More Dragon Fantasy updates…

Well first of all, we’ve had a few Dragon Fantasy updates, including the recently released Dragon Fantasy 1.2.0 update. We added another new chapter in that update with another ~10 hours of gameplay. And other than a few typical complaints (omg it’s more than $0!!!) the reception has been great.

On top of that, we just recently released this same version for PC on Indievania! Standard arrow keys / space / escape controls on that version, but we’re testing out the popular-on-PC “pay what you want” method…we’ll see how that goes (and maybe do a post about what people actually choose to pay after we get enough sales to make some useful speculation). Mac version will be out any day now once we get around a few Mac App Store requirements…

Minecon

Along with that update, we were one of the indies showing our game at Minecon last month. It was a blast, both in getting to see so many kids playing (and loving) the game, and in getting to hang out with some fellow indies. Speaking of the kids…WOW. Never would have guessed any gaming convention, especially one in Las Vegas, would have been so full of young kids but hey, we won’t complain. Plus, it seems that Minecraft is getting them into the retro-style of games which is all good as far as we’re concerned!

Moving

Lastly we just moved out of our old offices and into our new so-much-more-indie digs. Instead of a very bland office surrounded by lawyers and finance people (no offense to any of you, you were great neighbors!) we’re now in a much cooler building surrounded by design firms and architects.

We’ll post some pictures of the new office once we get the rest of our furniture in place (you know, the necessities…arcade cabinets…kegerators…etc.)

So yeah…it’s been a lot going on (plus adding in the just-passed and upcoming holidays) and we’ve been keeping busy. More fun Dragon Fantasy (and other games?) updates, updated web sites, and a lot more to come in the next months…we’ll be better about our regular posts!

So that’s today’s post…creating value by keeping the game going…

Coming from the world of “traditional” games, this whole business model took me a long time to get behind. The idea that you could charge a user a small amount of money once, and then just keep giving them new stuff, for FREE. Or even crazier, the idea that you could go ahead and give away the entire game for free and still make money. When this company first started…those ideas were about as foreign to me as Zimbabwe (note: Zimbabwe just happens to be my random “fill-in” location when I need to think of somewhere far away…plus it’s fun to say. Try it. Zimbabwe… Zim bob way. You know you love it).

We even tried to get behind this idea in the past. In 2009 we released both Master Jumperton and The Battle of Pirate Bay. We even went so far as to add a menu in the game where users could vote for what new feature they wanted in the next update. But it didn’t work so well…Master Jumperton was sadly a failure financially and while The Battle of Pirate Bay did well for us it fell much more quickly than we had hoped. Looking back, the why is sadly obvious…

We stopped too soon

That pretty much sums it up. We did like 2 content updates, didn’t immediately see any real huge spike in sales and made the call FAR too immaturely that it was time to give up and work on something else. We had this grand idea of “let’s just update continuously” and then we’d update…2 or 3 times and say well that’s that, I guess this doesn’t work. In reality doing 2 or 3 updates isn’t news…it’s standard…it’s expected, so it gets you nothing.

And honestly, while the voting seemed like a good idea…we did it wrong. We’d release an update, and there’d be a new poll up on our server, and people would start voting. But that meant instead of working on the next update (other than bug fixes) we were waiting to see what people voted for before we got to work. This ate not only a week or so of Apple’s review time, but also a week or two of waiting before we’d start on whatever new feature won. Plus, we were fairly convinced Harbor Master was just watching our poll and implementing whatever won…and they to beat us to getting those new features out! No we’re not actually accusing anyone here…just saying there were a few consecutive coincidences…

And with Dragon Fantasy…

And now we’re trying this method again with Dragon Fantasy. But instead of these content updates being small things like a new power up or a new enemy they’re much bigger, like here’s an entire new RPG adventure to embark on. And we’re just getting started. The game launched with a 6-10 hour quest (we’re hearing numbers in that range). We just added another 2-3 hour quest for free. And we have 10s of hours of additional quests we still plan on adding. Why? Because we love RPGs, and the people who have bought this game love RPGs. And we honestly believe that if we continue adding value to this game, more and more people will find it.

