Games Brief

Email Marketing for Game Developers

2012-02-02T15:29:21Z

Marketing and community-building are mandatory for self-publishing games developers. Reaching out and communicating with your fans is essential to making money with a free-to-play game. This post is the first of three extracts from How to Publish a Game that we’re reproducing here, to show you how to attract customers and build a tribe of followers. For a complete guide to self-publishing and making money from your game, buy the book now.

Acquiring Customers

The number rule for acquiring customers is to make sure that you can contact them again in the future. For decades, games publishers have considered customers as disposable playthings, to be courted for a new game and then discarded as the marketing team move on to the next project.

How wasteful.

Developers and the new breed of publishers have realised that, as a strategy, this is barking mad. No longer are consumers disposable, only fit to be spoken to every 12-24 months as each new franchise iteration is launched. They are now customers of an ongoing service, and need to be treated as such.

Being able to contact a customer again can take many forms. It might mean asking the consumer to:

Provide an email address
Become a Twitter follower
Sign up as a Facebook fan
Subscribe to a YouTube channel

Each one of these methods means that you can communicate with those users again. Which means you no longer need to pay to re-acquire them. And that goes a very long way to making your business successful.

Marketing Emails

Photo by Biscarotte

Email is often the most powerful marketing tool. It is flexible, under your control (and not subject to arbitrary changes of rules like the Facebook platform), and can have great response rates.

It can also be difficult to persuade consumers to give you their email address, can get you labeled as a spammer and can be tough to deliver.

I generally recommend using a third party supplier like AWeber, MailChimp or GetResponse. These companies are heavily focused on “deliverability”, helping you ensure that your emails get through to your consumers. MailChimp provides an extremely helpful guide to email marketing for free on its website. (For more useful links for your games business, go to the resources page)

If you want to do it yourself, go ahead. But it won’t take long before you are labeled a spammer.

The importance of auto-responders

Gathering email addresses will be useless if you don’t do anything with it. Auto-responders are an easy and critical way of following up.

Put it this way: do you put expect to sleep with someone the moment you meet them, or do you expect there to be some romancing involved?

Buy How to Publish a Game

You, as developers, are no longer looking for one-night stands. You are looking to build steady relationships. You want your gamers to start to trust you. To give you things (like personal information). To spend with you.

You need to earn their trust.

So you start with the basics. They give you an email address in order to get something (a trial, a login to a free-to-play game, a free sample of a book on How to Publish a Game).

Your autoresponder hits them with a “Thank you”. An automated message that confirms that you view them as a valued customer.

The next day, you might send them another automated message. It might say “We hope you’re enjoying our game. Here is your first of three emails introducing you to our world.”

Make the email valuable. Make it fun. Offer good, constructive advice. Do that for several days and your gamers will start to trust you.

So make sure that you keep earning their trust. Don’t spam them. Try to send them things that they value. Don’t drive conversion by lowest common denominator marketing, or by thinking that if you send enough emails, some people will eventually pay you some money.

Photo by Michael Gil

That’s spam thinking. And if you think like that, take a long, hard look in the mirror. That’s the face of a spammer.

Market by sending them things that you would like to receive. Build a loyal following. And then those gamers will seek you out. They will choose to spend money with you to reward you for the value you have already given them. You’ll be more profitable AND you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror every morning.

Autoresponders are your friend. Use them wisely.

Email Marketing Tips

ASK users to add your address to their address book. This will help with deliverability and potentially white-listing
BE yourself. Say what your email is about. Don’t use hyperbole “FREE! MUST END SOON! CLICK NOW!”
ONE exclamation mark is enough (in fact, it’s probably too many)
AVOID writing, “free” or “click here!” or “click here now!” or “act now!” or “limited time!” That looks like spam.
INCLUDE a real physical address. (This is a requirement of CAN-SPAM, the US email marketing legislation).
UNSUBSCRIBING should be really easy. Your recipients can either hit “Unsubscribe” or “Report as Junk”. You *really* don’t want them to hit “Report as Junk”. Do not make them login to unsubscribe.
RUN your target email through SpamAssassin. It’s not perfect, but it will give you a sense of how spammy your message is.

