hello friends,

i'd like to ask a quick question(s):

what is your ratio of online-purchases vs. purchases per mail(cd-rom)?
is it necessary to provide the option for mail-purchase at all?

and do you think many of the potential buyers refuse to purchase your
game online (because of credit-card security-issues etc.) ?


aspiral

I haven't had a chance to try out online sales yet but I did some research of my own regarding this. An interesting point is that offering a mailed product could help increase sales even for people that buy a download version. One specific remark was something along the lines "I would go oh cool, this can be shipped, I guess they are pretty serious about this, but I would still buy the online version once I saw the savings". A lot of people like to have a tangible product, I saw that complaint more often than the "having a means of buying online safely" one. A person will spend $20 a DVD that they will get far less use from because the product is tangible (there's other factors too obviously, but this is definitely a big one). I guess the tangible product part allows the person to get to the buy screen and then the more logical side of the person causes them to buy online and to enjoy the resulting price saving. I'm afraid I don't have real numbers to prove or disprove this though, just the results of a small survey. I can see a customer thinking like this though.

... of course, the people who have an 'install once and once only!' sort of copy-protection scheme would REALLY make me furious if I'd bought a CD copy, since (afaik) the top reason for getting a CD version of a downloadable game is to be sure you don't lose it and can reinstall without trouble when your hard drive crashes... :) but then, a lot of people also make the copy-protection slightly different for CD versions.