Roman over at Anawiki games just made a blog post called: This is why portals sell more than you do. It includes a large list of USPs that the portals have.

So what things could Indies do on their own sites to make them different and worthwhile for customers to visit? Here’s some ideas I had in addition to those mentioned on Roman’s blog post:

- Better support. You know your game better than the portals and can offer more accurate support.
- Better price. You could in theory offer a better price but then you are into price wars which is not healthy.
- Bundles: You can offer bundles, portals don’t do that very often if at all (except for Steam, but Anawiki was talking about casual portals)
- Merchandise. You can offer merchandise (t-shirts, mugs etc) for your games.
- Pre-sales. You could offer an alpha version for 50% off (like Minecraft) or sell it based on hype before you even have an alpha version.
- No DRM. You can offer no DRM and no game-launcher type of application.
- Personalized recommendations. You could program a recommendation engine like Amazon has, but it probably wouldn’t be easy, besides if you’ve only made a few games you should just recommend them all
- User-ratings. You could offer user-ratings on the games, but what happens if users give your games too many bad ratings?
- Different demos. You could offer different demo lengths, or cut your demo at a cliffhanger and use an upsell screen, but going longer than 1 hour is probably dumb.
- Cross-platform. You could offer an online version (maybe Facebook) and iPhone version etc all on the same page. Portals won’t offer a Facebook version as they don’t want to loose players to free Facebook games. Also you can make the different versions all affect the same game profile if you store it online.
- Achievements. You could add an achievements systems which the portals don’t have but that’s not exactly quick and easy.
- Global High Scores.
- In-game chat. You could add this and any other connectivity-related stuff that the portals won’t let you do in case their customers freak out when your game tries to connect to the Internet.
- Risky Content. You can use more “out there” or “on the edge” content on your site if you want to appeal to a more niche audience.
- Free tips n tricks. You could offer this via a link of the game’s page, or put them in an email newsletter.

Can you think of any more?

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 game 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.