The above plan only works for gnomes. I am not a gnome, so I'm missing one step.

No, seriously. I'm reading this forum for over 7 months now, and although there are bits of wisdom all over the place, I still can't get a clear picture of Step 2. I guess there are many other in this same situation.

You make a great game. You need lots of people to download your game, hoping that 1% of these people actually buy the full version. So you list it in every place you can find.

Question 1 : What do you do if your game is in download.com and many other places and still get only a few downloads? How do you get more people to download your game? Are Press Releases the answer? Are Reviews the answer? For example, PegSweeper got 190 downloads (or whatever download.com counts as a download) in 3 days. In the best case, it's 1900 downloads per month - in practice it will be far less, because it isn't in the front page anymore and because the real number of downloads is smaller (my Apache logs say so) - not a big number, no matter how do you count it.

I understand most of the successful guys here attract people to their sites just for being who they are - Dexterity and Retro64 come to mind. What can unknown developers do?

OK, let's say you manage to get lots of downloads thanks to an unknown method. princec just got 10K downloads for Alien Flux - but just 16 sales. It's a 0.16% conversion rate. While the famous 1% is just an average, it's an average because it takes into account much "lesser" games, like my PegSweeper (BTW, 3 sales in 1K downloads!). Being technically superior and a good game altogether, I'd expect Alien Flux to do much better. princec stated that just now he is solving some of the technical details. Let's assume the first 50% downloads didn't run because of Java (:P) and the number of "good" downloads was 5K - it's still a 0.32% conversion rate.

Question 2 : However, people say that sales start coming in one or two years after launch. I really can't figure out why. Two years means some "undatedness" to some degree. Ignoring that, I can understand more sales if there are more downloads - but why does the conversion rate improve? Is word of mouth that important? Can the little tweaking of the registration incentives and the game over two years have such an impact?

I really want to make a living off this. I'm not afraid at all of the technical and production side. But I'm pretty lost when it comes to marketing and sales :(

Conclussion : Steve, I REALLY need that book of yours :)

... can I admit that "PegSweeper" sounds uninteresting enough that I haven't even *looked* at your game? It sounds like jumping pegs or something. I hate jumping pegs. :)

I too would like to suggest that PegSweeper sounds so much like MineSweeper, or a dull game played with little wooden pegs, that I've not even looked at it either?

I think it looks like you need a rebranding excercise which is posh marketeer gumph for changing the name of the game. If you'd callled it Peg-O-Matic for example it wouldn't give much away as to what it might be. In fact if you called it Peg-O-Matic I'd be along to look at it ;)

Cas :)

I think the first place to start is Step 1. Many times developers think they have a great game when they don't. What they may have is great gameplay. But a great game is a product, and a product is much more than just gameplay. To have a great product, you must consider the whole packaging around the gameplay -- Is the interface so simple and clean that new players can get into the game in less than 30 seconds? Does the demo leave players eager to buy? Is the game rock-solid stable even if you're running DirectX 5 under Windows 98?

Also, keep in mind that there's lots of competition. If another game is just 10% better than yours, it could be getting most of the sales while yours gets very few. So if your game isn't one of the absolute best in its field, you might just be getting a trickle while the leaders are raking it in. A common rule of thumb is that the #1 product in any field makes double what the #2 product makes, and the #2 makes double what the #3 makes. I'm not sure how well this applies to indie games, but it does seem to hold for many other competitive industries.

Creating a great indie game isn't easy, but assuming you manage to do this, Step 2 involves promoting and selling the game. It takes a lot of time and hard work to build distribution. Unless you have millions of dollars to spend, it's likely to take several years to build up a web site with decent traffic. Four years ago this site got only 15 visitors and 60 page views per day.

Momentum plays a significant role. It takes a lot of work to get the ball rolling, but once it's in motion, keeping it going requires much less effort. It simply takes a long time to get your demo out there and wait patiently for those demos and links to bring in traffic year after year. Traffic should increase if you develop repeat traffic and give people a reason to return. If you only have one or two games, you probably won't see much repeat traffic. But as you add more traffic and have more regular releases, repeat traffic can go up a lot.

Take this forum for example. When it first launched in fall 2002, I did a little bit of promotion for it in a few places, but in the first few months, it didn't use more than 1-2GB of bandwidth. Then a bit later it hit 2GB in a month. In February I reported that it was hitting 3GB/month, as you can see from this post:
http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=4391&#post4391

Well, this month I'm projecting over 8GB of bandwidth used by this forum. And the average number of posts per day has tripled since February. But aside from writing an occasional new article, I haven't been directly pushing these forums much. So where is all this traffic coming from? This forum has achieved a certain momentum that causes it to keep growing whether I push it or not. Pre-existing articles, links on other sites, and word of mouth keep bringing new people here. But also, the quality of the forums as a "product" has increased as well, since the community is larger and stronger than it was last year.

