Thoughts on thoughts
All starting to get a bit meta now, like that portrait within a portrait in Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas. Anyway...
Thanks for all your comments and messages, it is always helpful to get input from you guys. Despite my frustrations at times, I'm not going anywhere, I still want to make the best game I can, and I genuinely appreciate all the support you give me, because I couldn't do it without you. As I've always said, it'll be a shame if the game ends up with a lot of black screens, but that game will exist and it will be a long game with lots of content, even if the money never improves.
Just to give you an idea of where I am coming from, since midnight on Friday, the website has had over six thousand hits, and just over 1100 downloads of the new version. I have no way of knowing how many people have downloaded it from various message boards, the patreon release post, the tumblr, and the other places I advertise, but if we put that even at a very conservative estimate of another 500, that's 1600 downloads in two days with less than half a dozen pledges to show for it.
This is why, as I said, I don't think the problem is PR, plenty of people seem to be playing the game. I need to focus on finding ways to convert these people to backers. Having listened to all of your suggestions, I've come to the following decisions:
No more public releases for at least three months - I haven't decided whether to go with demo idea, or a much longer gap between public releases as suggested, but I think offering people the chance to play a decent chunk more if they pledge may help tempt people.
The patreon page could do with a redesign - A lot has changed in a year, so the front page needs to change to reflect that, and it could also look snazzier (my friend Yron of The Eternal Feast fame is going to help me spruce it up a bit). I'm also going to look into getting a trailer made as people tend to respond better to videos according to site analytics.
What we already have needs to be polished before moving on - People's impressions are based on what they see, so the current game needs to be as good as possible. Now the game is 2-3 hours long, it is a good time to slow vertical development to focus on adding the missing features and art (mostly bgs), and generally rounding out the current experience. Save compatibility also needs to be enabled, and we have started working on that.
So that is my plan for going forward, and I guess we'll see in three months or so if it is making any difference. Again, I'd love any comments or suggestions you may have, thanks.
Comments (6)
Just a question, I see that a lot of other games go for $10 or even higher, while you give a bloody good game away for $5 per month (okay, it severly lacks at a huge amount of porn CG in comparison to some of the other games especially those with rendered graphics). And I see that you have a good amount of pledgers with 370 members in comparison to them, but only 40 of them pay $10 while 200 pay just $5. In my opinion you have the better game. So if you would get from all of those 200 patrons $10 instead of $5, you would get $1000 more and are able to order more CGs, which would help to increase the porn. And as porn sells, what would be so wrong in rising the needed amount for getting the newest release to $10, while for $5 you just get the previous one and the public release is two or more releases before that?
Hello, I like your work very much because it makes me think a lot of the role-playing books heroic-fantasy "where we are the hero". Never seen such a complete and complex game. Everything is really possible. Congratulation and we are very quickly immersed in it. The first version, free, left me on my end. I can not wait to see what happens next. I also wrote essays or news and some novels, all unpublished (because I worked in the kitchen and I could not reconcile the two) and some, although I am a touch to everything (sf, hf, war , Policeman, black humor, mystical ect ...), if you want a helping hand, do not hesitate to ask me on my mailbox. Still congratulation. Sorry if the translation is not very conform, I use google translation ^^
I'll comment on your point about PR. Consider this going off your rough estimates of 1600 downloads (that you're aware of), what's your conversion rate? When I mentioned PR before, what I meant is driving numbers to your product. So if, for example, your conversion rate is 1% than out of the 1600 downloads you've only secured 16 new subs. So the question is two fold; either increase the views, or increase your conversion rate (in the perfect world you increase both, yes). You're product is one of the few that when I sampled the game I came here and pledged. It's a good product but, think about this, lots of companies have good products and they don't sell. If you're old enough to remember the Beta and VHS wars of the 80's then you'd know that Beta was an arguable better format but Sony lost that battle. Focus on your marketing, as you noted above, and start gathering data points to see what's working and what isn't. Good luck out there.
We're in an environment where there are about 3 or 4 places to 'market' this sort of game. You have chans and a few websites and that's it. Pretty much he's hitting everyone that would find this 'relevant to their interests.' The way I see it there are only two things that encourage people to sub: 1) A genuine interest in seeing the project completed and being willing to put your money where your mouth is. 2) Liking the creator and the community enough to drop money to engage in a meaningful way. (A little flag next to your name when you go on Patreon.) I don't see where he could increase engagement or provide a better value proposition at this point for getting people onboard outside of how the patreon is featured inside the game itself.
If you swing too hard against public releases you risk more and quicker piracy. I think you definitely need and want to go with the delayed releases, but make it too long and it'll hurt your 1 dollar backers. Maybe you could layer it, but that's more work. Just be careful you don't turn into a shrieking monster people want to pirate just to spite you. Best of luck :)
My game was pirated ten minutes after the last release, there's nothing I can do about it really unless I go after links, and that is too much hassle for too little reward.