BecomeAPatron

Holiday Bonus just did really well on BFG

In December Big Fish Games put Holiday Bonus on their front page and I watched it rise up to position 54 in the top 100. This was a pleasant surprise. But an even greater surprise was the royalty report that I just received – it was my second highest royalty report ever! The highest ever was for the month when Fairway Solitaire launched.

Obviously I can’t reveal exact figures but it sold a good solid four figures of units and converted well above the “average” 1% you hear sometimes. Naturally the revenue was pretty good even with most of the sales being from GameClub members. Furthermore, as the Pound Sterling is so poor right now, when the royalties get sent to my UK bank account they will look rather nice. Very handy as Helen (my fiancée) just got a big tax bill.

Once the January royalty reports come in I’ll public post all my sales totals for Holiday Bonus. I remember at the time (Nov 2006) being a little bit worried about spending over £1000 on graphics and music for the game, but I’ve made that money back many times over. Also some portals like Real Arcade wouldn’t take it because it was “seasonal”, yet every Christmas (there’s been 3 since it’s launch) it seems to do better and better!

I worked extremely hard for one month to release it in time for Christmas 2006 (it was a reskin of my Oz game with new features), but I’m glad I did. I think the game really does have a great Christmas feel and I’m sure that feeling converts well into sales. I even considered making a Holiday Bonus Gold version at one point with more levels and more features, but never got round to it due to working for BFG as a 3rd party programmer.

BFG were supposed to launch the Mac version of Holiday Bonus at Christmas too, but due to their Seattle office getting a lot of snow it never launched until the start of January. This is a shame as I’m sure it would have done well a week or two earlier. Well I’ll see what the royalty reports say next month. I know that it got up to position 5 on the Mac games on Reflexive and of course I can view real-time reports on Reflexive’s Game Centre Solution site which is fantastic. It made some pretty good money there for me too.

2 Responses to “Holiday Bonus just did really well on BFG”

  1. Steve Says:

    I enjoyed both Holiday Bonus and its predecessor Xmas Bonus. I think a great addition would be the ability for users to create their own levels – maybe by an xml or csv file that the end user could put in a directory and the game would pick them up and add them to a drop-down of user contributed levels. For example, if the game is a 10×10 grid, just have a 100 row csv file where the user would specify each block:

    is it blank?, starting image, ice or not, power-up or not, etc…

  2. Grey Alien Games Says:

    Hi Steve, glad you liked my games! Actually the levels ARE stored in a csv file (in Data/Levels, but of course if you change them you change the official levels right now because there is no option for user-created levels to be loaded in separately. I even have a level editor actually. Yes those things would be great to add to build a community around the game, but as always it’s a matter of time…