How to make money on an indie game
Before starting to write this report, I read more than 115 post-mortems and indie developers stories. What do I understand? First, that my English sucks. Secondly, that indie is very different. Highly. And it took a lot of time to catalog them.
No need to take it as a whole story, these are excerpts from a pile of different stories. There are a few categories and digits under the cut. Approximately everything that will be in the post I tell in this video, but of course text is duplicated under the cut.
About 1.3 billion people play games in the world. Those. somewhere around 18% of the entire population of the earth are gamers. The turnover of the games market is about 71 billion dollars. Now to indie. For 2012, Notch earned 100 million by selling the game through the site. He is recognized on the streets, and his words are for some almost religious. This is for a rough estimate of the scale. Further I will try to break into categories.
')
Speaking of flash games most often refer to the portal flash, and not games made with Adobe Flash. Games are free, and they are monetized through internal advertising. This means advertising is inserted in certain places in the game. Those. inside the game there are places that can be sold. You can sell in different ways, therefore there are several types of transactions.
The essence of the sale of all rights to advertise one company. She pays you a one-time amount in X and further distribution rights for this game are with this company.
A small fight for the ownership of the exclusive rights to the game Berzerk Ball 2 ensued between the owner of bored.com and congregate . They raised the rates, interrupting each other and gradually reached almost 100 thousand dollars. Kyle, the owner of the boreda, said that somewhere after the 60's it became clear that the game simply did not pay off, but continued to squeeze. Why? Sponsors are ordinary people, they are inherent excitement.
It differs from the exclusive in that the rights to the game do not belong to one company. For it give less, but in the future, in addition to the main version of the game, which crawls through the portals, you have the right to sell the site. Approximate selling price about Âľ X
Saytlok: this is a version of the game, specifically for a specific portal. Those. you cut out all sponsor banners and insert logos of another portal. Typically, for such a site-lok give about 10% of the principal amount of a prime license, but this is very conditional. Formally, prices for website are limited only by the sponsor's capabilities.
Armorheims , one of the largest flash portals, has been buying siteculoes for some time and wasn’t spent on praymari. Due to the huge attendance, most of the locks turned out to be more popular than the prime version of the game, despite the distribution.
The least risky type of transaction for both parties. All rights to advertising inside the game are in the same company. Developers are paid for clicks on advertising for a certain period of time. There are also very frequent upfront agreements, where the developer receives an unbroken amount. This means that the developer gets somewhere ½ X right into his hands and he will receive the rest of the money after the first month of advertising clicks when the game goes into the world.
Formally, a performance does not have a ceiling, but it does exist. One of the founders of the congregate, Greg said that twice the games reached a limit of 100k, which is usually negotiated in the contract.
If interested, one of them is Coaster Racer.
There are tricky sites that work as a performance. For example, the Russian developer sbat sold website blocks for an amount 6 times greater than the primemar. The fact is that these were sites of Microsoft and Jahu, and they were paid for their viewing fees.
Before you type some kind of contact database and emails, before meeting at conferences you can safely sell the game without even knowing the name of any of the sponsors.
For this there are auction sites like fgl and gamebrokage . You put the game in there and after a while the sponsors start to make bets offering certain conditions.
One of the tricks to bet on behalf of the sponsor himself or ask a sponsor friend to make a fake bet. But if it's not legal.
It is also easy to get emails of most sponsors in the Contact us and For developers section on major portals. There are lists of emails of all sponsors, but because of the mass mailing, they increasingly lose their relevance.
Just do not forget about large companies. For example, if you have a cool indie game about soda, you can safely pound a Coke. Usually in such cases, reskins are bought for amounts close to an exclusive.
Some developers start portals themselves and support them with their games. There are a lot of success stories of niche portals that do not often need to make games for them.
As Sergey Yeliseyev told on the flashgamme of 2009 (a very large portal GameTop.com), they always post the same game on their portal, with slightly modified graphics (reskin) about motorcycles. And every time they play it successfully. Still.
Comrade from Turkey Erman Haskan has been making flash games for four years. Slowly and at your pleasure. Spread them out on his Games121.com gaming site and into a free distribution, acting as a sponsor. There are no other games on the portal, only copyright. The most famous of them are Ultimate Assassin 2 and 2099.
I don’t know how about last year, but 7 million people arrived at Games121.com before last. This is about 600 thousand visitors per month and 20 thousand per day. According to the information that I came across, usually with such attendance, the site can rely on income of about $ 3000 per month.
The trick is that with such traffic the site is on a free hosting and the owner has no problems with the server and the load. Of course, Google cares about it. :) Yes it is. Erman Haskan made his gaming portal based on the free Google Blogger service.
