Nick Gravelyn

[Edit: Yes, this is #5. Where's #4? Think of #4 as the spoon and the cake. There is no #4; it's a lie.]
[Edit 2: Please read the first comment below. My profit figures are slightly (3 cents per dollar) too high. But they're still close enough that I'm not going to redo the math now.]

A general poll seems to indicate that most people are more interested in the money and marketing of Pixel Man, moreso than the code. I don’t really blame anyone; the code is pretty basic. If you want to see more code let me know and I’ll gladly share it in future posts. But since it seems like that isn’t what most people want, I will temporarily deem this the last Pixel Man post mortem that way I can get back to focusing on making more games instead of writing about this one.

Anyway, let’s run down some of the details of what we know:

1) Pixel Man was released on September 19th. It is now September 30th. That means we have 10 days of sales to base findings on. It’s definitely a good indication of how good an Indie Game can do in the launch window, but won’t give much indication of what our tail will look like. And now that we’re #8 on Major Nelson’s list and in the Top Sellers section on Marketplace, we might actually see a bit of an increase in sales. So don’t think these findings can really be extrapolated much beyond where we are right now.

2) Pixel Man is  priced at 80 MS Points which is roughly $1 USD. After Microsoft’s 30% cut, that means we see $0.70 from each sale of the game.

3) The free download codes I handed out don’t count in these statistics (at least from my understanding of the sales page on creators.xna.com)

So with that in mind, let’s look at our sales. First let’s just look at the big picture. Our current totals and conversion rate:

• Trials: 13387
• Purchases: 1294
• Purchase/Trial Ratio: 9.67 %
• Profit: $905.80

I’d say that’s pretty good. We’ve had about 5,000 more trials downloaded than Bloc had in four months which means the market is definitely better than it was when Community Games launched. Another interesting note is our ratio. We’ve been watching that steadily rise over the last 10 days. It started around 6% and now is approaching 10%. Definitely good stuff.

Now let’s dig a little deeper. Let’s look at our day to day sales for a second.

• 9/19/2009 – 60 units = $42.00
• 9/20/2009 – 195 units = $136.50
• 9/21/2009 – 111 units = $77.70
• 9/22/2009 – 133 units = $93.10
• 9/23/2009 – 62 units = $43.40
• 9/24/2009 – 102 units = $71.40
• 9/25/2009 – 126 units = $88.20
• 9/26/2009 – 205 units = $143.50
• 9/27/2009 – 153 units = $107.10
• 9/28/2009 – 108 units = $75.60
• 9/29/2009 – 39 units = $27.30

So there are two really interesting dates on there. 9/23 is the day after Halo 3: ODST launched and, from the sales thread on the XNA forums, it’s clear that nobody did really well that day. Our sales dropped 50%, but returned back to a stead 100+ for a while. 9/29 is interesting because we had our lowest sales to date, for reasons I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s just because it was Tuesday. Maybe some great game (or demo) came out that everyone is playing. Like I said above, it’s hard to know what the cause is because we don’t know what will happen today or tomorrow.

Next let’s break sales down by country since I think this is an interesting statistic to look at.

1. United States – 785 units = $549.50
2. United Kingdom – 276 units = $193.20
3. Canada – 78 units = $54.60
4. Japan – 65 units = $45.50
5. Germany – 49 units = $34.30
6. Sweden – 21 units = $14.70
7. Italy – 7 units = $4.90
8. Spain – 7 units = $4.90
9. France – 6 units = $4.20

I find the large gap in sales between countries very interesting. I figured the sales were going to remain better in the US and UK than other countries, but the large gap down to Italy and Spain is rather strange to me. But it is what it is.

So those are some numbers to go on. Now let’s talk marketing. I really didn’t do much. Here are some things that I did to try and promote Pixel Man:

1) Twitter like crazy. I thankfully have 600+ followers which means a lot of people will see my tweets. My odds of getting retweeted (and thus exposed to more people) is pretty decent, not to mention just being able to expose 600+ people to my game.

2) Give away those codes. Developers on Indie Games get 50 codes to give away for their games. I gave a handful to Matthew to use for his own marketing stuff, but the rest are already gone. I tried to give away at least three a day, if not more. Get people to play your game (for free if necessary) and they’re more likely to talk to their friends about it.

3) Use hashtags on Twitter. It’s a trick I figured out with Pixel Man. If you just say “Hey, check out my game Pixel Man: http://xblig.info/Sw8″, that’s pretty good. You’ll get some people on board and maybe they’ll tell a friend or retweet. But if you say “Hey, check out my game #PixelMan: http://xblig.info/Sw8″, now you have a hashtag for your game.

What I found was that other people, then, started using the hashtag when tweeting about the game. And when someone sees that tweet with a hashtag, they’ll think “Hey, there’s a hashtag in here. That means there are probably other people talking about this game. I should click on that link and see what people are saying.” From there they can find links, see my Twitter account, and see what others are saying. It’s all a part of using social networking to your benefit.

4) Use your forums. I went on the Xbox.com forum for Pixel Man and made a nice “thank you” post for people. I also wanted to be pretty transparent about some things, namely the lack of replayability and the length of the game. I wanted people to feel like they’d know exactly what they were getting for their $1. There was at least one person who seemed to purchase the game after that thread, which means there might have been others since the thread has been viewed 218 times.

That’s pretty much it. I stuck to Twitter for my marketing mostly. I didn’t write any websites or anything like that. Maybe that would have helped; maybe not.

And that’s all I really have on that. Plus I need to get ready for work. Maybe if I sell a ton more I won’t have to go anywhere for work in the future. But I’m not quite there yet.