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[larsiusprime]

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you know that Gamasutra has published final sales numbers for our game Defender's Quest today!

Hopefully, our experience and stats will be helpful to someone in launching their next game.

These numbers are current as of April 1st.

Full Report


Here's the tl;dr version:




And our sales graph over time:



The article contains a detailed description of our marketing and press strategy, and gives an overview of everything we did to increase sales of the game.

I hope this information helps someone!

[TeeGee]

Great stats! Congratulations and thanks for sharing.

[Moczan]

Grats, it's nice to see that doing an AIR game that doesn't rely on Steam/Bundles can be financially viable!

[larsiusprime]

Yeah, I was pretty surprised. What's really interesting is how many sales were driven by the flash portals. If you take that away, our figures plunge to about 1,300 sales / $9K gross.

[Xienen]

Sorry in advance if this is covered in the article somewhere, but I was just wondering which method you used for selling the game.  Was it a demo to full version purchase system? Or something else?

[larsiusprime]

It's a standard demo up-sell. The game gives you the first 2 acts for free, then prompts you to buy the full version.

Two things that I think helped us is that the demo is browser-based, so you don't have to download/install anything, and you can export your save file from the demo to the full version.

[___]

It's a standard demo up-sell. The game gives you the first 2 acts for free, then prompts you to buy the full version.

Two things that I think helped us is that the demo is browser-based, so you don't have to download/install anything, and you can export your save file from the demo to the full version.

Ahhh this is most excellent!  I just released a game and I'm planning on doing a flash demo with the same deal (Play some levels, export your save data for the full version)

But yeah, mega congrats on those numbers, that's awesome!  I better get crackin' on my flash demo apparently! 

[larsiusprime]

@xerus:

DOOOOOO IT! Based on this experience, I cannot overemphasize the value of an in-browser demo. Flash right now has the benefit of being installed most everywhere and easy to distribute via portals, but even if you have to use HTML5 or the unity plugin, or even Java, it just makes it soooo much easier to pitch your game and convert people to paying customers.

I'd have to do a deeper analysis to be sure, but my hunch is this is one of the things that led to Minecraft's legendary success - they had a free browser demo you could try (Java).

Also are you Kyle Pulver? If so grats on Offspring Fling!

Edit
One thing tho: the demo-upsell format is risky for flash games - we're honestly surprised it worked. Flash portal players are pretty finicky, so even if the demo upsell works (as it did for us), your score will suffer. In contrast, some microtransaction formats are tolerated pretty well by the flash portal audience (e.g, Bloons Tower Defense, Kingdom Rush, Gemcraft Labyrinth), but I've never been a huge fan of the system so I've been wary to try it.

In general, our lead designer Anthony (also a Kong employee) says mtx works best for online or multiplayer games (flash MMO's in particular), and less well for single player games.

The bottom line, however, is if it's not too much effort to make a flash demo, you have absolutely nothing to lose by just putting it out there and seeing what happens!

[tametick]

Edit
One thing tho: the demo-upsell format is risky for flash games - we're honestly surprised it worked. Flash portal players are pretty finicky, so even if the demo upsell works (as it did for us), your score will suffer. In contrast, some microtransaction formats are tolerated pretty well by the flash portal audience (e.g, Bloons Tower Defense, Kingdom Rush, Gemcraft Labyrinth), but I've never been a huge fan of the system so I've been wary to try it.

I find the flash demo-upsell really interesting and might try it myself with my next game.

Thanks a lot for sharing your numbers. I had some commentary about the game design but I'll leave that out since it's kinda off topic to the business forum.

[gambrinous]

What's the total amount of times the flash demos have been played?

[larsiusprime]

@Gambrinous:

Let's see if I can get some numbers for you on that.

On Kongregate:
571,338

On Newgrounds:
39,042

Our site + those who "stole" the swf from our site:
46,410

So, total "plays" is 656,790. That includes repeat plays by the same person, as well as players of the full version on Kongregate.