So if you keep marketing and improving your product over time, you'll find that your web traffic will increase year after year. For instance, dexterity.com's average Alexa ranking has gone from about 54,000 to about 35,000 just in the past three months, yet I didn't do any major new marketing of the site during this time. Mostly it was the momentum of past promotional efforts that did the job.

I know it can be tough just starting out, but be patient.

I have to agree about Peg Sweeper. I haven't been the least bit curious about it. However, after seeing your concept screenshot for Betty's Beer Bar, I know I'm going to be downloading the demo of that one. It really captures my imagination. I wonder what the game plays like, how many different characters it has, how detailed the animation will be, and I even wonder what Betty will look like from the front. It made me want to take a closer look at Peg Sweeper, but I already know what a peg jumping game is like.

You need a great product like Pocket Tank Deluxe, made by one developer. He only submit the demo to some download sites. And he lives very well from his product. So a product sells if the quality is right and you let your niche know about the release of the product. In this case the developer only did marketing in terms of submitting it to some download sites. He didn't did marketing in terms of writing a business marketing plan and launching it. So I think that step 1 is the importants point, but still not a guarantee for succes. But it's the start.

I also checked the screenshots of your product and from that point it looks professional. Also the website is professional.

Maybe you need to contact some of the pc magazines and ask for a review and to add the demo to there demo cd rom. Contact publishers who publish shareware compilations in retail and ask to add your demo. Also you can try to update the demo often, so it will be freshed on download sites, like download.com. Still it's difficult. I know developers who developed excellent products and still the sales isn't great. There isn't a formula, the only point is that there must be a niche for the needs. For instance an innovative creative breakout clone can sell (still no guarantee), but an exact similar equal clone is diffiult to sell. It's more a folow the "leader...leader" product. You need to be creative and innovative to make your product different. The same is b.t.w. for retail games. If your product is different you can sell it on a different way, you can promote why your product got more challange. If it's too much the same, the customer will pick up the product from a well known competitor. So that's the risk. If you got more value in your product, you can promote that, why it's interesting to download your demo and buy the product.

I agree with others that the name sounds dull. There's nothing exciting to me about pegs or sweeping -- these words have no energy behind them, and I'd also be far less inclined to download a game with such a name. It has as much emotional appeal to me as "FurnitureDuster," "KitchenMopper," or "DrainCleaner." I'd rather download a game with a curiosity-evoking title. Take a simple name like Pharaohs' Curse, for instance. The "Pharaohs" part gives you a sense of an exotic locale, and the "Curse" part implies danger or mystery. Or consider "Gold Sprinter." The first word gives you a sense of treasure and riches, and the second word implies fast-paced action and movement. Every word has a certain emotional impact when we hear it, and even made up words like Dweep or Fitznik can give you a subconscious feeling about the game. Pretty Good Solitaire is also an excellent title IMO -- it has a sense of modesty that makes me curious. Why only "pretty good" and not "great" or "outstanding?" It also gives me a sense that if the developer feels his own game is only pretty good, he must have very high standards -- is he continuing to develop the game to the point of greatness? All this is "pretty good" because it grabs my attention and makes me curious.

Love the title of your post. South Park Rulez

Anywayz, I think the problem that the underpants gnomes didn't realize is that they had to market. If they marketed the underpants that they stole from the little kiddies bedrooms, they could have then sold them (to other......weird....people) and made a profit!

Thanks for the great feedback, as always.

I just want to point out that I do not think PegSweeper is a great game. Far from it - it's a test application for my sprite library, as I stated in other threads.

Originally posted by ggambett
I do not think PegSweeper is a great game. Far from it

It may or may not be a fun game to play, but I'm guessing the fact that the above statement was made by the creator and marketer of the game factors weightily into why it hasn't sold much.

So are you asking "how do I make a profit from PegSweeper?", or is it "how do I make a profit from my next Well Executed Totally Unique(tm) game?"

As you can see, based on a name and one screen shot, you've generated a lot more interest in Betty's Beer Bar than in PegSweeper.

If you can learn to sell the virtues of PegSweeper (or DiamondGrab as it might otherwise be called), imagine what you can do for Betty.

[edited for clarity]

papillon can I admit that "PegSweeper" sounds uninteresting enough that I haven't even *looked* at your game? It sounds like jumping pegs or something. I hate jumping pegs.
princec I too would like to suggest that PegSweeper sounds so much like MineSweeper, or a dull game played with little wooden pegs, that I've not even looked at it either?

Hey! It is a dull game played with little pegs! :)

Steve Step 2 involves promoting and selling the game. It takes a lot of time and hard work to build distribution. [...] it's likely to take several years to build up a web site with decent traffic. [...] Momentum plays a significant role. It takes a lot of work to get the ball rolling,

That was the central question of my post. I've already assumed it takes years; but years of doing what, exactly? Keep posting the game to as many sites as possible? Keep uploading point releases to make the game jump to the top again? Press Releases? What? As princec said in another thread, you just can't keep sending press releases about your game, can you? This is what I don't know. If you consider this a "trade secret", OK, no problem.

