[casual_games] Distributor / Portal Acceptance rates?

[James C. Smith]

Acceptance rates of what?  

I am guessing you are asking what percent of the downloadable try & buy
casual games that get submitted to a portal end up being sold on that
portal.  I have never seen anyone publish any exact information like this.
But it is easy to take an educated guess.  

It is fairly easy to see how many new games the portals launch every week.
Just subscribe to their newsletter or look at the history in the "World Wide
What's New Weekly" chart at game-sales-charts.com  

http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&qid=44

Most portals launch an average of 5 games per week. Some only launch 3 and
some launch 7 per week. Most portals are fairly consistent and launch the
same number of games per week.

The other part of the equation is how many games are submitted to a portal
each week. If you ever talk to anyone who reviews casual games submissions,
most of them tell you approximately the same story. They receive
distribution requests for 30 to 40 mew game each week.  

So you could guess that each portal distributes about 5 out of 35 games or
14%.

But most people are more interested in knowing "what are my chances".  If I
decide to take this seriously, and try to build a business based on making a
real product for the casual games market, what are the chances that my game
will get distribution on a major site.  This number is probably much higher
than 14%.  The problem is, of those 30 to 40 distribution requests portals
receive each week, many of them are just pure garbage.  Some are not
finished, some only send screen shots.  The Reflexive Arcade producer tells
me she only gets download links for playable games from about 20 of those 30
to 40 distributions requests she receives each week.  So maybe it is more
accurate to say that 5 out of 20 games get distribution. But many of those
20 game are not series attempts to make a real product for the casual games
market place. The author may think it is finish and fits the market, but it
is really just has a core play mechanic and no real game. Or it has major
compatibility and reliability problems. Or it has artwork that looks like
the results of a Google images search.  With more than half of those 20
games per week you can tell within 2 minutes that there is no way the game
is fit to be distributed.  Most portals probably receive about 8 to 10 games
per week that are series contenders.  If a portal wants to distribute 5
games per week, they are basically picking the best 5 games out of a pool of
about 8 to 10.  So in this scenario, you could claim acceptance percentage
is closer to 55%.  

But the problem is, where do you draw the line? This industry has such a low
barrier to entry. Anyone can spend a weekend with a game authoring tool and
submit their game on Monday.  Who decides how many of the submission aren't
serious enough to count in the rejection ratio?

James C. Smith
Producer / Lead Programmer
Reflexive Entertainment

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Allen R Partridge
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 9:57 AM
To: casual_games at igda.org
Subject: [casual_games] Distributor / Portal Acceptance rates?


Has anyone seen an information about rates of acceptance versus 
rejection from the various distributors / portals. I'm looking for 
published or official numbers from the major players regarding accept 
/ reject ratios.

tia for any assistance,

--Allen Partridge _______________________________________________
Casual_Games mailing list
Casual_Games at igda.org
http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/casual_games