Sales stats as of 10 seconds ago:
14,094 total (10,109 FastSpring + 3,985 from Kong)

So, we've got a conservative estimate of 656,790 plays.

We have 14K sales, so our conversation rate is about 2%. Now, that's the conversion rate of "plays" to sales - I have no idea how many unique people we're dealing with.

Edit:

Okay, so I just checked with my man on the inside at Kongregate, and he just has direct access to our conversion rate - he says 2.48% of players bought the game. That's just kreds purchases, so the ~75% of our FastSpring sales that were probably Kongregate-driven aren't included in that.

Also you have to be registered to buy something, so that's "2.48% of registered players."

[gambrinous]

What about minijuegos and others who got the site from mochi distribution? (those are linking through to your site and buying too, right?)

[larsiusprime]

I definitely did a horrible job of putting in tracking mechanisms before launch- most of them I'm pulling up from the sites themselves. Let's see what I can dig up.

I found out about MiniJuegos because I saw them pop up on my webhost's list of referring sites:





They were giving us something like 1-2% of our total traffic, which is huge for a minor flash portal. MiniJuegos.com / MiniJuegosGratis.com seem to redirect to the same site.

Holy crap!



235,097 plays on MiniJuegos.com!

It looks like they're using my mochi-wrapped swf (the one from my site), so I must have misinterpreted my mochimedia stats.

Here's that mochi stats:
46,410 "sessions"
383,457 "impressions"

I'm not sure what each of those means, but 46K can't possibly be "plays" if that number is to include the 235K from MJ, so perhaps "impressions" corresponds to "plays." MiniJuegos is using our mochi-wrapped swf, so it should be reporting back stats to mochi, and the larger number could reasonably contain the MiniJuegos figures.

Apparently I should get off my butt and translate this thing to Spanish!

[larsiusprime]

Motherlode!

I totally forgot that we integrated playtomic before we released the game! Let's see what we've got.



Playtomic tracking is installed on all versions of the game, even the full version, for both browser and download (you can turn off tracking at any time in the options menu by selecting "Don't Track me, bro!")

I didn't think to track data separately for the full version and the demo, so this data represents both versions.

Interesting things here: Minijuegos apparently is responsible for more traffic than Newgrounds! (ungrounded.net redirects to Newgrounds, must be their back-end server).

"localhost" represents people either playing the downloadable demo or the full version.

The "mochiads.com" numbers probably represent people playing the game on our site - because we don't host it ourselves, we just embed it directly from mochi to save bandwidth. There's nothing stopping others from doing this, but I imagine flash portals want to host it themselves for maximum control.

Not sure what "plays" and "views" means in this context. Anybody else who uses playtomic have an idea?

[Hima]

Thanks for sharing the data, larsiusprime! It's really interesting and I think it'll be useful for many people. The game is really fun and I'm going to buy it as well

As for View and Play, if I understand correctly, View is when you initialized Playtomic. It means that the player load your game or 'view' it. But if you don't make a call to Playtomic.Play(), then player won't be considered as playing the game. Though if this is the case, the localhost stat surely is strange!

[Desert Dog]

As for View and Play, if I understand correctly, View is when you initialized Playtomic. It means that the player load your game or 'view' it. But if you don't make a call to Playtomic.Play(), then player won't be considered as playing the game. Though if this is the case, the localhost stat surely is strange!

At a random guess, I'd say Play was called for each level, so they'd get an idea of how many levels people who tried the game played, before quitting. Errr, well, anyway, that'd be my guess... 

Thanks for sharing these stats! I gave the game a try, and dang it's enjoyable. 

[larsiusprime]

Okay, that makes sense. So a view is "the game has loaded" but a play is "a game session has started" - I think we call it when they load a save slot or start a new game, so that explains why localhost is like that - people who have the game downloaded will play a lot in one session.

[JigxorAndy]

Thanks for sharing! It's really interesting to see the sales graph over time and how different news sites affected the sales.

[Yrgkala]

Excellent article! Best number-share since the Steambirds one.

[zede05]

Nice numbers! And thanks for sharing. All the numbers are pre-tax, right?