Tag: pricing

Why Escape Goat 2 is (Probably) Not Coming to Xbox Live Indie Games

Last week I spent three days at CasualConnect in San Francisco showing Escape Goat 2, as part of their amazing Indie Prize event. Free demo space, lunches, snacks, and an open bar every day!  I felt like royalty. I wish I had time to play more games and see more of the show, but I was pretty committed to demoing Escape Goat 2 the whole time. I hardly left my table during show hours.

The most common question I got was “So is this coming to mobile?” which has a lot to do with it being CasualConnect. Being a paid-up-front, download game on PC, I was definitely a fringe title for the event. I resisted the urge to give a flat “no” to the mobile port question, and instead explain how the game would need to be redesigned for touch input, and with a direct port it just wouldn’t be a high quality game. (Imagine: Virtual D-Pad)  Pretty much everyone got it when I put it that way.  Each platform has a cost of porting, and I have a limited amount of time… it comes down to prioritization.

The priority is a basic equation: Potential revenue divided by hours of work.

eg2_alpha_july_4

It’s tricky because both of these numbers are guesses. For something like Wii-U, I doubt I could even get in the ballpark for either figure, so I’d have to do more research. For Xbox Live Indie Games, I have already released three games there, so I have a much clearer picture.

1. Potential Revenue

For potential revenue, I could look at how much each of my games made in their first year. I wish I had kept all the reports, because I can only download the most recent ones. But from the data I managed to revive, here are some estimates:

Game Launch First year revenue
Soulcaster March 2010 $8,000
Soulcaster II December 2010 $4,500
Escape Goat November 2011 $4,000

A lot of people are shocked when I tell them these figures.  But that’s just XBLIG, only certain types of games really make viable revenue there.  And as you can see, the trend is–though my games are getting objectively better–they make a little less money each time. It’s probably that the marketplace is getting more more crowded with high quality titles.

Compare those figures to what I made when these games launched on PC, in the Indie Royale bundle:

Game Launch Bundle Revenue
Soulcaster I & II February 2012 $17,000
Escape Goat June 2012 $15,000

This graph illustrates my 2012 revenue breakdown:

mtb revenue 2012 pie chart

There’s a chance Escape Goat 2, with its higher production value, will make more money than any of my other games on XBLIG. Very true! There’s also a chance that when the Xbox One comes out, Microsoft puts the 360 into the federal witness protection program, like they did with the Xbox when the 360 came out. Maybe the One will have a great self publishing deal–I’m keen to learn more about this in the coming months. But my future is not with the 360.

On the subject of revenue, there’s also the issue of pricing. Do I really offer my $10 PC game on XBLIG for just $1? I bet it would make more money there, but does this help me in the long run on other platforms?

2. Cost of Porting

The other variable in the equation is the time it will take to port. Now being built from the Escape Goat code base, EG2 should be ready to rock on the 360, right? Not really. The new lighting engine required a new renderer, so we’re not 100% organic XNA anymore. It could take a couple weeks to get the code to compile for 360, not to mention time spent on optimization. The file system needs to change to use storage devices. I have to remove every instance of default paramters.  I’ve got to do Evil Checklist testing, go through playtest and peer review. It could easily be a month-long project, and yield a separate code base in need of maintenance.

eg2_alpha_july_1

Escape Goat 2 has been chartered to make money. If I’m going to do this indie thing full time, I have to pick my battles wisely. I have a lot of fans on Xbox who don’t have a PC, or prefer to game on console (just like me!) and it bums me out that I have to snub them this time around.  I wish it wasn’t like this, and I hope in reading this article you can see what went into the decision to avoid XBLIG.

The Future

But just so this article isn’t a total bummer, let me close by saying that Escape Goat 2 really works best as a console game, and it will be on a console. Couch and controller. I will be in contact with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft later this year to see what it’ll take to port and publish on Wii-U, PS4 and Xbox One. I hope to see you guys on one of those systems. I owe my indie career to XBLIG, and it will always be special to me.

I’ll see you on the PC in September, and we’ll take it from there as opportunities come up.

Soulcaster I & II PC Combo Pack for $5

For those of you who haven’t yet played the Soulcaster games on PC, here’s your chance to own both at a $1.02 discount compared to buying them separately ($2.99 USD each) on Desura.

The best part is that despite the discount, I make more per sale than I would anywhere else, thanks to the generous terms of the Humble Store.  We’re talking around 90% of your purchase price (give or take a few % based on which payment provider you use).

Huge thanks to Humble for letting me take part in this program. Direct sales from this site is something I’ve wanted for a while.

In case you were wondering: No DRM, no internet connection required while playing.  Just a Windows setup file for each game. Easy Peasy.

Magic Seal Pelts Follow-up: First Week After Price Drop

One week ago, on December 13, I dropped the prices of my first two games, Soulcaster and Soulcaster II, to coincide with an article I wrote for IndieGamerChick (later picked up by Gamasutra).  The short story is that Escape Goat wasn’t selling as well as I hoped, and my hypothesis was that it was because it was priced at 240 MSP instead of 80 MSP.  The sales figures are finally in, so I can report what’s happened so far.

Bottom line: the price drop resulted in a staggering increase in revenue. Let’s take a closer look, starting with how things were selling in November to establish a baseline.

November 1-30 2011 Sales (30 days):

Game Trials Sales Conversion Daily Net
Soulcaster 115 39 34% $2.73
Soulcaster II 76 18 23% $1.26
Escape Goat* 2686 515 19% $37.29

*Escape Goat has much stronger numbers because November was its release month. Take a look at how the daily revenue has tapered off in its second month:

As you can see, the revenue from the Soulcaster games was barely covering my rent at the coffee shop.  So let’s see what happened in the week since the price drop:

December 13-19 2011 Sales (7 days):

Game Trials Sales Conversion Daily Net Net Change
Soulcaster 63 142 225% $14.20 +520%
Soulcaster II 80 86 107% $8.60 +680%
Escape Goat 117 52 44% $15.60 -237%

The numbers speak for themselves.  I also brought in some charts to give this post a bit more visual impact:

Escape Goat:

Soulcaster:

Soulcaster II:

The most shocking stat for me is the conversion rate.  For both games it jumped above 100%.  This means more people are buying the full version than are trying the demo first.  One explanation for this is that fans of one game buy the second one sight-unseen, perhaps through the new “related games” links.  The games are similar enough that if you like one, you’ll probably like the other.  But outside of those purchases, I think it really speaks to the power of the 80 MSP in terms of impulse buying.  Customers are grabbing the full version without trying it out first, because, “hey, it’s only 80 MSP.”

Edit: As pointed out to me by Ben Kane, Alex Macfarlane Smith, and Paul Thomas, the “over 100%” conversion might be from customers who had previously downloaded the trial, rather than trying the game on the purchase date.  Thanks guys for noting this.

I know, it’s early to call.  Just one week of data, and who knows, it could all collapse over the next couple weeks.  Maybe a chunk of these sales are the result of the publicity my price drop got.  To know for sure, we’ll just have to wait.

To summarize:

  1. After dropping the price, sales went up 12-fold, driving daily revenue up five-fold.
  2. I’m making nearly as much off Soulcaster, a game that’s been out over 20 months, as I am off Escape Goat, which is only in its second month and should be in its prime for sales.
  3. The dashboard update seemed to have little effect, since it went into effect a few days before the price drop.  And notice how it did not impact the sales or downloads of Escape Goat.

I’ll post another update after some more figures come in.  But so far, 80 MSP seems like the right price for these games.  It’s great to be making money with them again.  I can’t wait until February when I can drop the price on Escape Goat as well.