Johnson Maybe you need to contact some of the pc magazines and ask for a review and to add the demo to there demo cd rom. Contact publishers who publish shareware compilations in retail and ask to add your demo.

Isn't this the kind of promotion I don't have the money for? They probably won't mind filling 1.5 MB of their CD with my game. But don't they charge for reviews? I've been looking for online review sites, mostly shareware specific, but I came up with just a handful.

mg_mchenry It may or may not be a fun game to play, but I'm guessing the fact that the above statement was made by the creator and marketer of the game factors weightily into why it hasn't sold much.

Maybe. But it's mostly because I honestly don't know how to market a game. That's why I'm asking for heeeeelp!

So are you asking "how do I make a profit from PegSweeper?", or is it "how do I make a profit from my next Well Executed Totally Unique(tm) game?"

Neither, actually. I don't think PegSweeper can make a profit. We are still 2 or 3 games from our first WETU game (WETU sounds fun!). Being realistic, we're concentrating on the Well Executed part, and that involves Good Marketing, where I'm at a loss.

PegSweeper is an excercise in 1) Managing a team, 2) Developing a sprite engine, 3) Making a website + accepting credit card payments, 4) Marketing. I'm acquiring lots of experience in all of these areas, but I'm still lacking the Marketing part.

So in some sense PegSweeper already paid up (and at 3.5 sales per month, it's paying for our hosting, too :)). I want to know what to do for our next Reasonably Well Executed and Interesting Enough games - Betty's Beer Bar is one of them, another one is a 3D remake of an old ZX Spectrum and arcade classic, think "the Air Strike 3D of (...)" (sorry about the 3D part, Papillon).

That was the central question of my post. I've already assumed it takes years; but years of doing what, exactly? Keep posting the game to as many sites as possible? Keep uploading point releases to make the game jump to the top again? Press Releases? What? As princec said in another thread, you just can't keep sending press releases about your game, can you? This is what I don't know. If you consider this a "trade secret", OK, no problem.

well, yes thats exactly the way to go.
You have to get your game known to the public. The more places
your game will be published, the more people will download it.
How else do you think people get to know a game like yours?
Through shareware download sites, through newsgroups,
through shareware magazines coverage (press releases).
heck, i had 2000 unique visitors from only one post here in one
day, imagine what a couple of messages in different newsgroups
will do...

Originally posted by ggambett
That was the central question of my post. I've already assumed it takes years; but years of doing what, exactly? Keep posting the game to as many sites as possible? Keep uploading point releases to make the game jump to the top again? Press Releases? What? As princec said in another thread, you just can't keep sending press releases about your game, can you? This is what I don't know. If you consider this a "trade secret", OK, no problem.

No trade secret. Partly you have the passive momentum effect -- the longer you're around, the more people know of you, and the more you benefit from word of mouth.

But on the action side, you keep experimenting with different forms of promotion. I wouldn't keep sending out press releases about the same game, but you can keep updating and re-submitting games to download sites. Keep swapping links with similar sites. Keep tweaking and improving your web site to make it more user-friendly, more effective at selling, and better designed for search engine placement.

One exercise I do often (I used to do it every single day) is to take out a piece of paper and write down 20 new ideas to improve my business. I don't stop until I have 20 ideas, and it usually takes about 40-60 minutes. When I used to do this every day, I'd generate about 600 ideas per month. That's more than I could possibly implement, and some were definitely impractical, but I still have pages and pages of these ideas for improvement. And many of these ideas can be done over and over. Sometimes I'll add a constraint, like "20 ideas to improve my business that can each be implemented in 10 minutes or less." For instance, I could email another gaming site with a request to swap links. I could make one small tweak to the text on my web site. I could add one more item to the support FAQ. I could create one new email signature to handle routine correspondence faster.

Over the long term, I essentially follow the same steps I wrote about years ago in this article:
http://www.dexterity.com/articles/seven-keys.htm

I just keep looping through those steps: Decide where I want to go, create or update products and services, promote them, sell them, serve the customers, measure the results, and generate new ideas for improvement. Then repeat.

In practice there are hundreds of little tweaks that add up to big changes over time. One extra link swap. A slightly better home page. More shareware site submissions. A new game release. A newsletter issue. A customer emailing. A price tweak. Another article. Another database table. Another page to view sales data. More ideas. More testing. More tweaking.

But then on top of this background on incremental improvement, you have the riskier stuff -- the quantum leaps. Whereas the incremental changes can give you slow and steady growth, the quantum leaps have the potential to double, triple, 10x your income. Most quantum leap efforts will fail, but when they do pay off, they pay off bigtime. One lucrative retail deal. One outstanding new product. One amazingly effective marketing technique. One whole new revenue source. Dweep, for instance, was a quantum leap for me. As was getting into publishing.

Think of running a business like investing in the stock market. Some of your time/money is investing in safe investments, while you may devote a portion of your portfolio to high-risk.

I just had a look at the game. I think the game looks great and very professional. But there is a problem, the game is ordinary. Maybe the concept can be extended or some other idea may make the game more attractive.