OK, So Who's Selling, And How Is It Going

just curious as to who's actually selling their games or other apps made in Blitz, how they are selling it, and what numbers are you getting as far as sales... ball park figures would be fine...

i just wanna get some idea of how the 'proffesionals' (aka those in it for profit) here are doing... some inspiration, a lil reality check, whatever...

thx

--Mike

well you know I'm selling but only for 6 days so any figures are a tad meaningless.

sswift is selling his apps.

Indiepath is selling all sorts of stuff.

Others have stuff on their links so must be selling something (or tryig to). I'll be intersted to see replies too.

Not Inspiring!

I believe we've sold a total of 53 games between Aerial Antics (50) and Market Value (3) ... and some of those (6 AA's) were returned.

It's a reality check for me at least.

I learnt this lesson a long time ago after selling a shareware app by advertising in trade press (this is pre-internet) and only selling enough units to cover the cost of the advertising. :/

I must admit it was a pretty niche app, though.

Wow... that's an eye opener. Thanks for being honest Jeremy, it's good to see what is happening with Indie sales, although not so good to see a game like Aerial Antics not selling as well as it should (no comment on Market Value, as I've not played it, but I'm sure it's good too).

Probably not what you want to know, but I'm mostly doing contract work, brokered through personal contacts, and only sell about one copy at a time (I don't retain any rights).

Thanks for the info JA, sorry to hear you've had a tough time of it but at least both have sold >0! Don't give in though, keep going, build a fat portfolio of games! Were the refunds for techincal reasons like it not running or other reasons (if you are able to divulge)?

Basically when I looked into this whole thing about a year ago, I found out that some people do well, some incredibly well, but most do mediocre to poor, even some really neat games. Marketing seems to be key and also just having the right sort of game to sell, that's why I ditched my Iron Fist game and made a match 3 game, call me a sell out, but that's what I hope my game will do! Also, I think using portals could be essential otherwise you'd have to work REALLY hard to promote your own site. I've got a friend who made a Pocket PC game that is excellent and as had rave reviews but he just isn't selling enough because he refuses to use anyone else as he wants all the money himself (stingy). I think this is a mistake in his case.

It has gradually made itself apparent to me that you don't make money making games.

You make money by making applications/media that helps other people to make games.

This rings true in so many other fields far from gaming.

Think how many people have actually managed to make a complete game, then think how many people are trying to make those games and need the resources to attempt it.

business software can sure make money big time, I have first hand experience of this.

Yeah have to agree with you on that one shambler. I have purchased a few apps from the guys on blitz,but haven't purchased any games.

thx guys for your honest replies... 'Duck, your side of the coin and your experience is definitely as valuable here as well... thx...

and thx to Jeremy as well... it's good to hear the straight line... wish it were a lot better...

lets give a few more people a chance to reply so that we may get a more rounded sampling...

... then maybe we might take some time to consider some steps we could take to help each other actually become a bit more successfull at marketing our stuff.

--Mike

Cygnus and I are doing a contract job in Blitz3D for a client, not actually selling in the usual self publishing sense, but we billed them over $4000 for a weeks work.

It was really cool to make more in 6 days than I have in the past 2+ years of using blitz, and the nice thing is that this particular job is supposed to be spread through the next year providing some funding that will allow me to work on games more easily without a guilty concience.

A lot of the time I've had to rely on the wife supporting me in my independent game development, which so far has been slow and not very rewarding in a financial sense.

Well, I have had 770 downloads and no purchasers for "Snowball Scramble".

Glad to see some people do actually sell stuff - but it isn't going to make anyone rich overnight at those quoted rates!



IPete2.

50 Copies? That surprises me Jeremy. I thought people would buy that one :o)

FlameDuck: my day job is contract work too, Delphi business software, again no rights retained. Probably make more money in one day doing that than lots of shareware gamnes *ever* make. I do this 3 days a week (could do five but don't want to, been there, done that (7 days a week etc) and got the brain stretch marks to prove it!) and spend the other 2 days on games and ... uh ... bumming around, no wait "research", yeah that's it.

