Back in November 2011 I wrote a post about how my casual games seem to have a very long tail in terms of sales. I followed this up with a 5 minute speech/slideshow at Full Indie in December 2011 called “Holiday Bonus Postmortem”.

Here’s the video:

Stay tuned to this blog for a follow up on my December 2012 sales (hint: it was my best month ever!) and how the mobile versions performed.

image by DrJohnBullas

Sorry about that, there are proper graphs further down.

I recently ran a Thanksgiving sale on my site offering up to 70% of my casual games and I’d like to share the results with you.

Deals

The basic deal was that I was offering 50% off my 5x match-3 games (not Fairway Solitaire and Unwell Mel because Big Fish Games own those) via a coupon code.

Then I had 3 bundles:

2x Christmas-themed games for 60% off (PC only)
3x match-3s for 65% off (PC and Mac)
5x match-3s for 70% off (PC only)

Payment Provider

I use BMT Micro as my payment provider. They have various discount schemes that I was able to use for this sale. When I create a bundle, all the games are listed individually so that keys and download links can be send out for each one. I highly recommend BMT Micro for their customer service, and ability to deliver.

Promotion

- The sale started on Tuesday 22nd November and ran for 9 days until Wednesday 30th November.

Day 1:
- I put a coloured banner about the sale on the top of my page and showed some fancy bundle images.
- I emailed Gamezebo (a site that reviews casual games) and they mentioned the sale on day 4 which was my best day for sales.
- I tweeted about it twice on the first day (got 10 RTs, thanks everyone); made a Facebook post on my Grey Alien Games Facebook page; posted on the BlitzBasic and IndieGamer forums; and wrote a blog post about it.
- I emailed my mailing list of newsletter subscribers. An email was sent to 384 people and got 137 opens (35.68%) and 83 clicks (18.75%). It was text only and maybe could have benefited from a picture. I got a few bounces and a couple of unsubscribes, not many.

Day 3:
- I tweeted about it again on day 3 (got 6 RTs). Had about 1250 followers, so my best RT % on day 1 was about 0.8%, which isn’t exactly stellar.
- I also told indiegamer about it on day 3 via Twitter and got a retweet a couple of days later and also posted a comment on their blog post about sales but it got held up for a few days before appearing.

Day 6:
- I tweeted about 3 days being left (got 4 RTs)

Day 9
- I tweeted about it being the last day (got a few RTs)

I didn’t do these things:

- Contact Jay is Games, and I probably should have.
- Send out a press release or contact any other press/bloggers.
- Post on any other forums. I only post on ones I’m an active member on so it doesn’t feel like spam.
- Advertising. Probably should have used up a free Google Adwords $100 credit if I could be arsed.

Results

And now for the bit you’ve all been waiting for…drumroll…

29 units sold. Total revenue $55. Not exactly impressive, but hey it’s more than zero!

Because most of those sales were bundles, there were only 10 actual customers, 2 of which were existing customers (presumably from my newsletter, meaning it had a 0.5% success rate, which I’m quite disappointed by). Still at least that’s 8 new customers who signed up to my newsletter so I can inform them of future deals and the soon-to-be-released Holiday Bonus for iPhone/iPad/Android/WP7.

Also, weirdly, no one used the 50% discount coupon code, even though two customers bought single games (at full price)!

Traffic

- I checked my site’s monthly bandwidth usage before and after the sale and it went from about 3GB to 5.65GB, which wasn’t much out of the ordinary.
- I also tracked the number of hits on my site via my primitive visit counter and I got about 3000 hits on the first day and 2000 hits on each subsequent day. Again not much our of the ordinary.

There certainly wasn’t any kind of server meltdown.

Conclusion

For me this sale was an experiment because I’ve never done one before. I wanted to learn how to sell game bundles using BMT Micro, and I wanted to see how effective my Twitter followers are at spreading the word and how effective some other channels are (like my newsletter).

I’m crazy busy with several main projects right now, so I didn’t have any spare time to spend on better marketing or anything; I just wanted to see what I could do with a sort of basic minimum. The answer seems to be, not very well (take heed other indies!)

Part of the problem is that I’m selling casual games and I only really got one mention in the casual gaming press, and most of my Twitter followers are indie game devs, so they aren’t that interested. I thought that I’d have made more sales from my newsletter (which contains lots of existing customers), especially as a 70% discount is a pretty strong offering, but it wasn’t to be. Also of course I was competing against TONS of other sales and indie bundles.

I’ll probably try again at Christmas though and see what happens. Wish me luck!

Hope you enjoyed reading this post.

If you have any advice or thoughts, please leave a comment. Thanks!

Since starting Grey Alien Games I have sold over 100,000 units online. I’m very proud of that figure. When you see an number like that it’s: a) a good indicator that you are successful at what you do, and b) fairly easy to imagine it being 1,000,000 instead.

The sales are from the 6 games that I programmed and the Grey Alien BlitzMax Framework that I made, so 7 products in total (I cannot be more specific about which product sold what quantity due to contractual obligations). Most of the sales came from portals such as Big Fish Games, Oberon, and Reflexive, but I have also received a small amount of direct sales. I don’t really do any marketing for my site so any direct sales at all are a bonus.

The total revenue (after processing fees) from those sales is over £110,000 and it’s nearly 100% profit (97.6%), I’ve only spent a tiny amount on tools and game assets. The average earnings per hour is £34.88 (I kept detailed time logs of time spent making my products). Three games have earned me over £40 per hour.

The good thing about selling games online is that the figures above are not final! They will keep going up month after month, albeit dwindling over time.

Hopefully I’m proof that being successful as an Indie casual game developer is possible. You can do it too!

Happy New Year! Have a great 2010.