Facebook Indie Games

Guy Kawasaki states as one of his 11 laws of bootstrapping:

Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.

How does this apply to game studios?

In a top down model you start with the whole market -- a very big number -- and work down from there. In a bottom up model you start with yourself, and work up.

If your forecasts start out using assumptions or data like:

1. There are over 200,000,000 iOS devices in existence.
2. The top Facebook games attract up to 100,000,000 players.
3. Minecraft has made more money than Dr Evil would dare ask for

Bottom up means you start with your situation and capabilities -- pretty small numbers, I bet -- and work upwards to hopefully a decent number. You might look at all the options you have to drive views to your game's web or app store page, and make assumptions about how many visits you can deliver through various channels. And then think about how likely each view is to convert:

1. We have 2,000 followers on Twitter. Let's aim to get 50% of them to view the game, with 10% of them converting to a sale. That's 100 copies.
2. Our web site gets 500 views per day. Let's put an ad on each page. We might get 20% of visits to click the ad, and 10% of those to buy. That's 10 copies per day.
3. If we get featured by Apple we can expect sales of ~500 per day for a week.
4. We'll assume we get positive reviews on 3 fairly popular review sites. Let's assume 10,000 people read those reviews, and 1% of them go ahead and buy. That's 100 more copies.
   

HECTOR: Badge of Carnage is a true iPhone game success story. A first time release that's had great sales and strong reviews, all at a relatively high price.

GAMESBrief has a guest post from the man behind it exploring how such success was achieved.

What are the real lessons here?

1. Aim for a ready-made, passionate, and hungry niche. In Hector's case, graphic adventure fans. Adventure gamers know what they like, and are not afraid to tell each other about it. That's what you need if you want word of mouth marketing.
2. If you can't go IAP, find another way to get more than one sale from each customer. In Hector's case, episodes.
3. Make the tone of your game part of your marketing. Game designers talk about how a game is a "magic circle". If your marketing can bring people into that circle, so much the better.

This is the best guest post Nicholas Lovell has ever found for his GAMESBrief site.

With hats off to @johnwfisherii for twitting this.

Stick Run is a simple Facebook game reminiscent of Canabalt, but with most of the things that make Canabalt brilliant left out: the graphics are basic, there is little atmosphere, and you run at a constant speed rather than getting faster.

It's also delivering 300k+ DAU for its developer, which must be raking in enough money to keep him comfortable.

The game follows many of the rules I set out for Facebook action games last year: high scores, luck, no levels, unlockables. It isn't against the clock but each game is short enough that if anything a quick go of Stick Run will take less time than a game of Bejeweled Blitz. For an indy developer focusing on making the game fit the expectations of the platform is more important than crafting a really polished, deep game.

Source: Play This Thing!