Overview
Mason McCuskey
<mason@spin-studios.com>
If you're selling your game online, as shareware, you live and die by the upsell. Simply put, an upsell is when someone pays you money to get more than what he got for free. Depending on your business model, you might refer to this as an order, a registration, a full version, or an upgrade. Regardless of what you call it, it's how you stay in business.
Since making two dollars is better than one, here are some techniques for increasing the number of upsells you get. They're presented in roughly chronological order (from your customer's point of view), and are just waiting for you to put them to use in your own games.
Present a Professional Appearance
If you want people to buy your game, you need to look like (and behave like) a professional business.
Customers need assurance that they're not getting ripped off, and a professional Web site and a prompt response to their questions will assuage their fears.
Web Site Don'ts
If your Web site doesn't reflect a business mentality, you're going to miss out on some orders. Here are some things you should definitely not have on a business Web site:
Diaries containing personal opinions or rants. Not only is this unprofessional, but also, no one cares, and you run the risk of alienating your customer. "Company News" or development diaries are okay, provided they concentrate on your business.
Meaningless marketing hype about your game. When it comes to explaining why your game rocks, your best bet is to provide an accurate list of the things that make your game fun. Avoid phrases like "the best game on the planet" or "guaranteed to be the only game you'll play for a month," because they make you sound like a piece of spam.
False or misleading statements about what customers are getting for their money. It's illegal and unethical. Stick to listing features that you actually have. In addition, avoid listing nebulous features such as
"a totally redesigned gameplay engine," unless those features really do make a difference in the game.
Technobabble rarely impresses; the people who can't understand it don't care about it, and the people who do understand it recognize it as meaningless.
Web design gimmicks like mouse trails, animated GIFs, background music, and rainbow text. They make you appear juvenile. The exception to this is Shockwave or Flash-based Web sites, which many game companies use.
Broken links. This is an obvious one. Use software to check your site for dead links or buggy code.
Web Site Dos
On the other hand, your Web site should definitely include:
Screen shots. A screen shot is worth so much more than a thousand words. Showcase your game's good parts with lots of high-resolution screen shots.
Cohesive, easy-to-navigate design. Use a modern design that works on as many browsers as possible.
Contact information. Consider setting up generic e-mail accounts for sales, orders, Webmaster, and support, even if they all route to your personal e-mail.
A newsletter sign-up. Write newsletters when something happens, and send them out to people who have signed up for them on your site. This not only increases your chances for repeat business, but also keeps your name and products in the forefront of the minds of the people who read the newsletter, which can often result in "word of mouth" sales.
A message board. If you can supply the time to moderate and maintain a message board, it can be boon for your business. However, beware—a dusty ghost town forum can make your company look worse, not better.
There are many other techniques that can prove useful; check out what other software companies are doing, and if something looks like it will work for you, try it!
Make It Easy to Order
This seems like an obvious item, but you'd be surprised how many developers make it difficult for people to order their games.
Start by allowing your player to order the full version directly from within the game. At the start and/or end of the game you should display a teaser for the full version, and hyperlink that page to the ordering page on your Web site.
In addition, make sure that customers have options regarding how to order. You should accept major credit cards, as well as checks and money orders mailed to a well-publicized address. Setting up a merchant account for credit card processing takes some investment, but if you can't afford it, there are companies out there who will provide this service to you for a percentage of your sales. Do a search or ask around for names of reputable registration companies.
One way to measure how easy it is for people to order your game is to count the number of clicks that must occur before they get their game. You want to keep this click count as low as possible, ideally requiring just one or two clicks.
In addition, spot check your ordering system, especially if you're using a third-party vendor to handle your credit card validation. Buy software that periodically checks to see if your server is working, and alerts you if it is not.
Also check your order pipeline from different systems to make sure that it works equally well in all cases.
There's nothing worse than having a whole bunch of people who want to buy your game but can't because they don't have a specific browser or operating system.
Make It Worthwhile
To get the most upsells, you need to achieve a perfect balance between compulsion and boredom. Give your players a large enough demo of your game so that they're compelled to play and get hooked on it—but if you give them too much, they'll get tired of it before they register.
Several different strategies have been employed by games distributed online:
Time-lock. Allow the demo version of your game to be played for a certain length of time, and then force players to register to continue playing. This works well for highly addictive puzzle games.
Date-lock. Give potential customers a certain number of calendar days (usually 30) to play the game without restriction. If they want to play for more than a month, then they must register. This method works better for applications than for games, since it's very possible that a huge fan of your game will complete it within a month.
Tokens. This is a variant on the time-lock method. Allow potential customers to play your game 20, 30, or 40 times before requiring registration.
Episodes. In this scenario, your demo allows unrestricted access to the first few levels of the game, and allows the player to purchase more levels. This is the method id Software got very rich on with their shareware games.
Donations. When it comes to games distributed online, asking for a donation typically does not work;
either use a different method, or just release your game as freeware.
Resist pricing your game too high. Games sold online typically cost half of what a game in the store would; $10 or $15 will work well, since games are impulse buys for many people, especially online. Also remember that most of the people who purchase games online typically would not spend $50 on a videogame, even if it was something they liked.
