It seems that most shareware game pages have a few screenshots, a bulleted feature list, and mabey a paragraph of text about a game. Would it be helpful to give more info about each game. For example: detailed how-to-play information, character bios, enemy information, game story/background, screenshots with more text describing the features of that pic. Can you give the viewer too much information? I don't think you'd distract them from buying as long as you keep the "buy now" buttons scattered about on each of these pages. If this is a good idea, why don't more people do it?

Cause it might not be.

I myself like to be well informed. If there were multiple pages of info, I might be inclined to read through them, and yes, having the Buy button everywhere would be good, but it might also be too intrusive. I don't know.

Someone else mentioned here that they took four pages and cut it down to one, and sales went up 10%. So maybe the truth is that people don't like to read too much. They want to play right away.

One problem is that many developers are much better programmers than they are writers - and their audience is better players than they are readers!

Any detailed game information you put up *could* attract more interest, but it could also tick someone's hotspots for game dislikes ("It's turn-based? Boring.") and make them decide not to bother downloading. Or just confuse them.

You've probably put more work into making your game sell itself, catch interest, be intuitive, etc. Just enough information to make the viewer curious so they download the game and find out more for themselves might be best.

The common wisdom in direct marketing is: "Long copy sells".

Be as brief as you want to be on the front page. Your goal there is to provide a good, attention-grabbing summary. But make it possible to learn as much about the game as seems useful. No one likes to be stuck with "You'll love this great game!" as their sole purchasing incentive. They want to dig deeper, to make sure the game does what *they* are looking for.

-David

If you're presenting lots and lots of info, be sure to have a nice layout of it all. Several pages of plain text is just simply boring and could very well scare people (I know I tend to quickly close web pages with too much text).

A good idea might be to have a standard info page which is easy on the eye, and then have several sub-pages with further info for those that are interested. It won't scare off the casual visitors and at the same time there's enough info to satisfy even the most hard-core text readers! :)

very SIMPLE and CLEAR first page. only few words of text.

then... links to other pages with more info.

Originally posted by APE
It seems that most shareware game pages have a few screenshots, a bulleted feature list, and mabey a paragraph of text about a game. Would it be helpful to give more info about each game.

The standard practice for most people is clearly to give very little information as you say. I think this is wrong.

The more information you can give about your game, the better. I've run many tests on my site comparing long copy vs. short copy and long copy always wins by giving more sales. Most authors are leaving money on the table by not putting lots of information about their game on their site.

Of course, one issue is that you have to be able to write and also have to have something to say about your game.