Squimball:

Fireworks HD sales for October.  Game was released in July '09.

Trials: 896

Purchases: 132

Purchase/Trial Ratio: 14.73 %

I lowered the price to 80 points on the 15th, and oddly enough sales seem to be worse than when it was 200 points.  It's still a little early to say with absolute certainty though.  Before I changed price, it hovered around the 60th bestselling mark or so.  It was up to like 45th bestselling the day after I changed the price.  Now it is like 115th or something.  Weird!  At least my conversion rate is good.  Oh well, I made a very nice chunk of change off of it and anything now is just a bonus.  :) :) :)

I have experienced this on a number of my games as well. Lowering the price seems to actually decrease the conversion rate rather than increase it.
Given this I decided to raise the price on one of my games which seems to have resulted in increased trial downloads but a worse conversion rate so far as well.
Seems like what ever price the game comes out at, changing it later makes people less inclined to purchase it for whatever reason.

I guess we will see over time if this changes but it really seems like the best idea is to make sure your initial price is right on.

Aztec:

I guess we will see over time if this changes but it really seems like the best idea is to make sure your initial price is right on.

I would've released it initially at 80 points if I had the choice, but I didn't.  My plan was to release it at the lowest price point (200 at the time), then release a majorly awesome update/upgrade down the road and up the price to the mid-range value (400 points at the time).  Little was I to know the price structures would change a few weeks after release and I would be unable to change price for 3 months.  Now my game plan is junk and so is the game.  I'm debating even updating it now.  Live and learn I guess.  I'll never try that plan again.  :)

TrippinAlien:

Numbers for first full week of Trippin' Alien:

Trials: 4040
Sales: 157
Conversion: 3.89%
Price: 80 MSP

That was through Sunday. In the past two days, I have had 5 and 4 sales, respectively. That coming after a steady rate of about 20 per day, I think I must have dropped off the New Arrivals or something... oh well. I won't say this was an overnight game, as I spent nearly 6 months from concept to marketplace, but I was learning programming as I went, and did it in between high school and sports and didn't put nearly as much time and effort into it as I'm sure many people here have. As for the money, I was expecting a little more than this, but I got back my $99 in the first week, so I guess I can't complain. Trippin' Alien was a total learning experience and never even supposed to go to the marketplace (besides not being very good) so everything from here on out is just gravy. The best I can hope for is to put some effort into making a better game next time, and see what happens.

that's like my situation.


Development starts in june when I was learning game programming and xna for the first time.

Due to summer and university development has been on hold for some weeks during this period.


Unfortunately My CCO subscription of 4 months is about to finish so I had to publish the game without charts and a better experience

lefantome:

Development starts in june when I was learning game programming and xna for the first time.

Due to summer and university development has been on hold for some weeks during this period.


Unfortunately My CCO subscription of 4 months is about to finish so I had to publish the game without charts and a better experience

..looking forward for your next game then!

Noogy:

Everyone also has to remember that the holidays are quickly ramping up.  Listening to podcasts and going on message boards, it's clear there is no shortage of quality retail titles on shelves.   It's going to be difficult competing with the onslaught of games these next few months.  And it's not going to be easier at the beginning of next year, where even massive publishers have pushed their titles.

And I agree with the sentiment that pricing your game low doesn't guarantee sales.  Remember David Edery's Talk, where the consumer actually has a number of options for cheap (and even free) quality gaming nowadays.  In some ways this will limit the number of "hey, I spent 4 days on this game" titles, and force developers to make something that stands out.

Great post.  I started another thread in reply to this post, because I knew I would take this thread off topic:  When should we release Duality ZF?

Yesterday trials are extremely low


less than a half of the day before, Purchases in the same way.


Did you have the same?

lefantome:

Yesterday trials are extremely low


less than a half of the day before, Purchases in the same way.


Did you have the same?

No, it's probably from your position dropping on the "new releases list". The lower your game gets on that list the less downloads you're going to get, unless you can hold onto a spot in the top downloads. My downloads have been dropping as well, but at a more linear rate. Probably due to a mix of new competition, as well as falling off new releases. It always seems to me like 2 weeks is the average for strong sales times.

lefantome:

Yesterday trials are extremely low

less than a half of the day before, Purchases in the same way.

Did you have the same?