Do not forget about the prizes and awards that can be obtained by making the game. Some contests are obvious. For example from the popular portals congrege
The top prize monthly prize is $ 1500. We also give away $ 250 to the top-rated game and $ 150 to the second- and third- place games uploaded on Kongregate each week.
Sometimes you can get a prize from amazing places. For example, the Chinese portal 4399.com distributes cash prizes (up to 8k) to the most successful games, but even to register there is not so easy
I will spend quite a bit of time on portal multiplayer games, since indie developers rarely take on them and there is little information.
If we take the statistics of the congregate, the data are as follows. Top 50 multiplayer games account for almost 100% of the profits from microtransactions.
In one of the top games:
Left% of players, right% of profit
ARPPU - Average Revenue Per Paying User - about $ 140
People who spend $ 500 + bring most of the income from the game. Those who pay <$ 10 bring 2%. No, of course everyone loves the extra 1-2 percent, but in fact they practically do not change anything.
This is the statistics of one of the top games in profit, but the statistics are almost the same for other successful games. 4 or 5 of our most profitable games receive most of the money from players who spend $ 500 + and all of our top 10 games in profit, even if they have ARPPU $ 20- $ 25, most of the money comes from players who spend $ 100 +
Unlike the portal flash games without constant updates and support, the offline game is bent. She needs constant developer care. Rare portals take games with internal purchases, so you only need to take care of the main portals that you agree with.
Currently there is an active demand for games made in HTML5. Despite the fact that they almost do not pay off, the demand for them does not fall. Now HTML5 games are in trend and large investors are giving smaller sponsors an investment to promote this trend. For example, recently investors have allocated an investment of $ 5 million to the largest sponsor of SPILGAMES , and they buy a bunch of games, in whole batches. (it was true at the time of writing, now 90 people were fired from the company)
Monetization of these games is similar to flash, but there are almost no transactions by type of performance. Among other things, due to the fact that html5 is relatively new and widely known, as well as due to its universality, competitions with millions of budgets are constantly held, which is quite good.
Kickstarter is a very interesting system.
In short, for those who still do not know why they need kickstarter and groundfacing in general.
Suppose there is an almost finished game in which there is everything except high-quality voice acting and sound effects. You lay out all the sketches / sketches / working demos for this game and ask to give you money for high-quality voice acting. In exchange, donators will receive a copy of the game at a discount. This is what the kickstar creators ideally saw.
Now the pattern is about the following. Dudes make a demo, and sometimes just sketches for the game and ask for money for it.
When can it work?
a) These are very famous game developers. They have a lot of well-known games behind them and you trusting their experience, in advance of sketches you give them money to fully finance their development.
Example:
Wasteland 2 $ 2,933,252 and Tim Scheifer, who collected $ 3,336,371 at Double Fine Adventure .
b) The game is awesome. It is a niche game that everyone has been waiting for or has a well-forgotten mechanic in a new format. New ideas, cool art, awesome video all this can work.
It is on this point that indie should pay attention.
What is the sacral meaning of kickstarter for indie? Besides the fact that it is fashionable, stylish, youthful kickstarter is a good platform for press-release of your game.
Kickstarter has a permanent audience, including journalists. They have already connected wallets, have a shopping experience and they trust developers from the kickstarter. However, we must remember that none of them will see your game. Organic traffic is very low. It will appear in the new for a couple of seconds and disappear. Without quality PR, do not expect attention.
(Further a bit of text from the Habrovsky article and my replies).
Awards (rewards). This is one of the strongest motivators why users invest money. For example, very often for $ 15 you can get a box with a game, which after publishing a game will cost for example $ 50, and for a $ 50 reward you can get a gift edition + jersey + flash drive with the game logo. Rewards can be a lot of different, from $ 1 to $ 10,000. For example, Tim Scheifer “sold” four dinners with him and Ron Gilbert to four different people. The cost of lunch was $ 10,000.
It is important that many projects do not take into account the cost of making the awards that they promise to Beckers. For example, one project claimed as awards sweaters with symbols, the production of which, together with mailing, was worth more than the amount paid by the backers. Another example is the other team, which, together with taxes, the not calculated cost of sounds and music, the undervalued cost of making rewards, left to develop just $ 4,000. Therefore, very carefully consider the cost of making all game content, all prizes, shipments (international shipping costs about $ 15).
Accepts payments, transfers money from backers to developers and deals with checking accounts, cards and other financial issues on payments.amazon.com. One of the main problems for foreigners on Kickstarter is Amazon - it is he who works only with US residents. Now, as far as I know, Kickstarter is looking for ways to solve this problem and become an international platform.
The good of Amazon is an excellent payment acceptance system. Its essence is simple: you can support a project with any amount (from $ 1 to $ 10,000). But as long as the project does not collect the requested minimum amount, the money remains in your account. Amazon blocks them, but they do not leave your account. This gives the Bakers confidence and peace of mind. At any time, they can change their bid on Kickstarter, or cancel it altogether (and this happens in any projects - you have to be ready for this and treat with understanding).
