i find it a bit peculiar that the game creators will get cheques of 1000-10000 per month... i saw that an average game costs about 15$, and the programmer gets 35% which is 5.24$. this means that they promise to sell 190~ - 1900~ units per month, which seems quite odd for the arcade games ive seen. does anyone have enough experience with dexterity to verify their claims? Gil.

What''s odd about those kind of sales?

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John Hattan
The Code Zone
Sweet software for a saturnine world

The reason most people don''t get those kinds of sales is because they don''t know anything about marketing. You can''t just make a game and expect people to buy it. Dexterity invests a couple of thousand dollars in marketing and advertising for each new game they put out. There''s nothing peculiar about their sales, they just know what they''re doing.

well, since i''m a programmer,
i have no idea how much these sort of
products sell, so i guess youre right.

but itll still be nice to hear from someone
who published a game his reactions.

dont get me wrong, i''m just curious.
i dont mean to offend Dexterity by any way,
on the contrary, i''m thinking about choosing
them to publish my game.

Gil

Steve (Pavlina, CEO of Dexterity) has already covered this question in other threads. Since the forum Search is down I tracked down one of the threads for ya.

here it is

quote: Original post by Gilzu
i find it a bit peculiar that the game creators
will get cheques of 1000-10000 per month...
i saw that an average game costs about 15$,
and the programmer gets 35% which is 5.24$.
this means that they promise to sell
190~ - 1900~ units per month, which seems
quite odd for the arcade games ive seen.

does anyone have enough experience with dexterity
to verify their claims?

Gil.

190+ ? I dont think this is a huge (unrealistic) amount of units to pass a month. Dex doesnt say that you will get $10000, they say between $1000 and $10000.

10x

I''ve signed with Dexterity to publish my game "Once Twice Thrice". It should be availible sept 27. I look forward to providing some feedback here on these boards in 6 months or so(after I''ve recieved several checks), since Dexterity is getting to be a pretty common topic and because as far as I can tell, none of their other developers are posting here.

So far they''ve been very proffesional and easy to get along with. I''m just about done with Quality Assurance. Every question I''ve asked about business, taxes, copyright, etc, has been answered. I''ve fixed only a handful of program bugs (mabey 5 or so), and made 20-30 user interface/presentation/polish/shareware changes at their request. And all the non-bug change requests come with the qualifier, that I don''t _have_ to change them, but that it would probably increase my registration rate if I did.

I''m being very conservative about what to expect as far as the royalties go. I definately don''t expect $10K per month. I expect most months will be on the low end of the scale, with some obvious spikes when Steve makes some kind of third party re-licensing deal. I''m completely convinced that this is more than I would make if I was marketing my game on my own.

Also, the average price for a game at Dexterity is $20, they''ve only one priced $15, and a few older games for $10, last time I checked.

Gilzu, if your unfamiliar with Dexterity, you should definately check out the link Ironside provided.

We get asked this question a lot, and it''s covered in detail in our Developer FAQ along with dozens of other questions about our publishing services.

Everything has been going beautifully so far. August was a record sales month, we moved into a new office, and today I''m working on job descriptions for more positions we''ll need to fill soon.

As for customer support, while I agree that most retail publishers probably provide lousy support, I''m certain that we provide outstanding support to players, on the level you''d expect from support provided directly by the developer. Support is one area that can really bog down a talented indie developer. The more successful you get, the more you drown in tech support. Many developers initially enjoy handling their own support... until they start getting in the range of 20-50 support emails every single day. Even with lots of reply templates, this often becomes a motivational block -- developers don''t want to double their sales if it will also double their support burden.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

One other developer publishing through Dexterity that I know is a friendly, helpful kind of guy is Mike Hommel (Jamul) of Hamumu Software. You can find some contact info on the Hamumu site: http://hamumu.com/ . I would guess that he might be willing to answer questions about Dexterity.