IncaBlocks Trials / Buys / Conv. Rate (released 10/14):

10/14/2009	370	14	4%
10/15/2009	410	10	2%
10/16/2009	211	15	7%
10/17/2009	162	10	6%
10/18/2009	124	6	5%
10/19/2009	74	4	5%
10/20/2009	64	8	13%
10/21/2009	59	6	10%

I choose to only watch the conv. rate =p

Studio Hunty:

I'm sure that lack of advertising is keeping the trial number low, but I'm also fairly confident that the price tag is primarily what's keeping the conversion rate so low. I've emailed creators@xna.com to see if there's any way I can get an exception to change the price sooner than three months from now, and I'm hoping that works out.

Ugh. Apparently in my head-cold-addled state, I used the wrong email address and this bounced back. This is a good thing, though, since I was beginning to have doubts that lowering the price was the best move. I'll just let it go for now, see if sales pick up in January, and figure out what I want to do with the price then. I think I'll probably give google ads another whirl in January; when I tried google ads for In the Pit in August, it did make the trials spike, but didn't effect sales much; I suspect that most of those new trial players just decided "nope, this isn't the game for me", since it's such a niche game anyway. I think Crosstown has broader appeal, though, so an increase in trials for it would probably have a better chance of increasing sales.

It's disappointing to see such low sales numbers (I just finally hit 1% conversion today), but I think that the runaway popularity of In the Pit coupled with not knowing its sales numbers for months and months has given me a skewed idea of what kind of numbers to expect. I also need to keep telling myself that a 1% conversion rate on my 400 point game is as profitable as a 5% conversion rate on an 80 point game. :)

Just for clarification, further quoting in other threads and anything else you choose to do with this statement...

There are no exceptions to the 90 day price change rule.

Not trying to be rude or mean or anything here, just trying to be clear. Emailing the creators club team will not get you any exception. :-)

I've been debating making some compression changes to RadRiverRun to drop the size of the game down another 3-4megs so I can have that 80 point pricing, but I'm still not certain if it's a good idea considering the conversation here. I still have to wait until late December for any price restructure, though. So plenty of time to add in some new functionality, shrink the size, and set up some sort of holiday advertising for the game. My team (of three) is actually busy on our next title, since this was our very first game and a test of the whole process. So it's the major priority considering our conversion ratio on RadRiverRun. Although while I keep looking at an almost 2% ratio as being pretty darn low, the ratio is climbing while trial downloads are dropping and that means more of the people trying the game are inclined to purchase it these days.

In the sense of time and energy to create the game, there's no way we've recuperated the development costs at this point. (Missed that hook to really grab people and nail that purchase from the trial. And it could have used a little more fun stuff in it, too.) But we've got enough money to get some goodies and pay to continue our Creators Club memberships, which is pretty exciting for our very first game. The response has been amazing, too. I still get messages and people talking to me when I play multiplayer games about how much they like the game and how they play it to relax or while they are listening to podcasts.

Although I wish more people would rate games. I think RadRiverRun isn't the best game out there, but it should definitely be more around the 3-star level than the 2-star level. But that's a marketplace wide issue with some personal bias thrown in. ;) Heheh. I've been mentioning ratings (and how people should remember to rate all Indie Games) when I do my radio interviews and podcast stuff and I'm hoping the word will spread faster. But out of the more than 20 million active Xbox LIVE members we get a very small percentage of them even trying out the best of Indie Games, let alone rating them at this point. (I think I recently saw one with a little more than 22,000 ratings. Not a high percentage at all there based on how many gamers are out there, and how many have actually played the game.) I'm keeping the hope alive that this is simply because most of it isn't that good and I just need to personally try better on our next title, though. :)

Anyhow, here are the current numbers on RadRiverRun.

RadRiverRun (240points):
11,104 -Trial Downloads
191 - Purchases
1.72% - Conversion

Still doing alright for our very first attempt, I think. And we're still super happy about having released a title no matter what. And especially happy that we were chosen as one of the Top IGN.com Picks. I was actually starting one of our weekly business meetings with the guys all together when we pulled it up and just happened to notice it was up there. *lol* Very cool stuff. :) I think we've learned our lessons with RadRiverRun and our next project is going to do much better, though.

MadMojo:

And especially happy that we were chosen as one of the Top IGN.com Picks.

Congrats.  Getting picked is really good stuff.  Being was included in the same list.  I've had more sales and trials in the last eleven days than in the last three months combined.

MadMojo:

I've been debating making some compression changes to RadRiverRun

Since you've got time for some updates to the game, why not Christmas it up for a holiday rerelease? Replace water with ice, tube with a sled, and throw in snow and snowmen, etc.

Otherwise, congrats on seeing the game to release.  It's definitely one of the nicer looking 3D titles out there.

