Life is strange. When I least expected it, it happend. It did not happen with Tom’s Hen House. It did not happen with Runes of Avalon, though I was sooo sure it will make it (and not only I). It didn’t happen with Runes of Avalon 2, though I didn’t hope for it.

And now, Pony World Deluxe made it. On the first day after release.

It’s a great feeling to see your game in the top charts. A lot of portals is skeptical about Pony World performance due to choosen theme. Hopefully when they see how our game sells on iWin they will be much less skeptical.

UPDATE: It’s #5 today :)

From all the portals I know only Big Fish Games adds gameplay videos to every game. Reflexive does it from time to time. There must be a reason most portals don’t bother with it.

But I am not a portal and I want to check my chances. I want to know if and how it will affect my downloads. I can’t create videos for every game, but I already have one for Runes of Avalon 2 (please don’t check out the game site just to see it so you don’t screw up the test). To be honest, I was initially very skeptical about it. I thought: once they saw the video they might have another reason to not download the game, since they already know what’s inside. Fortunately, it looks like it’s the other way.

I’ve set up Google Website Optimizer experiment a while ago and here are preliminary results.

(click to enlarge)

It’s to early to give final statements, but if in the end improvement will be in that range it will be really worth it. When your marketing budget is small and every download counts then it may be the one thing that will let your ads break even.

How to shoot yourself in the foot?! No, I’m not talking about us, developers. I’m talking about portals. It looks like we are going to face another war between the key players in the casual game market. And it starts to look like some portals want to become evil.

Market review

Big Fish Games is one of the biggest, if not the biggest casual game portal. It’s one of my favorite portals. It’s easy to navigate, delivers wide variety of games, is great to work with and very responsive. They’re not afraid to risk the launch of new genres or not so casual games. There’s just one problem with BFG - their game club which offers games at discounted price of as low as $6.99. But is it really a problem?

It looks like other players in the market starts to think so. What’s more, Big Fish Games is very successful at getting exclusive deals, mostly short-period. And that’s another thing that bothers other players. Some portals start to send threats to developers - if you give even short-time exclusive to BFG we won’t launch your game. You can read more about it at The good BIG bad FISH exclusive GAMES… in Maciek’s blog. Initially I was very upset about it. But let’s take a closer look at possible scenarios.

The end of exclusive deals?

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Gaming industry is global. That’s why we create games in English. To maximize the chance that the person that plays your game will understand it. But just because people can undrestand what your game is “saying” doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer to play it in their’s native language.

If you haven’t already localized your games, then start doing it now. While we still get most of our sales from English speaking territories, it looks like German, French and Spanish speaking territories can earn you a few more bucks. The good thing is that Big Fish Games will help you translate your game into German, French, Spanish and Japan (for free, but it’s up to them to decide whether they’ll do it or not). Casual games are not text heavy so it shouldn’t be that hard to get your game translated.

Those markets are not soo crowded so it is much easier to stand out and get into the Top 100 or even Top 10 charts. Runes of Avalon 2 launched on June 9, 2008 on BigFishGames.de and made much bigger impact on the site than it had on global BFG website. Some say they like match-3 games in Germany, but my guess is that it is smaller market and new games due to the spike of sales during launch have it easier to get high positions. Runes of Avalon 2 got into Top 10 and reached position #9, while on BFG.com it has reached “just” #32.

Another good thing about European versions of your game is that those games are sold to game club members for 5.99 EUR which converts to a little bit more than 9 USD (instead of 6.99 USD) so actually you’re earning 30% more. Most probably you would not be able to get into those markets on your own (do you have a dedicated website for each language?) so it doesn’t hurt your own direct sales.

I don’t know yet how much you can earn on those language versions, but I am sure it’s less than you can earn on English version (global vs local market). Still, it’s worth getting those extra bucks.

Another good thing is that once you get translated version of your game it can be much easier for you to get a retail publisher for that market.

I was checking Runes of Avalon 2 performance on Big Fish Games yesterday (well, not good at all) and was very surprised by what I saw in the top-10 list.

First of all, I stopped checking the TOP 100 chart becausemy games are no longer there and I don’t think it’s going to change until I release Pony World Deluxe. I went straight to match-3 chart and saw a new game - FISHDOM on #1 place.

Well, #1 in match-3 genre is not something amazing, but breaking into TOP 10 is (#8 on June 19th). It’s even more amazing because FISHDOM is not BFG exclusive and because it was done within one day of launch of the game.

What is FISHDOM? It’s a classic match-3 game. It’s well polished and it has a little META game - you can build a tank and put in fishes. I would say it’s a straight Big Kahuna Reef rip off.

Which only proves that casual players don’t like too much innovation.

Three weeks after the launch I can say a little bit more about Runes of Avalon 2 performance, as well as Stoneloops! of Jurassica performance on the Big Fish Games top 100 chart. Both games for most of the time have been climbing up, but few days ago started to fall on the chart. That’s too bad when you prove one of your not optimistic theories with one of your games. We didn’t get into top 10, so it looks like our games will fade away. It’s just a question of time.

It may take a little bit longer for Stoneloops! because it still holds position #2 on marble poppers list, while ROA 2 moved from #2 on match-3 list to #10.

Interesting observations?

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Making the game is difficult, getting it on portals is even more difficult. Just look at two replies that my friends and I received from two different portals that we don’t want to name publicly.