IPete2: Sad to hear all those downloads and now sales yet, how can you improve the Conversion Rate? Have you asked people why they don't buy or what would make them?

Red: Mutual marketing could be cool. In fact I'm about to make a banner for Xmas Bonus because a record company said they'd put it up for free (nice!) and I was wondering if anyone else was feeling generous too?

Portals are only any use if they get serious bandwidth, and by serious bandwidth i'm suggesting they need to be getting 10,000+ unique IP# visitors a day before I personally will even bother to list myself with a free service.

My websites typical background traffic is 1gb a day, at 9 o'clock or so yesterday I started doing the rounds posting about my game, I checked the daily stats at midnight and i'd moved an extra 4gb ontop in just 3 hours.

All I did was register at a load of forums and posted a short message with a few screenies and a download link.

If a portal site wants money in some way, and it isn't getting several thousand or more unique IP# visitors daily, then frankly you dont need them. You can get those visitors another way and save yourself time and expense.

Sites with huge traffic ask for money to list your game, fair enough, but sites without huge traffic want to emulate them but that doesn't make them good investments. It's you they're milking.

We had over 150.000 downloads of the demo of LoveChess and sold thousands of copies. And it is still selling.

Marketing is mainly done via our blog site, which handles between 20.000 and 30.000 visitors a day. Since we have a good Google ranking we get about 20-25% fresh visitors every day.

Downloading porn is the internet's main purpose.

Banshee: Any chance of a hint at where you posted when "doing the rounds"?

also Banshee: regarding portals, my game was accepted by Big Fish Games and Reflexive Arcade, two of the biggest portals with massive hits per day (that's what I meant, I wouldn't pay anyone to sell my game, they should be paying me!). They don't want any money, they just sell your game alongside Big Kahuna Reef and Bejewelled 2 etc. Anyway my head is so big I can't fit out the door now :-) Actually this is all thanks to Tim @ Indiepath who is bloody marvelous!

Knotz: That's amazing and cool. Maybe I need a blog?

Yup, there is a lot of interest for those things. But the competion is extremely ferocious.

You don't need a blog, you need traffic.
Traffic equals money. Quite simple.

OT (getting in one list with the Sims 2, rofl)
http://www.igda.org/sex/archives/2005/12/christmas_buyin.html#comments

lol @ Lovechess, battlechess with boobs!

knotz... what time frame are we talking about for the downloads as well as the sales of licenses...

where did you advertise it... what sites/portals/mags/etc... (i see the one link you posted already)


also guys/gals... look at what he did...

1- identified a target market as well as crossover markets...

2- made an app that is appealing, and not objectionable to the general public overall...

3- gave it away free... at least part of it... the demo required licensing to 'unlock' the full game...

4- obviously the demo of the game was appealing enough to 1000 people, enough so that they wanted more... the sex aspect surely didn't hurt here :)

cool... also, can you add a lil more info as to why you are getting what looks like a good start selling licenses for your app, and what plans, if any you have for continuing or increasing sales...

thx

one last thing... i think you made an important point... numbers = sales... it's a numbers game...

but geez, that's a lot less than 1% of the traffic going past, in sales... that's a sobering stat... do you think that's typical... and if so, why...

thx again...

--Mike

LoveChess was relased in summer 2004. The demo was released in November 2004 (iirc). The bulk of the downloads of the demo happened in the 2 months after releasing it.

Curious thing is is that regardless of the demo, the games sells in a frightingly constant rate. Every day.

Our conclusion is that although the demo did well, the blog site did (and still does) much, much more to sell the game.
It's hard to tell if the demo really made a difference saleswise. As testcase to see if the game runs on ones system it worked quite well.

We even have a publisher who sells the CDRom version. But the cd sales are roughly about 10% of the total sales. Needless to say that the next version will be sold online only.

