Category Archives: marketing tips

Minisurvey about VN/Dating sims results

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Disclaimer: speaking with some friends who knows more about statistics than me, they said that the data collected might be not really reliable. I know, I made it mostly for fun with no intention of providing the “ultimate guide to make visual novels” for game developer 🙂

However, from my personal experience (I’ve made many VN/Dating Sims in past 3 years) I have to admit was quite surprised by the results, because they match completely my experience regarding which games sells more. The data collected comes mostly from Lemmasoft, Amaranthia, my own twitter, my forums, and indiegamer forums.

The total people who answered is 126, but recently has been progressing of only 1 new person a day, so I guess is time to draw conclusiong and post results.

I’ve made a PNG image of the final result, so anyone can link to it or share it easily, look on the right side of this post for the clickable thumbnail. As you can see, the standard Otome and Bish?jo are the most popular genres (well, no surprise here). As for art-style, detailed manga (I suppose like Heileen, Bionic Heart) wins hands on over all other art genres. People don’t like american comic style and cartoon style (I wish I did this survey before making Vera Blanc, I would have used manga art for that game too!).

As for setting, again no surprise: fantasy settings are always the most popular in any kind of games, not just VN/Dating Sims, so really I expected that. The other settings are more or less equivalent, only the modern drama/slice of life is slightly more popular (and yes, sci-fi isn’t much popular!).

Sexyness in games is a bit surprising, and probably the result less reliable IMHO. From my experience is always safer to go with family friendly (if you’re interested in maximizing revenues) for the simple fact that most big portal/sites wouldn’t accept your game otherwise. If you are making the game just as hobby or with direct sales in mind only, then you can ignore it 🙂 So far most of my games fall into the 2nd category from top, sexy stuff, but I have many family friendly games coming out next. One day I would like to make a very sexy, almost erotic game though. Maybe when I have enough funds to make Bionic Heart 2 as I have in mind of doing it.

The extras question is really a surprise. And I believe is very accurate: Most people don’t want to mix genres. If they want to play a minigame, they can find plenty of them in casual games. I really think VN/dating sims should focus more on typical dating sims elements and statistics. Or just let the players to read the story. You can also argue that if you put too many minigames in a VN, then it isn’t a real VN anymore but a “game with a story” 😉 It’s somewhat hybrid territory here.

“What is most important” result is also interesting. The most important thing is WRITING! Not art, as I was always thinking. Also, the starting idea, and I agree completely. If the starting idea is good, and the writing too, you have all the elements needed for a good VN. That’s the reason why I’m not personally writing my future games anymore 😀
Also is interesting that most people don’t care about voice overs. I had already given up on that because of too many unreliable voice-artists, and the result somehow comforts me. People don’t seem to care too much about the number of endings as well. Maybe better to make a more linear story, but longer to play ?

Based on the next question, “Do you really replay dating sim/visual novels to see all the possible endings?” it really seems so. Not many people are obsessed about unlocking all endings, apparently. I sort of agree since I do the same. I did the same also for AAA titles like Dragon Age / mass effect 2. I simply went to youtube and looked for videos for the other possible endings 🙂

About the remaining results, people seems to like game series (after a slow start I am now getting good results with Heileen 1+2 bundles), most people use a PC to play, and they don’t seem too much enthusiast about the idea of having to be connected to play a game.

That’s all! Again, this is not the holy-bible-of-VNs, but I found the results quite interesting and in many cases matching my own experience.

It means that you should all make fantasy based VN with stats and RPG elements? Well no, I believe that any game that is GOOD can sell: is your choice if you want to try to appeal mainstream (but have more competition) or niches (smaller market but much less competition). Personally I’d like to see more horror VNs, for example! 🙂

Simulate my life, please

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Of my upcoming games, there’s basically no “pure-VN” game. Flower Shop spin-off will have mini and meta games (more details in the coming weeks), and the other two otome game projects will have all a dating sim / life sim structure.

I know is a bit hard to define what is a “pure VN” and what isn’t. As practical example, Heileen is a pure VN: mainly text and choices (there are also quests but they’re not complex as the quest you might find in a RPG game). Summer Session instead is clearly a dating sim: you have stats to raise, several places to visit, character relationships, and so on.

What’s the difference then between a dating sim and a life sim? This is really tough. I might say that Summer Session and Flower Shop were dating sim, while Spirited Heart was a life sim. But really in this case the difference is much more subtle! I dare to say that dating sim focus more on the romance/relationship, while life sim have also other aspect. Spirited Heart has romance option but you can play it completely ignoring that, trying to raise your stats and become the best researcher, dancer, and so on.

I always loved life simulation games: I played The sims until the latest installation. However, while they’re very nice and varied to play, they miss completely dialogues as you might know. Making “dynamic dialogues” that change every time is impossible even for EA. However I would prefer some sort of “scenarios” where you have specific character background, life goals, relationship, etc. Sort of smaller scale, but more detailed.

On other news, I might be opening a new website soon specifically for otome games, since in my main website I always focused more on RPG/Strategy games. Games like Spirited Heart are OK, but for the new ones I’ll use a separate website. Beside I’ve read somewhere that if you put too many choices in front of the user he gets confused (I seem to recall the number was 12, don’t ask me why!).

So makes sense to keep in homepage only the best selling games, but some games deserve space anyway. So, better start a new domain with a new specific market in mind.