If the project is successful - money is transferred by Amazon at this moment. If the project did not collect the required amount (at least $ 1) - the payment is canceled and the money is not transferred anywhere.
Not everyone can use Amazon, so many developers on their websites make additional payment acceptance through PayPal (and / or other payment systems). For example: one game project collected about $ 580,000 on Kickstarter and on its website (via PayPal) collected about $ 35,000 (I don’t remember the exact numbers, but there are such orders). Thus, it makes sense to duplicate the acceptance of payments through alternative payment systems.
In connection with this fish Amazon, I recently noticed an interesting possible scam. The project after launch did not receive due attention and did not collect the required amount of money in the first days. The authors threw money from fake accounts, and when the amount was accumulated, they canceled the campaign on the kickstarter, saying that they had an investor. Total game scored potential buyers, did not fail the company in the kickstarter (ie, successfully lit up) and at the same time the money for support came back.
Kickstarter project statistics website - Kicktraq.com. Before you create a project on Kickstarter, I strongly recommend to study similar projects there, the daily influx of backers, the average payment and so on.
And sidekick.epfl.ch . The Swiss scientists collected data on 16,042 campaigns that ran from September 2012 to May 2013. In addition to data on the dynamics of contributions, they monitored Twitter for tweets with the word "kickstarter" and a link to the project page and examined the composition of project backers - their activity in other projects, typical amounts of contributions, etc ... It was the use of the combined model taking into account social interactions that significantly improved the quality of the prediction. Already 4 hours after the start of the campaign, you can predict its outcome with 76% confidence. After 10% of the time allotted for the campaign, that is, after an average of three days, the accuracy increases to 85%.
Indies cannot afford the marketing strategies of large companies. For large companies, the strategy can be described with the Rockefeller quote “Do not be afraid of high costs, fear small incomes.” Companies now spend $ 5 million to launch new top-end applications in Appstore (against 500k in 2009). Indies can only spend their time writing an article on a blog and a forum.
Look objectively at the market. All figures from post-sales and sales should be passed through the filter. Top 25 developers received half of all profits in 2012. 80% of developers get 3% of profits. Worthy analysis of the data of Owen Goss from Dave Eddy (Dave Addey): 19% of applications earn $ 24k. 80% $ 300. It is quite similar to reality. If your mobile game earns 100k, then you will give 30% to the eplu, 30 to your publisher and share the rest with your partner and tax.
Appstor is so crammed with marketing games that only feature + reward can be allowed to pop up your game if you publish yourself.
It is very important for indie not to forget to cover a large number of devices. Usually, owners of rare devices have no choice in what to play and they choose one of the few games.
Ideal hotbed of indie developing games on pc. There are many other incentive alternatives.
The only thing they lure is discounts on games. Therefore, the profit from these sites in the amount of about 10-15 less than the profit from the incentive.
Galenkin's book clippings :
Letsplayers, YouTube personalities, reviewers and all such “their own guys” are the same journalists as representatives of IGN or Eurogamer.For example, the recently popular YouTube channel Yogscast won a tender for the production of the Playstation Access video program, which was previously operated by the large publishing house Future Publishing (PC Gamer, EDGE and Stuff magazines). Letspeers and reviewers will be happy to make a video about you if it collects views. Unfortunately, here I can not advise something specific, except for "make a good game." Unlike journalists, limited to the short format, lettspleer can devote many hours to your game, if it is interesting.
It is useless to lettsplayers and surveyors to pitch stories - the audience loves them just for the fact that they are not trying to skip the game through themselves and analyze, but show it for what it is. They are not interested in interviews, videos, and even more screenshots.
Therefore, the only mechanism for working with them is an early version of the game. This, I want to note, is a rather effective mechanism: your game may not be ready for reviews, but it looks good enough that it is not a shame to shoot it on video.
I highly recommend not giving the version of the game to the leseers before you start preorders or selling the game. The letsplayers audience, as well as the gaming sites audience, actively buys games, but has a relatively small amount of attention. So if the game cannot be bought right away, they will most likely forget about it. In addition to the flysplays on YouTube, there is a huge amount of so-called “YouTube personalities” who do not necessarily make videos about games. Even if the games are not interesting for them (especially if they are not interesting!), The theme of your game may attract them. In addition, they still understand the video and attract the attention of the audience more of yours.
Doing a project about physics or history? Talk to those who shoot
on this topic. Together, you probably will
create something cool.
