Someone just emailed me asking some advice about getting their game onto Big Fish Games (BFG). They said “publish” on BFG but I’m guessing that they meant “distribute” instead. I’ve only got experience with having my games “distributed” on BFG, which means that they put a game up on their site and pay me royalties – this leaves me free to also put the game up on my own site and on other portals. If BFG “publishes” a game for you, they’ll give you detailed feedback and do lots of marketing and distribution for you, it’s a different ball game and it’s up to you which route you prefer.

Before you approach BFG make sure that your game is finished, good quality and as bug free as you can make it. It’s a good idea to have tested it on other people to make sure that they understand how to play it and don’t have any major problems. BFG has a “Developer Relations” department that evaluates games that get sent to them – you can read about the submission process here. They will advise the developer of any changes that may need to be made before it can be published on the site (splash screens, technical issues etc).

Bear in mind that BFG get sent many games each week and only the best ones actually make it onto the site, so make sure that your game is really professional before sending it to them. How do you know if it’s good enough? Download other games on the site and compare yours in terms of graphics, sound, playability, content/scope etc. Posting on forums like Indiegamer can help you get much needed feedback to refine the game into a winning title. Here’s another clue, if you didn’t spend much money making your game, then it probably isn’t going to be good enough.

Regarding royalty rate: I’m not sure I’m publicly allowed to state BFG’s royalty rate, so just in case let’s say that an average casual gmae portals is about 25% to 40% and that if you let them have an “exclusive”, which means that only their site has your game for the first few weeks, you may get a better deal and will certainly get better promotion – something worth considering.

Note that some Indies actually prefer to put their game on their own site (and use their own mailing lists) for several months to maximise revenue at the full $19.95 price (or similar) before putting it on the portals to make use of their much bigger audiences but with a greatly reduced revenue per sale (e.g. 35% of $6.95 after transaction fees = about $2 or so).

Check out this post for more info: I’ve just finished my game – now what?

Also here’s an article by BFG founder, Paul Thelen, about bringing your game to market.

I got an email from Buzzparadise today and I found out that bloggers can write honest reviews about products and receive payment for it. When you sign up you enter your blog details and what topics you write about. Then I believe you have to insert some code into your site that tracks traffic and if your site meets their criteria you will be asked if you want to write about certain products. You can of course refuse to write about certain things if you don’t want to, it’s completely up to you. It sounds pretty good, but I’ll reserve judgement until I actually get it up and running.

The email caught my eye because it was talking about promoting online games to help smokers quit their habit. As my dad is very ill with chronic emphysema due to smoking, that would be one promotion I’d be happy to do.

If anyone else has had any experience with BuzzParadise, please let me know your thoughts! Thanks.

Someone just asked me what things I’ve done to increase downloads on my site and I replied as follows:

To be honest I made most (*lots*) of my sales from portals so I haven’t spent a lot of time optimising my site for sales, but here’s what I have done:

1) I have a front page with featured games that each link to an individual game page.

2) I put Download and Buy buttons on each game page and I used a special colour scheme where the buttons are green for “go” (instead of something like red) and they have gold on them for “quality”. Note that the whole site looks clean and professional as well, not cheap or strange. I don’t think that many people buy directly, most people download play the demo first and buy from within the security wrapper. So I believe it’s most important to encourage quality downloads. That means customers who are actually interested in the type of game they are downloading (because they’ve read enough info and seen enough screenshots beforehand) and who are thus more likely to buy than random downloaders. This saves on bandwidth and yields a higher conversion rate.

3) My game pages have a nice big colourful image of the game name/brand and some short well-written text plus a list of bullet points of fun features including how many levels there are. I also have plenty of screenshots and then a list of real comments from sites that have reviewed the game.

4) I also have a 60 day no quibble money back guarantee right under the price. This is a well known technique to increase buyer confidence. You very rarely have to give refunds and it’s certainly not worth arguing with a customer if you want to get word of mouth referrals.

5) I dropped my prices several months back from normal Indie prices of $19.95 to $9.95 and $6.95 to compete with Amazon when they dropped their prices. I got a surge in sales but it has been quiet since then.

6) I host the files myself instead of on some free crappy server which is slow and packed with adverts and popups.

7) I have a page of free games which may attract people to the site. But it could be attracting the wrong sort of people i.e. non-paying customers.

8 ) I submitted PAD files of my games to shareware sites via a shareware submission service. This boosted traffic and resulted in sales.

9) I’ve done press releases via a PR service to promote new games and that has resulted in a traffic boost.

10) I’ve got the games reviewed on other sites and as they always get good reviews, this is bound to help. However, most of the reviewers approach me instead of me asking them.

11) I’ve had my games featured on http://www.gamedujour.com and I’m planning to put them on http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/

12) I have a newsletter and I email people when I make a new game or run a special offer. This sometimes results in increased sales and is certainly an important tactic if you have a large mailing list of loyal customers.

13) My site is linked to in all my emails, my site and games are linked to in my forum sigs, and my site is linked to when I post on other people’s blogs. I also post regularly on twitter now. This may bring in a bit more traffic. I also post about my new games on BlitzBasic.com which always results in some sales.

14) I have a links page and have traded links with several other sites. This may helped traffic and page rank. Certainly having a blog helps from an SEO point of view. Oh and I put some keywords in my site metatags but I’m not sure if the search engines bother with those any more.

Other Notes

- I do track downloads and sales so that if I was to change site layout or do A/B testing or run special offers I can track the changes. Without data, you are working blind. Also it’s well known that what you track increases However, I just don’t make enough changes to bothering tracking at the moment.

- I was doing affiliate sales and that was making some OK money but I had to stop that when I became a BFG employee due to a non-compete clause in my job contract.

- I have adsense on my site which some people say is unprofessional and may even draw away potential buyers. However, I make money from it so for now it stays.

- I’ve made tons of money from selling gambling site text links despite people advising against it, although recently my site pagerank dropped which may be as a result of google penalising my site.

- I have not tried bundle deals yet and I don’t change the site content much, it’s pretty much static. I don’t have a customer oriented blog, it’s developer oriented so there is nothing to keep customers checking back regularly. I don’t use Adwords or advertise on any other sites. There’s probably tons more I could do to, but it’s not a priority for me right now. Perhaps if I spent a little time though I could boost my passive income a bit, which is always nice.