I've recently started an indie company (it's just me) and released my first game, which can be found at www.mindscopesoftware.com. I have had around 1,000 downloads in the past month but not one buy! I haven't received any feedback as to whether there were bugs or if people had problems, so I'm assuming for the moment the problem is a.) with the game, or b.) with the registration incentive, or c.) this is not unusual and the process takes more time. I was wondering if the more experienced developers on this board could offer their advice. Thanks!

Just a couple of quick things:

There is no price on the game page.

According to the min system specs there is no mention of Win98, is this right or just an ommision?

I had to start downloading the file to find it's size, ie 7.72mb.

Alfie

Just crashes on my machine right after load. There is a single diamond on a black screen, the game makes a noise like air coming from a balloon then gives an exception.

Notebook
Athlon 2500+ XP-M
512MB
Radeon IGP 320M (Shared memory)
Win XP

SC

btw This thread probably needs moved to 'News, Announcements & Feedback Requests'.

And don't lose hope, it's very early days yet. It took me 2,000 downloads and two weeks to get just one sale at the beginning. I spent six months tweaking my game to get it to sell a bit better. Not that it sells particularly well (1-2 sales a month right now).

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec
It took me 2,000 downloads and two weeks to get just one sale at the beginning.

How did you manage to get 2000 downloads in two weeks for your FIRST game?

- Roulette

Can't try it now since I'm at work, but a few things come to mind.

1) Site isn't really buying friendly, I have no idea about the download size, buying price and also, since you only have one game, I would suggest making the website a bit more around the game. Now it seems the game is "just another product" for Mindscope "Featured game" and "More Info" on the game when it's the only one doesn't make me want to stay in the site (really!).
[update]I just noted you included the price and made the "Buy Now" button more visible on the first page, but I would still reconsider making the website revolve more around the game[end update]

2) I can't really say from the description, but it seems like a word game. I know you have "Keep the mischievous Gremloks from stealing all the treasure on Diamond Island! Includes 3 different word games set in rich, colorful 3D environments." on th emain page, but as soon as I click "More Info" I get no information on how the game is played, from the description, it seems more like a collumns or tetris game than a word game.

3) Since it is a word game, I do believe the OpenGL requirement is t much. Most people (imo) that play word games aren't that avid gamers which keep up to date with video card drivers. To require OpenGL support may be a bit too much. But then again, I may be completly wrong, but still, it gives me that tingly feeling.


4) Something that just came to my mind, but the name "Diamond Island" says nothing about the game. Most word games are identifiable by their name, e.g. BookWorm, FlipWords, etc.


Also, check http://www.dexterity.com/articles/basic-market-research.htm out, it may give you a few tips for the future =)

Originally posted by Roulette
How did you manage to get 2000 downloads in two weeks for your FIRST game?

That's how much a game gets when it's featured on download.com. After this period the downloads decrease rapidly.

a word puzzle game using opengl thats a 7meg download?

you have some serious competition here from gamehouse, popcap. they have smaller install sizes, they dont need openGL.
there goes 95% of your potential purchases right away.
and thats without knowing the price, or even looking at the game.

Originally posted by lakibuk
That's how much a game gets when it's featured on download.com. After this period the downloads decrease rapidly.

actually, i had better experience with http://www.jumbo.com, and not just in the first few weeks, but lets not stray too off topic :)

At this stage in your business just getting millions of downloads is your #1 priority. Get your game linked to from everywhere. Keep updating it and keep it on the New and Updated lists on list sites like download.com.

In the early stages of the business it would seem like you can expect few sales. However, your next game will be much more warmly received by your existing customers. Eventually with a bunch of good games that your customers like you'll get more comfortable sales.

That's my theory anyway. I don't expect to make any serious money at this malarkey for at least 5 years.

Cas :)

I was very impressed. The game looks very professional and polished. As other people pointed out, the > 7 MB download and the use of 3D may eliminate some potential customers but I wouldn’t be that worried about those issues.

The question I have is “is it any fun?” It’s hard for me to tell because I never liked this kind of game. Is it fun for 30 seconds but then it gets boring and repetitive? Is there something that makes you want to play over and over or do you get your fill after the first sitting? I am not trying to say it is boring or not fun. I don’t know and don’t feel fit to judge. I know other people do like this kind of game. But just because you made a letter clicking work building game don’t mean you captured what made Book Worm fun. Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t I don’t know.

I think the main reason you haven’t seen many (or any) registration yet would be your trial period. 15 days is a long time. It may be too generous. Then again, 15 days may be the optimum trial period for this game and could generate the most registrations in the end. But you won’t see them this early. Give it more time.

I thought I would share some numbers from when my latest game was recently featured on download.com. These are only downloads and sales generated by download.com. Sales from other sources are tracked separately.