For the announcement of the release of Prime World in the United States, we used the gender features of the game - separate prices for men and women, separate starting characters depending on gender, special gameplay mechanics for couples. By the time the game was in test in Russia for six months already, and we perfectly understood that gender mechanics did not improve the game. But this is a great story for western media. Material about developers who want to help women, but at the same time insult them with inequality to the core, walked around the entire Western press - we got not only on gaming sites, but also on Yahoo, CNN, feminist portals and LGBT community resources. We knew that our decision would incur the wrath of a large part of the audience who did not play games. This was the whole point of the campaign - to squander “beautifully by carelessness”, then to correct beautifully. We advance
prepared obese female characters and sexy male - these are the two most discussed problems when depicting the sexes in games
Organize something unusual to talk about. Say, Electronic Arts once made a fake demonstration of “angry citizens” against Dante's Inferno. CD Projekt of the Triss section from The Witcher for the cover of Playboy.
Pirates do not pay attention, and flirting with them is not particularly useful. The story of Game Dev Tycoon, its developers laid out on the trackers a special version of the game - in it the player’s studio was sooner or later closed due to piracy. You can come up with something just as good - good. No - do not worry. F2p-games are an exception, they can and should be promoted with the expectation of an audience of pirates. Pirates are converted into paying players not much worse than those who buy a license, because they still have the money.
The Stanley Parable - a small indie game created by just two enthusiasts that grew out of an amateur fashion. The Stanley Parable came out in the fall of 2013, before the start of sales of two consoles of the new generation. During this period, all expensive games with marketing budgets appear on the market — Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The most unfortunate time for release, if you're a small indie. The developers of The Stanley Parable have released a special version for a number of gamers and game journalists. In addition, instead of an advertising campaign for which there was still no money, they made an ironic demo version that mocked the very idea of ​​the demo versions - just like The Stanley Parable makes fun of the game. Without journalists showing at exhibitions, virtually without an announcement, without advertising The Stanley Parable became a hit, as they like to say in the business press, for the night. In fact, of course, the developers have been preparing for this sudden success for several months. Reviews of The Stanley Parable were published almost simultaneously in all major gaming titles, and it became the most highly rated game on the PC in 2013 according to Metacritic.
After literally a month after the game is released, it’s worth thinking about discounts and sales. There is nothing complicated in this mechanism - you put discounts on an ascending basis, starting from 20% (I repeat, it has no effect less).
To organize a discount on a PC, you will need to contact your platform manager, whether Steam or GOG, because your task is not just to lower the price (this can be done in the partner interface), but once again go to the main page of the service with the sale. Discounts work very well with the content supplement or at least a patch. They will return to the game of old fans who will advise friends to buy a good game while it is on sale. But this is optional.
The effect of participation in large sales platform (such as the summer sale of Steam) is not too great, if you did not manage to get to the main. Yes, the number of copies sold will increase, because on such days, players are buying products from their wish list. But these are the fans who would have bought your game sooner or later, but the sale will not attract new users without a feature.
Unfortunately, the bar for discounts on sales is constantly increasing; some time ago, 33% on New Year's Eve were considered an excellent discount, now the public is waiting for 80–90% for a daily deal and 66–75% for a regular sale. Consider this when you send an application to participate in the sale. Another important thing is the psychological thresholds of $ 3, $ 5 and $ 10. The difference between the game for $ 5.99 and $ 4.99 is just one dollar, but sales may differ by half. This is especially noticeable on Steam, where games are cheaper than 5 and cheaper than 10 dollars there are special sections. Apple has blocked most third-party sales tracking applications and therefore a discount without press coverage (or Apple features) will give you nothing. Apple makes free one app per week, and just does not advertise discounts. Again, they are not interested in making money on the AppStore, for them applications and games are a means of selling iron.
Participation in itself will not give you anything good — hundreds, if not thousands, of games are sent to such events. But winning at least some nomination of any of the festivals is a good reason to be proud of the press. And it is simply useful to listen to the opinion of your game from disinterested people.
The main advantage of the greenlight is that with an interesting game you do not need to spend money on PR.
Due to the huge audience of stim, good games get approval almost immediately. GreenLite pages have fairly flexible settings. There you can embed Google analytics for example. The Indians say that even considering that the greenlighting of their games is being written by large publications like rocket peypetshotgan, in reality, statistics can be surprising.
It is rather difficult to independently assess how much one or another game would have earned if the author had not spent money on marketing, but I was lucky and I personally know such a game. Intrusion 2 did not have any PR in the press, except for one topic on one of the Russian-language forums. The result - 300k per year.
There is also a huge amount of open statistics on incentives, in post-models of foreign and our developers. Usually the situation is this:
AI War: First Four Years Postmortem (And By Extension Arcen History)
91% profit from the stim
3% direct sales
6% from other sources.
Actually everything.
