Question about selling games
Community Forums/General Help/Question about selling games
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| Hey everyone, I've got a question concerning selling your own games. How would I go about selling my games? Would the best way be to set up my own site and sell them from there, and if so, then how do I set up one of those nifty little links that send people to paypal? Or is it possible to sell my games through Ebay? Because currently the only option I have is to tell anyone who is interested to E-mail me, pay me via paypal, and then send them the link to the download. That seems like a little too much trouble for someone to go through to get my games, so I would like an easier, user friendly method for buying them. Could any of you who have already sold your games help me out? Thanks, WERDNA |
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| "WALNUT" don't undersell yourself - do it all on Steam: http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/ Imagine that, "WALNUT" games on Steam alongside all the big-boy commercial games. |
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| Or is it possible to sell my games through Ebay? Possible, yes. Not really a great plan though. If you have a suitable PayPal account, rather than have people email you, perhaps you could build a whole site? You can pull that off without too much expense. Then you could link to a more formal sales method as well, like ShareIt (that's what they use here, right? It's been a while...). I've only tried one way of selling games myself - the old-fashioned way. Buy a few hundred CDs, spend a couple of days (preferably with friends, and their laptops) burning CDs and printing labels, stick 'em all in a box and sell them in person, for cash (or whatever, but PayPal isn't recommended for selling things in person) at whatever large area events are available, or school/university/work. This is good for immediate success - you'll probably sell all your copies (I did, anyway), because it's much easier to get attention by talking to people than waiting in a cold, dark corner of the internet for them to come to you - but not so good for the longer term or larger projects, as it gains you basically no publicity (unless your game is such a hit people talk about it later) and is a fair amount of effort. Still, you can make your first small profit that way and spend it on advertising for your website or something. |
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| Send a demo to a leading gamer magazine :) |
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| All 3 of those ideas sounds pretty good! I don't really know what steam is, but I do know that Puki's obsessed with it, so thats good enough for me! Building an entire site I will have to do at some point I think, no matter which selling option I choose, and I really like the CD idea! I can just start handing them out wherever I go, along with a spiffy little business card! That might be a good start at the very least. And yeah, I've been planning to send a demo to a game magazine. (Probably several:) I should actually have a demo available pretty soon. What I'm going to be selling is a heavily modified version of RoboAttack. So different, that the RoboAttack I have available now isn't even in the same ball park. Already the game is looking pretty good. Hopefully I can give you guys a demo pretty soon. Thanks a lot everyone, and if anyone else has some good ideas, I would be happy to hear them! WERDNA (Current Projects? RoboAttack. Cancelled Projects? Dragon Spirit) |
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| Would the best way be to set up my own site and sell them from there, and if so, then how do I set up one of those nifty little links that send people to paypal? Paypal has the code to add such buttons to your site. Anyway: While you can sell your programs directly on your own website, in practise this is very difficult unless you are a wellknown, established company. The biggest problem is that you need a LOT of visitors to get any significant sales, and it's very difficult to harness that kind of traffic. That's why portals like BigFish, Oberon, MediaHouse, RealArcade, etc. are so popular: Those companies may take a huge chunk of the sales, but they also have millions of visitors that will see your game (and/or playable demo) listed. Getting 30% for thousands of sold copies is more cash in your pocket than getting 100% of 1-2 sold copies on your own site. Of course, your game does need to be good enough to pass the portals own quality control department -- meaning it should look good, play good, be bug-free, and fun. (Of course, if no portals are even remotely interested in the game, it's probably time to go back to the drawing board anyway.) Or is it possible to sell my games through Ebay? Possible, but the problem with ebay is that they tend to routinely kill auctions of burned CD media since it can easily be mistaken for pirated copies. |
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| If you can get a publisher into your game, thats the best road. They can push steam for you and so forth. I know of at least one Blitz3D game on steam right now. |
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| Ok. I'll see what I can do. I'll wait until I get the demo version set up, then start asking around and seeing who might be interested :) The portals sounds like the way to go for me. I know that grey alien has a really great tutorial about how to sell your games, with a lot of info on portals. WERDNA (Current Projects? RoboAttack. Cancelled Projects? Dragon Spirit) |
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| I'd also recommend going to http://hotscripts.com/ and taking a look at some of the shopping carts available there that are designed for selling downloadable digital products. Some of them come as complete template driven content management systems, which will save you a lot of work in setting up a site. Once you have the site set up, you will then come to the really hard part - marketing your game and site. |
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| I wrote a website for a band that's selling their CD's online... used Paypal for the whole thing, the process was rather easy if you have an established site and configure your account properly. Paypal also offers a lot of business tools to manage your business. For each $10.00 sale we make, paypal takes 52 cents or something. A bit steeper rate than other sites, but its so easy to use I think its just about worth it. The best way to sell anything though is create a quality product. Your criteria should be what the portals tend to take if you plan on using a publisher, or what your target audience/dedicated fanbase wants if you plan on self publishing. |
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| What about a site like Plimus? Thats who I go thru and its pretty simple to set up... I sell my games for $9.95 and they take a dollar to handle the transactions. http://home.plimus.com/ecommerce/sellers/pricing But getting your game on a major portal will be best... trust me ;-) |
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| and BMTMicro. |
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| I'd also recommend going to http://hotscripts.com/ and taking a look at some of the shopping carts available there that are designed for selling downloadable digital products. Some of them come as complete template driven content management systems, which will save you a lot of work in setting up a site. DUDE, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU ZOMG THANK YOU!!!!! 8D I've been looking for something like that for AGES!!! PERFECT!!! I'd been using a combination PayPal-Email system, where they pay through PayPal & I email the game to them. It hadn't been a huge problem, since I've only yet sold one game anyway, but this'll head off any future issues! GEEZ, thank you so much!!! :D |
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| DUDE, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU ZOMG THANK YOU!!!!! 8D *Ctrl + C *Ctrl + V DUDE, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU ZOMG THANK YOU!!!!! 8D |
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| Sauer. I wrote a website for a band that's selling their CD's online... used Paypal for the whole thing, the process was rather easy if you have an established site and configure your account properly. I looked on Paypal, but couldn't find out how to go about setting something like this up. Could you go into a bit more detail about this? Thanks, WERDNA |
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| If you create an account, there's a tab for merchant services. Paypal lets you create pay now buttons, send e-mail invoices, and create shopping carts for free. Here's an overview of their services: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=products_services/product_services01 |
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| Ok, Thanks Sauer! WERDNA |
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| so what I usually do for advertising is google game blog or game forum and click on every forum that pops up under google. make a quick account and post a demo or link to the site... make sure you have some good youtube vids and screenshots first though. that will definitely get you some sales and get your game out there into that vast ocean they call the internet |
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| Plimus (or BMT) +1 |
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