Is your logo losing you customers? 6 ways to improve it

2012-02-06T12:00:16Z

Zoya Street is editorial assistant at Gamesbrief, and is about to complete a Master’s in History of Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her thesis is about Sega’s RPG Skies of Arcadia, and she is speaking at GDC this year about the fictional economies surrounding weapons in Final Fantasy games. Find out more at Zoya Street‘s personal website.

The logo for your mobile app is as important as the cover design for a boxed game. Just like a shelf in a physical store, your customers browse the app store, waiting for something to stand out and grab their attention. Don’t get lost in the sea of icons. Here are some key design features of top logos from the iOS app charts:

Show the object of play

The majority of touch-screen games are like toys. They are easy to understand because they centre on one object of interaction. Your logo should clearly show the object that users will play with. The

Angry Birds

logo doesn’t show the slingshot, it shows the bird.

Represent what users will do
This is secondary to showing the object, but it does help if you can graphically symbolise the action of play. Cut the rope features a ‘cut here’ sign with scissors and a dotted line, but more subtle cues also work. Fruit Ninja shows the blurry shape of a blade in motion, while Angry Birds uses a comic-book background effect to imply propulsion.
Jump outside the frame
This is another great comic-book trick to emphasise movement. First, you need to include a frame. These are usually white or silver, so as not to get in the way visually. Then, you want to make the object extend beyond it. The logo for NFL Flick quarterback shows the footballer leaning outside the frame. The juice splatters on Fruit Ninja appear to have landed right on the frame itself. The clouds in the Angry Birds logo are a frame and a background at the same time.
Point toward the player
Just like the famous ‘I need YOU’ poster, many top app logos point straight at the viewer. Monopoly shows the mascot gesturing out towards you, his hand outside of the frame. Words with Friends has letter tiles flying out, the edge pointing towards the customer. In contrast to logos that use this effect, many others look flat and motionless, causing them to fade into the background.
Use primary colours
This is a must for the majority of games, with notable exceptions: if your game is meant to look charmingly primitive, like Hatchi or Stickman cliff diving, use plain white or grey. The point is to either go for bright, strong colours or no colour at all; there are very few pastels in the top apps charts.
Don’t use the name
The name of your game is already written next to the logo, so you have no good reason to include it in the logo, unless your game is already famous. Grand Theft Auto? Fine. Anything else? Probably not.

No related posts.

What, exactly, is an IPO?

2012-02-03T22:24:18Z

My RSS feeds, tweet stream and favourite websites are all awash with news of Facebook’s IPO. But I also picked up questions at a much more basic level like “What is an IPO?”

So why did Facebook float, and what does that mean?

What is an IPO?

An IPO is an Initial Public Offering. It means that a company chooses to register (or “list”, hence “listed company”) on a regulated stock exchange to enable members of the public (hence “public company”) or institutional investors (such as the people who manage your pension fund or life insurance) to buy or sell shares in the company.

In the UK, it is also known as a flotation, and we would say that a company “floated on the stock market”.

Why would you IPO? – answer 1

The text book answer is “to raise money”. If you want to have more cash available for expansion – to buy a new factory, to build a new product, to open international offices or whatever – you can sell shares in your company.

You could sell them to friends and family, to a venture capitalist, to a growth or private equity investor or to investors in the public markets.

Investors in the public markets are very late stage. They are more focused on stability than growth. They worry about the downside as much as they get excited about the upside. Hence companies that go public have often passed the peak period of growth and expansion, and are settling down to the long-time grind of running a successful, profitable (but no longer hyper-growth) company. (See my former colleague Bill Gurley’s excellent post on Facebook’s S-1 and analysis of whether Facebook is past its peak).

As a result, institutional investors expect companies which float to be lower risk than the types of businesses that VCs and private equity invest in. They therefore expect lower reward, and are happy to take a smaller slice of the company, at a higher valuation, than an investor who is investing when the company is still private.

So you would float to raise money for your company at a better valuation than you could in the private markets (see “Why wouldn’t you IPO? – answer 2” for why this may no longer be true.)

Why would you IPO? – answer 2

The problem with answer 1 is that Facebook doesn’t need the money. It is raising $5 billion when it is already sitting on $3.9 billion in cash. So why is it listing now?

The answer is liquidity.

Let me give you an example. A long time ago, I was CFO of a dotcom startup, a comparison shopping website called Shopsmart. We’d raised some money from a bunch of high net worth individuals, and on the basis of our page views alone, the FT said we could be worth as much as £400 million.

