Was reading this informative post on www.developmag.com and some incredible sales figures jumped out at me. I knew the games mentioned had done well but seeing these hard figures was mind blowing…

- Jewel Quest (2 games in franchise excluding the solitaire ones): $27 million in revenue! 4 million units sold. (average $6.75 per sale). Sales breakdown = 2 million on PC, 2 million on mobile and around 100,000 via XBox Live Arcade. AWESOME!

- Diner Dash: 200 million downloads (not clear if this is the first game only or includes the sequels). $35 million revenue. If I Assume $6.75 per sale (like for Jewel Quest) that’s over 5 million units sold! (and a 2.5% conversion rate.) I’ve seen it on a variety of platforms including Nintendo DS!

- Mystery Case Files (not sure if it means the first game or includes the sequels): 1.2 million units sold. Impressive! Wonder if the programmer is a millionaire yet?

Hope you enjoyed these stats!

This article mentions how an Agatha Christie-based casual game - Death on the Nile has been downloaded 10 million times in 6 months (one of the downloads was mine, and I liked it). That’s pretty good (although my Wizard of Oz game has had pretty high downloads too…), so let’s do some projections:

If it has a 1% conversion rate, which is good but not fab, that’s 100,000 sales! Perhaps if the conversion rate is less due to people checking the game out of curiosity, then maybe it’s 50,000 sales. Still a lot, plus the game is only 6 months old. It’ll still be downloaded in another 12 months time, albeit at a lesser rate. So 50,000 x $20 = $1,000,000 nice. Although it’s probably been sold discounted many times via people like Big Fish Games, but worst case at $7 each that’s still $350,000 turnover. I wonder what the art, sounds, license and programming costs were? Probably a reasonable amount but not massive. This game will have generated some nice profit for someone somewhere for sure…

A thread on indiegamer was recently started by “Princec”, the director of www.puppygames.net, which details some tips for improving conversion rate (the number of sales divided by the number of downloads). The point is that each tip may not do much on it’s own but they all add up - so if you implement lots of them you’ll get a hike in conversion rate, which is what everybody wants! Here’s his list:

- Try selling initially at $10 - doubled or tripled my conversion rates!
- Before game exit, show them a nag screen with option to quit disabled for a short while. Or more amusingly, make both quit and buy buttons take them to the shop page anyway
- Be responsive to non-technical queries but ignore technical ones. People who make technical queries have never purchased one of my games, but many people with other sorts of question are overwhelmed by my friendliness and helpfulness and buy.
- On first install when the user clicks PLAY take them to the instructions screen before they can begin playing]
- Keep your instructions screen down to one page if you can
- Use both demo timeout AND maximum number of plays, and if possible, randomise these on first install and attempt to log which combination converts best and then lock it down to those values
- Remove as many “options” as possible from the game. Most users are entirely bewildered by screen resolutions.
- Avoid games that require both hands on the keyboard
- Use humour! Stale BUY IT NOW pages aren’t very compelling. Keep your players in a good mood when they reach your shop page. (See DRoD for best examples)

Sound advice, except for ignoring technical queries. He may be correct that these people never buy but if I can improvement my framework so that it runs on a few extra percent of computers then maybe I’ll make more sales in the long run.

Some other good points were raised:

- Show them something really cool, but only for a very, very short period of time and don’t let them play with it much. i.e. End on a cliff-hanger.”
- I always thought it was silly to nag them after they already decided to quit. I like to nag them between levels or at any point when their intention is to keep playing. Once they have decided to stop playing I give up and let them exit in peace.