Sunday, February 1, 2009

How not to sell games

Today's post is inspired by the fabulous people on yoyogames' Game Maker Community boards. More specifically, the "Distributing Games" subforum. It's description is this - Discussion of specific distribution issues related to your freeware, shareware, or commercial GM products". It's mostly used by people wanting to sell their own games.

However, there's also plenty of advice folks give that's more suitable for a "how not to sell games" book. Here's some lovely tidbits:

- Selling games to trick or treaters who come to your door on halloween.

- Going into a gamestop store and asking them to sell your game. Or in some cases, sell your games (plural)

- Putting your demo cd inside of library books. Those aren't free folks, and there's a high cost with trying to sell your games that way. Most of those cds will just find their way into dumpsters.

- Upload onto rapidshare & megaupload and ask for donations instead of selling the game. Pretend its a full version game that was cracked or torrented.

- Join digg and other communities and spam the hell out of them with your game. Those people don't buy games. It's useless trying to sell games to communities that are ALL pro-piracy people... and who really wants to be a spammer anyways.

- Giving demo disks to your kids to take to school and try to sell to other students. If they were in college, maybe, but most of the people on those boards aren't even old enough to have kids

- Selling games at car boot, garage sales and tables at flea markets. People go there for pirated things, cheap stuff and stolen goods, not full priced versions.

- Try to trade them at McDonalds for free food instead of selling the games.

- Hire people to sell them on the sidewalks outside of Gamestores.

The distributing games forum for yoyogames game maker isn't all that bad. There are a few people there who actually do know what they're doing and try to help others sell games. Among them are rinkuhero (Immortal Defense), hpapillon (Cute Knight) and TeeGee (Magi). Their games have sold hundreds of copies and you'd do well to listen to their advice. I'm another poster who's done well selling games too, but I like to remain anonymous over there.

1 comment:

  1. Who are you on the GMC? I have NO clue at all. You can trust us :D

    ReplyDelete