Day RDL CDL Sales Conv%
4/12/2004 425 271 1 0.37
4/13/2004 1,555 730 6 0.82
4/14/2004 1,256 679 11 1.62
4/15/2004 1,172 643 11 1.71
4/16/2004 716 375 14 3.73
4/17/2004 66 36 3 8.33
4/18/2004 75 35 2 5.71
4/19/2004 72 41 3 7.32
Total 5,337 2,810 51 1.81


RDL is attempted downloads
CDL is completed downloads
Conv % is the percentage of completed downloads that resulted in sales.

Interesting points. Downloads dropped off sharply when the game was no longer “featured”. Number of downloads peeked on day 2 but sales didn’t peek until day 5.

This is a game with a 2 HOUR trial period and the sales seemed to lag 3 days behind downloads. I am sure a 15 day dial period will have much longer lag even if there are many features disabled in the trial version. Historically we have seen that some users buy the game weeks or even months after the download even thought the game has a 2 hour trial period. The sales and conversion % will continue to increase overtime at a faster pace then the downloads.

Thanks! You guys are fantastic. I have taken all of your advice into account and am working on getting the game to be smaller, the gameplay to be clearer and the web page to be more of a selling tool. I appreciate all your suggestions!

James,

Can you tell us what game you had featured on download.com? Also the price.

$19.99 for Ricochet Lost Worlds

Ricochet Lost ... what?

Strange. I had never heared about such game. What is your website James?

:)

What is your website James?
Click the WWW button in his post.

;)

This is appreciated James.

Great company, good game and very useful statistics.
I was thinking that this is impossible at all to have a such a high conversion rate at download.com.

Now I know how big is our room to improve...

Do you have anything else to share?... :)
In PM? ;)

Thanks,

Ricochet Extreme and Lost Worlds really set the standard for games in this industry IMO. They have some of the highest conversion rates I have seen and are excellent in all aspects of the games. James and Reflexive had a winning formula with Ricochet Extreme and then merely expanded on the sequel.

Here is why I think the games do so well:

1 - Innovation - they aren't simply clones of Arkanoid/Breakout games. They take the genre to a whole new level so you feel as if you have never played a game like it before. If only this level of innovation was brought to bear in other games...

2 - Excellence - from the sound quality to the graphics to the game play, the game was tested many months (James can clarify) before it was released so they had a super polished product. The users were not the beta testers!

3 - Variety - every level introduces something new. This causes players to be excited about what the next level will reveal. Also, the varied boards, difficulty settings, etc help here.

4 - Fun Factor - very high. Extremely enjoyable game experience.

Thanks for all the kind words about Ricochet Jim and Andy. But I really wasn’t trying to hijack another thread. Just for the record, I didn’t even mention the name of my game until pushed. I was simply trying to explain how much sales lag behind downloads and how that lag is impacted by the trial period limitations.

I hope Mindscope got the advice and information he was looking for. Diamond Island looks like a great game. I hope it starts selling better soon.

James, not to (further) hijack the thread, but I visited your site, and the game that made my jaw drop was Lionheart. It looks incredible! (In fact, I was about to say it reminded me of the Baldur's Gate series, and then I noticed Black Isle is the publisher ;)) How many people are on the team behind the game, if I may ask?

Mindscope, I think what you must do is make sure your game is differentiated enough from your competition.

What can your game do for people that other similar games haven't already done?

What new or unique element can you add to the game to give users a fresh experience in this genre?

What can you do to keep people intrigued and dying to play the next level? (then chop them off at the high point at the end of the demo ;))

Is there any interesting music you can add that hasn't been done in a game before? (Big Fish's Top Ten Solitaire has some great classical guitar - that really stood out to me as a feature not found in other games I had played - too bad it was the same track over and over...)

... so, assuming what Jim just said

Don't believe to princec. If game doesn't sell - it doesn't sell and will never sell good till you change something in it or make another game.
So don't waste too much of your time, efforts and money on advertising and marketing till you are not sure that you have good enough conversion rate for this or another your games.

You addressed your questions exactly in the correct time. It's time to search what could you change/imporve in this great looking game to make it all times bestseller.

... I suppose :)

REM: But based upon our short experience in the area I'd better focus on the next game in the first turn. I'm really sorry to say this but we had found that this is very hard (almost impossible) to improve the game up to the money making excelense if it doesn't sell at all at the beginning.

Just my one and half cents.

What a nice game! I liked both the mood of the game and the gameplay. I'm also working on a word game and have been playing quite a few recently. The biggest backdraw here I think is that there is a tendency to 'take what you get' and only build three or possibly four letter words, which could be a bit repetitative after a while. But I haven't played so much and am not a native speaker so could be wrong.

There were concerns earlier in this thread that OpenGL requirements would slice off a big portion of potential buyers. My game will most likely require DirectX 8.1. Is there a similar problem with that or is that 'acceptable' by now? Thankful for comments.