While there is nothing technically wrong with the game (it is quite beautiful in fact), the core rotational mechanic makes the gameplay a bit unforgiving and stressful so we will be passing on distribution at this time.

The rotational piece mechanic to make matches is simple enough but as pieces are improperly placed the difficulty ramps up quickly and the game becomes much more difficult by orders of magnitude. This means that players can easily become frustrated though they are simply looking for a game that gives them a bit of relaxation during their normal work day.

That’s about Runes of Avalon 2. I always admire people that are able to say our audience is too stupid too play this game is such a nice way. I don’t blame them for it, but it makes me laugh.

The next one is even better, but sooo scarring

In fact we haven’t played your game at all and we know it could be of high quality. We just looked at how it performed on BigFish and decided that launching it is not worth the effort - especially if we can have plenty of better performing hidden object games to launch.

It’s about Stoneloops! of Jurassica. I read about it on Maciej’s blog.

You better contact all portals at once otherwise you’re risking getting same reply. You see, both games are great and would easily make it into top 10… but not today, when match-3 and marble-popper genres are not so popular anymore.

If I would have to name developer friendly portals, Reflexive would be on one of the top positions. Now, after release of Runes of Avalon 2 I can say that they are not only a portal that let’s you earn quite good percentage of sales price.

Do you need an e-commerce provider? Well, if you sell on your own for sure you need one. I use eSellerate, some use Plimus, a lot of developers uses BMT Micro and many others. But this may change… because if you set up affiliate account and sell your own game through it you can earn 90% of sales price, which usually is $19.95. That’s one of the lowest rates in the industry.

But that’s not all. Since they wrap your games (without putting Reflexive splash screen) you don’t have to worry about DRM. Forget about home made solutions, forget about Software Password.

And last but not least, you can use it as hosting service. No more worries about bandwidth.

The best thing about using Reflexive?

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This was very interesting week for me. I could watch closely release of two games that I cared about: Runes of Avalon 2 (my own game) and Stoneloops! of Jurassica (game made by friends from Codeminion). Both games are of similar high quality, as you probably already know. Well, the week has passed. We haven’t broken into the top10…

At first, I thought we will struggle to hold in the top 100 chart, but it wasn’t so bad. Actually, beside one day both games have been climbing up in the top 100 chart. Runes of Avalon 2 reached position #45 today, and Stoneloops! made it to #56. RoA 2 made it to the position #4 in match-3 games, Stoneloops is #2 marble-popper.

What was interesting to see is the #3 position that Stoneloops have held for almost a week and a correlation with the top 100 chart. So while for all this time it was #3 marble popper, it was ranked between #117 and #63 position in the top 100 chart. No change in it’s own category, but a shift of 54 spots in the top 100.

Here’s the snapshot of match-3 top games. I hope that Runes 2 will continue to move up on this rank.

Runes of Avalon 2 also launched at Reflexive (same day) . So far it have made it to position #36 for PC Games and #14 for Mac games (browse by top sellers).

May the sales be with us, little developers :)

On April 15th 2008, Big Fish Games released Runes of Avalon 2 (RoA 2). This event led me to watch the top 100 chart even more closely than I did before and brought me to a few interesting conclusions. Now I am sure that whether you “get in the top 10 or die” is even less correlated with how high the production values of your game are or how polished it is. It is strongly correlated with… game genre.

Stoneloops! of Jurassica launched one day before Runes of Avalon 2. This game was developed by my friends at Codeminion so I watched both releases very closely.

Both Stoneloops! and RoA 2 have very high production values and are very polished. RoA 2 was put in the match-3 category, Stoneloops! in the marble poppers category.

The top 100 chart is updated daily. Stoneloops! debuted on 81st place. The next day RoA 2 debuted on 73rd place, but Stoneloops! fell out of the top 100 chart. After another day RoA dropped 8 spots to 81st place, but Stoneloops! made it back into the top 100 chart with a climb of 27 places (ranked at #90). One day later RoA 2 made it back to position #73 and Stoneloops! peaked to #81.

While I was happy that we stayed in top 100, I was wondering how high both games are ranked in assigned genres. To my surprise… they ranked quite highly. Stoneloops! is the #3 game amongst marble poppers. RoA 2 was #7 amongst match-3 games, then #10, and then #6. That was quite a shock to me. Games ranked at #3 in the marble poppers category can sell worse than games ranked at #7 or even #10 in the match-3 game category.

The top 3 marble games are (as of April 16):

The top 10 match-3 games (as of April 16):

While the #1 marble popper and #1 match-3 games are ranked on very similar positions, the #2 marble popper sells a lot worse than the second and third highest ranked match-3 games. Its potential is close to the fourth place match-3 game. The #3 marble popper sales are even worse… its sales potential is about equal to the #13 match-3 game. To make things look even worse, Stoneloops was the #3 marble popper on April 15, but was not even in the top 100 chart.

So lets check some other genres. The #1 brain-teaser game (IQ: Identity Quest) is ranked at just #51 on the top 100 (peak at #35), the second (JigSaw365) is at #65 (peak at #6), and #3 is… not on the top 100 chart.

Are you working on the best platformer game right now? I’ve got bad news for you. The #1 platformer game - Supercow - is not on the top 100 chart. #2 (Super Granny 4, which I have heard was a successful game) is not on this list either…

Hottest genres?
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