And then there’s the question of why are we adding this for free. Honestly at one point we had thought about adding these extra stories as in-app purchases but the call was made to kill that. The reason? Because even if we assumed high percentages of users to buy each and every content update we do, we wouldn’t make their cost back. Adding a bunch of for-cost content means each piece of content needs to justify the cost. Adding it for free on the other hand simply increases the value of the overall product, which means over time it’s going to appeal to more and more people. There’s a huge difference between a 10 hour game (with 30 hours of additional for-cost content), and a huge collection of 40 hours of gameplay. It’s different to the people considering buying the game, and honestly it lets us think about it differently.

The importance of adding value

So why is it so important to keep the game going…to add constant value to a game you’ve already released? Because there are a ton of people who chose NOT to buy your game. They didn’t feel it justified the cost, or it just wasn’t so compelling they had no choice but to click the buy button, or honestly they just didn’t care enough to find out enough about it. Your game offers what it offers, for whatever you choose to charge for it. We released Dragon Fantasy offering 10 hours of old school RPG love for $3. And there are people that looked at it and said wow…$3…that’s way too much. Seriously, that happens. It STILL baffles my mind, but it does. So people feel a 10 hour RPG isn’t worth $3 (that they’d have paid $40 for 20 years ago). Well what about when it’s 20 hours? 30 hours? 40 hours? There are tipping points for people where at some point they’ll say wow ok I don’t care what it costs there’s so much awesome here, I just have to break down and buy it.

The more value you add, the less people can say no. And when you’re competing with the hundreds of thousands of other games on an overly crowded platform, you can’t leave people a reason to say no. And when they do, you push an update making your game an even better value proposition until they don’t.

So today let’s look at how the game turned out, what we’ve done since launch, and most importantly, how much more there is to come!

The Love

More than anything I think we’ve been overwhelmed by the hugely positive response. As of this morning we have a 5 star rating for the latest version, and a 4.5 star rating overall. This just validates what we believed from early testing – pretty much everyone who plays the game has loved it. From that early point we knew one thing was going to be a challenge still – getting people to play it in the first place!

We contacted no less than 30 media outlets, ranging from smaller app review sites, to bigger RPG sites, to the biggies like Destructoid and Kotaku. While we did get some good reviews (such as this one from TouchArcade) most sites never got back to us. As in maybe 10% response. This means other than the TouchArcade review, the majority of our sales have come from the TouchArcade forums, our Twitter and Facebook pages, and the live shows done by our musician, crashfaster. We just had an interview posted on RPGamer.com that will hopefully drive some interest as well.

The Business

This part’s about to get a little businessy…we’ll be talking sales, CTR, CPC, and UAC. If you don’t know (or care to know) what any of those are – scroll down to the next section about what’s coming next!

So how did this minimal coverage we got affect our sales? Well here’s a quick peek at the first 2 weeks of sales, in handy but unrevealing bar-chart form:

On the 24th the game started to go live (11pm eastern, 8pm pacific) and sales started coming in. We had a pretty huge jump on the 25th when it was properly released, along with various reviews and posts about the game. And then the falloff started. Our assumption was that as reviews were completed, we’d get more sales bumps along the way. The problem is, those reviews never came.

So then we decided advertising should go into our mix. We went with 2 avenues, BuySellAds.com for placement on TouchArcade, and Facebook ads. Why these two? They were easy to setup, and cheap to get started! So how’d the ads do? Well I suppose there are a few ways to measure performance:

Click-Through Rate

Our CTR was either good or depressing depending on what you believe to be the “averages”. Our TouchArcade ad has a CTR of over 0.4% – with the “average” being a reported 0.2-0.3% this is supposedly good. Our Facebook ad had a CTR of 0.02% (sadly typical for Facebook due to the HUGE number of impressions) but a Unique CTR of over 0.7%! That means of all the people targeted, after seeing the ad enough 0.7% of them eventually clicked it (and each person saw the ad on average 26.1 times).

Cost per Click

This is another area where the TouchArcade ad seemingly bested Facebook. The CPC on TouchArcade ended up being an estimated $0.66 (this is estimated because our ad run is only 60% completed…so we’re assuming we maintain roughly the same CTR. On Facebook, our CPC is $0.73 according to their own Insights reporting.

