Anonymous poster, I completely agree with you. BUT, your calculations are just from sales of download.com, if you read Dexterity''s FAQ about how they distribute your game, you will find that they do more than just put it on download.com. Quote from Dexterity''s site "Create custom web pages to sell your game on our web sites, and submit those pages to search engines
Get your game placed on hundreds of software download sites
Create a PAD (Portable Application Description) file for your game, and submit it to dozens of PAD sites
Get your game placed on AOL, CompuServe, MSN, and other major portals
Announce your game to hundreds of gaming web sites
Offer your game to our thousands of previous customers
Promote your game in our free newsletter
Announce your game to hundreds of users groups
Write a press release specifically for your game and send it to thousands of web/magazine/newspaper editors and radio/TV producers
Contact key reviewers to get your game reviewed quickly
Attempt to get your game demo placed on magazine cover CDs
Attempt to get your game demo placed on shareware compilation CDs
Purchase features on major software download sites for your game
Bid for appropriate game-related keywords on pay-per-click search engines
Send out demo CDs of your game to editors and game reviewers"

So if download.com is going to generate $1396.50, another site is going to generate say &1100.10, and another &900.00 and another $700.00, and so on so the developer alone alread gets into the &5000.00 range

And like you said before, its not bad for a lone wold

"So if download.com is going to generate $1396.50, another site is going to generate say &1100.10, and another &900.00 and another $700.00, and so on so the developer alone alread gets into the &5000.00 range"

It isn''t based on download.com, but electronic distribution
in general. Where the developer do the things you have mentioned.

Thanks for your response!

quote:

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
"So if you don''t get your game onto retail shelves you''re left with electronic distribution. Here''s the flat out numbers based on experience and talking to other publishers and developers. If you put your game on a download site, you can expect it to get about a 1% conversion rate -- downloads converted to an actual sale."

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1% is a reasonable off-the-cuff figure, but to say that you should expect this conversion rate is inaccurate. Conversion rates vary heavily based on the product and the upsell techniques use (time limitation, feature limitation, nag screens, bonuses, etc). Some games will see as high as 4% or more, while others won''t even reach 0.1%. We have a Registrations Incentives article on our site that explains various ways to increase the conversion rate. Most indie games seem to do a relatively poor job of upselling the full version, so it''s definitely possible to achieve a doubling or tripling of the conversion rate with some effort.

1-2% is a typical conversion rate for the games we sell. Dweep Gold gets close to 2.5% to the degree we can measure it. For each game we publish, we work with the developer to create a demo that will do a good job of selling the full version. We focus heavily on this area as part of our QA process.

Also note that many sales are made w/o generating a demo download. Demo distribution on shareware compilation CDs and magazine cover CDs are two examples, and these are especially prevalent in Europe. Also, we get many sales from customer referrals, and these people often just buy the full version outright w/o ever downloading the demo. Repeat customers will often buy from us based on the strength of our unconditional money-back guarantee.




Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

quote:

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
It isn''t based on download.com, but electronic distribution
in general. Where the developer do the things you have mentioned.

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Actually, the 20K downloads figure was just based on downloads through our own server. Some sites, like Tucows.com, host the file for you, so their downloads aren''t included.

We also negotiate third-party licensing deals when we publish a game exclusively. For instance, we just signed a new licensing agreement for Fitznik last week, and licensing revenue is split 50-50 with the developer. This deal alone will likely generate tens of thousands of dollars for the developer over time.

Our publishing model won''t make developers super rich, but for the types of games we''re publishing, you wouldn''t expect to make millions of dollars. We can, however, generate enough revenue to cover a developer''s basic expenses for several years, with just 1-2 games published. I, myself, for instance, am continuing to develop new games to be published by Dexterity as well.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

Are you saying that it''s possible to make a living from puzzle games, like the quality of dweeps and fitznik.

By the way are you supported by an investment company to build out your company, with new staff.
Or are you paying the staff from the generated sales of Dweeps etc.

It''s very interesting. I would like to hear more from you.
I or we could learn from it, because it''s unique nowadays that people could make a living from shareware.

It''s not that unique. Jeff Vogel (www.spiderwebsoftware.com) makes a living on shareware and pays two other people as well.



Mark Fassett
Laughing Dragon Entertainment
http://www.laughing-dragon.com

The myth that shareware games don''t make any money has been perpetuated in the indie community for far too long. If you look at the top of page 2 of this thread you''ll see that I posted a number of successful shareware companies. Is possible to be a full time shareware game developer and make a decent living? Sure it is. The secret to success however is not making a game that will compete head to head with the games distributed by the big guys. (EA, Infrogames, Microsoft, etc.), it''s making a decent mass market game and marketing it well.

It seems most indie developers try to make a clone of some FPS, RTS, or RPG and expect it to sell itself. (I’m not saying you can''t do well with these types of games) You must market your game and get it in front of as many people as possible. If they can''t see it they won’t buy it.

To increase the number of people they can get to view their game, many shareware game developers develop games for the mass market puzzle, card, etc. Take Steve Pavlina, he''s had great success distributing Dweep and Fitznik but he''s soon to be releasing his RTS Olympus. Judging by his feature list he''s made some innovations to make the game appeal to a wider audience then the hard core RTS crowd, without actually alienating them. This is just good business, if we as developers just spent a little time studying our target markets and building games to sell to them we would see a lot more success.

The myth that shareware doesn''t sell is perpetuated by developers who aren’t effective in marketing their games or make games that appeal to the same crowd as Starcraft, counterstrike, Q3A, you name it. As indie''s with no published games to speak of we can''t be taking on the big guys in our first game and expect to make any money. The customers of those games are already delighted with those products and you''ll be hard pressed to exceed the features that those games have and steal market away from them.

My advice, look around at some shareware companies, email the people that run them. In my experience shareware creators are always friendly and happy to discuss their successes with curious individuals.

How much of an issue is piracy then? It seems to me like the huge companies can survive it whereas the small timers need every sale they can get just to put food on the table...


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Hi, guys, i just want to ask you a thing since it was my intention to ask it before , but never had the courage, i would like to sell some shareware tools for 3d , what do you think
a 3d artist / coder wants most from a tool and how much do you think he/them will pay for it ?

It''s no question that piracy is a problem even in the shareware market. This article describes one shareware companies experience with piracy and how they took steps to prevent it. If you’re not familiar with how to prevent (make more difficult) pirating of your program, talk to your publisher chances are they have some experience with it. If you are publishing/distributing the game yourself then I suggest reading up on it. A good start is the article linked to above.