Just read a good little article (via Binary Joy) on how to improve your conversion rate via the trial. The trial is ultra important for Indie games and I’ve seen so many bad ones, but I’ve also seen some great ones. The Fairway Solitaire trial was carefully constructed to hook people in and it worked well - many people said they were really enjoying playing it and then suddenly the time was up and they just had to buy it

Here are the main points that I feel are important:

- Make the trial easy so that it can be finished no problems. (Yet still ramp up the challenge a little bit). Get your mum and friends to play it. If they reach the end of the trial and want to play more then you are onto a winner.

- Make the trial rewarding straight away (not after half an hour or something). Fill it with bonuses, trophies, sparkly effects, fancy screen transitions and great sounds.

- Make it interesting by introducing new gameplay features rapidly and don’t let up. You need to give the impression that the game has only just begun when the trial ends and that there’s loads more they are missing out on.

- Don’t repeat any graphics/design elements. Everything should be new in the demo even if straight after the demo stuff starts getting repeated.

- Keep the story quick and punchy, people don’t want to wade through wads of dross just to get to the game.

- Have good quick simple hints (or gameplay that requires none).

- If you have a map or level system, make sure that your demo doesn’t show the player that they’ve completed more than 1/3rd of the game in the hour trial! Otherwise there is little point in them buying it. Just make sure gameplay is 4-5 hours absolute minimum for an average player. (Fairway had about 25+ hours for the best of players)

- Get them hooked. Ideally they should play the hour demo and then buy it at the end. If they only play it for 20 mins then never again, you’ve lost a sale, or if they play it in dribs and drabs they have little incentive to buy it. If you can make it appeal to all family members then the main player may buy it just so the other family members can join in the fun.

- At the end of the day, you’ve got to look at what you’ve made objectively and think “Would I buy this if I was this type of customer?”. If the answer is no, rework the demo (or abandon the game ;-))

- Check out other top games to see what is so good about their demos.

Hope this helps.

My Big Fish Games is an affiliate scheme run by Big Fish Games.

Game Page

After you’ve signed up you can make a special page (called a “Game Space) with your favourite games on. Here’s mine. I’ve populated it with 3 of my own games and a couple of best sellers that I like. You can write your own text to go with the games to give it a personal feel. However, I feel that the page is a bit limited with only 1 featured game and 4 favorite games. It would be nice if I could make different layouts and have different sections for say adventure, hidden object, my games etc. I rarely direct people to this page because I have my own website, but if I didn’t have a website then I guess this page would be useful.

Links

As well as linking to your Game Space page you can also to the Big Fish Games front page and to individual game pages. All you do is add your affiliate code to the end of the link like this. Pretty simple.

Commission

The commission is only 25% per sale and because a lot of games sold on Big Fish Games are via the Game Club, the gross sale value can often be as low as $6.95! That’s a big different from the 40% commission offered by Reflexive where each game is sold at $19.95. However, once you “capture” a customer via your affiliate code, they remain yours for life. This means that every time they buy a game, even years later, you’ll make 25% from them! This makes up for the lower commission in my opinion.

Also, if someone who’s clicked one of your affiliate links makes their own Game Space and then starts making a commission from their own affiliate sales, you get 25% of their commission! (They still get their own 25%). So if one of your affiliate customers starts making loads of sales, you’ll be making 6.25% of whatever they make, wow! Plus it doesn’t end there, if one of their affiliate customers sets up their own game space, you’ll make 25% of 6.25% which is 1.56%! It’s not very much but it all helps. Believe it or not, this carries on forever, although at some point the commission must be less than one $0.01, so pretty much worthless (unless the superman 3 effect kicks in.

Reporting

The online reporting system is not as detailed as Reflexive’s. Plus you can’t use the customer emails yourself (you can use the Reflexive customer emails!). You can see who all of your “friends” are and which ones have set up their own Game Spaces and how much money each of your friends has made for you. Furthermore you can manually add friends and email your “friends” with a newsletter etc. I haven’t used the email facilities yet - but I probably will when I release my next game. I might even use the email facilities when Azada 2 comes out as an experiment.

My Results

Firstly I’ll say this - I wish I’d signed up to this scheme sooner! I had it on my to do list all year but was so busy with my latest game that I didn’t bother. I’ve been losing passive income all that time, doh! I only just signed up to it in mid-December so that I could earn a commission on sales of Fairway Solitaire (my latest game).

I posted affiliate links to the game on my blog, on the BlitzBasic.com showcase, on www.BinaryJoy.co.uk and in my BlitzBasic and IndieGamer signatures. Plus I sent out a newsletter to my Framework customers and my newsletter subscribers (approx. 400 emails). I know from tracking that only about 40% of people opened my newsletter and that the click through rate was only about 15% (so that’s about 60 clicks).

