Cliffski's Blog

So I recently released democracy 3 extremism, complete with it’s lovely trailer…

And how is it doing? Well it’s going ok. It isn’t selling as well as social engineering, but that is to be expected, as it’s the second DLC and these things always have declining sales as you do more. It’s also very early days, and so far it’s been 100% only for sale at full price, which is obviously to be expected as it’s only a few days into being on sale.

Anyway, my stats (which are partial, not complete) show me that my current profit from the DLC is $3,901. It’s probably higher than that, as I haven’t updated it today. The reason that profit is quite low is I’ve been channeling a big big chunk of the income from it back into promotion. My facebook ad which looks like this:

Is currently being shown at $600 a day, and has chalked up 1,291 clicks to the web page so far, at $0.49 a click. That doesn’t include the visits to the facebook page, the extra facebook likes and of course anyone with anti-tracking or noscript turned on. $0.49 is a lot, but I am targeting men of a certain age (sorry ladies, but you just do not buy this game, according to my stats), with an interest in certain games, in certain countries, so it should be very targeted. My target demographic on facebook is 2,600,000, which I reckon is quite small, having shown the ad to 171,000 of them so far (6%). I’m running the ad for a few more days, so should hit about 25% of that demographic, but I may supplement it with another reddit ad placement too. (I’ve already spent $2,450 on reddit ads).

The result of this has also pushed sales of the base game. Extremism released on 13th may. if I look at Democracy 3 steam sales from 13-17th and compare to the previous week in the same days, the difference is a boost of 134%. This is something I should definitely take into account when calculating if the expansion is a success or not. This also means I have greater freedom to re-invest in the game. I’ve already propelled Democracy 3 into the top 50 strategy games on steam again. Might another $2k on ads push me up a few more places? and might that be self-sustaining? It might be worth basically spending the whole DLC profit in PR in order to promote base game sales (which in turn may eventually lead to more DLC sales).

Of course it’s all guesswork, and tbh marketing and business is just a game I enjoy playing. I did start playing GalCiv III alpha, but its very very alpha (no space battles yet!) So I might just sit on that for a bit.

That doesn’t make sense unless you read it to the tune of ‘kung fu fighting’. Anyway…

Enough of that.

I’m very close to releasing Democracy 3 on the ipad. I’ve pretty much decided it will be $9.95 on there. Let me waffle about the decision…

• It can be argued that this is painfully high and nobody will buy it. I suspect this is an over-reaction and not true. It’s not angry birds, it’s a complex and deep strategy game, and I suspect players of those games are more prepared than the average ipad customer to pay $9.95
• This is less than 50% of the PC price. Granted, it has no mod support, fixed resolution, and it’s on a tiny little ipad, not a nice kick-ass PC, but really there aren’t many compromises being made to play it on ipad. In other words, this is very competitively priced vs the PC version.
• Theoretically a $9.95 game can set a decent benchmark price and maybe be discounted later, yet still be actually worth having on sale, unlike a 50% off on a $0.99 game.
• It’s not the sort of game you buy on a impulse to play on the bus for 10 minutes once. It isn’t flappy birds. My impulse purchase market is probably zero.
• Democracy 3 is in profit, even if I lose money on the ipad (I paid to have it ported), then it’s not a disaster, I could absorb the loss.
• I think it’s in the greater interests of gaming (yes seriously) if we can establish a wider range of price points on IOS. There is no actual technical reason for that form-factor to be for cheap shovelware. There is no real logical argument for saying you shouldn’t be able to have a business selling $39.99 games on IOS, exclusively. maybe this will be a tiny nudge in that direction?
• The sadist in me looks forward to the violent frothing at the mouth of the kids who complain about game prices. Deal with it! :D

So am I nuts? or is this GENIUS? or should it be priced at $24.95 like the PC version. Only time will tell, obviously. BTW if you work at apple, or know someone who does, and might be interested in promoting and featuring a non-casual game on IOS, please get in touch, I’m a PC gamer primarily so my knowledge of the ipad gaming market is very scarce.

I may have to buy that song on itunes now…