The great unknown: User Acquisition Cost

And now the downside to advertising your iOS game: you have no clue how many ad clicks actually turned into sales. That is to say, we haven’t found any way to track this yet. Apple doesn’t’ seem to give up any data regarding sources for sales which means that if your had as a CPC or $2 or $0.02 you still have no way to know if any of those clicks are turning into sales! With Dragon Fantasy selling for $2.99 (meaning our cut is $2.10), we could theoretically profit even with a CPC of $2, if 96% of those clicks turned into a sell (no, we don’t assume anywhere NEAR this rate) whereas at $0.02 we’d need less than 1% of clicks to turn into a sale to make it profitable. With the current CPC’s we have (approximately $0.7 on average) we need 1 out of every 3 clicks on our ads to result in a sale. That’s pretty unlikely by traditional web marketing analytics but again, this is a space where no one really knows the analytics because Apple shares nothing with us!

So with sales declining, ad profitability unknown, and a lack of response from most media outlets, does this mean we give up? No way! We’re going to keep contacting every site on our list until we get their interest (or happen to hit them on a slow news day where they need filler – being indie means sometimes you take what you can get). Luckily, we’ll keep having new things to tell them…

The Updates and The Future

We came into this game knowing there was a lot more story to tell, and we fully plan to keep telling!
So far since update we’ve already released one minor feature update, 1.0.2. In this we added support for pre-iOS 3.2 devices, improved performance, added little things like quick-save, and fixed up a bunch of bugs.

About a week ago we started teasing the next update, 1.1:

This is the first real content update. We’re adding a whole new (short) quest line following Prince Anders, the “other” prince from the opening sequence, knocked into the castle by the Dark Knight. You’ll follow his adventure, see his story intertwine with Ogden’s and begin to see that Ogden’s adventure is really part of something much, much bigger! Anders’ story will feature new locations, new enemies, new puzzles and a brand new feature in Dragon Fantasy: multiple people in your party!

And this is just the first content update! We have a number of adventures planned for this game to continue adding more content, more features, and a maybe even a little conclusion to why a game named “Dragon Fantasy” doesn’t have any dragons…yet.

Our latest internal project, Dragon Fantasy, was recently submitted to Apple. This brings with it a lot of joy here because for a couple of us, this game has been around for over half our lives. And here we are, 16 years and 14 revisions later, our RPG has finally shipped.

Once upon time myself and one of the other people here @mutekicorp, Adam, met in an IRC channel dedicated to emulation. There we found our love of classic RPGs, and the mutual desire to make one of our own. Now there was a problem – namely that neither of us REALLY knew how to make a game, but that didn’t stop us. And so, with him in Montana and myself in California we decided to team up and make a game. How hard could it be?

Keep in mind, at the time we were both high school students with no real programming education. So how hard was it? Very.
We started over and over again, always on the same game, always with the same characters and same basic story, and always we’d get a little farther than the time before. The game existed as a DOS 2D game, as a Windows 2D game, as a Gameboy Color game and even as a combo Windows and SGI 3D game to eventually put on the Gamecube. And time and time again it got put down.

That Gameboy Color version landed Adam (and later myself) our first jobs in the game industry. At that point we actually began learning what it took to make a game, but then suddenly didn’t have the time to do it anymore. Later on between jobs we picked it back up and started on the 3D version, even to the point of a small demo where you could travel between towns, fighting little monsters in 3D, and we showed it to a few friendly publishers at E3. Needless to say it didn’t go anywhere, and the game was again shelved.

At this point we “knew” well enough that an RPG was simply out of reach for us to do and we continued on in our careers. 5 years ago Muteki Corporation was born, and a couple years later Adam joined the group here. We both knew at some point the idea of making this RPG would creep back up but time and time again we shot it down, because again we “knew” we simply couldn’t do it right. RPGs are too epic and too long of projects, right? After all, if it was too hard so many times before, it’s because it’s simply too hard, not because we didn’t know how to do it, right? That’s the funny thing about when you “know” something…a lot of times what you know is really just what you assume.

And then one day the game came back up. It wasn’t a pitch, or a hey we should do this. No, it was actually a test of our cross-platform UI system. We decided that single columned table views wouldn’t cut it so we needed multi column table views. Well to create those we needed a test, and Adam being Adam, he decided he’ll test a table view full of images…which looked shockingly like a tile map that we’d use back in the olden days of making these RPGs. So Adam decided let’s make a tile map, using our UI system and see what happens.