Straight away this resulted in some good commissions, one day I even made more than $60. This could have been people just buying my game via my links, or perhaps they were buying other games too. It’s exciting to check my email each day and see how much money I’ve made, sometimes it’s nothing (sob) and sometimes like $1.50, but other days it’s over $10, which I think is fine for a start. So far I’ve made nearly $200 in about 2-3 weeks. It may be slowing down now that Christmas is over and that most people who were going to click my links have already done so.

Certainly it’s done better than Reflexive has ever done for me in a single month, but it’s early days yet, I need to monitor it on a monthly basis. However, I’m pretty sure that it’ll build up much bigger over time. I know someone with thousands of friends who makes multiple hundred dollars each month, nice.

Ranking

One more thing … You can find out your ranking in all the people using My Big Fish Games. When you logon to check your details it shows your ranking on the left-hand side. Currently I’m 89th on the Rookie Partners list (I was #1 on the Gold Members list for a while but I think that list is LOWER than the Rookie Partners list). I’ve been as high as #86 but I’ve dropped back a bit recently. I’m not sure how they work this ranking out - it could be based on total earnings or earnings in 30 days or something, not sure. It’s probably total earnings though because they also list the top 10 partners and they are in order of earnings. Their earnings are CRAZY good; the #1 parnter has earnt $67,000 - wow, that’s like having a good full-time job!

Hey if you are already a partner, let me know where you are in the list

Conclusion

So far I’m very happy with it and I’m going to work at boosting the income from My Big Fish Games throughout the year.

Naturally I’m hoping that some of you will use my links from the top of this page to either a) buy games or b) sign up to My Big Fish Games. You can’t loose and neither can I! What are you waiting for? Do it today.

Grey Alien Games is a member of the Reflexive games affiliate scheme (it’s probably not called exactly that). What this means is that I can post links on my website to games on their site and whenever someone buys a game from them (via my link) I get a 40% commission. All I have to do is make sure that the link has my affiliate code in it. As most games sell for $19.95 I get almost $8 per sale which isn’t bad. Also, I think you get 50% commission for actual Reflexive games such as the Richochet games.

I’ve been using it for about 11 months now and have made around $500 from it, but I haven’t made a BIG effort to push this figure up due to being busy programming my last game.

I use the links in two places:

1) on my www.greyaliengames.com website (recently revamped) - I’ve got lots of games on the front page and every one links to Reflexive.

2) on www.binaryjoy.co.uk in the news articles and reviews that I write.

Reporting

You can actually make different “channels” to track where your sales come from, so I can see how many I get from this site and how many from Binary Joy news and reviews - this is pretty handy as it tells me where I need to focus more.

The reporting system is neat, I can see how many people downloaded from each channel and how many sales there were, so I can work out the conversion rate. I love this kind of stuff!

Traffic

However, to make it work you definitely need traffic. When I launched Easter Bonus in Feb 2007, my site got lots of hits and lots of downloads and affiliate sales were good. Also I was writing lots for Binary Joy. During the summer there was a big dip in sales because I wasn’t writing much for Binary Joy and nothing new happened on my site. However it’s picked up again this Christmas and with the new site design I hope to keep the games fresh and send out newsletters more often. We’ll see what happens in 2008 (depends how busy I get with new games).

Try It Out

It wasn’t very difficult to set up so I recommend you go for it, but you do need to have an existing website and it certainly helps to have some traffic. One good tip is find out how to link to the actual game page instead of directly to the download or buy page. This way the potential customer can look at the game in more detail and even if they don’t download it and download something else, you still get the commission! When I made this change I got LOTS more downloads and sales showed up in my reports.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate seems to vary a lot but my yearly average is 0.46%. So you need about 200 downloads for a single sale. Use this figure when working out how much traffic you need to make it viable. I have actually got a chart that I made of my downloads, sales, revenue and conversion rate for the whole year but I’m not sure if I signed (or agreed to) something that said I’m not allowed to release this data - so to be safe I won’t. (I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned that conversion rate, shhh).

Passive Income

At the moment it’s certainly not a big earner but it pays for my web hosting and makes a nice little profit. It’s more like a hobby, but I like the idea of having multiple passive income streams and my Reflexive affiliate game sales is one of them (eggs in many baskets and all that!) Some people really push it big and probably make TONS of money from it. There’s certainly lots more I could do if I wanted but I have a full-time job making games so can only devote a certain amount of time to it.

One thing to consider is how much time (and/or money) you spend setting up and managing a site to do this and then promoting games because if your hours are high and your sales are low, clearly it’s not worth it. However, I viewed it as a learning exercise and was hopeful that the income would grow over time. Also, once it’s done, it kinda just looks after itself and makes you money!

Big Fish Games

Soon I’ll talk about the other big affiliate scheme that other people are using which is run by Big Fish Games. It’s called My Big Fish Games and has proven very successful for me in a short space of time, but launching Fairway Solitaire definitely has something to do with that…