Five golden rules for new indies

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I thought to take all the years of experience as indie, and write down five ESSENTIAL rules/tips to follow if you want to be a fulltime indie, focusing on direct sales:

  1. keep your IP / retain control – seriously, everyone agrees on this. Cliff posted about it a while back on his blog, and I want to reiterate this concept. There are SO many examples of people carelessly giving up their IP (Intellectual Properties) to find out a big company XYZ had made a fortune from what they just sold. So, if you think you have a good IP, think twice before selling it. Or ask for some big money upfront 🙂
    Also: whatever tool you use, be sure that you have FULL CONTROL over it.  Some examples: you can let a portal carry your downloadable game, but be sure that you agree with their terms. If they’re going to sell it at $6.99, you won’t have much success trying to sell it directly at $19.99.
    Another example: someone just published a new platform to build games online easily. Awesome! But does that platform let you publish the games ON YOUR SITE? No? Then, it’s not that great. Remember that promoting YOUR site, building up YOUR mailing list, YOUR fans, will let you survive even through really tough periods (like this year of crisis). See Jeff Vogel posts about getting “1000 true fans”. Also, don’t forget that if you build up your site, you can later resell the domain if has enough traffic / relevance.
  2. marketing – this is a very controversial point. I see to many people wanting to burn thousands dollars investing in a marketing firm or simply Google Adwords. It’s a wrong choice and I tell you why: marketing/advertising works but ONLY in certain situation you’ll get a decent ROI (return of investment).
    Example: a MMO. The nature of MMO, with his increased revenues per user, makes advertising much more viable than trying to promote a single-player-downloadable game.
    I get decent ROI from ads because over the year I built a catalog of SEVERAL games. So people that come to my site from a Spirited Heart banner, might end up buying also Flower Shop and/or Vera Blanc. It is not uncommon to see same person buy 3-4 games at once. Now what would happen instead if I had just ONE game for sale? Probably wouldn’t recover the costs. In the beginning, the best thing you can do is either release several games or partner with some affiliates.
  3. partnership & affiliates – Affiliates can be PURE GOLD: find someone that has a similar user-base (sells similar games to yours) and ask if he is interested in selling your game. Or, look if he is affiliating his games. I regularly promote other people’s games in my newsletter and I get a nice chunk of cash from affilite sales, plus I remind people of my site and sometimes they even end up buying games of mine (it’s really like if they forgot about them, and sendind a newsletter about other games reminded them!).
    Also, build up relationships with fellow indies. Over the years I got to know some people and now I have several business relationships with many of them. I did games together with Phelios, with Hanako, with Sakevisual. We didn’t even need a contract, because everyone had a reputation to keep (of course, be careful about people you just met). We exchange tricks and tips, and we keep updated about the latest news. What you learn through those relationship is often priceless.
    It’s a pity that not many people see the enormous potential in doing partnership and affiliate other developer games, especially niche games!
  4. differentiate / experiment – I started making sports games, then RPG, then simulations, then wargames, and now visual novels, dating sim… unless you have a fixation for one specific genre, and unless that genre gives you good sales (in this case would be pretty stupid to try another!) you should really try to differentiate.
    In my example I’m talking about game genre: another way is to change platforms (iphone, android, flash) or system (microtransaction, social games). I’ve heard so many stories of people that changed completely field and made a fortune…
  5. no epic projects – this is true especially when doing the first games. Doing an awesome 3d space battle should be done ONLY AFTER you built up a good catalog of games and lots of experience in doing indie games. I’m not saying that they should be avoided: only that if you go for the “big hit”, it can work but can also be a “big miss”, so you could end up with a unfinished game (because you’re burned) or run out of funds, or simply have to get back to daily work and then not have time to market it properly, and so on.

Of course, this is based on my personal experience! I hope you found this post informative, and if you did, spread the word about it 🙂

Is worth having a Flash version of your downloadable?

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That’s one of the most frequent questions I see asked around in game development forums. I released in May a flash version of my downloadable game Spirited Heart, so thought to share some info about it.

The stats are quite clear (timeframe, 2 months):

gameplays: 60-70k estimate (mochi-ads is 55k, plus a few more thousands in Kongregate, Newgrounds and other portals I submitted my game to)
unique visitors to my site:  12,886
tracked sales: 7 !!

As you can see, the visitors to sales ratio (called also CR, conversion rate) is 0,05%! Well below the standard CR of downloadable demos that is around 1% (actually, for my game it’s 2,6% well above average). If we calculated the people per sale ratio from everyone that played the game, we would get 1 sale every 10.000 players 😀

And I even put lots of “nag stuff” in the game, in several parts there was a hint that certain game functions would be available only in the “Deluxe Version” and not in the free flash demo.

That said, I probably made some mistakes in it: putting too many “hints” that the game was only a “flash demo”, pissed some people off and especially on Kongregate I got very low rating only because of that. Also, the flash market is known to like more male-oriented games (zombies, blood, violence!) so my game was badly targeted also for that.

Still, even if my game was played by 7 milion people (that would be a TOP record!) according to those visits/buy ratio I would have got “only” 700 sales, or translated in money, about $15000. But just so you know, Desktop Tower Defense, one of the most popular flash games of all times, made 15million plays. So getting 7 million would be almost an impossible task unless you have something really UNIQUE.

Based on this, the conclusion would be quite easy: is NOT worth it. However, I know some other devs doing online only games or browser MMO got much better results than me. So is correct to say that making a flash version of your DOWNLOADABLE game is a bad move. But for a online/browser game that could be very different.

New screens and facebook app

I’ve uploaded on my facebook profile new pictures of the upcoming game, but I have reuploaded here in my blog too:

related to facebook, I made an app to play my webgame inside facebook. If you liked the game and want to see more of those in future, please take a minute to try it at this URL:

http://apps.facebook.com/heileen/

it will ask your permission to post a small feed on your facebook profile saying that you’re playing the free flash game Heileen. This way I hope to get more people interested in visual novels to be able to release more soon! 😀