Some of the development team had joined the company in the early days and had options over 0.25% of the company. They were millionaires! Some of them even started spending as if they were millionaires.

Only they weren’t. It was an estimated value in an illiquid stock, meaning that there was no way for them to sell shares to someone else. Until the company was acquired, or floated on stock exchange, their stake in Shopsmart was simultaneously hugely valuable (if you believed the dotcom hype) and totally worthless (because they couldn’t sell their shares to anyone).

A stock exchange is an exchange. It is a place where buyers and sellers come to sell things (in this case financial assets like shares, bonds and derivatives). Its primary function in society is a sophisticated pricing mechanism for risk.

But it is also like ebay. A place for matching buyers and sellers. A place where you discover what something is actually worth by offering it for sale and seeing what someone will pay for it.

So for Facebook, an IPO is a liquidity event. By being public, employees with options and investors who invested in the early days of Facebook can convert theoretically valuable things (options or shares in Facebook) into cash.

This can be done outside of a regulated exchange, but it is much easier when a company is public. I don’t think that Facebook is listing to raise money. It is listing to provide liquidity for employees and investors.

Why would you IPO? – answer 3

The third answer is ego, both of the executives and the investors. Taking a company public makes the early investors look good. It is good for the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It can make the CEO feel more important (although Mark Zuckerberg was pretty damned important anyway). It can make employees feel that they are working for a bigger, better, more “real” company.

In the case of Facebook, this is the main reason I think it is listing.

* * *

Why wouldn’t you IPO? – answer 1

Going public is very expensive. As soonas you decide that you are going to be a public company, your administration costs start to spiral. In the US, you have to get ready to file your financial statements every three months. You have to reveal your company’s inner financial workings in great detail in a registration statement (also known as an S-1). This is a much bigger for wrench for American companies (which have never had to reveal any financial details before) than for British ones (which are used to having to file their annual accounts at Companies House anyway)

How much will they go up? Well after the spectacular crash of companies like Enron a decade ago, a couple of US Senators pushed through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which required much more stringent financial reporting. That adds direct compliance costs of $2.3 million to your company, as well as creating an environment where experimentation, risk-taking and new projects can be much less attractive because of the costs of monitoring and reporting on them.

Whenever a private equity firm takes a company private, their logic is often that they have “to restructure the company and help it adapt to changing market conditions away from the glare of public scrutiny and a fixation on quarterly performance.”

Add together the regulatory cost and the short-term perspectives of public investors and you can see why many companies prefer to remain private.

Why wouldn’t you IPO? – answer 2

Because you might be able to get a better valuation in the private markets. Economic theory suggests that the lower the risk an investor is taking, the lower return he will expect, because he does not need to be compensated for the risk that he loses his money.

The corollary of this is that a lower risk investment is worth more, and when you are selling shares in your company, it is good to sell them at the highest price that you can.

Theoretically, publicly listed companies are lower risks than private ones. They are regulated by the rules of the exchange. They have to be audited and be transparent about their financial affairs. If you want to sell your shares, you can do so at the touch of a button, rather than via tortuous negotiation involving lawyers and contracts.

However, this may not hold true at the moment. The emergence of sovereign wealth funds and enormous late stage investors like DST have meant that companies like Zynga and Facebook have been able to raise vast amounts of money in the private markets.

So much so that the investors in Zynga’s final round as a private company may be sitting on a paper loss after the IPO. With private investors prepared to value a company more highly (possibly because they didn’t have access to the same level of information as public company would have to provide), why would you take your company public?

Why wouldn’t you IPO? – answer 3

Being the director of a public company is heading towards having more downsides than upsides. As an executive, your salary and earnings become public knowledge and you become fair game for tabloid rabble-rousers due to your “public status”. As a non-executive, you have responsibility – true, legal responsibility – with little authority for relatively low pay. The reputational risk can be pretty high. I’d much rather be a non-executive of dynamic private company than a regulated public, particularly with the current anti-business sentiment running through the press and the nation. Never say never, though.

Conclusion

An IPO is an important newsworthy event because, particularly in the US, it means that a company is revealing information about itself that has only been known to insiders before. It is a transformation of a company from a secretive outside to part of the public establishment. It is a key moment in a company’s life.

I wish more people knew what it was all about.