No need to take it as a whole story, these are excerpts from a pile of different stories. There are a few categories and digits under the cut. Approximately everything that will be in the post I tell in this video, but of course text is duplicated under the cut.
About 1.3 billion people play games in the world. Those. somewhere around 18% of the entire population of the earth are gamers. The turnover of the games market is about 71 billion dollars. Now to indie. For 2012, Notch earned 100 million by selling the game through the site. He is recognized on the streets, and his words are for some almost religious. This is for a rough estimate of the scale. Further I will try to break into categories.
')
Flash
What earn flash games?
Speaking of flash games most often refer to the portal flash, and not games made with Adobe Flash. Games are free, and they are monetized through internal advertising. This means advertising is inserted in certain places in the game. Those. inside the game there are places that can be sold. You can sell in different ways, therefore there are several types of transactions.
Exclusive:
The essence of the sale of all rights to advertise one company. She pays you a one-time amount in X and further distribution rights for this game are with this company.
A small fight for the ownership of the exclusive rights to the game Berzerk Ball 2 ensued between the owner of bored.com and congregate . They raised the rates, interrupting each other and gradually reached almost 100 thousand dollars. Kyle, the owner of the boreda, said that somewhere after the 60's it became clear that the game simply did not pay off, but continued to squeeze. Why? Sponsors are ordinary people, they are inherent excitement.
Primary and sitelots:
It differs from the exclusive in that the rights to the game do not belong to one company. For it give less, but in the future, in addition to the main version of the game, which crawls through the portals, you have the right to sell the site. Approximate selling price about Âľ X
Saytlok: this is a version of the game, specifically for a specific portal. Those. you cut out all sponsor banners and insert logos of another portal. Typically, for such a site-lok give about 10% of the principal amount of a prime license, but this is very conditional. Formally, prices for website are limited only by the sponsor's capabilities.
Armorheims , one of the largest flash portals, has been buying siteculoes for some time and wasn’t spent on praymari. Due to the huge attendance, most of the locks turned out to be more popular than the prime version of the game, despite the distribution.
Performance:
The least risky type of transaction for both parties. All rights to advertising inside the game are in the same company. Developers are paid for clicks on advertising for a certain period of time. There are also very frequent upfront agreements, where the developer receives an unbroken amount. This means that the developer gets somewhere ½ X right into his hands and he will receive the rest of the money after the first month of advertising clicks when the game goes into the world.
Formally, a performance does not have a ceiling, but it does exist. One of the founders of the congregate, Greg said that twice the games reached a limit of 100k, which is usually negotiated in the contract.
If interested, one of them is Coaster Racer.
There are tricky sites that work as a performance. For example, the Russian developer sbat sold website blocks for an amount 6 times greater than the primemar. The fact is that these were sites of Microsoft and Jahu, and they were paid for their viewing fees.
Where to find sponsor companies?
Before you type some kind of contact database and emails, before meeting at conferences you can safely sell the game without even knowing the name of any of the sponsors.
For this there are auction sites like fgl and gamebrokage . You put the game in there and after a while the sponsors start to make bets offering certain conditions.
One of the tricks to bet on behalf of the sponsor himself or ask a sponsor friend to make a fake bet. But if it's not legal.
It is also easy to get emails of most sponsors in the Contact us and For developers section on major portals. There are lists of emails of all sponsors, but because of the mass mailing, they increasingly lose their relevance.
Just do not forget about large companies. For example, if you have a cool indie game about soda, you can safely pound a Coke. Usually in such cases, reskins are bought for amounts close to an exclusive.
Own advertising and profit:
Some developers start portals themselves and support them with their games. There are a lot of success stories of niche portals that do not often need to make games for them.
As Sergey Yeliseyev told on the flashgamme of 2009 (a very large portal GameTop.com), they always post the same game on their portal, with slightly modified graphics (reskin) about motorcycles. And every time they play it successfully. Still.
Comrade from Turkey Erman Haskan has been making flash games for four years. Slowly and at your pleasure. Spread them out on his Games121.com gaming site and into a free distribution, acting as a sponsor. There are no other games on the portal, only copyright. The most famous of them are Ultimate Assassin 2 and 2099.
I don’t know how about last year, but 7 million people arrived at Games121.com before last. This is about 600 thousand visitors per month and 20 thousand per day. According to the information that I came across, usually with such attendance, the site can rely on income of about $ 3000 per month.
The trick is that with such traffic the site is on a free hosting and the owner has no problems with the server and the load. Of course, Google cares about it. :) Yes it is. Erman Haskan made his gaming portal based on the free Google Blogger service.
Saytloki to China
Do not forget about the prizes and awards that can be obtained by making the game. Some contests are obvious. For example from the popular portals congrege
The top prize monthly prize is $ 1500. We also give away $ 250 to the top-rated game and $ 150 to the second- and third- place games uploaded on Kongregate each week.
