The 2 new games from Arcen

[eRe4s3r]

The best game developers should also like playing games, not just making them, or you risk becoming out of touch.

Truth has been achieved.

Also I think the lack of Arcengames self managed translations is a problem. You just can't give a random publisher rights to translate and publish your game in a region and then never bother again with it (worse, making it unpatchable). That's literally why nearly nobody in Germany, France or Russia knows about you guys

A game on Steam, needs the EFIGS-R languages. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian.

Even steam tells you this when you submit a game. ;P

[keith.lamothe]

We get good business (on steam, at least) from Western Europe.  Not so much Russia, iirc.

And it's fine if you want to say that we need to self-manage the translations into those languages, but I respectfully submit that it'd be quite a bit of work (and money to pay the translators and presumably also to pay people making sure the translation is decent) and we don't have sufficient evidence that said work would pay off.  Give us a rational basis for thinking it's a good business decision (that is, that the translation quality being better than a publisher-done one would actually make that much difference in sales), and that's a totally different story, but I haven't seen it yet.  FWIW the publisher we dealt with for the Russian retail version of AIW was really great to work with, though I don't know whether their translators were any good.  In any event, it didn't sell well in retail there.

Of course, the fact that the game(s) keep changing so much and those translations are significantly out of date mere months after release doesn't help.  But adding a re-localization step to every official release (much less every beta) for a self-managed translation approach would be... well, I'd need a lot of convincing, let's say.  Not that I'm the one making the call, but I'm probably the easiest one to convince.

[eRe4s3r]

The problem is this.

If you are not selling your translations on steam. Nobody is gonna buy them. Do you think the FIGS-R market is in the stone age? They all buy on Steam (or assorted). You are not offering your translations on Steam, and wonder why the translations didn't sell so well?

Basically, if you are not offering all languages on Steam, you have a serious problem reaching non English markets imo ;p Yeah you get "decent" sales (whatever that is) but you are not getting the maximum possible sales. And worse.. looking at German Tidalis, you get completely flawed products if you don't do it yourself.

[tigersfan]

But, doing a translation, (especially when no one on staff speaks most of those languages) is REALLY expensive. We simply don't have any evidence whatsoever to support the idea that doing the translations into those languages would increase sales enough to make it worth the effort. Sure, we'd sell more copies, but, I really doubt we'd sell enough.

Bear in mind too that these aren't one-time costs. Every time we update a game, there would likely be a need to have said changes translated into each language.

[eRe4s3r]

Well I am not going to try to convince you if you don't want to try it I just think you would get about 2500 sales per language you support. And I don't believe translation would somehow make that a loss.

You won't ever know if you don't try....

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Well I am not going to try to convince you if you don't want to try it I just think you would get about 2500 sales per language you support. And I don't believe translation would somehow make that a loss.

You won't ever know if you don't try....

I personally would like to know where you got that # and what evidence you have to back it up.

[eRe4s3r]

Anecdotal evidence at best.. but that doesn't matter anyhow.

If you don't see why you should translate your game yourself without an argument to be made for it, I am not gonna convince you with evidence I couldn't prove in a forum where you don't and shouldn't believe anecdotal evidence ^^

I strongly believe it would lead to more sales, because translated games are reviewed by national review sites. If you sell an English only game in Germany, you only reach some youtubers and the odd "blog" mainstream sites and magazines won't touch you. Why would they really, their customers speak German (for example) and they would not ever review a game that isn't in German. (Unless you are a AAA title...)

[tigersfan]

I don't argue that we wouldn't sell more copies. I think we would. But, I'm not sure we'd sell enough to be worth the significant cost.

[Cyborg]

Neither one of you provided any justification for any of your opinions.

Just saying.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, the justification-to-opinion ratio is disturbingly skewed in most discussions of indie business practices.  Partly due to the low availability (to my knowledge) of evidence.  And probably partly due to how different each indie's situation looks.

[Cyborg]

Here is some quantifiable data and example strats:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/top/
Master reddit.

Example charts, worldwide:

http://www.vgchartz.com/
global sales figures

http://www.chart-track.co.uk/index.jsp?c=p/software/uk/latest/index_test.jsp&ct=110015
United Kingdom sales figures

http://store.steampowered.com/feeds/weeklytopsellers.xml
Keep track of this feed, store it weekly because they don't save it

http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/281031-prior-bundle-statistics
Bundle Sales Statistics

Article
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/38202/Indie_Royales_First_Bundle_Hits_30000_Sales_Debuts_New_Bonuses.php

[keith.lamothe]

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/top/
Master reddit.