Five tips for transmedia game development

2012-01-31T18:37:05Z

The Mobile Games Forum featured three speakers from studios that carry out brand extension and advergaming projects: Michael Schade from Fishlabs, Celia Francis from WeeWorld, and Ray Sharma from XMG. Their success stories all share similar points of advice about transmedia game design:

Justin Bieber on WeeWorld

Use established intellectual property – whether it’s taking up old ip that is unlikely to cause legal trouble, or taking on a contract from an established entertainment brand, established ip is essential. Advergaming cannot attract new customers, but it will increase brand engagement.
Make participation frictionless - no downloads, simple gameplay, and easy interfaces that allow the user to feel like the co-creator of the media product. For example, XMG’s project with Teen Nickelodeon’s Degrassi allowed users to create music videos and mix karaoke versions of songs from the show using a simple, intuitive interface.
Create engaging brand experiences - you’re not using the game to promote the name or image of a brand. Advergaming is fundamentally different to poster design. High engagement levels are essential to what you’re offering to ip owners, so make sure that your game brings players back time and again for more brand experience.
Focus on action as narrative - in order to create meaningful brand experience, don’t simply plaster the brand name and image onto an arbitrary game mechanic; identify the key actions performed in the narrative of existing products using the brand’s ip, and turn those into your game mechanic. For Degrassi, it was making music. For Volkswagen, it was driving. For the celebrities featured in WeeWorld, image and identity are the primary activity.
Mirror how the audience already interacts with the brand - some audiences will balk at signs of obvious product placement, but for other audiences this is okay. Middle-aged women who watch American soap operas might not find product placement so unusual, and could respond more positively to it.

For more advice on creating games under contract from entertainment brands, read the GAMESbrief guide to Marketing and Games and Transmedia: is it just brand extension?

No related posts.

Dear Jas 1: Setting up as an indie developer

2012-01-31T20:39:43Z

This is the first of a series of guest posts by Jas Purewal, answering your questions about games development and the law. Got a question for Jas? Ask him!

Q: I’m thinking of setting up as an indie developer. Should I work as a sole trader or set a company up?

A: You’re doing the right thing by considering whether to get registered (with HMRC) as a sole trader or setting up a company: you definitely need to do one or the other if you want to conduct a business as a developer. Very basically, there are three main things to think about when deciding which option to choose:

(1) Liability:
If something goes wrong with one of your games (e.g. it accidentally infringes someone else’s game) or you have a contract dispute with a contractor, then as a sole trader you are personally liable. If that means money is owed, you have to pay it yourself. However, if you have a company, then the company is liable – not you. That’s one of the big reasons we have companies: if things go bad, the company suffers rather than you. That’s what allows businesspeople to take calculated risks – if they were personally liable all the time they probably wouldn’t.

Photo by Ken Teegardin

(2) Flexibility:
If you have a company then you can get other people onboard as shareholders and directors, both to even out the workload as well as give them a stake in the business. It also means that the company owns all the IP/other asserts and you can therefore sell it one day if you want (this is usually easier than you owning all the IP yourself). In other words, having a company gives you more options (although each of those options has its own cost/admin involved).

(3) Tax:
There are different tax treatments for sole traders and companies. Very simply, sole traders pay income tax but companies pay corporation tax. That said, this is the one bit which I can’t advise you in much detail on – you’d be best off speaking to an accountant about your precise financial situation, how much you make from games development/other work and what makes most sense from a tax perspective therefore.

However, generally speaking (and leaving aside the tax question) my suggestion is normally that an indie studios incorporates a company and uses it to trade, rather than working as sole traders. It means additional paperwork and administrative obligations, but ultimately that’s the way most developers go eventually. It’s also worth bearing in mind that there are other structures you could use in theory, like partnership or limited liability partnerships. If you’ve got more detailed questions, have a look at online resources like the official government business site (http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/home) and/or drop me a line.

No related posts.

Dear Jas: Legal advice for self-publishing

2012-01-31T20:48:19Z

Great news, everyone! From now on, we’ll be featuring monthly guest posts by Jas Purewal of Gamer/Law. He’ll be answering your questions about the legal side of games development, particularly for small businesses and self-publishing. If you have any questions for Jas, give him a shout.

nDreams is hiring a digital product manager

2012-01-30T15:43:55Z

Earlier this week, I put up a blog post about the role of product manager in the new world of free-to-play games.

