Categories
Marketing/Business

Reasons Why You’re Not Selling

Why Your Software is Not Selling attempts to answer the questions that almost all software startups ask. It’s a bit humorous, but it finishes with a list of reasons why indie companies have trouble with sales.

#8 is you made it too hard to buy. Recently I went to a soccer-themed store to purchase an Italian soccer jersey for my father. The cost was huge, but I was prepared to buy it. In fact, I was about to buy myself a United States jersey for the same price. It would have been a good day for them, and a bad day for my wallet.

Except I couldn’t buy the jerseys. The store only took cash as it didn’t have credit card processing setup. I didn’t have that kind of cash on me at the time, and for the prices they had, I don’t know of many people who would be willing to part with that much cash, either. They lost a huge sale that day because it was too difficult for me to buy what they were selling.

If it is too difficult to pay for your indie game, you can have the most compelling demo in the world with the best word-of-mouth marketing, but people would not be able to buy it. If you require the customer to register before submitting payment details, you will lose sales from people who don’t want to register just to buy a game. If your payment processor is specific to an American audience, how will someone from England or Germany be able to buy your game? How many barriers are you putting up for your customers?

I think #1 is the biggest issue facing startups: who are you? If your customer hasn’t heard of you, how can you expect that he/she might think to buy from you? It is a elaborate way to say that marketing is important.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical

Debugging

Richard “superpig” Fine has written a piece called Introduction to Debugging. While it is clearly biased towards using Visual Studio’s debugger, it does provide a general checklist of things to do when killing those bugs:

  • Issue recognition
  • Intelligence gathering
  • Diagnosis
  • Prescription
  • Response
  • Verification
Categories
Game Development

IGF 2007 Announced

Thanks to vjvj from the indiegamer forums, I learned that the website for IGF 2007 has been updated.

I thought I would be further along with my own development by this time, but I am still going to try to get a game submitted. I have until September 8, 2006 at 11:59pm Pacific Standard Time.

Check out the countdown, and another countdown for Chicago natives. Only 73 days left as of this posting!

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: June 26th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 107.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 408 / 1000

Target: 462

I’m still behind in game ideas, but I’ve been making some decent progress with Oracle’s Eye Prime. The code still compiles, at least.

I’m planning on picking a weekend in July and dedicating it to development. Working in short spurts of time is nice, but I can get a lot completed if I can work for longer stretches.

Categories
General

498 Spam Posts

Sometime between going to bed last night and waking up this morning, I got 497 spam posts on this blog. After scanning through them to verify that no valid posts are awaiting approval, I deleted them, to find #498 had appeared during that time. Posts don’t get published until I approve them, so readers don’t have to deal with junk, but what a hassle! It’s been this bad for the past couple of weeks. I’ll see about taking measures to protect against them.

How is it profitable? I understand people clicking on certain links, such as drugs and mortgages, but what benefit is it to link to the official website of a major theatrical release? Or Google’s gmail subdomains? As Seth Godin recently said, “It’s the enemy of anything open.”

Update: #499 was waiting for me as I was writing this post.

Another update: I just installed something. Hopefully it works well, and hopefully legitimate posters don’t get blocked. If so, my email address is available at the bottom of the page, so please feel free to let me know if your posts can’t make it through.

Categories
Marketing/Business

What Users Hate About Websites

Sandra Rossi’s What users hate most about Web sites outlines a few problems with website usability. While the early part of the article focuses on the misuse of Flash, it does list the main problems with most websites.

I have been to more than a few websites where the ad popped up within the websites and would not go away, and it was covering a huge chunk of the article I was trying to read. No close button was available, and sometimes the ad doesn’t even display! It would be a big window that didn’t load correctly, and it would block my view.

I especially don’t like it when I have a few links that will send me to other pages within the website, while a few open a huge PDF document. A simple “[PDF]” would have helped, but letting me know the size of the file would have been better.

Categories
Marketing/Business

Start a Business in a Day

What Can You Build in a Day? shows that with only a little bit of time and a small amount of money, you can start making money within 24 hours of deciding to start a business. Check out
New Venture Launch Announcement for the details of setting up the web-based business that was up and earning money in under 10 hours.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: June 19th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 101 / 1000
Game Ideas: 403 / 1000

Target: 441

Wednesday morning I finally hit 10% of my 1,000 hour goal for the year! As you can see, I haven’t been updating my game ideas list in a couple of weeks. I have been fairly busy and catching up on a number of things, and so some things have taken a backseat. For instance, I finally bought groceries so I can stop paying too much for lunch or skipping it altogether.

Oracle’s Eye Prime isn’t playable at all. I hope to get a few more hours this coming week to implement a few more low-level features so I can start concentrating on the game itself.

Categories
General

Final Score: 1-1

While soccer is usually played with 11 players on each side, the United States played Italy to a tie with 9 men to Italy’s 10.

It was an amazingly competitive game, and I couldn’t be more proud of my team. They overcame some great odds and earned their first point in a European-hosted World Cup. It wasn’t the 2-0 or 3-2 win that I had expected, but under the circumstances, I’ll take it.

Next up: Ghana, who beat the Czech Republic 2-0 earlier today. If the United States can win against Ghana, and if Italy beats the Czechs, the United States can move on to the 2nd round. Thursday’s games are going to be watched closely.

Categories
General

Thoughts on This Saturday’s United States vs Italy Game

On Saturday, I will be have my loyalties questioned by my family. I do not believe they will disown me, but conversations could get heated. I will be the only one who wants and expects a United States win. My family will think I am crazy not to cheer for Italy, and especially for expecting anything from the US team. We are of Italian descent. On Saturday, I’ll feel like the only American.

After Monday’s game against the Czech Republic, a lot of people in the world had their beliefs reinforced. The United States may be ranked 5th among the soccer-playing nations, but the ranking means nothing because they play against terrible teams. No one expected them to do well except Americans who have no idea how soccer is played.

I know that the United States plays better soccer than what they showed on June 12th. Much better.

I believe that the team that will play against Italy on Saturday will be completely different from the one I saw on Monday. They have to be. Whatever happens, Italy will not have an easy game. And I will be cheering. If it will be anything like July 4th, 1994, when Cup-winner Brazil went scoreless for most of two halves due to miraculous saves on the part of the American defense, I will be cheering. The only difference this time is that I expect a win.

Italy is always a favorite to win the World Cup. The nation has one of the most competitive leagues in the world. Naturally they’ll have some really good players. Unfortunately for them, it won’t mean much.

Am I being overly optimistic? Perhaps. Even when Monday’s game came to a close, I was hoping for a few quick goals to equalize. I was not thinking like most people that being down 0-2 at half-time means the game is over. Still, I have seen the United States come back from a three goal deficit to win a match. It wasn’t impossible this time, either.

We can play. The United States has a team that works well together, which is why Monday’s game was so heartbreaking for me. If the United States can play the game the way I know they can, Italy doesn’t stand a chance. My family will just have to deal with it.

I want to see the United States beat Italy. I want the United States to win 2nd place in their group and play likely contender Brazil. I want revenge for that 2nd round elimination in 1994. I want to play against Germany for that game that America won everywhere except where it counted in 2002. And I know that the United States can do it, too. Regardless of what the rest of the world thinks, regardless of what the world thinks is impossible, I know that they can do it.

I believe. I just hope my team does.