Is there something specific here, or do you simply mean to stay in touch with what's important to that (very large and fairly representative) group?

Erik is already heavily involved in Reddit for us, so I imagine he's already on top of r/gaming/top (no pun intended).  He lets us know when we're mentioned or there's a good place for us to chime in there, etc.

http://www.vgchartz.com/
global sales figures

Seems focused on console stuff, or is your point that the console stuff dominates the top of the charts?  Or is it more the compare/contrast of the USA vs Europe vs Japan, etc?

http://www.chart-track.co.uk/index.jsp?c=p/software/uk/latest/index_test.jsp&ct=110015
United Kingdom sales figures

Ok, useful to have country-specific data.  Is there any way to just look at the PC part of the data? 

FWIW we do get a substantial chunk of our sales there.  Just looking at February (one of our better months recently) here's the top 20 countries by % of gross for us:

Country	%
United States	47.06%
United Kingdom	9.53%
Canada	7.51%
Germany	7.07%
Australia	4.98%
Russian Federation	2.50%
France	2.28%
Netherlands	1.91%
Sweden	1.81%
Finland	1.51%
Norway	0.99%
Brazil	0.97%
Japan	0.89%
Poland	0.83%
Spain	0.79%
Denmark	0.78%
Austria	0.77%
New Zealand	0.73%
Italy	0.68%
Switzerland	0.55%

http://store.steampowered.com/feeds/weeklytopsellers.xml
Keep track of this feed, store it weekly because they don't save it

I'm pretty familiar with that data, yea, both as a developer and as a consumer.  Is your point basically "which kinds of games are selling well"?

http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/281031-prior-bundle-statistics
Bundle Sales Statistics

Yea, I've looked over that data at some length in the past, pretty interesting.  Particularly on the mac/linux numbers (though the steam numbers for us actually put mac revenue at 7.3% of our total for the last 12 months, so I wouldn't expect linux to add much more than that; still, we certainly do want to get full linux support working when we have time to sort through the engine issues).

Is there something else specific I'm supposed to take away from that?

Article
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/38202/Indie_Royales_First_Bundle_Hits_30000_Sales_Debuts_New_Bonuses.php

Yea, Tidalis was on a bundle there (Indie Royale) just recently.  Move about four and a half thousand units.  Not bad, not wildly successful.  Worth doing, in any event, but more for games past their sales prime, from what we can tell.


Anyway, thanks for the info, there were a few sources I wasn't previously aware of.  Please pardon me if I'm being dense, but how does this tie into the concept of "focus groups"?

[madcow]

Honestly, moreso than translating games over to different languages. I would wonder how Tidalis would do as an iPad/iPhone/Android app.  Though considering it didn't do all that great on computer, I doubt it'll happen. If these future games are turn based, they might adopt decently well over - but I would guess Arcen isn't really in the position to try.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Honestly, moreso than translating games over to different languages. I would wonder how Tidalis would do as an iPad/iPhone/Android app.  Though considering it didn't do all that great on computer, I doubt it'll happen. If these future games are turn based, they might adopt decently well over - but I would guess Arcen isn't really in the position to try.

I doubt it would sell all that well. Maybe iOS gamers would surprise me for once but it seems like the more intelligent games like Tidalis do not sell well on iOS. Considering the most popular games are Angry Birds and Temple Run, well...there you go.

[Cyborg]

I don't think you need me to walk you through data mining or how to analyze audiences. The point of those links is to give you a quantifiable place to start when you are coming up with or deciding on ideas. If you want a PC sorted list, you can try gamespot, although I don't really trust that site ever since they started manipulating results for their advertisers. But on the whole, not a bad place to find conversation about independent titles.

For example, you could look at how well independent titles do who have mod support. The lifespan of some of your titles has been shortened because your mod support sucks. No offense, just straight talking. Your mod support has been limited to graphics. Why on earth you haven't offered mod support for text strings is mystifying, considering you don't want to pay for language translation. The only reason AI war continues as strong as it has is because of the continued attention you pay to it with expansions and free content. If you stopped doing that, it would stagnate.

You could look at what genres are selling well in different locations. Forget about consoles. Your business staff should be involved in the decision-making process, and there should be fact-finding missions that have some basis. I'm just giving you examples on the types of things you could use. The data mining of the temporary locations such as the steam list need to start going into a database… today. That's one thing you could do right now.