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[RinkuHero]

Because I'm approaching the release of Immortal Defense experimentally, I see no reason to hide the business side of things, so I'll update this thread with how the game is doing. Hopefully other independent game developers can learn from this, but the main purpose is so that I can learn from this.

The game was released on June 1 as a soft release, as of June 2 (a two-day timespan) the demo has 70 downloads and the game has 3 sales, one of those I gave a half-off discount code to for telling me that the links were broken on the site.

At this point this is *not* statistically significant, so don't draw any conversion rate numbers from this, it won't be statistically significant until it gets around 1000+ downloads. It's like calling up three people and asking them who they'd vote for, and then estimating who will win the election based on that -- it's too small a sample to matter.

The plan is to, each week, try a new way of marketing the game, and see how it works; so I'll probably be updating this thread once a week. The first week is just going to be the basic announcement on the site, on a few forums, and on indygamer.blogspot.com. Next week is "press releases", the week after that is PAD file submissions on download sites, and so on and so forth. I have 14 different categories of marketing planned, so this reporting will go on for at least three and a half months.

Indra's Net is full of things to learn,

[JohnyZuper]

I really appreciate your intention to be open. I'll be following this thread. 

As an appetizer, could you publish your 14 marketing categories?
(I'm writing a marketing plan myself and I need some inspiration )

[RinkuHero]

Thanks, and thanks for buying the game today Michael. ^_^

Okay, the 14 marketing strategies I have so far (though the order may change):

week 1 -  posting on forums (including livejournal), there's a danger of people getting mad at this and calling it spam, but surprisingly that happens less than i thought it would if you phrase the posts correctly and post them in appropriate sections and read the rules
week 2 -  using PAD files to submit the demo to shareware download websites
week 3 -  submitting the game for reviews in blogs and other places where they write about games
week 4 -  sending out press releases to game news organizations, but selectively make the press release appealing to that particular place (perhaps with several different types of press release)
week 5 -  specifically look for people who have said they've enjoyed other "tower defense" games, and ask them to try this game (for example, searching blogs in technorati for mentions of a tower defense game and commenting asking them to try mine)
week 6 -  banner advertising, text advertising, sites like projectwonderful.com, etc.
week 7 -  looking for people who use affiliate programs on their websites and asking if they're interested in selling as an affiliate
week 8 -  posting on populated forums or blogs in the way I normally do when I have something to say, adding a link to the game in my signature, but not mentioning the game at all, and doing this for many hours a day, perhaps with a slight emphasis toward blogs/forums that are more popular rather than ones that have almost no visitors
week 9 -  contributing articles to the game development industry (e.g. postmortem, interviews, articles for gamedev.net or the escapist etc.), in general being writing helpful things from my experience, with a link to the game at the end or a mention of the game in the article if appropriate
week 10 -  releasing an update to the game and announcing that (the timing of this will depend on when a major update to the game with new content is added), also emailing the news about the new content to everyone who has bought the game in case they want to try the game again
week 11 -  do absolutely nothing (and see how that affects things)
week 12 -  selectively send free copies of the game to people I admire (such as my favorite GameFAQ writers or novelists and so on) as thanks for their good work, this may help word of mouth or it may have no effect, worth experimenting with
week 13 -  lower the price temporarily and see if that increases conversion rate (a lot of people say it does not, but it's worth experimenting with anyway just to be sure)
week 14 -  some type of contest (fan art, best set of levels after I add the level editor feature, etc.)
week 15 -  SEO

Other things that don't fit into any one week:
- I may submit the game to the IGF; if it makes it as a finalist it'd be good publicity, though this costs a bit to do since there's an entry fee.
- Submitting the game to portals, particularly Manifesto games and other non-casual portals.
- release another game (this will depend on when I finish my next game); the release of new games helps the attention toward old ones. Perhaps sell the two in a bundle as a special offer as well (like 20$ for each but 30$ for both).

[JohnyZuper]

Thank you for that. Very inspiring.
I like week 11!

Good luck!

Thanks, and thanks for buying the game today Michael. ^_^

Hope you'll still be thankful after I review that thing!   

[RinkuHero]

Don't worry, I can guess how you'd review a game about killing enemies on a line forever ^^ but pay equal attention to the full story too!

[RinkuHero]

AND it has goals and missions! I'm double-doomed! I think you'll like some of my future games better.

[TeeGee]

Week won't be a long enough period to judge the effects of some of those things. Submitting the game to a PAD site, takes about a week to be fully completed (game appearing on the site). Some review websites also can take weeks just to reply you, saying that they will review the game within a month .

Other than that - I think it's a great idea and I'll be definetely tracking this topic. Once again - my respect for making all that stuff public.

[RinkuHero]

Yeah, I might extend that one to two weeks or something, but also, I can measure where traffic comes from, and isolate it in that way as well.

[RinkuHero]

Just for our new visitors from indygamer.blogspot.com, here's some of the present numbers:

Days released: 5
Number of copies sold: 11 (2 at half price with discounts, 9 at full)
Downloads of the demo: 400 320*
Most traffic from: http://www.just-whatever.com/2007/06/04/top-5-tower-defense-games/ (someone mentioned the game in a comment there, which has given us a lot of traffic due to that entry's popularity), indygamer.blogspot.com, the GMC forums, and TIGsource.
Number of forums I posted the game on so far: 20

I'll give a more full report at the end of the week.

*EDIT: I was measuring the download numbers incorrectly, so I fixed it. I have to divide the Amazon S3 number (which is given to me in bytes of bandwidth) by the bytes of the demo file, and I was counting the bandwidth prior to the game's release (which would have been all the playtester downloads), so the actual download number is 320, not 400.

