I did a little breakdown of how many games Retro64 sells per country, and here are the nations that have higher than 1% of the total sales:

United States: 59.6%

Unided Kingdom: 15.1%

Canada: 4.2%

Australia: 3.0%

Germany: 2.9%

France: 1.6%

Italy: 1.1%

The rest is split among many many different countries....

I am not surprised at all by the 60% from the USA. However, I think Canada is quite low, and the UK is very high. Are my percentages in line with everyone else?

This is for 2002-present, and does not include WarHeads SE sales...

Well we've just launched so it might be a bit premature, but so far it is like this for us:
1) U.S.A: 70%
2) Canada: 10%
3) U.K: 10%
4) Rest of the world: 10%

URL History:

~80% of my sales are to the US
~20% are to the UK

I haven't had any sales in other countries.

Figures seem about right given that commercial software usually sells about as much in Europe and the US (if localised and marketed). Your figures all show the missing non-English speaking sales at between 30-40%.

Our sales so far this year:
USA: 73.6%
UK: 7.1%
Canada: 3.3%
Australia: 3.3%
(I'm not listing any country below 3%).


I've also noted that the EU sales has NOT declined since we started charging EU residents 17.5% extra (the VAT) on the 1st of July.

I wonder how much localisation would affect the sales into other countries?

Would a localised version actually make much sense?

We all talk about having "buy now" buttons and stuff everywhere, but does that significantly harm the sales if this isnt your native language?

I'm planning on at least trying localisation for SLOA, so I'll release a breakdown once we ship and get some significant testing done.

Would a native language website be a good idea also? I guess it would.

It'll be interesting to see what effect localisation has.

BTW: In retail sales, Ive been told on good authority by a major US developer that they expect sales to be roughly equal between the US and "the rest of the world", i.e. total worldwide sales is a 50-50 split between the US and Everywhere else.

Thats a VERY american centric view though, and these guys write games that appeal mostly to the american market.

Ive also known for a while that germany has HUGE sales potential (lots of gamers in germany), so I'll definitely be aiming to have a german version of my games. Europe actually has pretty good potential for a sales market as it happens.

Perhaps its because US developers dont know which european sites/magazines are the most influential?

.Z.

About 70% of my sales currently come from the USA.

I was surprising looking the 1.1% from Italy :)
So seems that there's someone not afraid to buy online here in my country...!!

about the translation question: it can help, if the game is particularly complex, but if it is a puzzle game don't think it really need translation.
For the languages, surely a german and french translation would be good. I wouldn't underestimate also the russian and korean market.
I had a friend of mine sell an adventure (called Tony tough) in russia, and surprisingly the sales were as high as the american ones!!!

(Hi! I'm new here. Finally managed to make this board work by disabling the cookie option...)

Originally posted by zoombapup
Would a localised version actually make much sense?


I know many people on IRC who don't speak or understand English well (I'm French). Those who are good at English are usually programmers :) .. So I guess they are not the majority.

The game I'm writting is ready for localisation, I just have to add some translations to a text file and that's it, any language (provided it uses ISO-8859-1 characters) can be supported.

I'll have to think of something similar for my web site if I don't want to spend hours copy-pasting things...

My numbers....

Since early 2002 (just counting my BMT Micro account, i.e. not any retail deals or affiliate deals):

US: 58%
UK: 12%
Germany: 8%
Canada: 4%
Australia: 3%

and then the rest: Netherlands, Austria, France, Norway each with around 2%, and then lots of wee little ones.

One difficulty with the European market (as opposed to the US) is that credit cards are not as commonly used. But I firmly believe those markets will eventually embrace online purchasing as much as the US/UK does.

Canada's numbers are low for me too (even though that's were I live) but of course its population is a fraction of the US - taking that into account it actually evens out. My Germany numbers are a little better because I have some good connections there (and have had reviews of my games in the glossies, such as PC Action and Gamestar).

Cheers!

A thing I'd like to ask to anyone who had both online and retail deals is: was worth it? I mean, your retail sales were satisfying or not? (compared to those online)
Maybe I should start a new thread to this...

I have always wanted to localize for the German Market. It is supposed to be the second largest gaming market in the world. But you have to accept German Bank transfers and have everything localized too, including the website. It's just another thing on my infinite to-do list :)

Mike,

Why do you have to accept german bank transfers?

I guess it would be better to find a german version of RegNow or whoever, but do you REALLY have to use german banks in the process at all?

How do german shareware companies do it I wonder?

.Z.

It seems like they prefer German bank transfers. BMT accepts them, but it's not an easily available option for the customer. From what I understand, ShareIt has some automated methods for acception German transfers, so they would probably be the ones to use for that.

This situation about german bank transfer is really strange.
I just signed with SWREG to sell some photos online (www.didone.com), not a game, but they didn't say anything special about german sales...!

Just a note about bank transfers in the EU. Beginning from the 1st of July all EU banks must do inter-EU bank transfers at the same commission as normal national transfers. And they can't raise their prices for national transfers either. There are a certain restrictions (most importantly that the transfer must be done using a IBAN account number to facilitate automatic clearance) but generally speaking this is aimed at making the EU market more transparent internally.

This means that accepting bank transfers inside EU will get significantly easier and you might only need one EU account to handle all the traffic. I haven't done any experimentation with this yet to see if it lowers the barrier of payment but this can't be all bad.

Just in reference to the German market, I have been thinking the same toughts as you have Mike, the market is huge but you would need to know some german to be able to enter it easily.

Potentially there's a big market everywhere if you do a game in their natural language.
I don't know about the german one, but I thought that a big market was the korean or the chinese one. The korea internet connection speed is really fast, the nation itself is almost all cabled and so downloading games from internet is really easy there.
If you speak about retail market, well, that depend a lot on price of the game.
Here in Italy my previous company was able to sold over 10.000 copies of a game based on a famous comic, selling it on newsstands. in facts here in Italy we sell the newspapers in the so called "edicola" which are really diffused on the territory, so basically we were offering a complete game (even if really short in therm of longevity) for small price (around 5-7$) but available to mostly everyone because was in italian and widely distributed.

It worked for 1 year or 2, then the people realized that they were wasting their money on such bad games :P LOL

I don't have any experience selling games yet, but from my screensaver sales, I'd say my sales are close to 45% USA, 40% UK and the rest are from elsewhere, Austrailia, France, Israel, etc.. These aren't anywhere near exact figures, but they should give you a good idea that my US and UK sales are quite close.