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[Paul Eres]

yeah i do think some games can make a lot of money when priced at $1, but only in special circumstances / certain audiences (mainly casual games or gimmick/viral games like massage/fart games, or when the game is a brand name and has a lot of marketing)

but even in those cases, what you usually get is a game that someone things is quirky, addictive, weird, a way to kill time, or funny, not a game that someone cares deeply about

[Christian Knudsen]

Somewhat related: I just watched an interview with Gabe Newell. He was talking about how unpredictable the effect of pricing is in digital distribution. All the experiments Steam have made point to lowering prices increasing the income (not the number of sales) by up to 40x! Furthermore, these sales didn't seem to come from hollowing out future sales, as even after the price was set back to its former level, number of sales remained higher than prior to the sale. Of course, this is Steam with a huuuuge user base, but it's interesting none-the-less -- and his point just seemed to be that we don't really know anything about how pricing in this new market works, and applying the knowledge we have from brick-and-mortar stores and the sale of physical goods is folly.

[Paul Eres]

i heard of that but i thought it was obvious he had never taken a marketing class; if he had he'd know that what he described is a well-known principle: that *sales* work, and permanent low prices do not work as well as temporary sales, and that if you have periodic low-price sales you increase even normal-price sales when your products are not on sale. it's really nothing new, department stores have been using what he described for centuries

[Christian Knudsen]

Well, I don't think it was so much that "sales bring your more customers", which as you say is pretty obvious, it was that if they lowered their price by 75%, the income rose by 40x, which is a staggering and pretty unexpected number, and that these sales didn't hollow out future sales as would have been the case with brick-and-mortar stores and physical goods. Of course, he didn't say what games these experiments were done on (I imagine old games without many sales would get a bigger sales jump than new and still "hot" games) or if they'd done any marketing for these lowered prices. I kinda got the sense that he was simply talking about lowering a game's price and then watch how that simple factor would affect sales, since he talked a lot about doing experiments with individual factors.

Anyway, it was this interview (I might be remembering some things wrong):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOMI0BxB0yA

[Arowx]

[Arowx]

OK I'm going to try some simple fast(er) games and see if I can raise some funds to build my bigger projects.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

I'll be back! :cool:

[DomAjean]

for your grammar, install firefox and download dictionaries add ons, after that you just have to right click on a word and it will give you the corrections you need.

[Arowx]

Just a quick thank you to everyone for their feedback and support, Project A is underway and making slow but gradual progress!

[jwwest]

i'd also encourage you to work with others; don't try to make games alone and do everything yourself. get an artist, get a musician, etc., and give them a % of sales. it may seem like you have to earn more money to make up for that, but talent is multiplicative: it's far easier to make $100,000 with a team of 5 people than it is to make $20,000 by one person working alone

This is tricky. I'm in the same position as the OP - I want to start making sellable games, but I lack a lot of resources such as art talent and music talent. Of course, I don't have the funds to contract this work.

Personally I find pitching people on revenue share agreements to be pretty....tacky. Do people really produce good work under such a scheme, and what about their reliability? They technically are working for free.

[bateleur]

Personally I find pitching people on revenue share agreements to be pretty....tacky. Do people really produce good work under such a scheme, and what about their reliability? They technically are working for free.

No, not at all. It's a very different proposition from contract work, but if done right it's much better for both parties. Reliability is a concern for both sides, but you can get around that by only hiring people whose reputations make them reasonably trustworthy. The other side of the coin is that you shouldn't approach people too early about this kind of arrangement. Get your game working with programmer art and no sound effects so that you have something to show that your project is a real thing likely to get finished.

[bluescrn]

Personally I find pitching people on revenue share agreements to be pretty....tacky. Do people really produce good work under such a scheme, and what about their reliability? They technically are working for free.

Depends on the project. If it's a serious project by experienced people, it's probably the best deal. For a revenue split to sound dodgy, you must be expecting the project to flop, rather than be excited about making it as good as possible?

The general attitude around the interwebs seems to be 'programmers start the project, and should take all the risk and pay cold hard cash up front for art'. Unfortunately, there's not that many indie programmers in a position to pay for any significant amount of high quality artwork. So we end up with lots of indie games done more-or-less alone by programmers...  a lot of very-lo-fi pixel art, and minecraft clones!

As a programmer, I'd much rather be in a revenue-split deal, as I think it would encourage everyone involved to work harder. If you're paying per hour, or per asset - there's incentives there to either rush things or slack a bit...

Of course, you don't want to invest significant time into such an arrangement unless the people you're working with have good track records for actually finishing things, and producing work of a decent level of quality.

[Inane]

Things like the unpaid collaborations subforum are largely ghost-towns-- the only way to get a good collaborator working for a %, without a really impressive portfolio and concept for a game, is to know them personally.

Bateleur's post is correct, though. Having a game mostly-done with programmer art and asking for help is a lot better than asking a stranger for a straight collaboration from the beginning, but honestly as long as you're paying in only revenue you're gonna burn through some flaky artists, and going through a cycle of people failing to meet basic expectations over and over is very demotivating.

[Paul Eres]

yeah i agree with inane: if you are going to work with someone for a % of the sales, make sure they are your friends, not just random people, otherwise they might not trust that you'd deliver the % even if the game is finished

and even if they are your friends, it's good to have the game nearly done before asking for help. you can do a lot without music or art, just using programmer art and public domain art and music as placeholders

[kamac]

I have no idea how to make that much, but i can tell you one,

don't go by Android advertisments in apps. 3 weeks passed and i've earned 7 cents. When you get on featured apps list you earn 2$-4$ daily. 

[Paul Eres]

speaking of ads, i recently got $100 free credit in google ads. not wanting to waste it, i put up some google ads for immortal defense, so that whenever someone searched for "tower defense" or variations on that word (e.g. tower defence game, turret defence, defense games, etc.) it'd show the ad. it got something like 80 clicks for the $100. of the people who clicked on it, 3 bought the game, and all 3 bought it for less than 5$ (it's pay what you want). so that's about $100 of advertising to become $10 in sales. so yeah, the lesson is that paid ads (at least through google ads) are not really worth it, don't waste money that way