As soon as I saw it I told him we had to make the game… It was just time. Everything we thought we knew about how difficult it would be had been wrong. It turns out when you take a game idea…and add over a decade of game development experience to it, that idea gets a lot easier. The game quickly came together and we all enjoyed getting to finally make the game we had spent over half our lives wanting to make.

Then beta time came. I’ll be honest we were scared. We loved it…but would others?
Well I’m SO happy to say the feedback has been TREMENDOUSLY positive. Apparently we’re not the only people loving this game.

And so after the majority of our lives, we’ve finally done that thing we started doing as young, dumb teenagers in high school.

An RPG is born.

Nothing special there, other than a bit of re-design of the UI of Game Studio. It now operates primarily in landscape mode.
Other than that, it’s just what you’d expect…4 walls, 2 paddles, and a ball. What’s special here about Game Studio…is that with just a tiny bit of wiring together, and without really having to write any complicated code, we’re going to make this whole thing work.

In the bottom right, the inspector showing properties for the currently selected object – in this case the P1Paddle, which is of the LeftPaddle class.

Let’s look a bit deeper at that LeftPaddle class. We’re starting off with a VERY basic implementation here…

This is everything that GameStudio knows about “LeftPaddle” objects. And the 4 basic events that can be handled by objects in GameStudio:

• init: Fired off when the game is (re)started
• tick: Fired off once per frame. GameStudio runs everything at a fixed 30fps currently
• collision: When 2 objects collide – in the next post we’ll be adding to this
• input: When the player touches (or moves, or stops touching) on the screen

Currently this is very simple, with only a couple of simple behaviors.

First, when init is called, it then proceeds to call Set Scale. This is because all of the images in this pong game share a single 2×2 texture, which is then scaled to the appropriate size. I’m an engineer, not an artist.

Then, when input is called, we have 2 additional nodes here. First, the y output of the event is wired up to a red node (a variable node) called p1y. This saves that value out and allows us to use it later. Then, it continues on to call Set Position, using that same p1y variable to update the Y position of our sprite.

Just like that, tapping on the screen causes our paddle to move around (but ONLY in the Y axis). Now this is VERY simple movement. The paddle will just jump to wherever we touch, but the goal here was to show just how simply you can string together simple ideas (like get this value, or set this position) and have things happen. We’ll be moving on to more complex behaviors VERY soon.

Hopefully the concept of node-based behavior trees (the “fancy” words for what we have here) is starting to make sense, and next time we’ll get that ball moving and bouncing off walls!

The title of this blog post, A Break From the Norm works for multiple reasons. First, because this is a 1-post side-track from the Game Studio related posts I’ve been doing, and secondly, because I feel compelled to write about just that – taking a break from the norm, stepping outside your preconceived notions of the right and wrong ways to do things, and being willing to admit that maybe, JUST MAYBE, you DON’T know what you’re talking about.

I promise, next post will continue the Game Studio posts (including a nice, easy-to-follow sample of setting up AI behaviors using nothing but flow charts, look ma no code!), but be it my research over the past couple of weeks, or the delirium caused by lack of sleep, I just need to dump these thoughts out there…

The “Right” Way

Muteki Corporation is 5 years old (almost 5 1/2…my how the time flies). Prior to the founding of Muteki Corporation, I (and others here) worked in various mobile companies. And prior to that we all worked in “real” video games. By real I mean consoles and handhelds (PSP, Nintendo handhelds, etc). I don’t mean it to be demeaning…anymore. You see the problem I (and I’m assuming many people who’ve decided to strike it out on their own) face at times is these notions of the “right way” to do things. For Muteki Corporation, the plan was start up, get work as needed to pay the bills (mostly mobile because it was the easiest work to get), while we work on “real” games for “real” systems (again meaning, at the time in my mind, consoles). It was so ingrained in my thoughts that that was the only real way to go, to the point of detriment.