Noogy:

Since you've got time for some updates to the game, why not Christmas it up for a holiday rerelease? Replace water with ice, tube with a sled, and throw in snow and snowmen, etc.

I really disagree with this approach. If you want to make a game for the holidays, make a holiday game. But I don't think reskinning games to fit a holiday is the way to go. Perhaps do an update where you add a new optional theme that users can select (and make it default to the holiday theme during the holidays), but definitely don't reskin it and put it up as a new game.

Okay, that first "day" of sales where I got 16 trials (half of them in non-English speaking countries) and 1 sale was obviously a result of missing the cutoff for sales tallying or something because the next day was substantially better.

Epiphany in Spaaace! (XBox Live Indie Game - 80 MS points)

Pumpkin Chop has been up for 5 days now, and is doing pretty well :)

Date                                    Trials  Sales

10/19/2009	2530	201
10/20/2009	1382	128
10/21/2009	1949	166
10/22/2009	1543	154
10/23/2009	1771	195
Grand Total	9175	844

So its averaging just shy of 170 sales/day currently.  It did get a bit of mention at Kotaku but that doesn't appear to have had any definate effect on sales so far.

...Just realized I apparently was logged in with a different Live account, regular nick on here is MatthewM

It has been more or less a month since Alien Pyramid Challenge came out, so here are my sales:


Most of the sales came from the first week that it was up.  After week 2, the sales petered out to just 1 or 2 a day.  Since I am only charging 80 points for the game, my total sales comes to $236.6 (after MS takes their 30% cut).  While it's a thrill having a game on XBLIG, I have to say that just $230 isn't really proportionate with the amount of time I spent working on the game.  But, I am not discouraged.  I am going to use this as a learning experience for when I put out my next one.

Richard

Anyone else noticed a surge in sales for the 23rd and 24th? I'm guessing it's due to the auto price drop (I don't see the same happening with my 240 point title) but I haven't noticed that being promoted anywhere...

lutas:

Anyone else noticed a surge in sales for the 23rd and 24th? I'm guessing it's due to the auto price drop (I don't see the same happening with my 240 point title) but I haven't noticed that being promoted anywhere...

A whole bunch of us on Twitter mentioned it a bunch of times. Hopefully a bit of grass roots advertising that worked out for people.

Well, I don't know about any spikes for anyone else, but over the past three days (10/22 - 10/24), I've had a grand total of 13 (!) trials and 5 sales. That's an average of 4.33 trials and 1.67 sales a day.

I'll just focus on the 38.5% conversion rate.

Nick Gravelyn:

lutas:

Anyone else noticed a surge in sales for the 23rd and 24th? I'm guessing it's due to the auto price drop (I don't see the same happening with my 240 point title) but I haven't noticed that being promoted anywhere...

A whole bunch of us on Twitter mentioned it a bunch of times. Hopefully a bit of grass roots advertising that worked out for people.

RT @NickGravelyn A whole bunch of us on Twitter mentioned it a bunch of times. Hopefully a bit of grass roots advertising that worked out for people.

;-)

Indeed many of use Tweet and RT each other a few days ago, when the switch was made.  XBLARatings was tweeting each titles and their new prices, so I am sure a lot of people have heard about it.  They were also a big news items on the front page of Creators XNA too. It will be interesting to see how this affect the sales long term, let say we compare in a few weeks when we have more sales to compile some statistics.  though you might get more sales, the revenue will be lower, unless more people buy it and compensate for the lower price.

It will be interesting to see indeed if the new pricing strategy benefits us or not.

Interestingly enough, all of my games were at the new price points well before the automatic ones came into effect so I guess I just sailed off the back of more users visiting

Hello ,

I thought I would share my sales numbers for ghastly ghouls

From July 31 to Sat 24 October.


I'm quite happy with this considering it was my first try on creating a xna game.
It's paid for the creators club sub! :)

I noticed a Massive surge in trial downloads of my game on friday and saturday in the U.S , does anybody know why this has happened??

cheers,

Phill

simiansoup:

I noticed a Massive surge in trial downloads of my game on friday and saturday in the U.S , does anybody know why this has happened??\

Your game, along with 4 other XBLIG games, is part of the XBox Shocktober Sweepstakes
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/shocktober/

I'm surprised MS didn't let you know about that :)

simiansoup:

I noticed a Massive surge in trial downloads of my game on friday and saturday in the U.S , does anybody know why this has happened??

Probably because Ghouls is included in the Shocktober section on the dashboard.  Downloading the games in there get you added to the contest, so people are going to be downloading your game quite a bit. :)  (I think that's how that thing works, anyway.)