Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: business

Analyzing advert effectiveness. (Where did all my clicks go?)

Posted on September 22, 2013

I ran an ad on reddit recently on the /games subreddit. it’s the place for fairly serious gaming debate, and I thought it would thus be a good match for my very serious political strategy game Democracy 3. It was a ‘sponsored link’ right at the top of the page. First things first, don’t let all that information on reddits ad page about ‘how ads work’ fool you. That’s an old comic they drew years ago and is completely wrong. they just sell impressions at $0.75 CPM. they really should update that…(I think this is a recent change).

Anyway….normally $0.75 CPM is a bit high for indie game advertising, but it was targeted, and a good experiment in a potentially rich new source of players. I put $250 into it, which lasted about 3 days.

According to the traffic stats provided by reddit I got:

stats1Which says 1,140 clicks. On the face of it, this isn’t too bad at all, 22 cents for a quality-traffic click. However, if I check google analytics for that page and its source I get this

stats2Only 199 views? that’s insane where are all the other views? Let me check my webalizer server logs instead… I see about 2,200 hits from reddit/r/Games for the month (which is almost certainly all this ad, as I have been listed only in /indiegaming until this. If I look at different logs from awstats I get 1,000 visits for the month from /r/Games.

So what value do I believe?

Well in a sense, who cares? All I care about is how many of those people bought the game, but so far I am suspicious about the tracking I have in place there, although it seems to work very well for other games so…arggghhhh!. Can I conclusively say the ad was worth it? I suspect not. Something I can definitely say from all this is that google analytics is CRAP at actually tracking the number of hits you get from a site. It could be php acting up, maybe people have javascript turned off or ad-block software turned on that blocks google analytics? All of my online research has given me long lists of reasons a few clicks might be missed, but not 90% of them. If we believe awstats & reddit 9and I’d be surprised if any site selling ads had the cheek to lie about them, they WOULD get caught by someone, and then the site is toast overnight), then it means that all of my google analytcis data has to be taken with a huge helping of salt.

Would I advertise on reddit again? Maybe, but I have other methods I’m experimenting with for now. (BTW don’t bother with google video ads, total waste of time and money).

Eurogamer Expo, press & public come see our games!

Posted on September 19, 2013

This is a public service announcement aimed at both press and public alike who will be attending this years Eurogamer Expo in London at the end of this month:

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PLEASE COME CHECK OUT OUR GAMES.

We obviously have 2 of the most interesting games at the show! I’m pretty certain we will have the ONLY turn-based deep political strategy game based on a neural network at the show…

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And also I’d wager that we have the only comedy sci-fi life-sim game at the show too…

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And when I say ‘We’ I mean me (Cliff Harris / Cliffski) the designer and programmer of Democracy 3, and Mitu Khandaker, the designer/coder of Redshirt. Come talk to us! Try our games! and if you are press, even just-starting-out youtube let’s players or bloggers, then don’t be shy, come say hello. We are happy for you to book interviews or meetings in advance (just email me), or just show up and tap us on the shoulder. We look roughly like this:

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We will be in a big indie booth collection near prison architect and hopefully lots of nice places where you can actually sit down. We will even have FREE BADGES. How can you turn that down?

Press people be aware that these are two new games currently in beta and both heading for release soon on Steam/GoG, so get in early and write up your impressions NOW!

Some marketing thoughts

Posted on September 10, 2013

I’ve been reading this book:

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Which is a bit old, but kinda interesting. I’ve always been impressed by the guy’s marmite theory of middle east peace. Anyway, part of the reason for this was for me to challenge my own thinking, and led to be scrawling all kinds of stuff over that big blackboard in my office. I was trying to re-evaluate all kinds of stuff. In some ways, F2P is the absolute perfect example of lateral thinking. It’s a totally different way of running a games business, as is pay what you want and kickstarter. All massively successful. Sadly, I did not reach a similar epiphany. However, it does open my mind.

I recently, out of curiosity, found myself adding up the total development cost (excluding my time) of Democracy 3. I then compared it to my proposed marketing budget for the game, and got a figure of 33.96%. In other words, for every dollar I spent on artwork/music/other stuff for the game, I was planning on spending $0.33 promoting it. This is lower than games like Call of Duty, where historically the marketing budget has dwarfed the mere development cost, but I can’t bring myself to do that :D.

However, with my lateral thinking-expanded mind, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a sensible way to analyze the optimum marketing spend anyway. In the back of my mind, if I’m thinking about what would be a suitable ROI, and looking at my costs, that’s probably the wrong metric. If I assume (conservatively) that D3 sells as well as D2, shouldn’t I really be looking at the marketing budget as a percentage of the projected revenue? not the costs? If so, then that 33% figure shrinks dramatically. As a result, what in my mind I can consider a reasonable marketing budget rises dramatically, because if I’m being rational, and I was happy to spend 33% I still should be, but of the larger (revenue) figure.

