Just a queation about your thoughts and experiences with add-on packs to your products. Practically any successful game, retail or shareware, has add-on packs. The reasons why they're a good thing are straightforward.

The question I have is when they should be developed/released. If you had a product that you basically developed add-on packs in parallel to is it a good idea to relase them when you release the original product or is it better to wait for a bit?

Should you come out of the gates with a full product line on day one or will users feel like the add-ons should have just been added to the main product?

-j

I think this is a matter of opinion as well as a matter of experience, but I'll just offer an opinion. First, ask yourself if your game is a good stand alone product when released on its own with no promise of an add-on. If it is then your customers may not feel cheated when you decide to release an expansion pack later down the road. There are many factors to consider, but for releasing an add-on, I get the impression that letting it go before 5 or 6 months have passed may be too soon.

I see this as kind of a pure business mathy decision. You basically have to weigh the effort of creating an add-on with the benefit you're going to get. Let's suppose we assume that 15% of the people who buy the game will purchase the add on. If you sell 100 games then you should sell about 15 add-ons. So for every 100 games sold if the product is 20$ and the add-on 20$ you'd make...

100x20 + 15x20 = 2300$

instead of

100x20 = 2000$

In this case it's easy.. it's 15% more since the price is the same. It may be possible to raise the percentage of add-on purchasers by offering a bundle. People I think are more likely to go for a bundle than come back and buy and add-on, but then you'd probably lose a little on the price.

with Aargon the breakdown (of profit) for me is roughly...

aargon alone 15%
aargon with level pack in a bundle 65%
level packs alone 10%
hint guides 10%

So now you just try to make a judgement... effort vs reward. Is the effort required to put the add-on together worth the time given that you'll get x% extra profit.

The other key thing is of course whether or not the game sells. Obviously even 90% extra profit on a game that's sold only 10 copies isn't worth a few months of work to make a level pack. So I'd say it's probably best to wait until there are at least a few thousand customers and you know that there's an audience for your game. You may just want to plan ahead and build in the hooks to add level packs.