Shareware Sales Thread '05

[Dan Potter]

I found this thread on here through a bit of searching:

http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2672

But it's a couple of years old. I'm just curious what people think about what are "good" numbers for Mac shareware these days (and even Windows numbers, if you know it).

In the spirit of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours", I'll give my numbers for Marbol so far. I haven't put anything up for sale yet, but I have download numbers:

Marbol PR1, pushed out mid-May, now retired: 8069 downloads

Marbol 1.0, pushed out late June but posted to download sites in early July: 4984 downloads

The game isn't super awesome yet, but 1.0 is relatively polished. I have several things planned for a shareware version, like 2-player, modifier and special effect marbles, better graphics, etc.

Any thoughts? If I saw a 1% conversion rate with those download numbers, it would be decent but it certainly wouldn't pay me back for the time invested in it. ;)

[funkboy]

Do NOT expect to get paid back with any regular rate, at least not for your first shareware game.

I still get near a 1% conversion rate, and I'm happy with that. I would like to hear strategies for improving it, though.

[Dan Potter]

Do NOT expect to get paid back with any regular rate, at least not for your first shareware game.

Honestly I'm not expecting anything except for the unexpected. :D Last time I sold shareware was about 15 years ago, and it's a totally different world now. I'm just curious to hear what others are ending up with.

The situation I'm faced with is that while I've got some pretty reasonable download counts, there are basically no Mac users signing up on my forum, or sending comment emails, etc. It's almost spooky. It makes me wonder if it's worth my time to even make the shareware version. I'm going to do it though because this is an experiment for me.

I still get near a 1% conversion rate, and I'm happy with that. I would like to hear strategies for improving it, though.

The big things I've heard, beyond submitting to download sites, are:

- Fix your web page titles to be more "googlable", i.e. include "Mac shareware game" somewhere in it

- Submitting PRs to the Mac PR sites

- Google adsense, on the paying end

All of these things sound moderately hokey, but the guys on the macsb list have been swearing by them lately.

EDIT: Err, sorry, I realize those are hit-increasers, rather than conversion rate increasers. Same basic effect though. :sneaky: For actual conversion rate increasers, the only things I've heard are just to make your site more attractive, make it very easy to find the Buy buttons, etc... and of course make sure what you're selling *over* what you get in the demo version is actually worth the asking price.

[Najdorf]

you need windows users to write in your forum, and mac users to buy your game ;)

I think a forum might be useful to give some confidence to potential buyers that they're not the only ones that buy it. But then I might be wrong.

Ragdoll Masters is doing pretty well

[Dan Potter]

Actually what's funny is that Windows users are pretty much all I've got writing in my forum. Because CAG was making Dreamcast stuff before, and most of the DC users were also Windows users. Bit of a rough transition trying to make Mac-only stuff now... I eventually ended up putting out a beta Windows version of the free Marbol just to get some more feedback and interaction on it.

[Jake]

Nobody's posting hard numbers so I will -

Escape - 185 - over 2 years?
Escape Expansion - 90
GL Golf - 792 - over 15 months
GL Golf Course Pack - 480
Hydrothermal - 25 - over 2-3 months

Now come on people, post sales because "doing pretty well"

[funkboy]

Over 7 months (since the beginning of 2005):

KTA Tennis - 100
KGA Golf - 50

(somewhat rough, I have my sales figures distributed over two machines... let's say an error of 12%)

[blobbo]

WTF! Jake: By my calculations you've made about 15k CDN on GLGolf. Is that correct?!

[Fenris]

As for conversion rate increases, you need to understand (and I quote Steve Pavlina) that the factors aren't additive, they are multiplicative. For instance, if you get 70% of your "ideal" download amount, you only drive away 2% of your customers waiting for the download, 20% are interested in your game, 50% of them try to buy the game, 10% of those give up trying to find the buy button, and another 40% of those don't trust your payment system, you end up with:
0.7 * 0.98 * 0.2 * 0.5 * 0.9 * 0.6 ≈ 0.025 = 2.5% of your ideal sales.

Realizing this, you will need to attack the most prominent problem available (improving the game should be your first concern, but that goes without saying, so let's look at the second worst problem) namely the 40% who don't trust your payment system. Let's assume we get the number down to 10% - suddenly you have 5.5% of your ideal sales - a doubling in sales!

Now, this isn't a very complete list, but account for advertisements, website attractiveness, if the download link is easy to find, system requirements, download speed, install ease, ease of understanding the game, if the player thinks the game is fun within 40 seconds, if the game promises enough to make the player consider a purchase, finding the purchase link, actually purchasing, trusting the payment method and so on. How are your numbers looking? ;)

[Fenris]

Ohyes, my uDG 2k2 entry Galder actually sold five registrations in spite of being utter crap. Unfortunately that amount isn't enough to actually check out the money from eSellerate, so they're rotting away somewhere. ;)

[Dan Potter]

Escape - 185 - over 2 years?
Escape Expansion - 90
GL Golf - 792 - over 15 months
GL Golf Course Pack - 480
Hydrothermal - 25 - over 2-3 months


I'm very curious about your numbers in particular. I took a look at your site and checked out game screen shots, etc... All the games look fun, but you've sold a ton more of your golf game. Any idea why? I'd hate to think that just because it's 3D you get more sales. ;) Hydrothermal for example looks more polished to me than Golf (though admittedly I haven't taken the time to download any of them to back that up...)

[Jake]

WTF! Jake: By my calculations you've made about 15k CDN on GLGolf. Is that correct?!

More like 17K USD. But remember eSellerate takes 10% and I pay Lee Bond 3 dollars per course pack.


