I was wondering if you can over do it, if you keep releasing a game each month, does each game get an equal amount of purchases? What I'm trying to say is would you reject a game, even if it meets all your requirements, just because you already have a lot of games to be released?

Thanks.

Interesting question.... Keeping the right pace of new releases is an ongoing balancing act. We want to make sure each individual game sells well, but we also need to maintain strong overall sales. In any given month, the best-selling game will outsell the worst-selling game by 20-50 times (i.e. the worst seller sells 2-4% as many copies as the best seller). And this is only counting the releases of the past three months, not our older games from the 1990s.

At the beginning of this year, I had set a goal for Dexterity to publish four new games in 2002. But it didn't take long to realize that the demand from both players and developers was far greater than that. So far this year we've launched eight new games, and all of them launched on schedule. Once Twice Thrice (http://www.dexterity.com/once-twice-thrice/) just launched yesterday.

It takes a good six months for each game to build up a decent level of distribution. There are lead times for things like getting games onto magazine cover CDs and shareware CD-ROMs. Since the first game we launched in 2002 has only been out for three months, we haven't gotten "into the long run" on these titles yet. The first six months of any new release tend to be very unstable and highly unpredictable. One game may get some great press that another game misses out on. It's really only after the six-month point that we can get a decent sense of the long term success potential of a game.

So in answer to your question, each game definitely won't get an equal amount of purchases, just like in retail. Initially we try to give each game an equal amount of promotion, but after that, the game may sell well, or it may not.

We'll be pacing the rate of new releases on many factors, one of which is how many quality games we find that meet our standards. Whenever we release a new game and see how it sells, we deepen our understanding of what players want. During the Spring we signed up many new developers, so we had a lot of releases during the summer.

Right now we are actively looking for new titles. Our submission volume is still high. But we're also a lot pickier now that we have a better idea of what players want. We may sometimes reject games that are too similar to what we've already published, but I don't think we've ever had to reject a really fun game that meets our standards because our queue was too full.

Fun is still the #1 criterion that we look for. If you submit a game that's really, really fun to play, the odds are that we'll find a way to publish it.

That was a really good question. I'm glad Steve answered this one as it gives some insight as to how patient and resourceful we must learn to be if we want to be successful as independent developers. This is very interesting stuff.

Yes, thanks for answering that in detail, I was getting a little worried about the answer, but if fun is still #1 then it's all good:).