[casual_games] New Issue of Casual Games Quarterly is available

Ron lists at rzweb.com
Mon Jan 9 17:01:37 EST 2006 

I'm curious...did they doing any research on lowering the price?  Would 
the conversion rate be higher if the price was a lot lower?  What if the 
games were $4.95?  Would you sell more than 4x?  It's interesting that 
they only looked at higher prices.  Or did I miss something in the article?

Or is the effort to pull out the credit card hit a wall at $19?  I 
wonder if that would change if people could just "on-click" buy games.

I'd love to see sales numbers to put this all in perspective.

Ron

Lennard Feddersen wrote:
> Am I missing some way to use the site to get actual sales #'s?
> 
> I thought the iWin article by CJ Wolf was useful in several ways and 
> appreciated the simple breakdown of earnings per download.  His opinion 
> that we shouldn't drift towards a price war and to find more ways to 
> calculate the most profitable pricing were well done.
> 
> Happy game makin'
> 
> Lennard Feddersen
> CEO, Rusty Axe Games, Inc.
> www.RustyAxe.com
> 
> Lennard at RustyAxe.com
> P. 250-635-7623 F. 1-309-422-2466
> 3521 Dogwood, Terrace, BC, Canada, V8G-4Y7
> 
> 
> 
> James C. Smith wrote:
> 
>>>> Interesting data from James Smith's Real Arcade article... only 
>>>> there's a fundamental flaw in the presentation of that data...     
>>
>> You bring up some good points. Those are things I did consider but didn't
>> have any good solution to.  You can do you own analysis along those 
>> lines using all the data I made
>> public.  If you go to www.game-sales-charts.com you can run the 
>> queries your
>> self on the current data and tweak some of the options. Or you can 
>> click on
>> the IGDA Article link on the site and download the full data used for the
>> article in an excel file.
>>
>> On the issue of a games position in the top 10, if you go to the web site
>> and run the "Top Games" query it will have a column for 'number of weeks'
>> and also a column for 'score'. There is an option to rank the games by
>> either number of weeks or score.  The "score" is a simple formula that 
>> gives
>> more points to game that were ranked higher.  But the problem is there 
>> is no
>> clear answer for how those scores should be weights.  Is 2 weeks at #1 
>> worth
>> more then three weeks at #2? What should the point difference be 
>> between #1
>> and #2?  Or between #2 and #3?  My "score" system is just a very simple
>> linear scale with 10 point for each week spent at #1 and 1 point for each
>> week spend at #10.  But for the article I chose to rank the games by 
>> weeks
>> rather than score because it is a more transparent method.  It is less
>> subjective. Any "score" system I devised could be tweaked to favor one 
>> type
>> of game over another.  More importantly, it just didn't make much
>> difference.  Most games fallow a similar pattern of quickly climbing 
>> to the
>> top of the list and slowly falling down.  The longer a game was on the 
>> list,
>> the more likely they spent a long time near the top.  When I compared the
>> rankings based on weeks vs. the ranking based on 'score' I ended up with
>> very similar rankings.  I decided it wasn't worth having people 
>> questioning
>> the score system and instead just published the raw number of weeks 
>> since it
>> ended up with nearly the same results anyway.
>>
>>
>> Your second point about the competition at the time of the games 
>> release is
>> also very relevant but has no clear solution. How much weighting 
>> should be
>> applied? It is more useful to look at a games performance compared to the
>> other games available at the time of it's release. For example, for a 
>> game
>> released in 2005, only compare it to other games also released in 
>> 2005.  You
>> can do things like that using the options on the web site or by 
>> downloading
>> the data and doing your own analysis. But I presented a simple summary in
>> the article to peek people's interests and let them dig deeper 
>> themselves.
>>
>> There are a dozen different ways to summarize this data. I presented a 
>> few
>> in the article and more several more available on-line.  It is not 
>> perfect
>> but it is a great start.  It is wonderful to have access to all this 
>> data.
>> I hope you would share any results you get from analyzing the data 
>> yourself.
>>
>> James C. Smith
>> Webmaster: www.game-sales-charts.com
>> Producer: Ricochet xxx, Big Kahuna xxx
>>
>> PS: I am sorry my game-sales-charts.com web site is not very reliable
>> lately. I will be moving it to a new host soon.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org 
>> [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
>> On Behalf Of SCOTT HANSEN
>> Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 12:49 PM
>> To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
>> Subject: RE: [casual_games] New Issue of Casual Games Quarterly is 
>> available
>>
>>
>> Interesting data from James Smith's Real Arcade article... only there's a
>> fundamental flaw in the presentation of that data...
>> First, it doesn't take into account the ranking within the top ten 
>> over the
>> life of the game... Game A can spend 10 weeks at number 1 and Game B can
>> spend 10 weeks at number 10, yet both would receive the same overall 
>> 'rank'.
>>
>>
>> Second, it does not factor in the increasing number of games. Earlier 
>> games
>> lasted longer on the top ten because there were fewer games to push them
>> off.
>>
>> Wouldn't it be more relevant to have some sort of weighted average which
>> takes into account the proportional relevance of the rank within the 
>> top ten
>> over the life of the product? It can even be 'inflation adjusted' to take
>> into account the churn rate at the time it was active on the list...
>> Scott P Hansen
>> Game Designer, MumboJumbo
>> shansen at udgames.com
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org 
>> [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
>> On Behalf Of Wade Tinney
>> Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 9:20 AM
>> To: 'IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List'
>> Subject: [casual_games] New Issue of Casual Games Quarterly is available
>>
>>
>> There is a new issue of the Casual Games Quarterly now available at
>> http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/1_2/
>>
>> Please don't hesitate to send feedback, ideas for the next issue 
>> (which will
>> focus on game design), or questions.
>> _______________________________________________
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>>  
>>
>

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