Dan Potter - The reason is that I target casual gamers. First off Escapes sales are crippled by its graphics, if it was a nice looking game and i redid the demo a little bit it could sell twice the copies (note to self, redo escape). HT is a little to complicated for a casual adult. On the other hand, lets say 35 year old Jane Doe decides to download a game. Is she going to want to buy a space city sim or a golf game that is 3D, easy to play, and she can relate to?

I am curious to see how my motorcycle game does once I'm finished (I know I don't talk about it much but yes I am making tremendous progress, its just WAY WAY WAY more work than the other 3 games combined). My goal is to outsell GL Golf, and I think its going to be good enough to target the more hardcore mac gamers and maybe casual games will like it too.

[kodex]

Ok let me get some numbers up in efforts to make others do so. Sales date back to 03/05 since i havent updated my graphs in a while

Blackjack - (10 Months) 648 Sales (1 return)
Looking Glass- (8 Months) 327 Sales (3 returns)

Sales tend to spike up after they appear in macaddict or macworld. As well as spike up when i release a new version of either.

As far as pushing sales. LG locks out use after 2 weeks. BJ is pretty much 100% functionally without registering less some small features and nag window.

[Najdorf]

Great job Jake!

Radical rebound sold 40 in 2 years :-(

Ragdoll Masters sold 165 in 2 months (75 from version 2.0 in the last 10 days)

[Najdorf]

No one else sharing numbers?

[Joseph Duchesne]

My "sales":
I have attempted to sell only one game ;).
SubLuna - Released 3 years ago. Downloads: 830. Download size: 5.3MB. Regestration incentive: the rest of the levels. Key flaws: ran 8fps. Bad for an action game. No powerups, non-fun. Inconsistant graphics. (rendered BG, pixeled sprites), graphics were locked at 640*480, and a few bugs that I never bothered to fix :sneaky: ... cost $5 USD. and the total regestrations: (drumroll please) 1. This goes to show you that if you make it, and have some insentive, someone will buy it :D . But yeah. I did no PR and no attempt to really make it worth buying :P

[sealfin]

@Najdorf: just wondering if you would be willing to share the ratio of Mac:Win sales of Ragdoll Masters?

I'll be posting my sales/download figures for shivering kittens and loopTHEloop as soon as I'm back on my Mac ;)

[Najdorf]

@Najdorf: just wondering if you would be willing to share the ratio of Mac:Win sales of Ragdoll Masters?

I dont know really. I estimate 70-75% from the mac.

[Max]

Some info on McSebi's games

Pac the Man 2 - released April 2003 - 500,000 downloads - no money made cause it's free.
Bub & Bob 2 (still in beta) - released December 2004 - 100,000 downloads - made enough money to buy 3 Power Mac G5.
Pac the Man X - not released yet - hoping the team leader will add a donation button. ;)

[Najdorf]

jeez, I'm lucky if I got 7,000 downloads... how did you get so many downloads plz? Advertising?

[Max]

jeez, I'm lucky if I got 7,000 downloads... how did you get so many downloads plz? Advertising?
No advertising. McSebi gets many downloads because the games are listed on 4 popular sites - Mac Game Files (5%), Version Tracker (10%), Mac Update (15%) and Download.com (70%). McSebi's reputation and the type of games it's making also help get many downloads. Also, the games are translated to several languages - 3 languages for Pac the Man 2 and 6 languages for Bub & Bob 2.

[Dan Potter]

Download.com (70%)

Wow, that's the first time I've heard something really positive about download.com. ;)

Out of curiosity, do you think the localization was a big factor in helping to sell your games? I guess it's hard to say without a control in the experiment, but it'd be interesting to know.

[princec]

Ultratron's been doing nicely. I'm not sure of the ratio of Mac:Windows because, err, I don't track it ;) (although I track everything else!)

Logs tell me this:

Total downloads: 7,706 since 6th June 2005
135 sales
CR average 1.75%
CR currently 2.35% (version 1.1a)
Failure rate on OSX: 13.8% (version 1.1a) (pessimistic analysis)

Cas :)

[Dan Potter]

What's "Failure rate"?

Those are some pretty awesome numbers actually! I'm feeling pretty optimistic now... (which was the point of me asking this stuff to begin with actually) It's great that some of you have done so well with this.

Another random question for you guys selling across multiple platforms... do you usually sell a single registration key for all versions, or are they separate? I can see advantages to doing it either way. (And definitely disadvantages if you farmed out the port to someone...)

I've seen a couple of "Linux" download buttons too. Anyone getting any real interest on Linux?

[Max]

Out of curiosity, do you think the localization was a big factor in helping to sell your games? I guess it's hard to say without a control in the experiment, but it'd be interesting to know.

About half of McSebi's customers don't speak english (France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, etc.) So localization really helped. We expected many Japanese registrations, but we only got a handful. We thought Japan was a big market...

[EvolPenguin]

I have a question, do you have your site translate into multiple languages, or how do you tell people you have different versions available? Or is the game all one version and people select the language at the beginning, but you still have to tell them you have different languages.

Alex

[akb825]

You create different localizations, and it automatically chooses the same language as the system language when you launch it.

[Max]

I have a question, do you have your site translate into multiple languages, or how do you tell people you have different versions available? Or is the game all one version and people select the language at the beginning, but you still have to tell them you have different languages.
We didn't translate our Web site. It's in english only. As for our games, we don't mention that they are localized... which is not good. But somehow, many foreign news sites find out.

We only make one version for all languages. The players don't have to select their language - the games automatically choose a language according to the operating system. Gotta love technology! ;)