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

Category: business

Exchange Rates

Do you want to be a currency speculator? Because if you are outside the USA and considering a career doing what I do, you might have to become one.

Most games sales come from the US, and generally people tend to price their games in dollars. Plus, most of the big sales portals charge in dollars, and (more importantly) pay the developers in US dollars. I’m in the UK, and this means two big things.

  • I have to pay a fortune each time in bank fees when the money gets converted into UK Pounds
  • I am at the mercy of exchange rates.

Recently, the pound and the dollar have been all over the place. here is a 3 month chart:

Generally it’s been good news, because a stronger dollar and a weaker pound means I earn more for each game I sell in the US.  However it’s not that simple, because I tend to pay for my advertising in dollars. Advertising is my major expense, once the games are done, so it really matter if the adverts are suddenly 20% more expensive than they were a week ago. As a result, one of the many parts of my daily routine is to keep an eye on the exchange rate to see if now is a good time to stick some money in the advertising account and get a few free dollars (effectively) by ‘picking my moment’.

If I was really organised I’d probably have a US bank account that people could pay into (in dollars) and avoid a lot of currency-changing fees. Does anyone know how easy it is for a UK busienss to open a US bank account?

Interview and AI

Here’s a nice little blog interview with yours truly:

http://thereticule.com/2008/11/24/cliff-harris-interview/

I spent a lot of today doing some basic AI for my mystery new game Just the very basics so that I have stuff on screen actually doing something. I’m quite pleased with it so far, although at the start of a game there is always a quick rush of instant results before the debugging and re-factoring sets in later :D

It’s amazing how much time can be involved in being an indie developer. Apart from all the actual work on games today there is all the email stuff to handle, ad budgets to tweak, website changes to make and financial spreadsheety and invoicy things to do. It’s a full-time job and then some.

Promoting a genre-less game

There’s a big problem in doing PR and marketing for Kudos 2. It has no genre. The nearest it gets to a genre is ‘like the sims’. But even then, the Sims has no genre. Most hardcore gaming sites have genres such as Strategy,Arcade, RTS, FPS, Adventure. Kudos is none of these. Some might consider it a strategy game, but many sites assume a strategy game is an RTS, or at least some sort of combat or war game. Most strategy sites are bulging with screenshots of Elves and Tanks, hardly the same genre as Kudos 2.

Then there are the casual sites, where the taregt market for Kudos 2 also overlaps. The people who play games like ‘Diner Dash’ often quite like Kudos 2, IF they get to try it. The thing is, these sites also pigeonhole their games into ‘Time management’ ‘Puzzle’ and ‘Arcade’.

That makes me laugh, because what they really mean is ‘Diner Dash clone’ ‘bejewlled Clone’ and ‘Zuma Clone’. There is sod-all innovation in most of these games. But anyway, despite that rant, you will see again that Kudos 2 does not fit nicely anywhere. Sometimes it’s puzzle, sometimes arcade, sometimes its RPG or Adventure or strategy.

Nobody actually looks for Kudos 2, because they don’t know what sort of game it is. The best I can hope for is people expect it to be like an existing gewnre, but give it a go anyway. When people try it, they tend to like it.

Maybe next time I should make a game that more clearly fits in an existing genre. Right now I’m doing the very first bits of work on the next game, and it’s another strategy game. I have a nice idea for the game, and can imagine it being really cool. I just need to get the visual side of things arranged nicely…

Your Sales Guesses and a nice chart

Well….

You guys seem to have some pretty widely varying guesses as to how many games I sell. Be aware that i am only talking about DIRECT sales. By that I mean someone who comes to the positech site and buys the game direct through BMT Micro (my payment provider). That excludes all the casual portal sales through sites like arcadetown, bigfishgames and so on, plus the other portals such as GamersGate and Stardock’s Impulse. It also excludes retail deals, and it excludes stuff such as sales of the Apple Mac ports as well.

Some of you guessed around 25,000. I would be very happy with that :D. if I disregard my advertising costs (which are BIG in my terms), then I’m earning around $20 for Democracy 2 and $18 for Kudos 2. That means that 25,000 copies of D2 would have earned me half a million dollars (almost £18*)

Ha!

I wish. I REALLY do. I’d be working on Democracy 3 right now if I had earned that amount from just the direct sales. The real number is a lot lower than that. There HAS been a bit of a sales spike recently for D2 thanks to the US elections though.

Unfortunately I can’t really tell you the figures for Kudos 2, or the exact Democracy 2 figures, because that information is what they call ‘commercially sensitive’. In practice that means that while I’m negotiating with several companies (many of whom may have people who read this) it’s not in my interest to ‘reveal my hand’ as to how much money I make from my games. However, suffice it to say that i don’t *need* any of the portals, publishers or people I do business with. I can pay the rent and food bill with my direct sales. This is l33t because it means I don’t have to answer to anyone and can make the games I love to make.

Because I predict lots of cross blog readers wanting some juicy stats, here is a chart instead…

One day when I’m feeling less stressed about sales and have some decent figures behind me, I might publish some more sales figures.

*joke

Thoughts about sales volume

When I was on holiday, i was flying over some big city, looking down at all the tens of thousands of buildings, and thinking  “This is just one city, in one state, in one country, in one part of the world, and yet if I could sell a game to just one person in every street in this city, I’d be doing much better than I am”.

Of course, it’s not as easy as that. But That’s how I think. I hear that Fable II sold 800,000 copies last month. That’s pretty awesome, and that’s at a higher price, and just one month. Surely overall, the game will shift 1.5 million copies, maybe 3 million in total. Equating it to copies of Kudos 2, it’s like maybe 5 million copies. (huge congrats to everyone I know back at LH working on that game btw)

Now obviously I haven’t sold 5 million copies, and obviously I only need to sell maybe half of one percent of Fables II’s sales to make the same ROI (which would be very nice) , given that it’s mainly just me. But even taking this into account, it occurs to me that it would be entirely feasible to sell double or four times the number of copies I’ve sold so far.

Some people assume I sell hardly any copies of my games. A lot of the people who admitted to piracy who emailed me gave me helpful hints on how to sell a few copies a month if I did X. Thanks guys! Some other people assume I sell a LOT more than I do. These tend to be people who see my games on sites like Stardock and yahoo, and assume all games on such platforms make people rich. My Mother is convinced I drive a Ferrari, because I gave her a boxed copy of one of my games. All things that get into shops make people rich according to her. (no they don’t).

So I’m curious. How many copies of Kudos 2 do you think I’ve sold so far? How many copies of Democracy 2? (It’s been out a year).