Months of development time and thousands of dollars in development kits for various consoles and handhelds were wasted on projects that could never be finished due to the reality of our situation here – we’re a small shop that can’t do both a BIG console game, and the contract work necessary to survive. Furthermore, with internal projects constantly being the first thing pushed off when an overflow of work comes in, it’s impossible to keep a project like that moving forward without the people involved either losing interest or just becoming plain demotivated. And of course you can’t turn down work, that’s just throwing away money! Or is it…another notion to kill off in the future…

It’s sad because as there opened up to developers more and more possibilities to release games, be it on the web, on Facebook, or on iOS/Android, I shunned the options as they were all, in my very mis-conceiving mind, wrong. I can think of more than one occasion where decisions were made around these ideas of what the right or wrong way to do things were, that probably hurt us in the end.

The Real Right Way

So this is where I vowed just recently to kill off these faulty ideas and be more open. Consoles are a great way to play games, and great to develop on sure, but if it’s not what’s ever worked for us, maybe I should use that to push us in a better direction, right? So for our next set of projects…consoles aren’t even a thought. I’m going to embrace the options we have readily available, and decide to push back those options that, while very viable in the industry, just aren’t viable for us right now.

As a start, I’ve been looking into Facebook games a lot recently. Now anyone who knows me knows that I don’t really use Facebook. It’s not a strong hatred I have or anything – I’m just not a person who shares much about my personal life (and yet here I can’t shut up…fancy that). But I’ve been forcing myself to look into the options for making Facebook games, because it’s so far in the opposite spectrum of what I’ve been focused on for so long that it forces me to rethink how I’m looking at things. This isn’t a pledge that we’re going to make a game on Facebook anytime soon, but at least it’s no longer walled off in my mind as “oh we will NEVER do that” like it once was.

Dragon Fantasy is another good example. The original plan was great let’s make the iOS version and then hold off while we look for a publisher for the “real” (read: console, read: not actually happening right now, read: not real at all?) version. Forget that – we didn’t start making our own games just to have to work around what other people want or think, did we? No! So the iOS version is almost ready to ship, and once it is? We ship it. And then we look at Mac and PC versions (other “taboo” markets compared to consoles in the past…). And we enjoy the process of making a game instead of being stuck in the mindset of what we’re supposed to make and how.

And after Dragon Fantasy? Who knows…maybe more iOS games…maybe a PC/Mac game…maybe a web game…or maybe a console game IS next. But what matters is that by deciding to break from these ideas I once had about the “right” way to do things…our options doubled.

In Closing…

So this is the new REAL “right way” – being open to the things I once thought were never options. The more we limit our options the more we limit our potential. Being independent developers we have so many limits we have to deal with…so why do we feel the need to add more of our own?

And I leave you with a shameless plug… Dragon Fantasy Beta announcement coming soon!

Let’s look at how this is laid out a bit…

First, a fancy little screenshot:

So this is the canvas you work in.
The horribly ugly magenta (also known as, Programmer-Transparent) is the current background. The green square shows the current scene. If you rotate the app landscape, the game goes fullscreen, and only those things inside of that green square are visible. What this does is allow you to place objects you want created, but not necessarily visible just outside of that square. Back to portrait, and you’re in editor mode again.

There are currently only 2 items you can add to your scene, Objects and Sprites. Sprites are actual images, potentially animated, and visible in both game view and editor view. Objects are invisible parts of your game that show up as a simple icon in editor view, and are hidden in-game.

Now let’s add a VERY simple Sprite to our scene. In this case, an ugly smiley face with a lack of transparency (I’m no artist, I do not claim to be…):

You’ll see a small red rectangle outside the smiley face. This is the currently selected object. You’ll also find it highlighted in the scene list on the bottom. Speaking of that scene list, let’s zoom in a bit:

This is the simple flat-list of all of the Objects and Sprites in the scene. Currently there is no hierarchy here, we’re honestly in debates between adding support for grounds and hierarchy, but also wondering if for a 1.0 that’s more complexity than most people will need just to play around – the goal isn’t to make a AAA title out of the gate, but rather to let people who otherwise don’t have a chance to experience the joy of making games to tinker and play.

Selecting an object, either in the scene view or the scene list will show its current details in the Inspector. This is a simple sprite object with only a few details that are specific to all sprites. The name is set because I specifically chose one when adding the sprite to the scene, and the class is (null) because no script was specified. Tapping on any of these items will bring up the option to edit the value. This allows you to easily place objects by number instead of just dragging around, for more precision. Objects can also be modified by script commands typed into the script input text field (see the previous images “execute lua statement…” field). The goal in every place is to make things as easy to put together as possible, and NOT to be as completely flexible or powerful as possible.

