I set up a kickstarter page for SD as an experiment:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinkuhero/saturated-dreamers-igf-fee...
It's a site where people can try to fund projects -- there you can donate to us to help pay for the IGF contest fee for SD, the FMOD library license fee, and if it goes past the target goal any other costs we may have. In return you can preorder SD and get access to beta testing it when it goes into beta testing (which I am guessing is going to be January of 2010).
I intentionally chose a low target goal ($195) because if it doesn't reach its target goal nothing is paid and people's credit cards aren't charged, and I figured a low goal would be more likely to be reached than a high one.
So please help it along if you have any extra money!
Here's a video I created of our next game -- just the intro. It's still very early so it's not perfect-looking yet, but it might give you guys a taste of the story.
Light of Altair is an indie game (by a fellow developer I know and his brother) which fans of Immortal Defense may enjoy. It plays much like Sid Meier's game Civilization, except it's in space and you can colonize planets and asteroids across solar systems. It's also fun zooming in and out just watching the solar systems do their things: planets and asteroid belts moving by as you watch. It's very pretty, and rotating around the worlds and just looking at stuff was my favorite part. I had a lot of fun playing through it. Go check it out if you have some time.
* Note: this is there affiliate link, if you use it 30% of the sale price goes to support our games, the other 70% to them. If you don't like us prefer for it to go all to them, you can always buy it on their site of course. :)
There was a bit of discussion about piracy on the Indiegames Blog. People asked me to post my own data regarding piracy's affect on sales, but I do this with some reluctance because it may come off as whining. I don't mean this entry in that way at all. I am just trying to present this stuff objectively, because data about this stuff isn't very common (many people aren't comfortable being as open about their sales and conversion rate and all that).
Okay, in this thread you can read the download numbers, number of sales, and conversion rate (percent of sales per demo download -- so 1 sale from 100 downloads would be a 1% conversion rate).
Immortal Defense was released in June of 2007, so it's been on sale for two years now. Despite that, there was no actual torrent of the full game until the end of January, 2009, because it's kind of an obscure game. It was still pirated via megaupload and rapidshare links, but those I could take down when I saw them via a single email, whereas you can't really take down torrents, and they're easier to use for most people.
Here's the conversion rate data for every month of the game's release so far (the full data for sales numbers and download numbers per month can be found in the aforementioned thread but is excluded for readability here):
aug 2007: 1.8%
sept 2007: 1.3%
oct 2007: 1.1%
nov 2007: 0.4%
dec 2007: 0.5%
jan 2008: 0.975%
feb 2008: 0.64%
mar 2008: 0.4%
apr 2008: 0.35%
may 2008: 0.375%
june 2008: 0.57%
july 2008: 0.6%
aug 2008: 0.8%
sept 2008: 0.3%
oct 2008: 1.5% *
nov 2008: 3.75%
dec 2008: 1.9%
jan 2009: 2.25%
feb 2009: 0.667% **
mar 2009: 0.85%
apr 2009: 0.56%
* October 2008 was the release of v1.1, which improved the game quite a bit, and the new demo now included a nag screen at the end which asked them to buy the game and provided a link to my site, and was also when I lowered the price from $23 to $15.
** February 2009 was when the first working torrent of the full game came out.
Okay, the above is the data, the rest can only be interpretations. The conversion rate is jumpy, and not predictable. For me it varied between 0.3% at its lowest and 3.75% at its highest, a more than tenfold difference. Because it fluctuates randomly so much, conclusions about what affects it are necessarily suspect. But it can still be put in roughly four groups (as I did above) which are somewhat similar in their average values. So two interpretations I have are:
1) The v1.1 drastically improved the conversion rate: lowering the price and providing a link to the site from the game itself seemed to greatly improve the percent of people who bought the game.
2) The release of a torrent of the game seemed to decrease the average conversion rate back to pre-v1.1 levels.
3) I don't know what caused the original drop (the first three months had a relatively high conversion rate, followed by a long time of relatively low conversion rate); it could just be related to those months being the first release of a game and the reviews of the game, which mostly appeared around that time.
Those are just interpretations though, I'm not positive the new release and price change in v1.1 was actually responsible for the improved conversion rate, it could just be chance; similarly it could just be chance that the conversion rate happened to go down so much when the torrent of the game was released. It's just speculation, but since data about this is lacking I thought I'd put this data out there.