Our key thing to sell LoveChess is to get as much traffic as is possible to the blog. Over the year we became masters in search machine optimalisation. Besides that we (mostly my collegue) spent countless hours plugging the site and the game and wrote hundreds of articles for the blog. One fortunate side effect of this work is that we also have an considerable income from the adverts alone. So if people don't buy LoveChess, sometimes they're buying something else.

As Mike said, it's the numbers. Not something you think about when you're making a computer game.

Btw. the game sold thousands of copies..not 1000, and I can't recall having a more stressfull year in my life as last year. It's not for the fainthearted. I could write a book about it.

1% is supposed to be good.

I just added up all my downloads from Leadfoot Productions which are about 25,000 total Aerial Antics downloads. We've sold exactly 25 games from Leadfoot ... 22 AA's and 3 MV's ... MV not really accounting for more than maybe a couple of thousand downloads. So actually these games are only converting 0.1% ... 1/10th of what is typically considered good sales of a PC shareware game.

I suppose you could still look at it as a numbers game and just try to get 10X the downloads but we could have sold 500 copies of the game if it were executing everything correctly as a game. Then I would feel comfortable putting a larger investment in marketing it. Without getting that 1% it's a bit of a waste to pump money into marketing when you could get a 10 fold increase with some tuning.

From what I understand Platypus was doing similar numbers from Idigicon's website. They sold 16 copies from some 16,000 downloads. Of course this doesn't include what they did with the retail version. However, although I don't know the numbers from what I understand the game is killing it now that Retro64 has tweaked the game and got it up on Real Arcade. So I still feel confident that with the right attention Aerial Antics can be a strong seller, which is why I began a rewrite with multiplayer.

Typical Conversion Rates are 1-2% with >2% being great and <1% need improvement. It's possible with sex-related games that there is higher "gawker" traffic and thus a lower CR bu if the traffic's high enough, it doesn't really matter.

thx for the additional insights Knotz... sorry i got those numbers wrong :)

i'm gonna need at least $2000 a month sales for at least 3 to 4 months... (am i dreamin!!! :) ) but i'll settle for half that at startup :)

anyways... your experience and insight has been very helpfull, to any of us planning on trying to sell some of our work...

so has the experiences of the other devs who haven't seen the sales they'd like as well...

hoefully from all this we can come up with at the least, a winning solution and game plan for marketing our stuff...

ok... so right now i'm seeing these as important points...

1- numbers... as in traffic past your game ads...

2- a blog or forum that gathers the interested from all over...


--Mike

That means the percentage could be quite high on that. He didn't say 1,000 ... as Red stated ... he said "thousands" ... which at 3,000 would be 2%. Of course Love Chess is a very interesting idea and ... well it's Chess with Sex ... so you've got ... the gameplay (is there a better game than chess) ... and the ultimate video (is there anything more visually stimulating than sex) in your video game. It was a bold move ... one that I personally ... even if I thought of the idea .. wouldn't ever have attempted to execute. It's good to see that someone is doing well with it though.

That's the way I look at it now ... you need to have the Video and Game aspects nailed and that's it ... once those two are executed properly the rest will come naturally.

Of course sometimes good games get ignored anyway.

If your gonna make a game about, let's say dishwashers, you have to start with the marketing today, even before you start programming. A site needs about 9-12months to grow and be accepted by the search engines.

Also, making a game, even a little one takes a lot of time. LoveChess took about 7 monthd to make with 2 people, and the marketing took another 6 months.

O yeah, Mystical mayjong sold 9 copies.....:) But we made it in 3 days, more or less for fun.
We didn't market it, besides putting it on download.com, and some signature link in the forum.

But...we made a customized version of Mystical Mahjong for my family of "industry tycoons". We didn't endavour(?) it further but i think there is a real market for casual customized games for companies. Like a Mahjong game where all the tiles have products on them.

Knotz: Your Mystical Mahjong link doesn't work.

Looks like my next game better be called Sex Bonus and should involve matching 3 x-rated shapes with some *very* interesting bonus items... ;-)

@Grey
Probably that's why it sold only 9 copies :)
We changed servers recently, i forgot something, it's up again

You know after all these years, I've never played mahjong? What's it like, is it easy to get into?