In short, an entire simple game can be put together by adding objects to your scene visually, editing small values (or just dragging them around), and attaching simple scripts, which can also be created entirely visually.

So this is a very brief overview of the Scenes in Game Studio. Next time we’ll either look at a bit more advanced scene including setting up additional fields on Sprites (such as adding physics and collision) or the Visual Script editor…whichever is in a better state at the time I write this thing!

Game Studio started with a complaint. I could do absolutely everything I do in my every day life on my iPad, EXCEPT for my job. The one thing I do more than anything else, is the only thing I couldn’t do. And why not? Well we make software for a living…FOR iPads even…so clearly there was a way to make this work…

It started with our internal engine, a custom project, and a bunch of (very shoddily thrown together) UI. Originally all it did was provide me a text view where I could edit LUA scripts (our internal engine has a pretty strong LUA backend), save them out, and watch the results. From there I realized I couldn’t actually do a ton here yet, so I threw together a very ugly and barely usable image editor. And with those 2 features I got my first glimpse of what Game Studio has been born from. I was able to sit down with just the iPad and actually make up a small game (anyone who saw it at GDC saw it in this state… a simple space shooter where meteors flew around and blew up).

And then crazy amounts of “real work” cropped up and it was left in that state for quite a while, until just recently when I got the urge to pick it up again, and really make it something that lives up to the promise of anyone with just an iPad being able to sit down and actually create something with it.

The new plan:

1. Out with the LUA, in with the Visual Editor
2. The simple view of the “screen” is replaced with a proper scene view
3. A new proper scene editor is in progress
4. An updated non-sucky (not-by-me) image/sprite editor
5. A new audio recording/editing tab

And that will be the new Game Studio, coming to an iPad near you.
Over the next few posts we’ll follow the progress of these updates, take a better look, and then actually make a small game, using nothing but some simple art, and an iPad.

GDC time and time again has me leaving excited to work. I see what people have done, what people are doing, and I feel inspired. The flood of ideas come every year, and it’s usually when new ideas get pitched most around the office. E3 on the other hand isn’t about inspiration, but about the love. It’s where I see the sights and sounds and craziness that is this HUGE game industry we’re a part of (even as indies), and reminds me what I do what I do: I love games.

Now, this being my 9th E3 (give or take one…) I’ve seen quite a bit…numerous console announcements and releases, and endless (truly endless) hordes of gamers rushing to see what’s coming soon. The almost celebrity status of certain companies (and being ANYONE in that company endows a portion of that status on you as well), and just the pure love of it all.

So all of that being said…what was this year like?

Lines

Oh god the lines…the LINES!!! They were everywhere. 3 hours to see (or in my case, told you couldn’t see) Battlefield 3. Then 4 hours to see (and spend 10 minutes with) the Wii U. Lines were everywhere this year, and I wasn’t the only person to notice.

The Wii U: Too soon

Really that’s about all I can think to say about it…the demos were nothing that were mind-blowing or impossible. That’s not to say the potential isn’t there but I don’t think it was ready-enough to really show. The games all looked like Wii games (with the only exceptions being the slightly controllable tech demos where you could just change camera angle a bit) and there just wasn’t enough there. I have high hopes for Nintendo and really want it to work out (they seem to make money regardless though…)

Indiecade

This was the highlight of my show I think. The guys (and gals) at IndieCade setup a great booth where not only did they show off some cool indie titles, but they brought some to life in the form of live-action games being played right on the show floor. I left with some battle wounds (a first in my 9 years of E3) but it was worth it. I wish them all the best and hope they keep ideas like this coming back to E3. Taking rules from the game world and bringing them out to the real world and acting them out was a blast (and a blast to watch obviously, from the huge crowds that gathered).