Follow Through Quickly
One of the easiest ways to irk new customers is to make them wait a long time before they receive what they paid for. For games distributed online, there's no excuse for long order delays—ideally, your customers should receive what they paid for within minutes after paying for it. Of course, to achieve this requires a fully automated order processing system, which makes you vulnerable to bogus registrations and invalid credit card numbers.
Work around these problems as much as possible, but not at the expense of your true customers' time.
Be sure to explain your registration process to your customers. Tell them how long it will take, what they should do once their order is processed, and where to send e-mail or call if they feel something is not right.
Use Minimal Copy Protection
For years, developers have debated over how much copy protection a game should have. Today, the standard seems to be to create "light" copy protection—just enough to keep the honest people honest.
Heavy-duty copy protection usually isn't worth it. As you know, no copy protection is unbreakable, and hackers see sophisticated padlocks as challenges. The cracker might not even like your game, but will still crack it just because you've "challenged" him by using sophisticated anti-piracy techniques.
Remember that most of the people who play and buy games online are not technically knowledgeable enough to crack something. They're casual people who enjoy a quick diversion, not hardcore gamers. They don't usually know how to get a crack, much less how to use it.
The most prevalent form of piracy today is called "casual piracy." This is where someone lets a friend copy a game he's bought or got from someone else. Most of the time, if someone copies a CD and the anti-piracy mechanism notices and prevents them from playing the copied game, that person isn't likely to spend time trying to crack the protection. At worst, he might try a few times, enter a few different serial numbers, fail, and either buy the game or move on.
This is great, because it means that you can prevent most of your piracy losses by employing a relatively easy protection scheme. You just need to think about the most common ways a game gets copied, and put a couple of layers of protection on those holes.
For example, Web-validated registration codes work well. The basic idea is that in exchange for their purchase, a customer gets a registration code that he or she types into the game. Then, the game validates the code, either through an internal algorithm (e.g., a checksum), or by "phoning home" to a registration server and query that server to make sure the code is valid. The game either checks the code each time it is run, or it hides a key/value pair in the system's registry that specifies whether the game is registered.
The main problem with an algorithm-based registration code is that it doesn't prevent someone from writing the code on the CD copy and giving that to a friend. Unless your algorithm is based on something unique to the machine the game was originally registered for, your program has no way of knowing if a code has been used before. If someone posts a registration code on the Internet, your only recourse is to release a new version of your software that disallows that code.
The "phone home" method is slightly better than relying on an algorithm, if you don't mind forcing your
customers to connect to the Internet. With phone-home protection, whenever someone uses a code, you know about it. It then becomes easy to prevent the same code from being used on multiple computers, and if you see that a registration code has been leaked out to the Internet, you just add it to your "blacklist" database, so that any game that asks if that code is good gets a "no" answer from your server.
The weak spot for the phone-home algorithm is spoofing. To a cracker, it's pretty easy to write a program that pretends to be your registration server, and tricks the game into believing it's talking to the real registration server. You can mitigate this risk by creating your own communications protocol, but then you're off to the races—you can spend months designing a secure method of communication, but there will always be a way around it.
Another issue to keep in mind if you use the phone-home technique is that users expect to be able to re-install their games on their own computer if they're forced to re-install their operating system, if they upgrade to a new hard drive, or otherwise change their system configuration. You need to think about a way they can do this easily, or you'll get a lot of angry e-mails from people who believe their fair-use rights have been trampled.
In summary, you should create some type of copy protection. Most games distributed online use algorithm verification, and/or phone home to a central registration server. Regardless of which method you choose, realize that it's a game of diminishing returns—concede the fact that you'll never stop someone who really wants to crack your game, and concentrate on keeping honest people honest.
Track Where Orders Are Coming From
Companies that distribute games online typically do not have a lot of money to spend on advertising and marketing, so it's important that what you do spend, you spend on the right things. Therefore, it behooves you to track where your page hits and orders are coming from. If 90% of your game's orders come from a
shareware download site like download.com, it probably makes sense to spend your advertising money there, perhaps by purchasing an enhanced service plan that makes it easier for your customers to order or download your game from that site. This enhanced service might take the form of a better spot in a search engine, a boldface upgrade, an ad that appears based on user input, and so forth. The possibilities are endless.
In addition, knowing where orders come from helps you design your site better. Make sure that the path most often used to order your game works quickly and reliably.
Keep It Fresh
Games distributed through retail have notoriously short life spans. Consequently, many game companies release expansion packs and add-ons to keep their games fresh. Games distributed online tend to stick around longer than games on the shelf, but there's no reason why you shouldn't also use expansion packs to keep your game fresh and garner repeat business.
Most successful games distributed online have multiple expansions, sometimes called "episodes" or
"installments." Usually, these expansions sell for around half the price of the full game, and most companies sell packages that include the original game plus all the expansions, so that newcomers can "catch up."
A big part of keeping a game fresh is fixing bugs. You need to release patches and bug fixes as if you were a large company. Sales for games distributed online usually start slow, then build up over time as word-of-mouth advertising kicks in, so you shoot yourself in the foot by not maintaining your software.
Conclusion
In this article, we hinted at some of the common strategies for increasing upsell. Don't hesitate to keep looking for other tricks, and don't be afraid to talk about your processes with other shareware authors; it's always valuable to share ideas.