Direct sales
I’ve been making games for 13 years now. But I just had a first over the weekend – my first direct sale (sorta).
‘Til now, I’ve never cashed a check or received money directly from a customer. I’ve always used publishers, and there has generally always been at least one more middleman down the line – either the retailer or, now for Bonnie’s Bookstore, the portal.
I signed Bonnie’s Bookstore with PopCap as a publisher, and they’ve done an excellent job getting it on to the major portal (just added RealArcade last week), as well as selling from their own site. But in my agreement with PopCap, I retained the right to sell the game from my own site (as many casual game developers who sign with publishers do).
On Friday afternoon, I finally finished setting up my account with Plimus, an on-line transaction provider catering to online software sellers. And over the weekend, I had my first sale, to John XXXX of Brisbane Australia – thanks John!
It’s only sort of a direct sale, as I guess Plimus is still a middleman. But as an order processor, they only take 10% of the revenue, so I should make about $18 off of this $20 sale. $18 is way way more than I’ve ever made per unit via any other distribution arrangement I’ve had. That said, I’ll be surprised if direct sales from my website constitute even as much as 1% of my sales over the next year – but I’ll be curious to watch them.
For the record, I’ve had 103 downloads in the last 3 days – about 40% of the people who visit www.newcrayon.com download the game. Now if only I can sell a second copy, I’ll double my conversion rate 🙂
Here’s the traffic to the New Crayon site over the last 3 months. Bonnie’s Bookstore was first released to the PopCap mailing list at the beginning of December – that’s the first spike. A week later, it started to go ‘wide’ – first to PopCap’s general site, then other sites. So far, I’ve done no marketing myself, so this traffic is basically organic. Not substantial enough to build a business on or even have a material effect as a secondary revenue stream, but we’ll see what happens over the next year…
January 27th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
here’s a crazy thought: have a firesale.
you’ll want to clear it with your publishers first, of course. but, maybe, try dropping the price down to $7. structure it more like a limited sale sort of thing. for the one month. or two weeks. whatever. then, just track the sales. especially track them against your publisher’s sales. see what the conversion rates look like.
will you sell 5 times as many for 1/3 the price? especially since there’s no stamping, packaging, shipping, shelf space, inventory management, etc.
it’s not like you are selling a scarce resource. your only real problem may be leaving money on the table.
and, even if you lose a lot of potential dollars, you still have the price jump since it’s a limited time thing and the long tail of onlin to lean on.
m3mnoch.
January 27th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Well – I don’t think that’d be particularly fair to the other partners I’m working with. I think no matter what, my direct sales are going to be <1% of total sales for the foreseeable future – so to risk alienating partners for something that might, MIGHT, increase those direct sales to say 2%, isn’t really worth it.
January 29th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
that’s the point actually. with only 1% of the sales, your risk is relatively little. and, that’s why i suggested you clear it with your current sales channel first. that’s also why i said only for a couple weeks.
don’t you think your partners (who would have oodles more to lose if it didn’t work) would like to sell 5 times as many for 1/3 the price? i believe they’d actually be much more interested in the outcome than you.
they have a lot more product to leverage if that’s the case with digital distribution. pricing this stuff at standard box retail prices, i think, is silly.
m3mnoch.