Last year I tried to get Holiday Bonus for Mac on apple.com. I filled out the form to submit an app but never heard anything back which was frustrating, and then the window of opportunity passed…

So I added it to my To Do list to try again late in 2008. I even asked other developers how easy it was and they said they had no problems. Anyway, Reflexive Arcade launched the Mac version of Holiday Bonus just before Christmas and it seemed to do pretty well on their site (got to no. 5 in the Mac games) and whilst checking the Internet for other Mac version (because I’d also sent the game to Oberon and BFG) I found it already on apple.com! The link actually led back to a Reflexive Affiliate site (http://www.topgamearcade.com/).

So the canny affiliate (I think it may actually be some kind of mirror site owned by Reflexive) added it directly to apple.com before I did! I considered asking them to remove it so I could make my own submission, but then I thought “What if mine doesn’t get accepted again?” and also it’s a certain amount of admin to do it and I was pretty busy at the time. So I didn’t bother.

Affiliate sales make me 40% of the full $20 price I could have made had I sold it myself. So there’s a reasonable loss there, but I didn’t really know how many copies it would sell and if it was really worth asking for it to be removed (also Reflexive might actually refuse due to some contractual reason). Plus maybe the wrapped version from Reflexive might convert (downloads into sales) better than my wrapped version, who knows? Looking back, perhaps this thinking was a bit negative and I should have just gone ahead and done it to ensure I got the full 100%. Interesting dilemma.

So my advice would perhaps be that if you have a Mac version of a game, put it on apple.com yourself first and on your own site and THEN submit it to the portals so that they don’t put it on apple.com first and take a big cut. This seems pretty obvious but I totally failed to do it due to not being 100% focused on my own business at the time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 3:15 am and is filed under Grey Alien Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.