Thursday, September 21, 2006

Direct Sales FTW

Direct sales from the developer to the consumer will always be the best way to make money. There are just too many unknowns otherwise. Here are some of them:

Trust -> Is the publisher legit? will they just do a runner with the money? will they report royalties accurately, have they made deals concerning your game you dont know about? are their promises of projected sales accurate?

Support -> You have no way of knowing if a tech support claim is legit. Did they really buy it? did they copy it off someone? is it a dodgy pirated copy? You have no way to know

Feedback -> You are one step removed from your customers. Will the portal/publisher pass on any customer feedback or suggestions?

Community -> People will talk about your game, but at the publishers / portals site, not yours. This does little to build a community

Reputation -> You didnt make the game, the publisher did. At least as far as the customer is concerned. Who the hell are you?

Updates -> You want to patch the game? you need to go through a third party. they need to schedule some QA. maybe next month? next year? sorry, the games too old, we dont issue patches.

Demographics -> Who bought your game? what gender? what age? what country? You will never know.

Of course, ALL this can be offset if the royalty check is collosal enough. But it *does* need to be pretty good to offset all this. That's something to keep in mind when you balance out your strategy for selling games.

I'm really getting into Starship Tycoon 2 now...

7 Comments:

  • 2 words, affiliate sales! Get an affiliate program set up! =x

    By Blogger Cooper, at 3:17 PM  

  • I still don't understand what FTW means. Does that make me a bad person?

    By Blogger dan marshall, at 4:02 PM  

  • I still don't understand what FTW means. Does that make me a bad person?

    By Blogger dan marshall, at 4:03 PM  

  • From The Well???

    By Anonymous Mr. Phil, at 6:16 PM  

  • FTW... Find The Way ?

    By Blogger Jack Norton, at 9:44 AM  

  • Direct sales.. From The Web?

    By Blogger Manuel F. Lara, at 9:56 AM  

  • Ugh. FTW is short for "for the win", and the phrase is the bane of my existence.

    Why?

    Because it's from an old TV show called "Hollywood Squares". Players would take squares "for the block" or "for the win".

    Now, how do I know this? Because I worked for about six months on a Hollywood Squares-based video slot machine. You have no idea how many times I heard the phrase "for the win" repeated. Once the game shipped, I was confident that I would never hear it again.

    And then it somehow became internet slang. I'm not sure what terrible thing I did in a previous life to be tormented like this.

    By Anonymous Viridian, at 4:20 PM  

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