One of the companies where I am a director and have an equity stake (nDreams) is looking for a a “digital product manager”. I’ve reprinted the full job spec here, because it is a great illustration of what a digital product manager needs to do.

If you think that you might be right for this role, please apply at http://www.ndreams.co.uk/recruitment

DIGITAL PRODUCT MANAGER

nDreams is looking for a digital product manager with a core understanding of what defines an online user experience. Someone who can forge strong community ties, who has already proved their business worth whether it be in online gaming or social media. The ideal candidate must have a strong passion for games and gaming in general and be able to analyse our marketing data, research reports, market trends, statistics and help deliver commercially successful quality products to our growing community. This role sits on the intersection between business, technology and user experience, and we’re looking for someone experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and able to comfortably talk about them all.

You will need to champion our new products, everything from a cute virtual item to a vast community hub or a service-based multiplayer action adventure whilst tailoring them to the target market. You should have the following skills:

- Demonstrable use of analytics
- Knowledge of metrics-lead marketing
- Passionate about games (but games industry experience is not a pre-requisite)
- Understanding of user acquisition strategy
- Familiarity with a data driven decisions
- Comfortable presenting and arguing your case to individuals and to a team
- An understanding of ‘service-based’ gaming and working on games that evolve over time

http://www.ndreams.co.uk/recruitment

CPA hits all-time high

2012-01-31T20:29:45Z

Cost per Loyal User Index

Fiksu’s Cost Per Loyal User Index, a measure of how much it costs to acquire a customer who will open a mobile app three times or more, rose to an all-time high last December at $1.81. This is still lower than the CPA reported by developers for other platforms such as Facebook; Rick Thomson of Playdom said last October that it cost between $2 and $3 to acquire a customer, while at the Social Games Summit last November Kixeye reported a cost per acquisition of $4. These figures are available on our CPA page and are updated regularly.

Mobile Beat points out that the high cost of customer acquisition last December will have been partly caused by the rush to reach a top position in the app charts before Apple’s rankings freeze between 25th and 28th. Those top in the charts by 25th would benefit the most from the 6.8 million iPhones and Android devices activated on Christmas day alone. This momentary hike nevertheless came during an upward trend in CPA, as virality has become less attainable and competition has increased. To forecast what rising CPA means for your games business, use the online games spreadsheet.

To learn about how CPA is calculated and get updates on the latest CPA benchmarks as they come in, do check the CPA, CAC and Customer Acquisition Cost page regularly.

GAMESbrief’s Black Swans

2012-01-30T15:41:49Z

In December 2011, one of my “Black Swans” came good. Several people have asked me to explain what a Black Swan is. This post will explain what it is, and help you understand why I run GAMESbrief the way that I do.

Channelflip – my first successful Black Swan

Channelflip, an online video business in which I had a small equity stake was acquired by Shine, the television production business owned by News Corp and run by Elisabeth Murdoch. I consulted quite heavily to the founding team of Wil Harris and Justin Gaynor in the early days of the business. I helped them determine strategy and rapidly experiment with the different ways of making money in their fast-changing world of online video. Justin was kind enough to give me a testimonial to promote How to Publish a Game.

“Meeting Nicholas Lovell was the most significant turning point in the development and understanding of our business. Having been initially sceptical about using consultants, our concerns were blown away due to his rigorous, thoughtful and sophisticated analysis of our sector and business model. It helps enormously that Nicholas has got such terrific experience of all sides of the business world from finance to technology to startups. His work transformed the way we operate and crystallised our strategy. I really couldn’t recommend his services enough.”

I’m delighted that I helped the company in the early days, and equally delighted that the company had a successful exit. Channelflip have validated my Black Swan strategy.

What is a Black Swan?

The term was coined by trader and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan published in 2007. I urge you to buy the book (although it suffers from Taleb’s self-indulgence and an insufficiently ruthless editor) but if you can’t be bothered, just read my review on GAMESbrief.

A Black Swan is something unpredictable, with enormous impact, that everyone says is obvious in retrospect. The credit crunch is a classic Black Swan. The consequences of Hurricane Katrina too. They are high impact, rare events that can’t be predicted.

But they can be planned for.