Sometimes you can get a prize from amazing places. For example, the Chinese portal 4399.com distributes cash prizes (up to 8k) to the most successful games, but even to register there is not so easy
Multiplayer:
I will spend quite a bit of time on portal multiplayer games, since indie developers rarely take on them and there is little information.
Tricks:
If we take the statistics of the congregate, the data are as follows. Top 50 multiplayer games account for almost 100% of the profits from microtransactions.
In one of the top games:
Left% of players, right% of profit
ARPPU - Average Revenue Per Paying User - about $ 140
People who spend $ 500 + bring most of the income from the game. Those who pay <$ 10 bring 2%. No, of course everyone loves the extra 1-2 percent, but in fact they practically do not change anything.
This is the statistics of one of the top games in profit, but the statistics are almost the same for other successful games. 4 or 5 of our most profitable games receive most of the money from players who spend $ 500 + and all of our top 10 games in profit, even if they have ARPPU $ 20- $ 25, most of the money comes from players who spend $ 100 +
Unlike the portal flash games without constant updates and support, the offline game is bent. She needs constant developer care. Rare portals take games with internal purchases, so you only need to take care of the main portals that you agree with.
HTML5
Currently there is an active demand for games made in HTML5. Despite the fact that they almost do not pay off, the demand for them does not fall. Now HTML5 games are in trend and large investors are giving smaller sponsors an investment to promote this trend. For example, recently investors have allocated an investment of $ 5 million to the largest sponsor of SPILGAMES , and they buy a bunch of games, in whole batches. (it was true at the time of writing, now 90 people were fired from the company)
Monetization of these games is similar to flash, but there are almost no transactions by type of performance. Among other things, due to the fact that html5 is relatively new and widely known, as well as due to its universality, competitions with millions of budgets are constantly held, which is quite good.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is a very interesting system.
In short, for those who still do not know why they need kickstarter and groundfacing in general.
Suppose there is an almost finished game in which there is everything except high-quality voice acting and sound effects. You lay out all the sketches / sketches / working demos for this game and ask to give you money for high-quality voice acting. In exchange, donators will receive a copy of the game at a discount. This is what the kickstar creators ideally saw.
Now the pattern is about the following. Dudes make a demo, and sometimes just sketches for the game and ask for money for it.
When can it work?
a) These are very famous game developers. They have a lot of well-known games behind them and you trusting their experience, in advance of sketches you give them money to fully finance their development.
Example:
Wasteland 2 $ 2,933,252 and Tim Scheifer, who collected $ 3,336,371 at Double Fine Adventure .
b) The game is awesome. It is a niche game that everyone has been waiting for or has a well-forgotten mechanic in a new format. New ideas, cool art, awesome video all this can work.
It is on this point that indie should pay attention.
What is the sacral meaning of kickstarter for indie? Besides the fact that it is fashionable, stylish, youthful kickstarter is a good platform for press-release of your game.
Kickstarter has a permanent audience, including journalists. They have already connected wallets, have a shopping experience and they trust developers from the kickstarter. However, we must remember that none of them will see your game. Organic traffic is very low. It will appear in the new for a couple of seconds and disappear. Without quality PR, do not expect attention.
(Further a bit of text from the Habrovsky article and my replies).
Awards (rewards). This is one of the strongest motivators why users invest money. For example, very often for $ 15 you can get a box with a game, which after publishing a game will cost for example $ 50, and for a $ 50 reward you can get a gift edition + jersey + flash drive with the game logo. Rewards can be a lot of different, from $ 1 to $ 10,000. For example, Tim Scheifer “sold” four dinners with him and Ron Gilbert to four different people. The cost of lunch was $ 10,000.
It is important that many projects do not take into account the cost of making the awards that they promise to Beckers. For example, one project claimed as awards sweaters with symbols, the production of which, together with mailing, was worth more than the amount paid by the backers. Another example is the other team, which, together with taxes, the not calculated cost of sounds and music, the undervalued cost of making rewards, left to develop just $ 4,000. Therefore, very carefully consider the cost of making all game content, all prizes, shipments (international shipping costs about $ 15).
Accepts payments, transfers money from backers to developers and deals with checking accounts, cards and other financial issues on payments.amazon.com. One of the main problems for foreigners on Kickstarter is Amazon - it is he who works only with US residents. Now, as far as I know, Kickstarter is looking for ways to solve this problem and become an international platform.
The good of Amazon is an excellent payment acceptance system. Its essence is simple: you can support a project with any amount (from $ 1 to $ 10,000). But as long as the project does not collect the requested minimum amount, the money remains in your account. Amazon blocks them, but they do not leave your account. This gives the Bakers confidence and peace of mind. At any time, they can change their bid on Kickstarter, or cancel it altogether (and this happens in any projects - you have to be ready for this and treat with understanding).
