Selling Indie Games online your view

Just wondering how many units have your previous games sold average per week,month,year and what is the average sale life of a game in your experience ?.

Also how many portals will you try to sell your games on and which ones do you rate highly.

Is there a price vs sales strategy ie $9.99 $19.99 $29.99 and do people stray away from buying both the cheap and expensive price margins.

What game format ie style have you had the best return ie rpg,fps,puzzel = match 3 , logic ,ect..

What themes attract the biggest sales ie Cartoony Serious Simple.

Whats your view ?

As a noob going into this for the first time im at a loss please any advise welcome thankyou

I feel a BIG blog post coming on ...

And why not! ;)

Dabz

So I take it that we are all broke then and have wasted the vast amount of time we have spent on things that have never made it to the portals/personal sales market .... Shame realy as the talent on these forums is way above average for a normal dev site. Even the newcomers to programming show a great learning curve thanks to this community.? but how can we be so good and yet so bad?.

Ive seen whats on the portals and tbh its a bit pants okay they say these games are for the casual market but hell they are the same thing repackaged over and over again.

I suppose thats why my latest and only game aiming for the market is so far from classic match 3 that it is more a logic game than easy make a line

? Do you prefer sales over gameplay quality I personally buy games that might have more than 4 hours gameplay in them. Even the casual games I see posted on the portals have a very limited appeal in this aspect.

There are some pretty (very) good games out there on the portals and on the individual developer sites. Also there's lots of cool free games of course.

I might try to reply to your first post in some blog entries but you've asked a lot of (good) questions that will take a while to answer and I'm kinda busy right now ;-)

i think it would be a good idea if we drop the loners path and from teams. imagine what we could build together.

We could also make an AWESOME development program, for
images. Like the Adobe Photoshop of Blitz. It would be amazing if everyone pitched in and could reach that extreme.

There's free GIMP that I'm afraid we can't jump over. Free 3D modeller Blender is also above our abilities. But there's a lot of valuable game designer tools and utilities that can be done with one man or small group of people. There are some niches, as sometimes there is no appropriate solution (high price or low quality/abilities). In example, I still cannot find convenient tile editor that have abilities I need - sprite placing / resizing / rotating, editing collision models in example. So I'm ended developing my own based on my 2D engine.

I think its better to focus on games if any of this going to work out. but i doubt it as everybody has its own schedual and plans.

I would say that's true for about 90% of the people in game development.

Hmm I still haven't blogged some answers for this thread. I've been working all Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday though. When you are self-employed you don't get paid for holidays unless you work ;-)

For indi games i'll pay up to the cost of a night out, because usually i'll only play them for a night. I'll not buy over £15 usually - else a trip to the cinema or the pub is better value for money.

The most expensive indi game i've bought was £24 but that was by a pro developer who just went his own way rather than carrying on working for a major software house - the game was somewhat better than the 'typical' indi shareware game.

I dont buy puzzle or arcade games, there's a gazillion free games. I like things that are different and fresh.

For some wierd reason I bought a hunting game a few months ago, but it was totaly unique compared to everything i'd played before. You tracked animals, and if you wounded them they limped - the graphics where pretty good (by indi standards) and the gameplay was different and interesting.

I also liked Bus Driver, but didn't buy it because I was broke! lol. Again, it was unique and I was close to purchasing it. I stopped playing the demo before pay day so never bought it, this is an important point...

All of the indie games i've bought i've handed over the cash before completing the demo content. I bought them because they had 'wow' factor even for a seasoned old hag like me.

Demo content is something to bear in mind seriously. If the demo runs out before i'm convinced to buy it then I just wont buy it because I remain unconvinced - I hate time limited demos for exactly this reason.

The best demo restriction, I think based on my purchases, has been content limitation.

Take a utility for example 3ds Max - limiting time stops people learning how to use it before the demo is up... No buy.

Limiting export stops coders from testing it works... No buy.

So why not make it so that if certain features are used then it wont export... Take a modeller for instance, it'll export but if you UVUnwrap or MultiRes it refuses to save, but otherwise save works fine. Buy.

thanks for your replys next questions

What Screen Resolutions Should a Game Support?
I ask this because of the visual quality vs render space
1. High RenderSpace = Higher Quality Sprites
2. High RenderSpace = More Space for Content Complexity Variations..

Question 2 extends Question 1
Do you play these games full screen or windowed or only windowed at work so i can close it if the boss comes by... :)

Question 3
What is your View around adding the ability for the customer to have their own music playing or do you just add a mute option so they can play music in their native player ?

Question 4
Okay Im looking into comparing as many indy games as possible whats the best one you have played and played the longest (Note these are not the Same Ive played excellent games but with only 8-10 hrs contents vs Okay Games that ive played 100hrs +

1 and 2:
Puzzle games are fine to play windowed.

Action games I hate playing windowed. And now with more and more TFT monitors I would suggest you support every single graphics mode available. Having anything out of native res generally looks ugly. So it gives people the option.

3: Mute option, I'm assume you're talking windowed games now. Full screen is a totally different story, if you're full screen action you have chosen the music and mood for the player. You don't usually get music options when watching a movie do you.

And seeing as we're talking puzzle games, *most* puzzle games I play I never purchase. Why? Generally because either A: It's crap, or B: it'll only take 30 minutes or so to rewrite the logic without the frills and you have the game for a lot less than the author felt it was worth. You also had the added bonus of going ner ner ner ner ner ner ner and feeling smug about yourself.

I actually had a BOSS key in my bonus games where if you press B, even in full screen mode, it will minimise the game and turn off the music and sounds, plus pause the gameplay!

lol! thats cool!

1&2 - windowed games are usually simpler than full screen games, in order to avert the stereotype full screen is usually best. I think its important to stress that I dont like puzzle games. In terms of screen resolution, make sure you have support for at least one widescreen resolution. I generally include 640, 800, 1280 and a widescreen as a bare minimum, or I read off acceptable modes from the graphics card. I dont play games at work.

3) You should always include a music mute control because not everyone will like the music no matter how appropriate it is for the game, a music and sfx volume control is a good idea but not absolutely necessary. Personally I dont bother with my own music, I think games music helps set the scene for the game. When I write games I always give a brief of what I want from the music, to get exactly what I think each scene needs. I dont just use rock because I like rock. Dont be shy of using classical orchestral music - nobody ever complains about classical music IF you can find a copyright free productions. (The BBC Symphonic Orchestra had some for download a while ago).

4)
I mentioned some in my earlier post, the best indi game i've ever played is Live for Speed (www.liveforspeed.net) it's a racing simulator that quite frankly beats all the commercial titles.