Personaly, I've sold about 60 copies of the applications I've made in the space of half a year. The conversion rate being about 1% but falling to about 0.5% over time and I've sold nothing this month.

Personaly speaking, I think this is not bad, helps to keep beer and pizza on the table while I'm at Uni. Mind you, because I am at uni, and can't devote nearly enought time to promotion, updates and new products based on the existing ones which would easily push up sales a bit.

GA: I think you mean "If everything in life had a point. Life would be *very pointy*". Anyway making and sellin stuff at Uni sounds like a good ideas as you have more free time then than you realise, wait till you get a full time job and kids. Plus it's all really good training and beer/Pizza money as you say.

That game isn't Mah Jong it's just a puzzle game using the Mah Jong tiles. It's like making a game of 'pairs' and calling it Poker. A perfectly fine game but misnamed.

Knotz: I'm so glad you posted in this thread. Great to hear some good news.

I plan to make a living out of this (starting early next year when Naked War is released) which means selling several thousand 'games' per year.

and the big thing to make money is "sell yourself" i.e. 90% of gross is yours or "sell via portals" i.e. 30-40% of their net is yours in best case. Makes a fair difference to yearly income, unless you do both of course.

Wow, I'm surprised at the Aerial Antics sales... and I'm grateful for the honesty with sharing this sales info. o_o

I suspect turn based and puzzle games have a much larger sales ratio than action games in the indie sector. Then again that doesn't seem to have helped Market Value, but I wonder whether that's too dry for a casual fun market.

I'm pretty certain I'll end up with freeware on my upcoming 3D puzzle game project (when it is released next year), but I'm considering some sort of donation system on the site. *shrug* I dunno. :) I'll get back to you when I've done my game.

1% for untargetted marketting, 2% for targetted. That's marketting industry figures as I was tought them at college. If you dont get those figures or thereabouts something is wrong with the product or purchasing process.

Anyway in response to the post earlier asking for my leads I should make clear I dont sell anything (I made my points regarding traffic generation) so the actual places that are biggest for me dont necessarily apply (nonags and gamehippo are probably the biggest, nonags is great if you want a coverdisk, just get a 6/6 rating there and you're on several rags within a couple of months).

Mostly though I just google up some forums, look at how many posts it has and if it's big enough I sign up with a temporary email address, post the game, and maintain the post for a few days before removing the link from my favorites folder.

Blogging has also generated some extra feedback for me and pressumeably more visitors to my sight, although i've not tried to use it for marketting purposes yet and dont have any good figures to support Knotz because I intentionally dont have a feedback feature. EDIT: Thinking about it, my blog probably only appeals to techies anyway.

Banshee thanks fot the info on the sites.

I think AA can sell but it needs a lot of work done to it. When the sales got so low, we didn't really feel motivated to fix it.

A new front end is planned and MP gameplay. But there's too much going on and not much incentive. What AA did do is put us on the map, and give us a lot of decent media coverage and credibility. Everyones surprised at how poorly it did.

Looking at it now, I can see quite a few of the problems that hold it back, and some publisher requested changes really told us what their marketing guys wanted in the game to make it sell. We just have to take the time to sort those things out eventualy.

boring as it may seem, giving in to what the marketing guys want is probably a good move unless they are out of touch, which if they work for a big portal is unlikely.

nSprite Pro sold about 40-45 copies, nSprite 2 is at about 6-7 now.

The first full day of stats on from launch and i'm 8gb over typical traffic for this point in the month, at 8mb per download that's ~8000 downloads in 1 day and 4 hours (not including background site traffic).

If I was selling a shareware game with a 1-2% conversion rate that could have been 80-160 sales (the game wasn't good enough for that, but to give you an idea...).

None of the portals have listed my game yet, that is just forum generated traffic.