And the work part…

And of course there was the self-promotion. We @mutekicorp showed off 3 things this year:

1. Game Studio: Our (still in-progress) development environment that runs entirely on the iPad, allowing you to create a full game with nothing else. It’s half experiment, half prototyping tool, and by the time we’re finished with it we think it will be a lot of fun. We’ll likely do a post about this as it shapes up more (the UI is terrible…as it was done by me).
2. Super Jetpack Dragon IV Challenge Mode: A new action-platformer mode being added to Super Jetpack Dragon IV. It will be a free update for those with the HD version (the free non HD version is something we’re still trying to figure out what to do with) and it includes 20 new challenge levels for people to play through – with a lot more content planned!
3. Our 8-bit retro NES-style RPG. From the palette (based on the NES palette), to the music (chip-tune all the way), we’ve made this our love-letter to our childhoods. Some of us @mutekicorp have been working here and there on trying to make this RPG for…well literally over half our lives. It’s finally being made, and we think once it gets out, people will love it as much as we do. More on this in the future!

Wrapping up…

So there we go…a short bit about E3, how it differs from GDC (in my opinion), and a bit about what we’re up to. To everyone we saw (@hodapp, @crashfaster, @notch, @indiecade) – we had a blast and hope to see you all again next year!

E3 was crazy this year, with hitting up the show all day, and working on projects all night, but it’s a blast (and FREE for those with industry credentials, you almost can’t afford NOT to go)! And on that note…I think it’s finally time to rest. See you all in two weeks – this time with my completed tech blog – a bit about graphics engine design and cross platform compatibility.

You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.

Really, that’s it. You’re just trying to find the best way to make money on whatever it is you’re doing. The problem is there are a LOT of ways to go about this…what’s best for you? Well first, you have two starting points: Is your game going to be free or paid. Think about this a lot at the design phase of your game. As we’ve (very depressingly, and completely obvious in hindsight) discovered, you can’t just take a paid game, release a free version with ads, and expect to make money.

So that being said, let’s look at what options are out there for monetizing your game, and let’s look at some of the dumb things we’ve done regarding those options, so you won’t do the same!

Paid Games

Well, the monetization path seems obvious, right? You’re charging for the game. But then…how much? This is a topic that has been covered a lot in the past, so I’ll just highlight some general rules…

• Don’t start at $0.99. This leaves you nowhere to drop the price to for sales, promotions, or if you just discover your pricepoint isn’t working.
• Don’t charge TOO much. How much is too much depends on the game. If it’s a long drawn out epic, $5.99 or even $9.99 might be justified. If it’s a shorter form game, much higher than $1.99 or $2.99 will be difficult to get.
• Prepare to experiment. Do sales, do promotions, make the price higher for a week, drop it lower for a week, balance it out. It’s not about units sold (unless you’re tracking on the Top Paid Games/Apps list), it’s about revenue.

Most important of all, if you’re releasing a paid game you need to find a way to get the word out and make people care. There’s a lot more hesitation to trying out a game if it costs money, even if it’s only $1.99 or $0.99. The same people who will throw a few dollars away on something at a grocery store that they might not like just to try it won’t here. It sucks, but accept it. It’s just the way it is. So be prepared to advertise. Yes, that means you’re probably going to spend even more money on the game that’s already made, just to hopefully get more sales. But it’s more important than you know. If people don’t know you exist (and with half a million apps out there, that’s not hard) they can’t buy it.

Advertising

Advertising is (in my opinion…but I’m more than happy to be proven wrong) a lot more important with paid games than free ones. Free games have the benefit of being easy to try with no commitment. Paid games need to have people looking for them to spend the money, and if people are going to be looking for them you need to make them look. Get the word out before it’s released, push it hard once it’s released, and be prepared to try whatever you can to keep people caring about it after it’s already been released. This is something the “big boys” do very well that indies typically fail at. Once a game is made doesn’t mean your work is done. It means the work of creating is done, and the work of promoting begins. Having worked with a lot of big publishers it’s something I’ve gotten to be privy to that I probably otherwise would have never even thought about. Find ways to keep people caring, push for more press, and do absolutely everything you can to keep people interested. The more they think about your game the more they’re likely to drop their precious soda money (sorry, not a coffee drinker) on it.