If the project is successful - money is transferred by Amazon at this moment. If the project did not collect the required amount (at least $ 1) - the payment is canceled and the money is not transferred anywhere.
Not everyone can use Amazon, so many developers on their websites make additional payment acceptance through PayPal (and / or other payment systems). For example: one game project collected about $ 580,000 on Kickstarter and on its website (via PayPal) collected about $ 35,000 (I don’t remember the exact numbers, but there are such orders). Thus, it makes sense to duplicate the acceptance of payments through alternative payment systems.
In connection with this fish Amazon, I recently noticed an interesting possible scam. The project after launch did not receive due attention and did not collect the required amount of money in the first days. The authors threw money from fake accounts, and when the amount was accumulated, they canceled the campaign on the kickstarter, saying that they had an investor. Total game scored potential buyers, did not fail the company in the kickstarter (ie, successfully lit up) and at the same time the money for support came back.
Useful sites
Kickstarter project statistics website - Kicktraq.com. Before you create a project on Kickstarter, I strongly recommend to study similar projects there, the daily influx of backers, the average payment and so on.
And sidekick.epfl.ch . The Swiss scientists collected data on 16,042 campaigns that ran from September 2012 to May 2013. In addition to data on the dynamics of contributions, they monitored Twitter for tweets with the word "kickstarter" and a link to the project page and examined the composition of project backers - their activity in other projects, typical amounts of contributions, etc ... It was the use of the combined model taking into account social interactions that significantly improved the quality of the prediction. Already 4 hours after the start of the campaign, you can predict its outcome with 76% confidence. After 10% of the time allotted for the campaign, that is, after an average of three days, the accuracy increases to 85%.
Mobile games:
Indies cannot afford the marketing strategies of large companies. For large companies, the strategy can be described with the Rockefeller quote “Do not be afraid of high costs, fear small incomes.” Companies now spend $ 5 million to launch new top-end applications in Appstore (against 500k in 2009). Indies can only spend their time writing an article on a blog and a forum.
Look objectively at the market. All figures from post-sales and sales should be passed through the filter. Top 25 developers received half of all profits in 2012. 80% of developers get 3% of profits. Worthy analysis of the data of Owen Goss from Dave Eddy (Dave Addey): 19% of applications earn $ 24k. 80% $ 300. It is quite similar to reality. If your mobile game earns 100k, then you will give 30% to the eplu, 30 to your publisher and share the rest with your partner and tax.
Appstor is so crammed with marketing games that only feature + reward can be allowed to pop up your game if you publish yourself.
It is very important for indie not to forget to cover a large number of devices. Usually, owners of rare devices have no choice in what to play and they choose one of the few games.
PC:
Ideal hotbed of indie developing games on pc. There are many other incentive alternatives.
The only thing they lure is discounts on games. Therefore, the profit from these sites in the amount of about 10-15 less than the profit from the incentive.
Galenkin's book clippings :
Letspleyry
Letsplayers, YouTube personalities, reviewers and all such “their own guys” are the same journalists as representatives of IGN or Eurogamer.For example, the recently popular YouTube channel Yogscast won a tender for the production of the Playstation Access video program, which was previously operated by the large publishing house Future Publishing (PC Gamer, EDGE and Stuff magazines). Letspeers and reviewers will be happy to make a video about you if it collects views. Unfortunately, here I can not advise something specific, except for "make a good game." Unlike journalists, limited to the short format, lettspleer can devote many hours to your game, if it is interesting.
It is useless to lettsplayers and surveyors to pitch stories - the audience loves them just for the fact that they are not trying to skip the game through themselves and analyze, but show it for what it is. They are not interested in interviews, videos, and even more screenshots.
Therefore, the only mechanism for working with them is an early version of the game. This, I want to note, is a rather effective mechanism: your game may not be ready for reviews, but it looks good enough that it is not a shame to shoot it on video.
I highly recommend not giving the version of the game to the leseers before you start preorders or selling the game. The letsplayers audience, as well as the gaming sites audience, actively buys games, but has a relatively small amount of attention. So if the game cannot be bought right away, they will most likely forget about it. In addition to the flysplays on YouTube, there is a huge amount of so-called “YouTube personalities” who do not necessarily make videos about games. Even if the games are not interesting for them (especially if they are not interesting!), The theme of your game may attract them. In addition, they still understand the video and attract the attention of the audience more of yours.
Doing a project about physics or history? Talk to those who shoot
on this topic. Together, you probably will
create something cool.
