next »

[GeoffW]

On Saturday I created a page on Steam Greenlight.  This was a couple of days after they launched the service but before they introduced the $100 fee ... though it turns out my Steam account hadn't been 'activated' yet so I had to purchase SpaceChem before I could post and that cost £6.99 (plus a bazillion hours of spare time - that game is hard!).  Here is The Trouble With Robots on Greenlight:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93293369

I created the page from text and screenshots I'd used elsewhere, with added review quotes at the bottom.  It doesn't seem to be possible to insert a link to my site on the Greenlight page, so I had to leave the URL as text.  Anyway, my experiences so far have been:

• lots of people are looking at my page
• lots of people are saying nice things
• but nowhere near enough to be greenlit any time soon!

As other people have observed, Greenlight commentors are a mixed bag and I have had a couple of nasty comments.  Generally these come from people who are clearly looking for something quite different and you wonder why they even clicked on your game in the first place.  As an author you can actually delete comments now, but I don't want to make a habit of censorship and I've only deleted one so far (it was utterly incoherent).

Overall, I don't think I'm going to be Greenlit any time soon, which is a shame, but I've probably had enough new people discover my game to make it worth my time.

[GeoffW]

I forgot to mention here that The Trouble With Robots is now on Get Games:

http://getgamesgo.com/product/the-trouble-with-robots

I hope to get much more exposure and legitimacy via Get Games and a couple of other distributors I'm still setting up with.  Unfortunately I don't have any sales figures from them just yet, and I think my contract forbids me from disclosing such things anyway.  Sorry.

Get Games wanted to go with a slightly lower price, so we agreed to 25% off.  Then it occurred to me that I should let customers buy from my site with 25% off as well, so I made a coupon code.  Actually I made several and posted them to different places (e.g. reddit GameDeals) so that I can track which ones get picked up.  Here is one for TIG:

TIGROBOT

---

PS: I think this thread would be better with a bit more discussion.  So if you've got something to say, please don't feel you have to read everything I've posted before you can comment.  Even if it's been said before, there's bound to be something fresh to say by now.

[GeoffW]

So far most of my marketing effort has been aimed at indie and indie friendly game review sites one way or another.  But I've noticed that The Trouble With Robots is going down really well with Magic: The Gathering players, so I wanted to do something specifically to reach that audience.

First I e-mailed out copies of the game to a few influential people in Magic circles who happen to regularly write reviews of CCG's or computer games or both.  That was pretty easy to do.

Then I donated to the popular Monday Night Magic podcast, who promise to read a 'shout out' for every donation.  The mention yielded a bump in 'direct' hits to my web site (hits that a user typed in directly to their browser rather than following a link, as you'd expect from a podcast).  Nothing huge but I reckon I got a few extra sales and hopefully it's got people talking.  Note that I don't recommend you go out and do exactly the same thing, but be on the look out for opportunities specific to your game and your particular audience!

I'm still looking for more ways to get attention in the Magic community, particularly amongst more 'casual' groups of players.


In other news, I'm going to enter the IGF!  At $95 it's a bit of a gamble, but according to my calculations* it's worth it.

* - calculations may involve lots of made-up numbers being multiplied and/or added together.

[GeoffW]

Just entered the IGF.  There was a lot of information to enter but site was pretty slick and made it very easy.  I feel more confident than I know I should, given the number of entrants last year ('nearly 570'). In other news, my Google Adwords campaign has started and appears to be doing quite well.  I have pages of statistics to wade through ... will say a more in a few days when I've had a bit more time learning and tweaking!

[GeoffW]

I've had a busy week learning to use Google Adwords, and also putting together packages for another online publisher.  Both of these tasks have been surprisingly time consuming!

Adwords is definitely a useful tool, I'm still dabbling but I've been able to get quite a few clicks and demo downloads for very little cost (strangely, this seems to be much cheaper than approaching web sites who manage their advertising directly).  The system is similar in many ways to Facebook ads but far more detailed - I'd actually recommend starting on something simpler like Facebook if you've never done this before (or hire a company like The Adword Adviser to do it for you!)

