Category: business

When my site got hacked recently (bah…) I had to go through a lot of html checking it over. As I did this, I began to realise just how much of my site is effectively useless. I’ve been running it sicne 1997, so there is some crap there, like this early game or a whole bunch of ultra-low selling affiliate links. The affiliates sell very little, and I’ve handed over my ideas for an indie games website to showmethegames now, so they are redundant.

My first thought is to junk almost all of it, keeping  just the sites for GSB, Kudos 1 & 2, Democracy 1 & 2 and Rock legend, maybe Starship Tycoon and planetary defence. I can just delete the rest, and have a tidy site.

My second thought is that this might be bad, from a search-engine optimisation POV. suddenly googlebot will see a whole bunch of dead links, will this affect my page rank? Should I do some clever htaccess crap? or is it just fine to junk it all and let my normal 404 to the homepage redirect handle it?

Does anyone have experience of tidying up a really old site? is it worth doing?

Thankyou Scott Fadick!, for alerting me to my blog giving some arcane error. I assume it was hacked, because I haven’t changed a thing, and wordpress was hugely out of date. Anyway, a simple one-click update to the latest version (things really have improved since I last went through wordpress upgrade hell), and it all seems fine again. Let me know if it isn’t.

That awful dread feeling I had when I’d finished a long (but very productive) days work, had a quick game of Battlefield:BC2, and thought it was time for a glass of wine and an episode of spooks…. and then to think the evening would be spent fiddling with databases and php….Bah. What a pleasant surprise to have it fixed so easily.

The trouble with being an indie is that such problems all become yours. If you are thinking of leaving a coding day job for indie software business, consider this:

• Do you want to be in charge of the design, code and management of your company’s website?
• Including the blog?
• And the forums?
• Do you want to be the one who talks to the accountant and works out stuff like VAT and corporation tax?
• Do you want to be in charge of choosing which subcontractors to hire, and haggling over how much to pay them?
• Are you confident your idea for a product is so good it can pay for your family for the next 2 years?
• Are you confident enough of financial success that you can set aside money for a pension, and if you are in the US, for private health care?

For a lot of people, the answer to all of that is ‘yes!’, but they fall at this next fence:

• Can you get out of bed promptly every morning, and go sit at a desk and do a full days work in your own home?

Most people can’t. It’s generally hard, although I have various tricks to make me do it. One day, I’ll give a talk at some games conference about it. or maybe a series of blog posts. Hmmmm.

Increasingly, my thinking is that ‘knocking out’ a quick, easier to make, low budget indie game does not make economic sense. That has never been my plan, but I’m getting even more convinced that to do so will not work.

Obviously there are arguments in favour of a low budget quick, small project (I’m defining that as under 6 months development time for 1 person). I’d guess they are as follows:

1. Spreading the risk. Multiple games per year, so chances of having a zero-profit year are lower
2. Multiple rolls of the dice. You have more chances to hit on a perfect design and implementation
3. Lack of burn-out. You finish a game before you get bored with it, everything always feels fresh
4. Keeps you in the public eye. Your hardcore fans can buy a game from you every 6 or even 3 months.

I think this is outweighed by the downsides:

1. Lack of polish. It can take 50 people 6 months to polish a AAA game. If your game is all done in 3 -6 months, there is likely no polish, no testing. You are selling a half-completed game
2. Lack of wow-factor. Like it or not, many people ignore a game that isn’t awesome in screenshots and videos, and which doesnt have a huge feature list. You won’t get *less* press coverage, you will likely get *none*.
3. Lower price point. If your game looks like it took 3-6 months, good luck charging $20. It *might* work, but you will likely charge less. Lower prices mean many marketing possibilities, like advertising are no longer cost effective.
4. Lower mindshare, market-share and virality. If your game is played by 500-1,000 people, it is unlikely to build up momentum in gaming communities. A bigegr game selling 10,000 copies starts to get multiple mentions on forums, people hearing about it from multiple sources. 100,000+ and the effect is much much stronger.

I know some devs making a living from small, quick-development games. Personally, I think that they would make a better income from bigger, higher budget titles that they spent longer on. Obviously YMMV, and your aims may differ. I know many devs suffer from critical burnout, and love short dev cycles. I think my limit is 2 years, I’m not massively keen to continue tweaking and adding to the GSB code base now. However, I am assuming that the new game (sort of code worded LB) will be of a similar development scale and polish. Hopefully much more :D

After a long period existing as a rather ugly thrown together mess, my little side project indie games database / promotion website ‘Show Me The Games’ has got a decent revamp:

http://www.showmethegames.com

I think it looks way better:

What do you think?

In my never ending quest to have 1% of the metrics-obsession of zynga, I’m going to just brain dump loads of web stats and see if anyone can drawn more epic conclusions than I can.

For the last two weeks (27th feb – 12th march), here are some analytics web stats for positech.co.uk

There were 32,500 visits, and the bounce rate was 66%.

32% was direct traffic, which is interesting becauise I’d assume that was forum stuff, but the forums aren’t tagged by analytics at all. Weirdly, the top content for direct visits, with 10% of the total is the Kudos homepage. I bet this is a link through some [code] tags on a pirate site, hence no referrer. Oh joy.

If I look at new visitors, their top destination is Gratuitous Space Battles.

If I look, in general at visitors to the GSB homepage, the bounce rate is 44% which isn’t so bad. 24% of those who stay go to the demo page next, which is also a good sign.

When looking at the demo page itself, 18% of people bail out here, the top move for people who don’t is the demo download link, other people visit other parts of the site. That’s pretty good.

The second most popular page on my site is the positech homepage itself. It has a bounce rate of 45%, which could be lower, considering there are so many possible destinations from there. Scarily, the top destination from the homepage is actually this lil ol blog here. Very surprising, I’d expected the top result there to be GSB. Should this bother me?

Quite a few people click the small icons going to pages for affiliate sales. Harvest:Massive encounter got over 200 clicks in 14 days. There were zero sales, and generally affiliate sales are very low. I am strongly minded to remove all that from the front page, and concentrate on my own games, especially as I now have showmethegames to promote the general indie scene.

Looking at visitors, I can see that firefox is #1, followed by chrome. Internet explorer has just 23.8% of visitors. Specs-wise, the most common screen res is a scarily low 1024×768, followed by 1280×800. This seems to me that it is mostly laptop and netbook surfers. I surf a lot on my laptop, but work on a massive four trillion pixel monitor.

Demographics wise the top visitors are from the US, then UK, Canada, Germany, This is all good, and due to me changing the settings on my ad-campaigns no doubt.  Stats are awesome, the top state is California, and the top city is San francisco. You SF surfers are busy, with a shorter time on site than average :D. Scarily, if I look just at users who visited the GSB buy page, the #2 country is Brazil. I can’t find any sales to Brazil, so one can onyl hope thiose Brazilians tell their German friends they should check out the game…

I know… I need to get a life or something :D