Some Pandora Publicity

[aho]

10% of 8,000 users at $15 per game is $12,000. Even 5%($6,000) would be nice. But we really don't need another topic about the commercial potential of paid games.
[...]

10%? With shareware you usually get a conversion rate of about 1%. However, if there is a total of 8000 users you won't sell 80 copies, because not every user is going to give it a whirl. For example a large percentage of the user base won't be interested in the game, because they don't like the genre.

So, say... you'd manage to sell 50 units... then you'd end up with about $500 (after you subtracted processing fees and VAT).

With a budget like that you can at most produce something like a cheap Flash game. Unfortunately no one will pay $15 for something like that.

The only way to make it worthwhile are ports or xplatform titles.

 

[WizardStan]

With a budget like that you can at most produce something like a cheap Flash game. Unfortunately no one will pay $15 for something like that.

Actually, people will apparently pay $20 for that very thing

The only way to make it worthwhile are ports or xplatform titles.

Precisely. If it takes 2-4 weeks to produce a port, $6000 suddenly doesn't seem too bad. Not enough to gain major interest, but a few of the smaller teams looking for some free money and publicity.

 

[dflemstr]

Woah, I really didn't intend for this thread to become Yet Another Commercial Game Thread®, but rather a discussion about how to promote the Pandora among developers (Open source devs, homebrewers, indies, and commercial devs with big companies).

Mods: feel free to close this thread if it evolves into something like the previous commercial games thread.

 

[maiden]

once every month we have a "develop a minigame in 48h" lan-party here in västerås (when i get my pandora we will make some games for it)

but lets come to the point, coding competitions for the pandora is a very good way to make good publicity
making pandora threads on general linux forums might be a good idea to.

 

[aho]

With a budget like that you can at most produce something like a cheap Flash game. Unfortunately no one will pay $15 for something like that.

Actually, people will apparently pay $20 for that very thing

Eh. That isn't a cheap Flash game. The kind of game I was talking about takes a single person 1 or 2 weeks to complete. The one you linked to probably took 2-3 man years or more. Huge difference.

The only way to make it worthwhile are ports or xplatform titles.

Precisely. If it takes 2-4 weeks to produce a port, $6000 suddenly doesn't seem too bad. Not enough to gain major interest, but a few of the smaller teams looking for some free money and publicity.

$500 instead of $6000. Which means you have about a week if you want to break even.

Woah, I really didn't intend for this thread to become Yet Another Commercial Game Thread®, but rather a discussion about how to promote the Pandora among developers (Open source devs, homebrewers, indies, and commercial devs with big companies).

Mods: feel free to close this thread if it evolves into something like the previous commercial games thread.

What's bad about talking about this stuff? People have limited time and do need some money. Unsurprisingly developers aren't an exception. E.g. I do some open source stuff, but that doesn't mean I can do even more of it. If writing games for some platform would allow me to earn some money, I would be able to spend time on it (e.g. by reducing my weekly working time by a few hours).

 

[WizardStan]

$500 instead of $6000. Which means you have about a week if you want to break even.

At $15 a piece, that's only 33 sales. Out of 4000, that's less than a 1% penetration, which is simply pathetic. If you can't get at least a 5% market, then you're game sucks, or you're charging way too much for it.
Combine that with the fact that OpenPandora need to produce about 10'000 (although I'm sure they hope to need to produce many more beyond that) and you're looking at at least $7500 (assuming a cost of $15 for a game that doesn't suck)

What's bad about talking about this stuff? People have limited time and do need some money. Unsurprisingly developers aren't an exception. E.g. I do some open source stuff, but that doesn't mean I can do even more of it. If writing games for some platform would allow me to earn some money, I would be able to spend time on it (e.g. by reducing my weekly working time by a few hours).

What's bad is that there was already a thread specifically on this topic, and another thread which was nearly hijacked completely onto the same subject, and here I am not helping to keep this one from being hijacked! Go to the Commercial Games thread where all of this has already been discussed. Read it from the first page, then put in your own thoughts.

 

[aho]

$500 instead of $6000. Which means you have about a week if you want to break even.

At $15 a piece, that's only 33 sales. Out of 4000, that's less than a 1% penetration, which is simply pathetic. If you can't get at least a 5% market, then you're game sucks, or you're charging way too much for it.
[..]

If you sell a game for $15, you earn about $10 per copy. As I already mentioned there are those annoying things like processing fees and VAT.

And 5% of the market? Even Doom didn't manage to pull something like that off.

If the genre of your game appeals to 25% of the market and you manage to reach 25% of those who are interested and 50% actually give it a try... and let's say the game is so amazing (and the competition is so low) that you end up with a mind boggling conversion rate of 8% (3% for example is already very high)... then you reach... 0.25*0.25*0.5*0.08=0.0025... 0.25% of the market.

For a 5% penetration rate you'd need 20 times more. And these figures are already overly optimistic.

8000*0.0025=20

20*10=200

Woohoo! 200 bucks!