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Author Topic: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!  (Read 1961 times)

Grievous69

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Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« on: January 17, 2020, 09:26:16 AM »

https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/13/21063660/danger-gazers-torrent-steam-sales-piracy

Ok I know the title is a clickbait joke but here's to all diehard armchair intellectuals who think consumers trying something out and then talking about it with others is a bad thing. Look, I'm not saying every game should be free, then donate if you want. But the large amount of devs shoot themselves in the leg with their monetary decisions. Of course those with large amounts of cash will buy *** just because they can, the thing is this way gets those who are picky about their purchases.

P.S. Whoever gets the idea of puting DRM protection on their game, is hurting everyone, not just the pirates.

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SCC

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2020, 10:15:02 AM »

Regardless of my views on the matter, Alex exercises a "don't do shite that will get me into lawsuits", and apparently discussing piracy is one of these things.
Besides, Alex already has gotten some of that sweet pirate money when Sseth made his video.

Grievous69

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2020, 10:19:20 AM »

Yea I know all of that, that's why I posted it here and not in General discussions. Isn't this like a separate thing where people can talk about whatever?
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Thaago

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #3 on: January 17, 2020, 12:33:09 PM »

As a reminder, the forum rules do apply here, but as this thread is mostly about the benefits to sales that can come from voluntarily publishing a free version of the game, its not breaking any rules. Lets avoid discussion of piracy please.
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Grievous69

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #4 on: January 17, 2020, 12:49:41 PM »

Ah ok noted. And yea I was more focused on the part where the dev gave his game to the masses so everyone can try it. Indie games don't get a lof of exposure and sometimes it can be really hard to judge how good the game actually is. Also I can't remember the last time some game had an actual demo, very rare thing these days.
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Thaago

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #5 on: January 17, 2020, 01:01:50 PM »

Its interesting to think about it as advertising: there's no up front cost to releasing the game for free and getting all of the exposure/interest, only a potential future loss from people who don't buy who would have. But if there is no or little money to spend on advertising anyways, those people would have given 0 dollars anyhow, because they would have never heard of the game. In this case it seems that the 'advertising' created a lot of exposure and goodwill.

I fondly remember demos. I've never developed a game with one (or any game larger than tiny learning projects), so I don't know how much extra dev effort is required to make them happen.
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BringerofBabies

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #6 on: January 17, 2020, 01:46:10 PM »

I've never developed a game with one (or any game larger than tiny learning projects), so I don't know how much extra dev effort is required to make them happen.

Not that I've ever made one, but my understanding is that it is a decent amount of work to set up, although depending on your build pipeline it may be possible to set it up once (per game) and produce a demo from the current state of the game at any time.
Generally you want your demo to be a restricted slice of the game (possibly the very beginning of it), so you would need to:
1) Code in the prevention of escaping the restricted slice (cut off after time, can't leave an area, progress past a story event).
2) Removal of assets not in the demo slice. This includes both art/audio, but also scripting/code if possible. You want to make sure that enterprising hackers can't discover what flag/bits needs to be flipped to enable your entire game just from the demo, in addition to just reducing download size.

In addition to the basic mechanics of setting up your demo, you would also need to consider what would make the best demo for your game, and maybe even have to build demo specific content that won't show up in the main game, because you need to both introduce players to the game and give them an idea of the main gameplay. The demo for Brutal Legend did a good job introducing players to the game, as it was just the beginning of the game/tutorial, but did a poor job of showing off what the player would be doing for the rest of the game because it didn't show even an inkling of the true strategy game. Releasing a bad demo could even reduce sales of a good game (at least early on when the return on investment tends to be highest).
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SCC

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #7 on: January 17, 2020, 01:49:46 PM »

Nowadays, there are three possibilities. The first one is that you are too small for the demo to be viable to make. The second one is that you're an AAA games publisher, but you're aware of changes in the technology, so you call the demo a beta test available only for a limited time. Works for multiplayer games, because how are people going to steal their servers? The third possibility is that you are also an AAA games publisher, but instead of focusing on making games, you mostly make hype with some tv game leftovers on the side. In this case, demo is going to uncover that you are making money off people wanting to play the game, instead of actually playing the game, so letting them taste it before they spend the money is a no-go.
Unprofitable or undesirable. Demos fell from grace.

Tartiflette

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #8 on: January 17, 2020, 02:12:17 PM »

There seems to be a catch in that article though: 400% of "not much of a splash" still doesn't bode very well for the sales of the game.
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Grievous69

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #9 on: January 17, 2020, 02:22:25 PM »

Yea that's true, if it's a game almost no one ever heard of, even a 1000% increase wouldn't make a huge difference. But at the end of the day it still has more potential to come across future buyers than if it remained ''dead'' on steam. Although the best example of this, as mentioned earlier, is Sseth. No joke, games that he reviews go on a sale just before he puts out the video just to maximize the profits, and it works ridiculously good. There's a ton of ''those'' games that are hidden gems, but impossible to just stumble upon, so the only hope is you either hear it from some youtuber or a friend that plays similar games.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2020, 02:24:45 PM by Grievous69 »
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Deshara

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Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« Reply #10 on: February 07, 2020, 04:21:15 PM »

I recommend & talk about games I think my friends would like based off of torrent releases all the time. I literally bought a friend of mine DMC5 last night bc a torrent with denuvo removed got put up and I was like, "oh hey she likes DMC doesn't she?" & she isn't a pirate.
Tho TBH I think some of this comes down to the fact that the steam storefront is nigh but un-usable. Torrenting sites do a much, much better job of filtering thru the chaffe by just browsing all (game)torrents by release date & ignoring everything that's sitting in the low tens
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