Google Analytics has been essential, for tracking demo downloads as a result of adverts and for examining details like countries of origin, pages viewed etc.  Having said this I'm also starting to see the weaknesses of Analytics, such as not showing much at a resolution finer than days.  Also for a couple of reasons I can't accurately track all the way from ads to actual sales right now.

A few posts ago I shared my friend Jason's advice to divide campaigns up into different regions according to the cost to reach / value to you of reaching people there.  Well, I forgot this advice at first and with effectively equal bids, ended up winning a bunch of impressions mostly from places like Vietnam and Iran - which resulted in plenty of demo downloads but no sales as far as I can tell.  I've now restructured my campaign into three different tiers focusing my highest bids on the most developed countries where people are, I presume, more likely to pay.

The plan is to spend a few more days or even weeks learning and then scale up my Adwords usage once I'm happy I'm doing it right.

[GeoffW]

I want to say something about posting on gamer forums - not gamedev forums like this one, but the ones where normal gamers hang out and talk about Call of Duty and Minecraft.  We all know that building up a community is important, but this could be a controversial topic because the difference between posting and spamming is somewhat subjective.  Before I start, I will say that if you think that simply spamming links on the biggest sites is going to get you tens of thousands of eyeballs ... you've got a lot to learn.

The reality is that the most popular forums are well moderated, so there's no point posting anywhere but the most appropriate place and there's no point posting on sites where you aren't going to be welcome.  Look for other indie game announcements and see what has gone down well.  You'll have to spend time writing something worthwhile and descriptive (this was my best attempt) and format it nicely, because simple links are quickly ignored.  You'll probably find you get more interest on forums where you're already part of the community and it's much easier to write for sites you're familiar with.

To be honest though, don't make this a big part of your strategy.  I get far more and higher quality traffic from indie game review sites - this was probably not time well spent.

[GeoffW]

A pattern has emerged in all of the feedback I've had for The Trouble With Robots from customers, friends and reviewers alike.  Nearly everyone has enjoyed the game, finding it addictive and well designed.  That's great!  I'm also pleasantly surprised to find that so many have also enjoyed the humour, after discovering in development how difficult it is to get this right.  But two criticisms that have reared their ugly heads again and again, and if this isn't the place to discuss them I don't know where is:

• The price
• The length of the game

Notice that these are really two sides of the same problem, that is value for money.  I've already addressed the first point by lowering the price to £9.99 (in retrospect I do now think the initial price of £12.99 was a mistake).

To address the second point I've decided to make some extra content, which will be distributed via an updated game installer, and a free patch for existing customers (which will also come with a few minor bug fixes).  Obviously this is great if you've bought the game, but for me it's definitely an experiment - I don't know if directly addressing people's criticisms is going to increase my sales or if people have already made up their minds one way or the other.  We will see soon enough.

I haven't yet decided how much extra content I will make, so now would be an excellent time to post if you have any suggestions!

[GeoffW]

Just a quick note to say that The Trouble With Robots is now on GamersGate:

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-TTWR/the-trouble-with-robots

All of my numbers suggest that GamersGate is the biggest digital shop I've worked with so far so obviously this is great news!  Also their site looks nice and I'm pretty sure Cynical Brit recommended them at some point.

---

Those of you who've been following this thread for a while may have noticed that I said TTWR would be on ArcadeTown and it isn't yet ... don't worry, this is still happening, the process has just taken a bit longer than I expected.  Though the game wasn't designed for casual portals I can see why they approached me (cute graphics, really easy to get into, addictive) and I'm really curious to see how it does there!

[GeoffW]

This week I've made a solid start on the expansion, codename 'Megamort', which will contain:

• 8 new story levels
• 2 new challenge levels
• possibly new music?
• a few small bug fixes
• some number of new cards

The last point has been a particular nuisance, as there are now enough cards to require a scroll bar on the deck builder screen.  This was quite fiddly to implement, it helped to think of the bar as being made up of four distinct components - up button, down button, track and thumb.  There are still quite a few dependencies between them though, and various types of mouse input to capture correctly (click, drag, wheel).  The scrollable area itself is clipped using Direct3D's 'SetScissorRect'.