Anyways, I hope the sales will pick up on this fun and polished game.

DX8.1 will likely cost you as many customers as OpenGL.

Cas :)

Are there any stats on that? I always thought DirectX outstripped OpenGL by a very large margin.

And, as long as the latest version of DirectX is included in the package, I don't really see a potential user base problem.

Hi,

I've the same problem as the initial poster. Although I had all set up (price, download size, etc) and the demo had some success, it hasn't been purchased yet.

Take a glimpse : http://www.dude-development.com

I've set up a 10 level per collection demo...

Would be great if you could share your comments and opinions.

Best regards,
Stefan Maton

I really need to get some logged stats about DX penetration but OpenGL is installed on about 65% of PCs. DX is installed on nearly all of them of course but DX8.1 is a relatively recent version and isn't nearly as prevalent. DX7.0 or 8.0 are more common.

This of course has nothing to do with lack of sales except that if the game doesn't run the download is a waste. And without logging stats you'll never know what's going on.

Cas :)

That's very interesting, Cas. I didn't know there was a significant difference of 'user-base' between 8.0 and 8.1. I have to downgrade my engine (written for another game) from DX9 so I might as well go for 8.0 in that case. It's just before v 8.0 it was too different, so I don't want to go there.

Thanks.

I think the major advantage of using DirectX over OpenGL (don't start a flamewar =)) is that DirectX is a) included in the Windows OS, I think XP has 8.0 pre-installed by default. b) Users can seemly update DirectX from the windows update site when they upgrade for security patches (have no idea how many people do this, but it is still a more easy download over OpenGL).

The main disavantage I see is portability where OpenGL beats DirectX.

I'm using OpenGL right now because of a mac port, but I'm seriously considering when the game is over to rewrite the renderer for dx7 in the windows version.

Also princec, you get 65% of YOUR users, but I would suspect the number of people that have OpenGL working that like word and puzzle games is far less.

There's a difference all right but without actual random logged stats - I can't say how big it is.

Cas :)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/directx9_c/directx/intro/program/version/versioncheck.asp

Microsoft Windows 98 Gold: DirectX 5.2
Windows 98 SE: DirectX 6.1a
Windows 2000:DirectX 7.0
Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me): DirectX 7.1
Windows XP: DirectX 8.1

DX7 seems like the absolute minimum (I mean, who's running Windows 98 that's actually going to have a 3d card?), but I don't see the point of DX8. Might as well just go with DX 8.1 if you want to go past 7.

Whoa, this seems to be wildly different from this thread:

http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3011&perpage=15&pagenumber=3

(toward the end)

From those numbers, it would seem to indicate that targeting OpenGL 1.1 (at least you get vertex array support) was the wisest decision... assuming your game wasn't so fancy that it needed a higher version of OpenGL.

Originally posted by brian
DX7 seems like the absolute minimum (I mean, who's running Windows 98 that's actually going to have a 3d card?), but I don't see the point of DX8. Might as well just go with DX 8.1 if you want to go past 7. [/B]

I'm running Windows98 with a 3d card (ATI 7200). And before that, I ran Win95 with a Voodo 3d card. My Win95 machine is long since gone, but I bet one of your potential customers is still using theirs.

Anyway, instead of sweating what version of directX to write for, just use SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/) . It'll use whatever version of DirectX happens to be installed, and if there is no DirectX, it uses GDI. I think that should include just about all your potential customers. Not to mention ease of use. I've writtten in DirectX, and there's no way in hell, you can drag me back there after using SDL. But wait, there's more. It's cross-platform as well. Your game will run on Mac, Windows, or Linux. This book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592000304/qid=1083865284/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-8879854-1077466?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) is pretty good if you need a jumpstart.

As for OpenGL, sorry can't help you there, other than to say that SDL and OpenGL do play well together. Haven't tried that yet, but many have.

Just a quickie one, but windowed SDL apps and Windows running WindowBlinds don't mix. The SDL windows are small as (usually jsut shows the titlebar and some pixels) and most times exits as soon as you click them.

I've tried SDL, didn't like the lib design so I didn't continue to use it, but that's just me =)

From the thread linked 2 posts above:
Ok. Just parsed it... to get an idea on how many systems a game should run, if you target a specific version. The percentages are relative to the amount of PCs wich claim to support OGL (so 1.0 get's 100%).
(...)
1.0 | 1186 | 100.00%
1.1 | 1176 | 99.16%
1.2 | 974 | 82.12%
1.3 | 860 | 72.51%
(...)


Remember that this is assumming it HAS OpenGL. If you pick up and assume that only 30% of all computers don't support or don't have drivers for OpenGL all those numbers drop to 30%.

What is being shown there is the supported version of OpenGL on OpenGL supported cards, not the total of machines that support OpenGL.