Taleb argues that taking a “middle risk” approach is the worst of all possible worlds. By excluding the highest risk opportunities, you are still exposed to the random vicissitudes of the world – natural disasters, man-made disasters or, more prosaically in the case of business, the failure of a business model or competitive disruption – but you don’t have upside exposure to them.

In Taleb’s world of high finance, his trading strategy is to take 85% of his money and put it in the safest place he can find. Historically, this has been in US government bonds, also known as T-bills or Treasuries. The fact that these may no longer be regarded as “risk-free” is a matter for much smarter minds than GAMESbrief’s.

The remaining 15% he invests in high risk areas: uranium mines, drilling for oil, maybe backing a pop star or a novel or a movie. Anything where the rewards for success are potentially stratospherically high.*

The results look like this:

In a bad year for Taleb, the market performs well. His T-bills plod along while his competitors benefit from heady returns in the equity markets. None of his 15% investments come good. He underperforms.
In an OK year for Taleb, one of his Black Swans comes good. He strikes oil, or Hollywold gold, or whatever. His Treasuries have done well. He matches the market, or maybe slightly outperforms.
In a great year for Taleb, disaster strikes. The credit crunch. Black Monday. Hurricane Katrina or the Kobe earthquake. His 15% don’t do well, but his Treasuries rise as everyone else flees their risky investments into a safe haven. While the equity markets collapse, Taleb’s investments rise. He outperforms massively.

The heart of this strategy is to say: bad things will happen, but I can’t predict them, because no-one can. I want a strategy that enables me to do OK in good times, maximise my chances for getting lucky and give me some protection if it all goes to hell-in-a-handbasket.

Running my life according to the Black Swan

I can’t exactly run my life according to Taleb’s theory, because it is hard to find the working equivalent of risk-free investment. Here’s how I do it:

My consulting and masterclasses are my 85%. They pay the bills, keep me active, involved with clients and in the flow.

My 15% can be anything that I fancy. Right now, they include:

Equity stake in nDreams
~~Equity stake in Channelflip~~ (sold to Shine in December 2011)
GAMESbrief itself
The freelance database on GAMESbrief
The book How to Publish a Game
The GAMESbrief Unplugged series (Volume 1 and Volume 2)
The book 52 Game Design Secrets (work in progress)
The book 50 questions you should ask when raising venture capital (in association with Nic Brisbourne)
A book proposal on what the games industry can teach other industries (in submission to publishers)
Two novels: Dirty Money, about high finance, european gangsters and stock market crashes and Kidnap, (working title, obviously) about a totalitarian London
A comic book about superheroes with a twist
A website about the quirky history of London at www.lovellslondonlist.com (very early days)
A website about sailing with kids that I hope to turn into a self-published book one day (www.havekidswillsail.com)
Probably some others that I have forgotten about.

I’m obviously not pursuing all of these with equal intensity. The point about Black Swans is that you can’t predict them, but equally, success comes from focus. I’m trying to find ways to spread myself thinly while also giving projects the maximum chance of success by giving them the attention that they need.

I’m not saying that this strategy is for everyone. I am saying that when luck is the biggest determinant of success, it makes sense to work really bloody hard to put yourself in places where you can get lucky.

That’s the heart of the Black Swan theory for me.

* Note that I’ve been living by this strategy for so long that I may have started to backfill Taleb’s investments with my own ideas. So if you want to be sure of his trading, please read his book. Don’t take my word for it.

The black & white era: are games finally waking up to aesthetic style, or taking a step back?

Starting out in mobile games – Triolith Entertainment

2012-02-02T12:16:05Z

This is a guest post by Magnus Söderberg, CEO of Triolith Entertainment (Facebook | Twitter), an independent developer for iOS and Android; having released two games – Thunder BANG and Wisp – they are now working on their third game, Megatroid. Almost a year has passed since Triolith was launched, and in this post Magnus shares some lessons learned in these early stages.

Someone once said to me that learning new things takes time, but sharing that knowledge won’t take long. In this post I will be talking about our first year in existence, sharing what we learned about marketing mobile games and making your way in the world as a new indie developer.

Who are Triolith Entertainment?

We are a bunch of half-crazed Swedes who studied game development at the University of Skövde in Sweden, and also studied a year of entrepreneurship while starting up the company. Official launch was March 2010, but we started working on the company 9 months before that. Basically, we have been living on student loans for this entire time, but we are slowly getting to a point where we can hopefully get paid.

