How much do you sell about a month in units Jester.
And how big is your staff?
How long did it take to develop each product?
And what product is selling the best?
How do you promote your products?
And where can I find reviews?

HI Jester,

I checked in google and didn''t find much reviews or downloadsites where your games are listed.
Some on CNET, also your own smuggler.net site.
And a bit 3 or 4 other sites for TV manager.

But your aren''t listed on all or most of the "hundreds" of download and review sites. How did your game(s) become a succes?

Your website looks by the way very well.
But how did people know your game?

btw, a "non-exclusive" distribution deal means that you are free to distribute with ANYBODY else you want. an exclusive is you will only deal with them. a distribution that is neither exclusive nor non-exclusive is non-existent and thus means you are granting NOBODY distribution rights. just an fyi so you dont look stupid when showing this to prospective publishers.

"single person the exclusive or not-exclusive right to sell one or more of our games without limitations to certain editions."

For sure you need to read it as ONE sentence. We do not give not-exclusive rights to sell without limitations. Of course we give a not-exclusive rights WITH limitations.

---

I am earning a couple of thousand dollars every month.

Smugglers 2 sells the best. TV Manager is not running so good, but I did less promotion for it and the development costs were 75% smaller.

For both games I needed 1-2 months (full time working, I worked longer, but not full time on them).

I am tired of submitting it to all Shareware sites. Most don''t even get more than 100 downloads of their TOP downloads (not even neccessarily my games) - so I don''t care about them.
But there are some few that rock.

I am thinking about building up and promoting an own Shareware site - investing about 5000$. Where should I buy advertising spce for a Shareware site?

But you all know this already. There are some posts in this forum from the past.

Wow Jester, that is great! I can recall not too long ago when you were posting about just a handful of sales per month! You are doing very well. Are you distributing a German and English version? If so, how do these sales compare? Where are most of your sales coming from, what countries?

99% of my sales come from USA.

Hi Jester,

How do people know your game Smuggler 2, so how did you promote/market it, that it sells the best.

Thanks!

Yes, how do people find your website in the first place.
What kind of search techniques and promotion methods did you use?

Your website is indeed of good professional quality. And also the game, that is why people buy it.

But...why was Smuggler 1 not selling the best?
Or for instance the strategy game Starliner of Positech?
This is what I was wondering about.

I simply submit it to the major shareware sites. Hell, even without Tucows (as they want a 30-day unlimmited copy). The rest is...well...marketing. How your product is presented to the customer - and the product itself for sure.

For sure I do offline selling too (-> in which I use this distribution policy) also, but I didn''t calculated that to the amount of money mentioned above.

The download/buy ratio of Smuggler 1 was the same - but more people download Smugglers 2.

I don''t know how Starliner from Positech sells.

[Buster doesn't like TUCOWS]

[edited by - DavidRM on April 23, 2002 1:30:25 PM]