Just a quickie one, but windowed SDL apps and Windows running WindowBlinds don't mix. The SDL windows are small as (usually jsut shows the titlebar and some pixels) and most times exits as soon as you click them.

This sort of worries me as I use SDL for all my projects. Is WindowBlinds very popular?

I don't know, is the most popular windows skinning program, but the percentage of users, I have no clue. WB has been in business for a long time so I would suspect it has a decent user base.

small note, I stated SDL doesn't work with WB, I'm not sure of this, but 3 computers (2 work pcs, one not even mine so it wasn't something *I* was using and one home computer) with WB installed had this problem while it didn't have problems in computers without WB made me assumed it was WB the problem.

Remember that this is assumming it HAS OpenGL. If you pick up and assume that only 30% of all computers don't support or don't have drivers for OpenGL all those numbers drop to 30%.

30% *do* or 30% *don't* have OpenGL support?

Anyway, is this true? When did Microsoft start shipping Windows with opengl32.dll and glu32.dll? In another thread I posted, I also posted this - couldn't the game ship with these dlls as part of the install, and all would be fine? (Sure, worst case, the game would end up with software rendering if the computer didn't have GL drivers for the hardware accelerator, if one even was on the machine, but if the game wasn't doing anything fancy, it wouldn't matter too much.)

Software ppenGL1.1 has shipped with Windows since 95OSR2, i.e. 100% of Windows machines have OpenGL, and it's a very high quality implementation but deathly slow. However individual vendors' hardware accelerated drivers are generally not shipped with OEM Windows since Windows XP, although the very first driver update the user does will typically give them hardware GL drivers. From a fairly random sample, I've determined about 35% of Windows machines do not ship with hardware OpenGL drivers.

If you factor this out of your conversion rate you will find that using OpenGL has no effect whatsoever on sales anyway. All it does is make your life as a programmer a lot easier.

Cas :)

When someone buys a computer with a 3d accelerator, it generally does not include that accelerator's OpenGL driver?

I'm not sure what you meant by "since Windows XP" - you mean only recently they are not shipping with the OpenGL drivers? If so, they were before?

Original post by princec
If you factor this out of your conversion rate you will find that using OpenGL has no effect whatsoever on sales anyway. All it does is make your life as a programmer a lot easier.

A 35% hit on the conversion rate is likely to cut sales in half.

Like princec say 100% of windows 98 (and version after) have opengl. Hardware acceleration come for directX and opengl with the driver.

The first problem is when the customer never install a graphic card driver, and the game is too slow (which will be the same for a direct3d game)

For that, advise the user during the install to use the lastest video card driver.

The other problem is when people don't know opengl. Sometimes they think they don't have it (directx is much well known) and don't download the game...

Explain with a short sentence that most computer have opengl, and that every computer build since 1999 support OpenGL.

I know that Windows comes standard with OpenGL for a long time now, but I wonder if computers that are bought with 3d cards don't have the OpenGL drivers for those cards already installed. That sounds very strange to me if it's true. I've never bought a computer that didn't have the OpenGL drivers already installed for the 3d card on the system.

If I wrote my game in OpenGL, I wouldn't be advertising it as such as I don't want to confuse people that might buy the game. I'm targeting a non-hardcore crowd. So, also, advising them to install the latest video driver is not an option.

So, this is what I'm really trying to get a handle on -

what % of computers that:

a) were bought since, say, '98
b) came with 3d cards when bought

.. did not have OpenGL drivers for their 3d cards already installed at time of purchase?

We sorta hijacked the thread but:

I was refering to HW OpenGL, because SW OpenGL just sucks big time. Even on my P4 2.4Ghz, running a simple game (some Tux racing game on Linux) is slow as hell. between not running and running at 2 fps I don't see the advantage.

Getting back on topic, here are my thoughts on the game.

Firstly, congratulations on the programming and the graphics. Very polished and first rate. However, I have two fundamental points which I think are definitely harming your sales.

1. The title of your game must absolutely and obviously communicate that it is a word game. People looking for word games will miss it, and those wanting to avoid word games may accidently download it.

2. The game design is the biggest problem. The concept is good, but I felt frustrated after playing for 15 minutes for several reasons. I clicked individually on each of the three game types and tried them all twice. I may be dumb, but it just seemed way too difficult, especially dropping the gremloks in the lava. You must absolutely flatter your play and make him think 'hot damn, I'm good at this game'. You can do this by giving ever increasing points awards, and some solid feeling of progress. The ending of each level seems arbitrary. I didn't get a sense that I was acheiving anything except an abstract score, which seemed to be humiliatingly poor. It wasn't clear what I needed to do to progress or improve. There is no explanation of the scoring system, or any hints on how I could improve my score. The bottom line is, that there seems to be no incentive for me to buy this game.

I think these problems can be fixed. Do a usability study on the game play if you can. If you work on it, I think you can get it right.