Thunder BANG was our first game, and development started a few months before we started the actual company. After some time we got a new coder, learnt some new things about Unity 3D, and decided to redo the entire project from scratch. It was a painful but wholly necessary decision, as the whole project was chock-full of learner’s mistakes. Total development time was roughly 5 months (including prototyping and R&D). We released the game, on April 1, about a month after we officially formed Triolith Entertainment.
Bad decision! I won’t go into specifics, but let’s just say that the game we thought would be a huge success was a total failure: people didn’t understand either the humor or the point of the game. We got comments about the whole thing being assumed as an April fool’s joke.

Thunder BANG conversion and revenue

Thunder bang free total downloads

Thunder bang total downloads

Total paid downloads to date: 142
Total free downloads to date: 4878
Our ad-supported version has had more downloads, but we are not making much money on it: total free downloads so far is 4878 and we are getting between 20 to 80 free downloads per day at the moment. Revenue so far from ads… a whole bucket of $60, great isn’t it?

As far as marketing is concerned we did it all ourselves. Marcus, one of our designers, did most of the work emailing review sites and posting on forums.
Due to the bad ratings and comments we decided to not release the game on iOS. However, we did not accept defeat! We did some patches based on the few constructive criticisms we received and then focused on producing our next game, Wisp.

Wisp floats into the Android charts

Wisp, or Wisp: Eira’s Tale as it’s called on iTunes, is an ambient labyrinth adventure with no time limits or scores to keep. It’s a relaxing game where you guide the wisp Eira home through a forest maze while listening to nice relaxing music. On 29th April we released Wisp on Android and it didn’t do that well. We did make a few sales, but still not enough to make a living. After porting the game to iOS (having had some initial problems registering on iTunes) we released Wisp: Eira’s Tale and in one single day the iOS sales beat 1½ months of sales on Android. My developers were pretty disappointed about Android at this time but I stayed optimistic.

I “accidentally” mentioned to the Android support that my developers were a bit unhappy with the results on Android. Seeing the results on iOS, they apparently had a look at Wisp and, all of a sudden, we started to get a lot of downloads. We had no idea what was going on! A few days after this started I had a look at the market app and what do I see? We were featured!

This was a big boost to our sales and we are still seeing the effects of this a few months after the feature. While on iOS we have almost no downloads at all any more. What we learnt from this was that once you get on the Android charts it’s a lot easier to stay on them than on iOS. In total we have so far made about $9000 on iOS and $6000 on Android.

Wisp iOS openfeint promo

We also tried the go-free-for-a-few-days approach with Openfeint’s Free Game of the Day. This would have been great if we had any in-app purchases in Wisp, but sadly we don’t. We did, however, get a bucket of downloads as you can see in the picture. First peak is our first Openfeint Free Game of the Day and the second smaller peak is our second Openfeint feature.
The first promo gave us about 64000 downloads and the second promo gave us 21000 downloads.

So during this first year what have we actually learnt? Well, a lot more than we’ve ever learnt from going to the University! Learning by doing is the best way to learn. It might not always be the most fun way to learn, for example when your game get beaten to pieces by the collective Internet, but as long as you can learn from your mistakes and move forward it’s a lot more rewarding in the end.

Marketing a Mobile game

Marketing either takes a LOT of time, or a LOT of money but it is necessary. The days when you could toss a new game on the market and see it soar to the skies and make loads of money is over. We’ve hired a firm called Peppermint P to do our marketing for our next game, Megatroid. Also, start with your marketing as soon as you possibly can. Even if it’s just a concept image, post it and get some buzz out there.

If you don’t have a big IP/franchise associated with your game, the way forward today is going Freemium, which is exactly what we are doing with Megatroid. We think it will do a lot better than our other games, simply because it’s a lot better adapted to current market trends. We’ve allowed ourselves to extensively polish the game, in order to deliver what we believe will be the next game everybody will talk about!

We are also working on some other promising things which I sadly can’t tell you about, but what I can tell you is that they would not come into motion if I had not been networking as much as I have.

One of the most important tasks for a CEO is to network: get new contacts, be nice, share as much as you can and people will take notice of you and the company and good things will happen eventually. A really good place to network is conventions: if you spot me at Casual Connect, come over and say hello!

Finally, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to email me at magnus.soderberg@triolith.com