Other than that it's been fun going back to do some actual development this week!

[tuckertuck]

Thanks a lot for this GeoffW, We're heading into this phase of our game so it is great to hear about your personal experiences.
I think developing a game is the easy part, marketing and everything else... not so much.

[GeoffW]

I think developing a game is the easy part, marketing and everything else... not so much.

Well I'm not sure I strictly agree with this given how much time and effort we put into our development skills, game design, code, tools, art and polish ... but yes, marketing is a world most of us aren't very familiar with and to begin with it can feel like learning to walk all over again.

Good luck with your release - and do share your experiences!

[GeoffW]

There's been some discussion elsewhere and I feel it's time I posted an update about my various forms of paid advertising.

On Facebook, I've had some more success tweaking the wording of my ads, and adding new targets (like Ireland which I had completely forgotten).  However, visitors from Facebook ads don't seem to convert into paying customers as often as they should and do from other sources.  Facebook advertising seemed to work much better when I was just using free credit to attract people to my page!  Anyway, my current strategy is to leave my bids low so that I can still expect a profit, but I only get a tiny trickle of traffic as a result.

The Google Adwords Display Network is working best for me at the moment.  There's a tricky game to be played setting bids right for different countries - depending on the going rate and my conversion statistics.  Reaching the US is particularly expensive but I've had better luck finding customers in various parts of Europe.  I've also begun to find favourite sites and create manual placements based on them.

On the other hand, I haven't had much luck with the Google Adwords Search Network.  I set up some ads and keywords but they aren't being shown in many searches, even after attempting to tune my landing pages and upping the bids a couple of times.  I wonder if I'm doing something wrong or if this type of ad just isn't suitable for what I'm trying to do (it probably works much better if your product is something functional people know they want, like clothes or computer parts).

I haven't tried Reddit ads again.  They worked out a bit too expensive the first time and I don't have a clear idea of what I would do differently.

I am thinking of trying Project Wonderful at some point, possibly after releasing the expansion.  I'd love to hear your experiences with that!

[GeoffW]

Yesterday The Trouble With Robots finally launched on ArcadeTown.  I'm quite impressed with their reporting system and I'm really looking forward to comparing my sales on core stores vs casual portals. Incidentally, making a game that's somewhere between core/indie and casual is not a strategy I would recommend.  My audience seems to be a sort of mish-mash of indie gamers, CCG players, casual and family gamers which is great except that they don't really correspond to the traditional groupings - which unfortunately makes them harder to reach!

[GeoffW]

A couple of early screenshots from the new levels:



I'm trying to mix things up a bit in the new levels to keep experienced players interested.  For example the the following screen is from a level that's only three waves long, which is also quite difficult so you'll need to adapt your strategy:



Also the new music is in, thanks to Matt Javanshir once again!  It looks like you can listen to it on his site (the last track is the new one).

[GeoffW]

A couple more things that happened over the last few weeks:

Richard Garfield wrote about my game!  I don't know how well known he is to your average gamer, but in the Magic: The Gathering world he's pretty famous as the creator of, well, Magic: The Gathering.  It looks like he enjoyed The Trouble With Robots, I got a bit of traffic from his modest blog and a shiny new quote to put on my web site!

The Trouble With Robots was part of the Get Games Sci-Fi weekend sale.  This was very simple to do at my end, I got an e-mail about it on Friday and replied saying basically 'yep, go ahead'.  They sold the game at 50% off RRP, and along with 31 other games the sale was promoted on their front page and other places.  I don't have any sales figures yet but I noticed a recommendation for the game on reddit and on Sunday it hit #10 on their 'top 10 PC games' list!

Lessons learned:

• Don't be afraid to approach famous people like Richard Garfield (where appropriate)
• Weekend sales work