I was thinking about Dexterities services, which are admittedly very good. I think that all the contracts Steve proposes are win win sutioations. However wanting to test the marketing end of things myself, I find myself wishing I could still benefit from Dexterity's QA processes and Web based purchasing system.

Now I haven't thought this through entirely, but I was wondering if there's some demand for a QA/online billing service through dexterity. Basically whatI envision is that dexterity helps the indie developer QA his game, tests it on old systems etc. Once that process is complete the indie developer can get a logo for their site saying "Dexterity Seal of Quality" or something like that. They could choose to adopt dexterities gaurentee system as well.

On top of that they would route their sales through dexterities merchant account. Now this sounds quite attractive to me from an indie developer point of view. But how would dexterity win from this as well?

While a one time fee for QA services sounds O.K. it's hardly compelling from dexterities POV when they can offer the same service to the developers they publish and get revenue streams from it.

I'm not sure how it would all work out, but somehow dexterity could take a X% cut of your profits for the QA and for use of the billing system. In that manner dexterity would have an aditional revenue stream that they dont have to actively promote.

The idea is still a little rough, and it seems like dexterity is still getting a slightly shorter end of the stick because they have to have faith that the developer will actually do his job and sell the thing effectively.

After thinking about this I thought to myself "now why wouldn't someone just sign one non exclusive marketing contracts that dexterity offers?" Well for one, dexterity only has so many resources to spend promoting games. You have to be able to secure one of those contracts as well and if recent activity is any indication it's only getting harder to do so. So if dexterity has some extra bandwidth for QA this could be a nice additional source of revenue for them.

This idea could have merit depending on the demand from the indie community and the resources that dexterity has to spend. I really like the idea that dextirity could be responsibile for single handedly improving the quality of indie games everywere. If our budding indie game community can shake the "Shareware" reputation (that games distributed with the shareware marketing method are of lower quality) then we all stand to gain.


just some thoughts... I'd be interested in hearing any feedback.

Interesting ideas....

Unfortunately I don't think the QA idea would work because indies aren't known for having a lot of cash to spend on QA. Our costs to run a typical game through QA are well over $1000 and can take many weeks of back-and-forth worth with the developer. I think we'd have a really hard time selling such a service. Plus not every developer would get the same benefit -- some games require a lot more QA work than others.

QA is also something of an ongoing process. Even after a game is released, new bugs may still be found. It's also not uncommon for us to work with the developer on tweaking registration incentives post-release.

As far as us providing e-commerce services, there are at least a dozen companies already doing that, such as RegNow, RegSoft, Digibuy, SWReg, Kagi, etc. If we went that route, we'd just be another me-too -- I don't see that we'd have anything unique to offer in this area.

Hmm yes I see the difficulty...

I'm aware that there are other billing services available, the reason I suggested it be part of a QA package is that it would allow dexterity to extract it's percentage of each sale in a fair and accurate way. My idea was not to have an up front fee for the QA but have it factored into the percentage of each sale.

The trouble with this is that it represents a sizeable investment on your behalf up front and it doesn't have gaurenteed long term returns because those returns are basically dependant on your indie developer's ability to go out and sell like crazy.

If there was a good way to solve this problem it might be something worth implenting (assuming there's demand), but i'm all out of ideas at the moment ;)

Anyway, I know you're (steve) always interested in win-win ideas (who wouldn't be) so I just thought i'd throw that one out there.

Yes, it is a nice thought, but as you said it is dependant on the developer being able to market and sell the game himself. Of course, the biggest falling point of most developers is a failure to market properly. Thus Dexterity's income would be resting on the most common point of failure.