
Nexis - we're practically next door, i'm in Wilsonville ;-)

Keith

That is close, we're probably not much more than 15 minutes away from each other.

I assume you know about that local igda chapter that just got started in Portland a few months ago? You can check it out at www.pagdig.com if not. Perhaps I'll see your there or at the IGC 2003.