...I didnt sell any game made in Blitz, but in total 12 interactive walktrough for architectural visualization, for very good money, and I'm still doing that..I'm not saying its not possible to do good selling game in Blitz, in fact it is possible, but it must be a team, not single man show..at least not for something very serious...anyway, last time I earn some money from game bussines was 1999/2000 with CroTeam, and by then, I'm living from small programs fited in to MCU's :)..but hey Red, thats good money buddy, trust me ...

Right, Thats it! The video camera's coming out as soon as I get to Tracy's on Friday!

I could have guessed actually that it would do better, since the internet is full of..well, Perverts :D

I made $5 on a 24hr job a few weeks ago.

I just landed a 30 day job for $95.

I completed a ~60 day job for ~$1500. However, that was over a year ago, and I am STILL waiting to get paid for that one...

Banshee, that is a lot of traffic!

You may get that alot :P

lots of good input here... thanks everyone...

here's a few that caught my attention from the latest postings... i think these are really valid points, that i, as well as a few other developers, might not have realized... or have overlooked...

Gray Alien: giving in to what the marketing guys want is probably a good move...

Naughty Alien: I'm not saying its not possible to do good selling game in Blitz, in fact it is possible, but it must be a team, not single man show..at least not for something very serious...

***added***

oh yeah, one more...

Knotz: If your gonna make a game about, let's say dishwashers, you have to start with the marketing today, even before you start programming. A site needs about 9-12months to grow and be accepted by the search engines.

definitely worth considering...


--Mike

Yeah one person can't do it all. As well as the code you need people to do the graphics and music, and possibly sounds too. You need constant input from other people so they can tell you if something is rubbish or give you new ideas. You need someone to do all the marketing/sales/website etc (this is a big job!) This forum is a great place for help and opionions too.

I find that to even get close, you need to have a plan, or at least, know what you need *completed* next, and complete it. you also need to know where the finish is. Keep moving the finish and you won't finish your project and probrably wont sell it either.

One other thing that seems to attract heaps- CAD stuff. Companies will want to get the best quality, performance, usability they can and therefore will pay what it's worth, but smalltime platform games may be fun as hell- but the publishers wont generally ever pay what its actually *worth*. you wont (!GENERALLY!) get paid for your time. Would be nice if they did. [edit] No bias meant- With publishers you would probrably get a % per sale. It's still hard to earn what you put into it back though.

obviously i'm no expert, these are however thing's ive noticed from a stand-and-watch point of view.

I gave up the idea of writting something in blitz to sell. I ended up writing firmware for video and text to speech. I use the money for toys.

www.speechchips.com

I've sold 5 of my Transition Studio tool, and 7 of my Bitmap Font Edit tool. Not huge numbers, but I haven't really done much of anything to promote them. No idea how many times they have been downloaded. I got them added to a few shareware sites, which seems to generate a little bit of traffic.

I hope to do better on the modules for blitzmax that I am working on though.

Not stricly true, I manage alright. Mind you, I do feel like one of those circus acts who spins loads of plates at the moment. I seriously need to think about employing a few additional people!

I created a suite of apps that does include 1 app made with BB3D. I have sold 1 installation.

Tim: Ok, one person can do it all ... if they are insane! :-D Well a team, even of 2, is a good idea is all I'm saying really. Two heads, better than one, type thing.

The quantity of people doesn't matter. It's the distribution of talent within the fields necessary for a given project that is important.

If a dev can code, make graphics, design gameplay, buy a theme tune and sort sound effects out then what would the second person do?

Quantity is irrelevent. You only need extra people to finish faster, or to do things you cannot do yourself.

I've never seen a good porn game, at least not something above quality any of us could do with 0 budget and newbie modeler/texturer. Not that i searched. *blush* But if someone made an interactive porn game with shaders he'd be new Bill Gates of smutland.

"You only need extra people to finish faster, or to do things you cannot do yourself" True. I did Xmas Bonus almost 100% myself (with Indiepath as the voice of reason) but only by sourcing free/paid music and graphics on the web. However, I still stand by my opinion that having 2 people to bounce ideas off each other is a great idea, even if the other person only devotes a few hours a week. Anyway this has worked for me for business software and games. Also the forum feedback of the beta was useful and helped me hone it a bit more - I would suggest everyone does this.

