A few years ago (before I started as an indie), I decided to give free registration codes for my game Charlie the Duck (http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/charlie/) to anyone who completed a registration form (http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/charl...php?P=6&L=E). Before that, the game was shareware and lots of people were ordering it, but it was really cheap and handling registrations and sending diskettes via the post (I didn't know about payment processing systems) was driving me mad, since I also had a full time job. Now I don't know if that was such a good idea...

It certainly has helped to attract many visitors to my site and to build up a huge database of potential customers. Because of the free registration, the game has been featured at several freeware sites like gamehippo.com, and for the past years it has continuously been in the top 10 at tucows games (Windows).

But it is always a lot of work. I usually receive more than 50 form submissions a day, sometimes over 100. Once or twice a week, I process them, which always takes a lot of time, eventhough I've automated it a little. Earlier this week I went through about 650 of them and now there are another 289 waiting...

After removing the duplicates and making a choice out of the almost identical ones, I go through all of the forms one by one to remove garbage, check registration names and read comments. Eventhough some people write nice comments, most aren't very motivational: things like "i want it fast", "this better really be free", "why shoud i tell u?" or "when will Charlie II be freeware?". Codes depend on the registration name and city (which are displayed on the title screen) and people keep trying to get codes for certain names like "x", "hacker", "nobody", "anonymous", "freeware" (and thousands of other ones).

After going through all these forms, my program generates e-mail messages which I then send. And guess what... about 10 - 15 percent is usually bouced and comes back. I used to go through these and either correct the addresses (things like "hotmial") or delete them from my database, but I stopped doing that.

By now I have a list of over 60,000 registered users, of which about 80% wants to receive announcements of updates/future games. Unfortunately, last time I sent a mailing out, almost 1/3 of the addresses didn't work anymore.

Now I'm wondering if this whole thing is worth the effort. I have the feeling that free registration for one game might actually even be bad for sales of other games, since people start to expect that the other games will eventually be free too. People ask questions like "How long before Super Worms is freeware like charlie?" and "Will you give free codes for Charlie II when Charlie III is finised?".

So I'm planning to change it back into payed registration (starting January 1st). That should save me a lot of time and also increase my sales! But would this be a good idea, in the long term? It will probably make the game less popular and those freeware sites would probably remove it.

Sounds like you're getting a lot of traffic, but it's largely useless since these people just want a freebie. Therefore I don't think that charging for the game again is going to make things worse, only better. Think about it this way -- right now you're attracting a LOT of people, but none of them want to pay you money. So you're getting lots of traffic with $0 in sales. Now, if you start charging for the game you'll lose a LOT of traffic, but these are people who wouldn't have bought anyway. So you'll have a lot less people coming, but they'll have a much higher chance to buy. It's pretty simple math -- you either have a large number multiplied by $0 which is $0, or a smaller number multiplied by the price of the game, which is going to be a number larger than $0. :)

A few years ago (before I started as an indie), I decided to give free registration codes for my game Charlie the Duck to anyone who completed a registration form.

I think this is a brilliant approach to marketing. You compile a large list of potential customers by enticing them with the free software, then you send them an interesting newsletter about your shareware sequels. Some thoughts, if you continue this practice:

1. Don't let the users asking for a freeware sequel faze you. To game players who have spare cash, if it's worth spending their time to play, there's a good chance it's worth spending money on.

2. It sounds like the registration process is taking up your time. An automated process might mitigate this. Sure, it could let users by the name of "Haxxor1" through; you'd have to weigh that against the time-savings. Also, an automated process could catch some of this by checking for substrings like "anonymous" and "nobody," and not actually sending the e-mails out.

3. You have a list of 31,000 (60,000 x 80% x 2/3) people who have actively asked for more info -- use that! Do you send out a newsletter regularly? How about e-mailing users 2-3 weeks after they've played the initial free game with a message asking if they'd like to try the shareware sequel? One mistake we made with our most popular product was to follow up with newsletters announcing free upgrades, but not for other products. We have this list of users who enjoyed our game enough to spend $14.95 for the whole thing, but we did not leverage that towards making more sales. You have a much larger list of people who have enjoyed your product; many of these are already receptive to your message.

4. Even if 50% of your users just want to know when all your games are becoming freeware(!), you'd still have over 15,000 who are interested in your shareware games.

So I'm planning to change it back into payed registration (starting January 1st). That should save me a lot of time and also increase my sales! But would this be a good idea, in the long term?

Since you'll be selling to the people who have not already seen the original, I doubt you'd suffer more of a backlash than removal from freeware sites and a few nasty letters from kids. ("Why isn't this freeware anymore!?") But from your description, it seems that you have something quite valuable in that e-mail list. An alternative to your plan would be to automate registration and focus on using that as an avenue for really pushing your other products.

Go from the original "Charlie the Duck" version to a "Charlie the Duck Gold" or "Deluxe" version. At the very least, you could update some graphics and text. Add some new levels or effects if you feel it would help your selling power. Marketers do this all the time with old products, often changing nothing but the packaging. Popcap (http://www.popcap.com) uses this marketing technique in almost all of their games!

If anyone complains about going from free to pay, you can point to the new version suggesting it's not the same game anymore.

Michael Sikora
Guardian Games (http://www.guardiangames.com)

Thanks for your comments.

Also, an automated process could catch some of this by checking for substrings like "anonymous" and "nobody," and not actually sending the e-mails out Yes, my program detects a lot of those, but there are always other ones. And whether the name is allowed or not often depends on how the rest of the form was filled out and that's easy to see in a glimpse, but hard to program. I just hate to let bad ones through and then later find these names/codes on some website.

You have a list of 31,000 (60,000 x 80% x 2/3) people who have actively asked for more info -- use that! That is a good point. I must say that I've only been using this about once or twice a year so far, only for important annoucements. But I'm not very good at writing an interesting newsletter if I actually don't have any news... :(

I don't like to write about projects that are in development, because they always take much longer than I expect and usually change quite a lot in the meantime. I get flooded with e-mails "when will ... be released?", "will it have ...?", "can I please have a alpha/beta version now?" etc.

Go from the original "Charlie the Duck" version to a "Charlie the Duck Gold" or "Deluxe" version. Yes, I plan to port the game to Windows some day (and make lots of improvements), but that will be quite a lot of work since the code is filled with asm blocks which write directly to the VGA card. Eventually, I want to be able to combine it with other Charlie games as a little part of a huge game (something like Mario AllStars).

Anyway, I guess I'll just try it for a while and see what happens. Maybe I'll start with keeping it free, but only for people who have purchased Charlie II (which might encourage more people to buy Charlie II).

I don't like to write about projects that are in development, because they always take much longer than I expect and usually change quite a lot in the meantime. I get flooded with e-mails "when will ... be released?", "will it have ...?", "can I please have a alpha/beta version now?" etc.

True; I've also been in a situation where I haven't had enough news to post, and so I've let the newsletter fall by the wayside. However, there are probably some ways to generate news that don't involve new products.

For example, Dan MacDonald posted this article (http://www.rainfallstudios.com/Articles/OnlineGamesPanel/summary.aspx) in another thread; it touches briefly on coupons. Promotional offers "only for registered newsletter subscribers" might draw interest.

Also, I noticed that Charlie II had a good number of secret areas you could enter. You could divulge a few secrets every now and again; not only would this be informative for your existing Charlie II customers, but it might make Charlie 1 registrants say, "hey, that's neat! I gotta download the sequel."