[TeeGee]

11 sales for 320 downloads? Impressive - keep that up. Of course it's still not big enough to judge anything, but seems great anyway.

[RinkuHero]

Yeah, but I just got 300 *new* downloads yesterday due to a surge of traffic from some blog comment that was a del.icio.us most-bookmarked of the day, no new sales from that yet, but that will probably lower the conversion rate somewhat since it's an audience that's used to flash td games rather than downloadable indie games. No new sales from those 300 yet, but it sometimes takes a few days before someone decides to buy it or not.

[mrkwang]

Hope to do well!

[RinkuHero]

Okay, time for week 1's report!

OVERALL
There were 13 sales out of 747 downloads and 4000 unique website hits. There were a lot of downloads in the last two days of the week, so sales of those may not have come through yet (if they will), but the conversion rate up till now is ~1.75%, which is relatively good as indie games go.

TRAFFIC
By far most of the traffic (some 2700 hits) came from a single blog comment in a popular blog post: http://www.just-whatever.com/2007/06/04/top-5-tower-defense-games/ -- it's funny how the internet works, that most of the site's traffic would come from a single word-of-mouth comment.

The rest of the traffic (the remaining 1300) came from (in order):
~200 indygamer.blogspot.com (an announcement I made of the game there)
~100 Garage Games (a blog post I made there)
~100 TIGSource (a review they did)
~70 The Game Maker Community forums.
~50 The Pixelation forums.
~30 The Indiegamer forums.
~30 The Rage3d forums.

All others below 30, but there were many different forum announcements that generated around 1-29 hits, which adds up.

DOWNLOADS
The website hit to download number is a bit low: only 19% (747 out of 4000) of the people who sent to the site wound up downloading the demo. Because the rate went up halfway through the week when I put a short clip of the game right at the top, I'm going to aim to increase that rate with a better full-length trailer (my friend Hachi-Roku agreed to make one for me, he's the one who made the excellent Alphasix trailer).

SALES
As most of you know, I thought up an idea where someone could get the game for half price in exchange for driving some traffic to the site. So of the total sales 3 were at half price, 10 at full price. 5 of the 13 sales were from people I "know" online on LiveJournal or messageboards, 8 were from random strangers.

I'm very happy with that overall, I was worried I wouldn't have a single sale in the first week of release (a lot of indie games don't have any sales even after 1000s of downloads), so it's a relief that people enjoy the game enough to buy it and that most reviews so far have been positive. The worst responses we've gotten were not "this game sucks" but "this game is great but not worth 23$" -- I've actually *never* yet had a person who played the game think it's a bad game, which is encouraging.

FORUMS
Forums seem to be fairly effective: a good number of the sales (I didn't count, but I'd estimate about half) were to people who post on forums and who learned about the game through forum posts. I personally posted the game on around 20 different forums (I was getting tired of filling out those capchas things), and a few of my friends and some of those seeking discount codes posted it on a few other forums. Some forum posts produced only 1 or 2 hits, but I don't think any were deleted as spam (although I didn't check them all today).

The types of forums I posted in were mixed: 4 general game forums, 2 tower defense forums, 7 independent game forums, 3 game development forums, 2 game maker forums, and 5 miscellaneous/specialized forums (like the storytron forums). I really should have posted in more forums than around 20, but...

...Doing this was grueling. Not so much in terms of work, but in terms of the emotional feeling of signing up on a forum just to talk about my game, which felt kind of bad even though I rationally knew that it wasn't that horrible of a thing to do (the people might enjoy the game, at the worst I would have wasted 2 seconds of their time with a forum post). Posting about the game on indie forums and on forums I normally post on was fine, it was just signing up to a new forum just to post about the game that felt bad, so I don't think I'll be continuing it or doing that again, even though nobody seemed to really mind. I am proud of the game and I do want to show people it, it's just that I don't want to waste their time with messages from a stranger either.

I'm looking forward to this next week's marketing strategy (asking people to review the game in their blogs and small review sites), because at least now it won't feel so intrusive.

[JohnyZuper]

Things seem to be going well. Congratulations. A single week is nothing of course. Online things need to simmer quite a bit longer, in my experience.

What makes you say that a ~0.175% conversion rate is relatively good? I always hear people talk about 1% being average.

And thanks for the web stats. Gives us a good idea about the actual size of sites <surfs to just-whatever to sneak in a link >. Perhaps we should publish some of our own stats too... It's quite interesting to see how American McGee's blog is much more popular than Gamasutra, e.g.

[RinkuHero]

On the indiegamer.com forums and the earlier dexterity.com forums the general word was that "1% is good, anything less is bad, anything higher is great, and only a few games ever reach 2%" and also things like "if your game is getting less than 1%, you need to improve your game, if it's getting more than 1%, you need to improve your marketing".

I've heard that some games do get higher, but for me, 0.175% means 1 sale out of every 57 downloads. Considering a) how few people actually want to pay for games and b) the people that download it just for fun and never intended to buy it (like kids with no money on the gmc forums) and c) the number of people who don't ever buy anything online due to suspicion of fraud and d) the number of people who download a game and then forget it and never install it at all (I do that most of the time), 1 out of 57 seems good to me. It might go higher or lower, as the sample size isn't large enough to judge, but even if it stayed at that I'd be pleased. I don't know anyone else who got this high for their first shareware game; Aveyond for example was very successful due to portals but I have heard that even it has less than 1% conversion.

And yes, I think more people should publish these kinds of things, I'd be interested in that type of thing.