Forget Cross-Platform

I mean this solely for paid games, but seriously…it’s just not worth it. You’ll hear a lot of reports about how Android’s bigger than iOS, and how it’s going to overtake everything and on and on. Ignore it. Focus on your 1 core platform, release what you can, support it as long as you can, and make your money. Sales for paid games on Android are nowhere NEAR where they are on iOS (read a report just earlier today that only 5 Android paid games have topped 250k sales…). It’s really not worth the money to port your game to a platform where people don’t pay money for games.

Free Games

Free games are even more difficult to monetize. You have three main options…

• Ad-Supported.
• In-App Purchases.
• Linkshare-Supported.

To make matters worse, you don’t even have to pick one, you can use all three. To be honest, you probably want to use all three, as if people are downloading your game for free, the more ways you can potentially make money off of them, the better!

Ad Supported

First, let’s look at ad-supported. A lot of games do and some even bring in great revenue from it. The problem is if you’re going ad-supported, PLEASE make sure that it makes sense for the game and fits in. If it doesn’t, you will make next to nothing on it while giving away a product you put a lot of effort (and probably money) into.

I submit for your consideration, The Battle of Pirate Bay: Free. We had this great game, The Battle of Pirate Bay. And as sales started dropping we had this BRILLIANT idea to release an ad-supported version. So what did we do? We said ok let’s put a full-screen ad in between levels. For those of you who’ve played The Battle of Pirate Bay can probably imagine why this was a terribly stupid idea. For those that haven’t, here’s why…

The way you make money off of ad-supported games is for people to keep playing, and to keep seeing ads. Now in a game like The Battle of Pirate Bay the more you play, the longer the level lasts. The longer the level lasts, the fewer opportunities to see an ad. The fewer opportunities to see an ad, and well you can guess how that effects the revenue. So, with all of the people playing this free game…how much do we actually make from the ads? In the last 30 days…a whopping $0.05. Which means of all the people who have downloaded this free game…if even ONE of them would have purchased the full game for the hefty price of $0.99 instead of us offering the free game at all, we’d have made more money. If one of a full YEAR’S worth of free downloads would have spent the $0.99, we’d have made more. This hopefully goes to show how offering a free version, if not well thought out, not only can yield next to no profits, but can probably even hurt your profits from paid versions. Please, learn from our stupidity. We certainly did with our next ad-supported game, Super Jetpack Dragon IV.

In-App Purchases

Speaking of SJD4, let’s talk in-app purchases. This is the first game we released using in-app purchases, and we learned that again, you can’t simply implement a feature and expect it to work. There’s currently only a single purchase possible, which is removing the ads from the free version. Having a single option for in-app purchases, that can only be purchased once per user EXTREMELY limits the revenue you can count on from this. It’s a nice bonus (the $0.99 from disabling ads is more than we’ll make off most users in their usage of the app from ad-views) but in our experience only 1-2% of people will purchase something like this (which goes with other reports we’ve read…so this might be a pretty good number to plan on).

Make purchases that people can buy over and over. If only 1-2% of people buy in-app purchases at all, you want to make sure those that do can keep making purchases. If this doesn’t make sense, at the very least make sure that there are a large number of one-time purchases to be made. Very few people will buy items in-app, but those that do will likely buy more than one. The more options you give them, the better your chances.

Linkshare-Supported

Linkshare isn’t something we’re as familiar with as we’ve just now started testing it out. What Linkshare allows you to do is promote other apps with a linkshare ID. If anyone follows that link with your ID and buys that app, you get a percentage. More than that, if they follow that link with your ID, and buy ANYTHING on the App Store (or the iTunes Store at all I believe) in the following hours, you get a percentage. Again, this isn’t something I have hard numbers to report on (we’ve just begun experimenting) but Ian Marsh of NimbleBit has stated before that the Linkshare revenue ALONE would have made Pocket Frogs profitable. I’ll say that again…without any ads or in-app purchases (of which there are plenty) they would have been profitable from Linkshare ALONE. I’ll hopefully be able to follow this up with reports of the same as we get more experience using it…

Wrapping Up

So there you have it…a bit of an overview on monetization options…some examples of the mistakes we’ve made along the way…and hopefully a mildly interesting first post for my iDevBlogADay contributions. There’s a lot of options, and a lot to consider when choosing how to best monetize your product, and hopefully some examples of how we’ve failed will help you think about it before you decide. Enough about business…next post, let’s talk tech!

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iOS development blogs featuring two new posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.