Now I know what you are thinking. In a perfect world the marketing budget expands infinitely as long as the ROI on each marketing dollar spent is positive, but that’s in a theoretical world with perfect information. If I spend $100 today, I might not see the ROI for six months, so do I halt my spending entirely tomorrow? Obviously you have to guess what’s going to happen and budget accordingly.

I find analyzing and managing this stuff fascinating, but am not aware of any games built around it. Gratuitous Marketing Battles here we come!

 

Learn from the veterans

Posted on September 5, 2013

I was watching a video of a talk by an indie game dev recently, where they outlined all of the huge mistakes they made with their first indie game. They were very clever, very capable programmers with a huge amount of mainstream industry experience, and this was their first indie game. They made pretty much every mistake in the book. They picked a vastly complex and huge project without testing the code gameplay first, they aimed it at consoles instead of the (much easier, open market) PC, they took YEARS to make it, got burned out, kept re-designing it…

All the stuff that old and grizzled indie devs like me keep telling people not to do. Why do new indies do this? My theories:

  1. They thought they were not NEW to this. They confused being part of a AAA team to being a sole coder/designer/artist/businessperson in an indie team. In other words, they thought they had experience in something they did not.
  2. They were arrogant, and thought they were better than the devs such advice is aimed at. This isn’t as critical as it sounds. I’m pretty arrogant too. Most people who think they can design whole worlds to entertain others are arrogant. It’s important to at least *know* you have this trait, so you can check it now and then.
  3. They were stuck in AAA development habits. In their experience, games take years, they take big teams, they are done for console, they are done with crunch. Why would it occur to them to work any other way?
  4. They think people only buy AAA games, so they aim to compete with the games they are used to working on. Not true. Just ask notch :D

I don’t think anyone can change all this. Those reasons all seem pretty *real* to me. I fumbled and made mistakes and screwed up as a new indie dev myself. The good news was I did that as a hobby, with a secure job, and I never spent years on a game to learn that lesson. I probably shouldn’t expect anyone to take a more considered approach to seeking advice than I did (although to be fair there were VERY few indies back then. these days we are swamped with experienced devs offering advice).

Still… It does make me cringe when I see first-time indies outlining their 3D MMO ideas on the day they quit their jobs. Don’t do that :D

Self-destructive behavior? or practical PR management?

Posted on August 31, 2013

I was replying to an email about democracy 3 today, when ti occurred to me to suggest the person who wrote to me ‘like’ the facebook page for democracy 3. For those interested, you can find the page here: https://www.facebook.com/democracygame. As of the time of writing, it has 540 likes. This is not a lot. On the other hand I could have sent him to the very sparsely populated Democracy 3 forum at my site, which is at http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=35. It currently has 139 posts.

I’ve been musing over whether or not that sort of decision makes sense. This is the kind of thing I lie awake worrying about :D

Pros:

  1. Almost everyone has a facebook account. he can visit the page and click ‘like’ and that boosts the popularity of the game in the eyes of others. it’s simple and easy. He is MUCH more likely to do this that join my forums. In other words, this is less likely to be a waste of time.
  2. Facebook is always up to date and has no security flaws or requires any technical maintenance on my part. It also has features that forums do not have, and everyone knows how to use it. People are more familiar with facebook ‘likes’ and posts than they are forums.
  3. Facebook is viral. If this guy ‘likes’ democracy 3, then that gives me indirect marketing to all his friends who saw that like. Even those who have never heard of the game. In other words, facebook likes ‘leak’ out into the rest of the world for free. Forum posts stay where they are.

Cons:

  1. I control my forums and my server. I have total freedom to do what I like there. I cannot have my forum ‘banned’, or have the terms and conditions change underneath me. I can also populate that forum page with banners linking to my main site, and promote my games there with greater freedom than I can within a facebook page
  2. I’d just be making the facebook page more popular and my own forum less so. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy if I start defining facebook as the place to go, which could kill off my own forum.
  3. People on my forums can be ‘marketed’ to for free by me. People on facebook, even those on my facebook page, will only see my posts if I pay facebook enough. Essentially, I’m building up their network for free, and then paying them for permission to talk to the same people I sent there in the first place. This is stupid in the long term.

The game is not even in beta yet (although it will be soon, I’ve even made the buy button for it!). So the traffic on both is limited. I need to get these decisions right NOW, not dither about them. The trouble is, I tend to dither and not make firm commitments.

Does the virality of facebook trump the ownership of developer forums? I’m suspecting that it may do, although that is horribly short-term thinking. ARGHHHHH.