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Reflexive Games Affiliate Scheme

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…

11 Responses to “Reflexive Games Affiliate Scheme”

  1. papamook Says:

    easily the best blog post I’ve read all year!
    (and I’ve not been drinking this time!)

  2. Oliver Rendelmann Says:

    Awesome post! Thanks for sharing that! 🙂

  3. Grey Alien Games Says:

    You are welcome. Hope it comes in handy or at the very least is an interesting read 🙂

  4. Joe Says:

    Great post, I have heard of but not seen many of the details on the Reflexive program. I’m looking forward to what you have to say about BFG’s.

    It has really shown some good results for us. The big strengths as I see it are the lifetime residuals from customers you introduce, along with the residuals from Game Space members who introduce other players. I have customers that I am receiving commissions on their 6 and 7th game purchase!

  5. Grey Alien Games Says:

    Yes the lifetime commission is a great idea as Reflexive is only a 30 day cookie or something like that. The BFG % is only 25% which is not so good and of course most games are sold using Gameclub so are worth a lot less, so you need the lifetime commission to make up for it. If it pans out really well, I may swap ALL my games over. Anyway, more on this in the proper BFG post. It’s early days yet but I’m liking it!

  6. Joe Says:

    BFG’s actually announced a 15% exclusivity bonus back in August bringing it up to 40% for some affiliates. But again looking forward to your post, there were several active threads going on the indiegamer forum in the months after they launched the program but they seem to have played out.

  7. Grey Alien Games Says:

    What is this 15% exclusivity bonus? Thx

  8. Grey Alien Games » Blog Archive » My Big Fish Games Says:

    […] sale value can often be as low as $6.95! This is 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 […]

  9. Grey Alien Games » Blog Archive » No More Affiliate Games On My Site Says:

    […] even though some people seem shocked by it. It’s a shame as I was making some money from Reflexive Arcade and My Big Fish Games via affiliate games sales. But it wasn’t big money and certainly not […]

  10. UFO Bob Says:

    Found you on Google + I think this post needs updating as Reflexive is no longer using affiliation….

  11. Grey Alien Games Says:

    I know. I’ll leave the post for historical purposes though.