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[bateleur]

Yup, seconded thirded agreed - this thread is very useful.

It's interesting to me that the flash portal size restrictions limiting demos effectively means this kind of approach is limited to games whose demos can be kept small. (I seem to remember Jasper Byrne having some trouble making Lone Survivor's demo fit in the limits.)

[ANtY]

I read it some days ago but forgot to comment. Very useful, I have no other choice than to make flash demos for every game I'll release 

[larsiusprime]

@zede05

Kinda. Sales taxes and VAT are part of FastSpring's 8%, and Kongregate's 30%, which is one of the reasons we use those guys. That way any money that hits our account is pure "income", so we do still have to pay income taxes on it, but we don't have to pay any sales tax - that's taken care of.

The way we set up our company is as an LLC, so that money passes through our company and then out to the people who worked on the game, and in Texas I believe there is no corporate income tax. We'll pay individual income tax when we get our cut of the money.

Or at least that's what I *think*. I'm going to meet with an accountant in a week or so who will give me the final answer

[larsiusprime]

@bateleur:

You've got some wiggle room with the flash portals. It's all about tradeoffs.

So, if you want to absolutely maximize distribution, make your game no larger than 640x480 and no bigger than 5 megabytes. That way it will fit within almost every random flash portal's max requirements.

Defender's Quest was 800x600 and about 10 megs, I think. The Kong version is nearly 20. So, that cut me out of some flash portals, sure, but the majority of the traffic came from Kongregate and Newgrounds, who let you upload slightly beefier stuff. I think NG has a 10 meg restriction, but you can PM Tom Fulp and ask for him to lift it once he verifies you aren't just uploading total crap.

Although still pretty huge for the web, 20 megs is still low for downloadable games' standard, which can be hundreds of megs in size, so you'll want to use conditional compiling to selectively remove embedded assets that won't be showing up in your demo.

[larsiusprime]

For everyone who isn't using flash: you can still get a browser demo out of a lot of the popular technologies.

The new Game Maker has an HTML5 exporter (though I hear it's buggy), and Java of course has applets, and Unity has the unity plugin (as well as flash export? Does anyone know if this is available yet and/or whether it works?)

For raw C/C++ you might be kind of out of luck, but there's always Chrome Native Client - and a lot of people are using Chrome these days so it's certainly better than nothing.

As for the portals themselves, though, Flash is kind of where it's at, though I know for a fact Kongregate allows Unity games now, and they also *may* support Java games, too. I know Kong is also going to roll out support for HTML5 games soon, if they haven't already.

[Xienen]

C/C++ can be done with simple wrappers for each browser to handle audio/video context creation and input mapping.  I would assume that's how the Unity plugin is working, though I've never attempted to nail down their process.  Obviously you run into problems with players having to trust your plugin, but that is arguably the same thing they have to do when they download your game, right?  Though I'm sure a number of users don't think of those 2 as being equally risky.

[larsiusprime]

Ah, cool! Good to know.

I think the main reasons to go with a browser demo are:
1) Reduce friction
2) Leverage web game portal distribution

So, a custom plugin is certainly better than nothing, but I think it'll still be a pretty big barrier for your average person, and it's not supported by the major portals. I wonder if there is some other way to get a C/C++ game into a browser short of porting it?

For friction, options from best to worst:

• Plays in browser right away (flash, plugins they already have)
• Plays in browser with quick plugin install
• Download and run a standalone executable
• Plays in browser with laborious plugin install
• Download and install something, then run that

For portal distribution, best to worst:

• *Flash
• *Unity plugin
• *HTML5
• *Java
• Native Client
• Custom plugin

*=Supported by Kongregate (just confirmed this)

As of today, nothing beats flash for friction/distribution. In the future, if HTML5 gets it's act together it'll start getting picked up by the portals. Google's been building their own stuff that might become a Chrome version of Kongregate one day, with lots of NaCl games, but so far that seems kinda marginal.

Anyone agree/disagree with my lists? These are just based off of my experience, and I think they'll probably change as time goes on.

[King Tetiro]

Nice work larsius! Looks like I'll be adding one more to that number of sales!

Can I ask what forms of marketing you performed for Defender's Quest if you didn't use Steam?

[larsiusprime]

@King Tetiro:

Besides the stuff we mentioned in the article, you mean?

Let's see - basically we found out that sales pretty much do just boil down to driving traffic to your site. Your game has to be good, of course, and you need to "ask for the sale" and have a good pitch / demo, blah blah blah, but you still just have to drive truckloads of eyeballs to your website.

Driving traffic to you own site is *hard* - even with lots of good press. Press gave us quick spikes that then immediately died off, but the flash portals were incredibly helpful, Kongregate and Newgrounds in particular - big spikes, and then sustained sales for a while.

We didn't try any formal advertising, but I'd like to experiment with $50 bucks on Project Wonderful to see if I can get more out of it than I put in.

In the article, I didn't talk too much about contacting Journalists - but that's a thing we did, and we could have done a better job, in my opinion. I sent out individually tailored press releases to about a half dozen gaming news sites, and also over gamespress. I get timid when it comes to talking to journalists so I'm always afraid I'm annoying them, so I didn't contact as many as I could.

I'm working with a friend now who's done a lot of journalism freelance and he's showing me how to contact a truly MASSIVE number of news outlets without being a total Spamster, so we'll see how that goes and if there's any good results I'll write up a report about it.

One thing I do is get on twitter and follow interesting people and share information if it seems relevant. Ben Kuchera from the Penny-Arcade report tweeted this:

People ask detailed questions about how to market their game, and I'm not sure how to respond. I barely have time to write my OWN stuff!

So, I sent him this article with something to the effect of "Hey, maybe this marketing/sales report will be of interest to your readers", and then he put the story up that day:
http://penny-arcade.com/report/the-cut-article/lars-doucet-drops-knowledge-on-gamasutra-about-how-to-successfully-promote

Let's see, what else? Well, I write articles like this , and I'm a regular blogger at Gamasutra. Anyone can set up a Gamasutra Member blog, and apparently if you write enough articles one day you'll be randomly promoted to the "expert" blogs - that's what happened to me at least.

That's my shotgun-style answer to your question. Got anything more specific to ask or does that about cover it?