Cliffski's Blog

I’m experimenting with using the humble store for my direct sles, on two products: Gratuitous Space Battles, and the GSB collectors edition. The buy page, for those interested, is here:

http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/register.html

I’m still using BMTMicro there for my credit card payments. I’ve been with BMT a long time, so it would take a lot to move me, but I know that the humble bundles are very popular and I’m guessing there are a lot of people out there who ‘trust’ the humble store as a brand, whereas they may not have encountered BMTMicro before.

In any case, it’s an experiment to see if it affects sales up or down :D

Also… Patch 1.009 for Gratuitous Tank Battles has been released. Here is the changelist:

1) Fixed crash when attempting to save out a unit that had a * in the name.
2) Setting windowed mode, whilst also matching your desktop resolution will result in borderless window mode now.
3) Game now explains to player that they won't see any challenges until they are logged in.
4) Online challenge browser now shows complete two-line descriptions rather than cropping them at one line.
5) Fixed bug where the game would hang sometimes on playing custom or online maps as defender with 'scenario units' where a small number of units was included.
6) Fix for occasional crash bug on saving units (in some circumstances)
7) Fixed bug in non-steam version where the default sample units could not be deleted from within the game.
8) Balance:Laser carbine cost up from 3 to 5.
9) Balance:Heavy Pulse laser damage up from 6 to 8
10) Balance:Rapid Pulse blaster damage up from 4 to 5
11) Balance:Light pulse laser damage down from 9 to 6
12) Balance:Salvo interval for incendiary rockets up from 300 to 2000
13) Balance: Heavy Missile Rack damage down from 68 to 52
14) Balance: HEAP Missile thrower fire interval up from 1400 to 1700
15) Balance: Light Missile launcher damage down from 38 to 31
16) Added new map : campaign map 12.
17) Fixed bug where sorting by class on the unit design load dialog sometimes did not work entirely.
18) Balance: Changed the difficulty of a number of scenarios.

More fixes and improvements to come…

People tend to keep this stuff to themselves, but I’m not really sure why, unless you are WPP or Saatchi and Saatchi, worried about the competition…

Anyway, I’ve been running a few ads since the launch of GTB. The game is on big name portals such as steam, which is where it gets a lot of visibility, but I don’t think there is any harm in promoting the games website direct, my company, and the idea of direct sales.

My ad campaign has been fairly low key so far. I have exclusively used google adwords as my ad provider in this case (I’ve used other companies for other campaigns, but adwords seems to be a good ROI).

The ads have been running for 4 days so far and the stats are:

446,851 impressions

901 clicks

Average cost per click: £0.15.

Traffic bounce rate: 71%

Ave visit duration: 25 seconds. (vs 1 min 09 for all traffic)

Interestingly that makes for a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of £0.30.

Even given MUCH better quality traffic, that’s why I laugh at the CPM prices quoted by many big name sites.

I can’t help thinking that the scale of my ad campaign is laughably small so far (I might double it right now…) and that the average visit duration is really low. Roughly 10% of my adword-sourced visitors spend >60 seconds on my site, which I consider to be a fairly good quality visitor. That means £1.50 to get a good visitor that way, which seems pretty poor, if you consider they still might not buy the game (although they may still mention it to others, or buy it later).

However, comparing it with 2 other recent ad campaigns shows me that adwords certainly beats them, in terms of price-for-quality-visitor.

I’m definitely going to go double my daily ad spend…