Press
For the announcement of the release of Prime World in the United States, we used the gender features of the game - separate prices for men and women, separate starting characters depending on gender, special gameplay mechanics for couples. By the time the game was in test in Russia for six months already, and we perfectly understood that gender mechanics did not improve the game. But this is a great story for western media. Material about developers who want to help women, but at the same time insult them with inequality to the core, walked around the entire Western press - we got not only on gaming sites, but also on Yahoo, CNN, feminist portals and LGBT community resources. We knew that our decision would incur the wrath of a large part of the audience who did not play games. This was the whole point of the campaign - to squander “beautifully by carelessness”, then to correct beautifully. We advance
prepared obese female characters and sexy male - these are the two most discussed problems when depicting the sexes in games
Organize something unusual to talk about. Say, Electronic Arts once made a fake demonstration of “angry citizens” against Dante's Inferno. CD Projekt of the Triss section from The Witcher for the cover of Playboy.
Pirates
Pirates do not pay attention, and flirting with them is not particularly useful. The story of Game Dev Tycoon, its developers laid out on the trackers a special version of the game - in it the player’s studio was sooner or later closed due to piracy. You can come up with something just as good - good. No - do not worry. F2p-games are an exception, they can and should be promoted with the expectation of an audience of pirates. Pirates are converted into paying players not much worse than those who buy a license, because they still have the money.
The Stanley Parable - a small indie game created by just two enthusiasts that grew out of an amateur fashion. The Stanley Parable came out in the fall of 2013, before the start of sales of two consoles of the new generation. During this period, all expensive games with marketing budgets appear on the market — Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The most unfortunate time for release, if you're a small indie. The developers of The Stanley Parable have released a special version for a number of gamers and game journalists. In addition, instead of an advertising campaign for which there was still no money, they made an ironic demo version that mocked the very idea of ​​the demo versions - just like The Stanley Parable makes fun of the game. Without journalists showing at exhibitions, virtually without an announcement, without advertising The Stanley Parable became a hit, as they like to say in the business press, for the night. In fact, of course, the developers have been preparing for this sudden success for several months. Reviews of The Stanley Parable were published almost simultaneously in all major gaming titles, and it became the most highly rated game on the PC in 2013 according to Metacritic.
PR
After literally a month after the game is released, it’s worth thinking about discounts and sales. There is nothing complicated in this mechanism - you put discounts on an ascending basis, starting from 20% (I repeat, it has no effect less).
To organize a discount on a PC, you will need to contact your platform manager, whether Steam or GOG, because your task is not just to lower the price (this can be done in the partner interface), but once again go to the main page of the service with the sale. Discounts work very well with the content supplement or at least a patch. They will return to the game of old fans who will advise friends to buy a good game while it is on sale. But this is optional.
The effect of participation in large sales platform (such as the summer sale of Steam) is not too great, if you did not manage to get to the main. Yes, the number of copies sold will increase, because on such days, players are buying products from their wish list. But these are the fans who would have bought your game sooner or later, but the sale will not attract new users without a feature.
Unfortunately, the bar for discounts on sales is constantly increasing; some time ago, 33% on New Year's Eve were considered an excellent discount, now the public is waiting for 80–90% for a daily deal and 66–75% for a regular sale. Consider this when you send an application to participate in the sale. Another important thing is the psychological thresholds of $ 3, $ 5 and $ 10. The difference between the game for $ 5.99 and $ 4.99 is just one dollar, but sales may differ by half. This is especially noticeable on Steam, where games are cheaper than 5 and cheaper than 10 dollars there are special sections. Apple has blocked most third-party sales tracking applications and therefore a discount without press coverage (or Apple features) will give you nothing. Apple makes free one app per week, and just does not advertise discounts. Again, they are not interested in making money on the AppStore, for them applications and games are a means of selling iron.
Contests
Participation in itself will not give you anything good — hundreds, if not thousands, of games are sent to such events. But winning at least some nomination of any of the festivals is a good reason to be proud of the press. And it is simply useful to listen to the opinion of your game from disinterested people.
The main advantage of the greenlight is that with an interesting game you do not need to spend money on PR.
Due to the huge audience of stim, good games get approval almost immediately. GreenLite pages have fairly flexible settings. There you can embed Google analytics for example. The Indians say that even considering that the greenlighting of their games is being written by large publications like rocket peypetshotgan, in reality, statistics can be surprising.
It is rather difficult to independently assess how much one or another game would have earned if the author had not spent money on marketing, but I was lucky and I personally know such a game. Intrusion 2 did not have any PR in the press, except for one topic on one of the Russian-language forums. The result - 300k per year.
There is also a huge amount of open statistics on incentives, in post-models of foreign and our developers. Usually the situation is this:
AI War: First Four Years Postmortem (And By Extension Arcen History)
91% profit from the stim
3% direct sales
6% from other sources.
Actually everything.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/228147/
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