Knotz - congratulation. From my point of view Lovechess is the most successful game written in Blitz, and also the most innovative Concept. I wouldn't say it's porn but it surely is kind of bizarre and is sold in the erotica corner.

I have seen it in the new www.pearl.de papermag catalog they sell at every kiosk. pearl.de is selling things to the masses.

Maybe, but do your research first, I think you dont want to put shaders as a minimum requirement on a porn game. If you did then Daddy could only get off in his kid's bedroom - and there's limits to how much a customer will pay for that.

Porn needs to work on office machinery & on the computers of those who spend all their money on porn - not computers.

and what about Mommy... where would she be getting off...

Becks... what a sexist statement... i'm so shocked!!!

:)

(hey... this thread is too important and informative to let get locked... so lets try and keep it low keyed... huh...)

--Mike

Possibly, but I'd love to hear from the guy who did that official Sponge Bob game. That must have shifted a fair few units - dunno if he had a per-sale deal or not, though.

What? Why would people want to be playing porno games at work, unless they wanted to get sacked? :/

Sex is good.

Thanks for your input, Hugh. :P

I think Platypus is probably ranking number 1 on the Blitz success charts.

And spongebob.

And Platypus. :P

Not for long if I have anything to do with it! ;-)

PaceMaker has been downloaded about 12,000 times since release with a conversion rate of about .003%.

Its quite apparent from the experiences of others that producing anything in Blitz for purely commercial purposes is not really viable unless it contains a large amount of porn or is a very simple 2d puzzle game that you could do in a couple of weeks/months.
Anything that takes you longer is not really going to cover costs unless its something quite exceptional.

People are prepared to pay for porn, why wouldnt they buy a gfx card for the ultimate experience? With advertising you could make them do it. Enough of them already own a good gfx card that if noone bought a card just for the "game", still enough sales would be made to make you rich. lol. And why would this make the thread lockable? We're just discussing the markets and what sells and why.

I don't know if LoveChess was the most succesfull Blitz game. I highly doubt it. IMHO the most succesfull Blitz program (maybe not in numbers) is Giles from Fredborg.

About the competition, i did not mean other erotic games. They are mostly pathetic and cheap. I ment the competition in the erotic marketplace to get attention, quality traffic and a high Google ranking.

About the "getting off" and things. Whilst making LoveChess we never had the goal to make a game where people could "get off". We wanted to make a game that was a tad bizarre, erotic and fun. The same goes for the blog.

About GFX cards. Most of our customers have better stuff than we. Most of the support related to gfx cards was related to onboard gfxchips in laptops (ATI Mobility) and Intel Gfx sets. An ATi9500 / NVidia FX5x00 is really low end nowadays.

You must be joking! I think you'd be suprised how many "successful" non-porn and non-"simple 2d puzzle" games out there are written in blitz.

Well please enlighten me - I'm curious ! Apart from gile[s] I can't think of any.

well it's already in the other thread, platypus, super hamsterball, spongebob etc.

banshee. unfortunately gamehippo and nonags are no use to me as they are for freeware games only.

I haven't a clue how successfull these have been in terms of sales so you may well be right. However I would put 2d platform or scrollers in the same class as 2d puzzle games.
They are relatively quick to make and 2d art is much cheaper than 3d art. In fact for Platypus - the price of a couple of boxes of plastercine was enough ;)
A 3d FPS, RTS, RPG or Flight Sim in Blitz3d would require a lot more time & investment. By the time it was released it would be outdated - it is now anyway.
2d games are timeless - 2d graphics don't need to evolve.
Perhaps I should have stated that a fairly simple and standard Blitz 2d game has far more chance of becoming a success than an ambitious 3d one.

@Grey - I did say that. :)


By office machinery I meant two things: Firstly laptops; and secondly because whenever I see a half naked women on a computer desktop there's at least 10 guys looking at the monitor discussing assetts that I dont think involve capital stock.