On a forum I visit someone asked for tips to help improve sales of one's indie game. Here was my suggestion (copied and pasted):
"
My suggestion is just to constantly do stuff that's valuable to people and let them know about it so that they can get value out of it. Post tutorials, guides, helpful stuff like that. Give people feedback on their games in forums. Write for indie game blogs. Praise people: send complementary emails about things you like, and include your email signature to your site. Make lists of games you recommend. Make friends with journalists and other game developers and help them out any way you can. Just in general be a good person to people.
One example: I made a video of 100 of the best Game Maker games and put it on YouTube, with a mention in the side info that if they like it they could check out my game. That video so far has 60,000 views, and a small fraction of them visit my site, but it helps.
I estimate that I only need around 1000 or so sales per year to make a good living (currently only getting around 200-300 though...), and my theory is that I can get 1000 sales just by being helpful or nice to 1000 people who then become interested in the game.
"
As some of you might know, I started learning Flash programming a few weeks ago. Here's something I've come up with for a Valentine's day contest over at TIGSource:
http://studioeres.nfshost.com/Valentine.html
The idea is that often there are two 'clumps' or 'clouds'. Sometimes they meet, sometimes they just wander around and seem like they're never going to be together. Sometimes they seem like they're about to meet, but then just pass each other and don't. Try reloading the page several times in order to see different destinies.
There was an interesting discussion about retro games over in the TIGSource forum. I'd like to quote Chris Whitman's post about it, an opinion I strongly agree with, and then one of my own, because I feel that this is an important subject. Here's Chris's:
*
Personally, I don't mind if someone decides to knock out a retro game now and then. It's nostalgic and fun, and I don't have a problem with that.
Besides the nostalgia factor, many mainstream games were, in fact, better then (although we tend to ignore the majority of SNES movie license platformers, for example). There are a variety of reasons why this was so. For one thing, if a game was focused around action and reflexes, typically you actually got to play the damn game instead of having a cutscene rammed down your throat every ten minutes.
HOWEVER:
The problem is that it has become a superstition, really. I mean, say you need rain to water your crops, so you do a dance and it rains. From then on whenever you need rain, you just do the dance. Sometimes it rains when you do the dance, so you figure that you did the dance particularly well that day and got some rain.
The endless tide of retro platformers are a bit like the rain dance. Old platform games were awesome (sometimes), so people hope that if they make something with lo-fi graphics, they'll get something great too. Except that it wasn't the lo-fi graphics that made the games great (after all, those graphics were usually cutting edge at the time), it was gameplay and fun and the desire to make a well-crafted game.
But for many people it's a crutch. Instead of analysing what makes a game 'good' (for whatever your personal definition of good is), people just adopt the entire mantle of retro platforming, taking both the good and the bad things, and end up with yet another identical game to be thrown on the enormous pile of retro crap. So no one ever expands their horizons, no one ever tries to make the best art they can muster, no one ever really does anything but make the same thing again and again, constantly hoping it will, in a manner of speaking, rain. I don't mind it when someone does a well-thought out, retro styled platformer once in a while, but I do mind it when everyone does poorly planned, hopelessly derivative retro-styled platformers all the time.
Just... game design-wise we are still depending on very basic, well-established methods of creating interest. Almost all games cast you as a little man who has to fight guys. I think that there is definitely a place for that. I enjoy action-platformers and I don't want to see them go away any time soon. However, I can't help but feel that the whole community would be better if people put more effort into branching out and trying to create things which were important and perhaps spanned at least somewhat more of the enormous gamut of human experience.
*
And here's mine:
*
Although it's true that it's not the low-fi graphics and scanlines that made the games good, I feel that the brain is a malleable thing, and sometimes things which are not inherently pleasurable can become inherently pleasurable through association with pleasurable things. This is a standard idea in behaviorism, with the bell creating the saliva and all that. Fetishes also work in that way. The brain's weird like that.
So I think that has also happened in many people, and that the retro game elements themselves have become inherently pleasurable in many people just through association with pleasurable games, so games which nostalgically contain retro elements and nothing else can give pleasure through association to people who have become wired that way. And I think making games which appeal to that is fairly limiting, because they often aren't pleasurable in themselves, they are mainly pleasurable because they remind people of old games. I mean some games are literally just retro graphics and sounds and have nothing else of value, and people eat it up because of pleasure by association.