If you scroll to the bottom of my post you’ll find a Retweet button and a Digg button. I’ve finally got round to adding these so that my readers can recommend my blog posts to other readers easily. I hope they work 🙂 Please try them out on your favourite posts.

Should I add any similar buttons for other services? Please advise. Many thanks in advance.

I’ve recently read a couple of good books that I thought I’d blog about in case you are interested. Yes, these are Amazon Associate links but hopefully you won’t begrudge me that – the books are very good and I’m sure that many of you will enjoy them if you haven’t read them already.

First up is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I bought this book pretty much based on its front cover and after reading the first few pages of it. It turned out not to be exactly what I thought it was but that was fine actually. I thought it was going to be about HOW to persuade people to do stuff – this is not something I particularly wanted to do (I used to sell computer systems for a living, so I’ve been there done that!) but I was nevertheless interested in this topic. What the book was really about was a whole load of scientific studies that showed how “compliance practitioners”, as the author calls them, e.g. car salesmen and telesales people etc, use special tricks that they know work on pretty much everyone because we’ve evolved to be susceptible to them. The tricks are described well with some fascinating studies to back them up. Then the author describes some possible techniques for not being caught out by these tricks the next time you find yourself the subject of them. What’s quite funny is at the end the author reveals himself to be a bit obsessive in his “war” against compliance practitioners and advises you to refute them and try to take them down – I’d advise him to chill out a bit though 🙂 Anyway it was a good book that I blasted through in a couple of days of lounging around at the weekend.

Next up I read The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a very well known book that I’d been meaning to read for a while ever since reading another of his books called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking which was fascinating. The Tipping Point talks about how epidemics occur (viral, social, fashion etc) when they reach a certain “tipping point” and what factors influence that. Certain kinds of people seem to be vital in turning something small into an epidemic and other factors such as “stickiness” play a big part too. I found the book really interesting from a marketing point of view just as well as general interest. Again he cites many scientific studies, some of which overlapped with the Persuasion book that I just read which was fluky (flukey?). One section about the rise and fall of crime in New York during the 1990s also reminded me of another great book that I read last year called Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, which is definitely worth checking out. You can probably find the older unrevised version for cheaper if you are interested. Malcolm Gladwell also writes in a very easy manner to read (I also blasted through this book over the last weekend) and I’m looking forward to reading his new book (which is sitting in my To Read pile) – I’ll report back on it later.

Well, that’s it for now, I hope that you find my recommendations useful. If you have any recommendations for me, please add them to the comments. I’m building up a pretty big recommendation list at the moment but if the same book keeps on cropping up, I’ll make sure I get it ASAP!

I recently posted sales stats for my Xmas Bonus game and now it’s time for some Easter Bonus sales stats!

Easter Bonus was my second game and it was launched early in 2006 on several portals. It was based on the Xmas Bonus code base but with some minor improvements, plus it had better graphics and music.

Initially the game was published by Indiepath (but I negotiated a higher cut than for Xmas Bonus and this made a good difference to my revenue) and then later on I took back the publishing control and launched it via Oberon which gave a good sales spike during Easter 2007 (see graph below).

Sales Stats

Sales stats are in US Dollars for easy comparison.

– Direct Sales: 14 (same as Xmas Bonus at time of writing)
– Portal Sales: 444 (similar to Xmas Bonus but a bit higher)
– Total Sales: 459 (similar to Xmas Bonus but a bit higher)

– Direct Revenue: $219.00 (approx.) (This is double Xmas Bonus because the price was double!)
– Portal Revenue: $2011.42 (approx.) (This is quite a lot higher than Xmas Bonus)
– Total Revenue: $2230.43 (approx.) (This is quite a lot higher than Xmas Bonus)

Note: This is the net revenue, so the value of sales minus transaction fees and publisher/portals commissions. Gross revenue would have been a lot higher, maybe $9000+

Note: The game was originally launched at $19.95 and I kept it at that price instead of dropping it to $9.95 like I did with Xmas Bonus in its second year. This is why its revenue is a lot higher than Xmas Bonus.

Check out this graph of sales over the last 3 years. You can see peaks for the first two Easters but then it pretty much fizzles out. The first two peaks are big because they correspond to the initial launch and “re-launch” where I asked the portals to re-promote it again because it was a seasonal game. After that I didn’t bother to re-launch it because I was focussed on my newer more successful games. Note that it still sells a few copies every month, it’s slightly more consistent than Xmas Bonus.

Expenses

– Artist, Stock Art, Music, Shareware Submission Service: $736.12

– Total profit: $1494.31

– Profit per unit: $3.26

The main spend here was art. The game has great pixel art by Jason Faramus, who I made contact with on the Blitz forums. The stock art was used for the title screen and options menu. Some of the music was free from http://incompetech.com/ and some was composed by Damien Sturdy (also from the Blitz forums).

Almost everything in Xmas Bonus was stock art or programmer art and the music was free low quality stuff (but OK). However I wanted to up the stakes with Easter Bonus and have properly customised art and music so that the game was more cohesive and I think it worked well. But in hindsight, the pixel art look may not have helped sales (awesome and cute as it is). Other games at the time were coming out with great pre-rendered 3D shapes and fancy backgrounds so mine didn’t quite live up to them in the eye candy department. This is why I switched to BlitzMax for Oz (to do more fancy special effects with scaling, rotation and alphablending) and why the producer of that game paid for pre-rendered 3D shapes and painted backgrounds.

Still, I’m fond of this game and it has made a little bit more profit than Xmas Bonus and will probably continue to slightly outpace it over time.

Effective Hourly Wage

I kept a detailed time log of working on Easter Bonus and the total hours were 184 – this includes marketing and portal contracts etc at the end. It took less time to make than Xmas Bonus because I already had a code base to work with, but I still added in some improvements. A lot of the time was getting the new look and feel right and there was also a certain overhead in designing and testing some new levels (although a few are actually the same as Xmas Bonus!). I basically “re-skinned” Xmas Bonus, as some people scornfully put it, but note that it was not a simple quick task at all as the total hours worked shows.

Anyway, this gives an effective hourly wage of $8.12. Not a huge wage at all, but it’s $3.00 more than for Xmas Bonus, so it showed progress! My other games seriously blast this out of the water though (some add a zero to the hourly wage!)

Keep an eye out for my Holiday Bonus sales stats coming soon. They are pretty rad.

Once again, I hope that you enjoyed this post and that you found it useful (either as inspiration or as a warning, lol). Thanks for reading!