There's just nowhere to put two AAA batteries on a modern PC.

banshee: Rumble pads and um force feedback joysticks and all that ;-)

smiff: I think 2D art actually does takes ages and 2d platform games needs just as much engine programming as 3D ones if they are done properly with objects, physics etc, my Iron Fist took bloomin' ages and that's why I had to stop, it was too big for just me to finish.

Am I missing something here? Don't you mean ~ 1,000 downloads?

Anyway, there are quite a few successful Blitz programs ... games and apps. If you talk to m@#!*ie apparently his Wrestling MPire game is extremely successful financially. I think he touted it as the best seller. I'm not sure if it's better than Platypus ... but it could be considering there really aren't many good wrestling titles for PC. Also, Platypus has just recently become a big seller online ... in its first few years it barely shifted anything online ... when Idigicon owned it.

Reflexive is now selling my game like hotcakes and it's only the first day, woooooo!

...I take it you don't have a wireless optical mouse?

My wireless mouse takes AA not AAA.

Super Gerball has sold 100 copies exactly from my own site. Not bad, sales have definitely picked up since it appeared on miniclip.com (via Google searches).

On miniclip due to their immense traffic it has sold much, much better than what it has done on my own site, and in a much smaller time frame.

It also appeared on bigfishgames.com, where it did terribly (about 10 copies sold), which I blame on the structure of the demo (everything unlocked - 60 mins playtime).

It was a bad day, and maths was not the only thing I got wrong that day, I was so dopey I went to work and when a laptop wouldn't read a DVD I took it apart thinking the CD drive was faulty... Think about it... :)

Fontext has sold about 150 copies. Not bad for a specialist application with no marketing.

Grey Alien - super hamsterball isn't a Blitz game, but Super Gerball is.

Smiff - I think Platypus' art work was expensive in terms of time.

Also, "Spongebob" is also sold as "Best Friends", and so was already fairly successful before the spongebob deal.

it used to be Super Hamster ball right?

oops Gerball, you can see my mistake.
I asked Antony about his plastacine stuff and he said it took age, but it looks cool!

can someone who is familiar talk a lil about portals, and how they work...

thx

--Mike

My opinion Red: I only use free ones myself, most of the portals that allow shareware/commercial games ask you to pay to list there - despite the fact that most of them get naff all traffic. If a portal site isn't getting hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a day the only customer will be you.

thx Becks...

--Mike

hey Smiff... this thread has made me take an in depth look at Pacemaker as a possible animation solution for the stuff i'm doing, and you'll soon be able to up your sales stats by at least .0001 of a percent :)

i've found a way to export the results to a few formats that i use, so it looks like i'll be licensing it...

as far as reasons it aint selling as well as it should, a single addition might help... add an export to milkshape .msd or milkshape ascii... and maybe a few premade animation sets... like idle to walk, to run, to sidestep left and right, to idle to crouch, to crouch walk, to lie prone, to stand, to sit... (not much huh :) )

also... you've gotta get the word out more... i don't think that a lot of developers at our level (Blitz, DarkBasic, 3DRAD, Torque, and 3DGS) even know that it is available, much less what it does... not to mention, how easy it is to rig and get an animation into their projects...

this is really a good utility... intuitive and easy to use...

too good not to be selling a lot better than it is...

anyways, i'll be posting the word around the forums i frequent (3DRAD, DarkBasic)... and, you got one more licensee...

good luck...

--Mike

Thanks Red !
I think Pacemaker will do ok in the long run. I will continue to add features and improve things pretty much forever - it does at least have a userbase albeit not very large at the moment - it's only been out a couple of month's . I'm convinced that that will grow as does the product.
As long as I cover costs of tools, websites and bandwidth etc I am more than happy - a tool of this nature is never going to be a big seller as its market is very small and its difficult to compete with some of the great 3d tools that are available. I knew this when I started so what I need to do is to keep adding unique features.
I would still continue developing PaceMaker even if it were just for myself - its become very much a labour of love now and I'm just dying to get everything I have in my head translated to code !