And by the way, ditto what jaxson said! You''ve been extremely patient and helpful. I''ve read tons of helpful programming and game development articles all over the web and this site, but few people discuss the business side of game development in the detail that you''ve offered to us. In fact, you and DavidRM are the only knowledgeable people I''ve seen actually throw real numbers out there and discuss money at all.

Are you interested in 10 stand alone cd roms "Doom" shooting ups to publish in the 2 years contract.
Or are you not interested in it. So can you publish in the same 2 years 10 shooting ups cd roms of the same developer.
Or are you only more interested in variable gamesgenres.
By the way are you serious that a developer can earn so much for one cd rom game? It''s very much. It''s close to one million.

Is it possible for the retailer to bring your published cd roms back/return to you, when he can''t sell it after a specific period. And then you must give his the money back he paid. Or is sold=sold the case, what is better for us, developer as publisher.

Dear Friends,

Phew... You really make it a tidal wave of questions for me to answer Anyway, I''ll try to do so with everyone who''s posted a reply.

Jaxson: Thanks for your kind words. We advertise our games in-store with end caps and all sorts of extra joint efforts with retailers like featuring on their flyer, or being part of a sales promotion. Besides this we advertise in the popular computer games magazines. The backbone of budget games marketing is however impulse buying. Our budget for "Green thing hops up and Down a lot" is not as high as the budget for "Quake III". But that''s rather obvious.

Diragor: Additional hardware requirements have never stopped us from publishing a title. Our forthcoming product "Close Approach" actually as it happens has 3D accelleration. So that answers your question I hope? And thanks also for your kind words.

Dak Lozar: You''re absolutely right.

Granat: We always try to give our developers the best possible deal but in the end we have to please our shareholders/investors who''ve put up the money. A 50-50 split is definately the format we use in calculating the developer''s share, but a $10 game has a $5 trade price and therefore an extremely tight margin. Example: For a $19.95 retail game we charge a $15 or $12 trade price to the retailers. Let''s assume the $15 trade price for this example. A box takes us $1.86 to make. We also need to cover our expenses in terms of warehousing, shipping and the actual sales. The margin for these administrative costs will be at least $4, maybe $5. This leaves stuff like returned products (very annoying!) and advertising still to be calculated. In effect our net profits for the royalty calculation would come to $6 or so. We''d give our developers $3 and keep $3 as our net profits for taxes. I''ve come across a lot of people who think we''ll actually be able to split the $19.95 50-50 so some ignorance in terms of what it takes to publish a game in retail is not a crime. You seem to have a good understanding of the process though.

Nazrix: A good budget game is innovative to some degree and features something that triggers impulse buyers. So a cute character, retro style gameplay or a controversial topic usually do very well. You may have noticed the "Dweebs" license we''re currently using to push more products. The secret to this $200.000 for a developer is simple:
1) We pay our developers a fair share. Not common in the industry.
2) We don''t use silly clauses like "royalty stops" you''ll see in fine print in other publishers'' contracts.
3) Our distribution is simply that good

Anonymous 1: We''ll consider ANY game for publishing. So if you come to us with 10 consecutive DOOM style products we can publish all 10 of them. It''s however a fact that strategic marketing decisions would prevent us from pushing them all out at the same time. We''d be saturating our own market! But to answer your question: yes, we''re interested. And yes you can make that much money IF your game sells well enough.

Anonymous 2: Good question. A retail chain will often take products on a "Sale or Return" basis. This means that they''ll for example buy 5.000 units and sell these for a period of time. After that time we get the unsold products returned to us and a check for what''s sold. Our credit rating is so good that we can get 50% of the value of the purchase order up front from our bank in order to pay our developers and cover misc costs. Often it''s like this: a retailer initially buys 2.000 units and signs a contract with us for payment after 30 days. After 30 days they pay, and re-order. If they still have 1.000 left to sell they won''t re-order yet, but pay us after another 30 days for what''s sold then.

Take care,

Alex de Vries
http://www.crystal-interactive.com

I have an extraordinarily hard time believing that selling "50,000" or even "100,000" copies of your indie game via ANY publisher is feasible. Folks, if you''ve ever sneaked a peak at real PC Data numbers, you''ll see that most mainstream, big-publisher games don''t even sell anywhere near these numbers. I think it''s really misleading to suggest that this is possible. Can you tell me the name of (and provide any pointers) to games the Crystal has published which have sold at least 50,000 units? How many games (or game bundles) have you ever sold that broke 50k units? What percentage is this of the total number of products you have ever sold?

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I have an idea about that last anonymous comment, about how these budget games can sell 50,000 - 100,000 even though the games on the charts aren't selling that much. For one thing, I believe all of these answers from Mr. de Vries are based on a 2 year time frame. The PC Data charts are based on data from a single month's sales figures (there's a weekly chart too, I think). I think smaller-profile games, by nature, probably have a more consistent sales rate than the latest blockbuster titles that fall out of favor after a few months. The games are not based on showing off the latest technology, they usually focus on more time-proof simple fun, and they are much cheaper than the big titles. While some fancy, complicated, big-name $50 game may blow quite a few copies off the shelf in a short period after its release, the budget games continue to trickle off the shelves in places like Wal-Mart, adding up to a lot of sales after two years but never touching the charts because of the slow, steady sales rate.

Edited by - Diragor on June 4, 2000 3:12:25 AM

Dear Mr. Anonymous,

Thank you for yet another question. Mr. Diragor has already answered a good part of it on my behalf (thanks!) but I''ll elaborate a bit.

It''s true that most $30 titles (according to U.S. sales charts) do not sell 100.000 units. This is mainly because A) These are overpriced and overrated products, B) U.S. Sales charts do not calculate worldwide sales (WE DO!), and C) It''s a fact that a $9.95 game sells more then a run of the mill $30 game due to a simple marketing mechanism we call "impulse buying".

Our racking program alone is good for 50.000 to 150.000 sales of each title. Our Autobahn Racer, The Unholy, The Fugitive and Dweebs games previously sold exceptionally well in Europe. Autobahn Racer breaking records in terms of budget titles. But we''re not the only ones pulling off these fantastic numbers. Expert Software manage to sell millions of CDs a year, as well as eGames. 3D Frog Man by eGames is a 1.000.000+ seller! Never checked this??? Even though these companies sell huge numbers of products they still manage to pay developers dismally poor...

In any case this racking programme of ours (50.000-150.000 units + normal distribution (another 50.000+ units) and various licenses and OEM deals to other publishing (mainly Asian) companies result in a tremendous return in terms of volume. In Japan we pushed about 20.000 units of Dweebs, Treasure Island, Witch Frog and Sleepwalker out the door, and in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and mainland China we achieved another 50.000 units sold of each.

You won''t become a rich man by writing one budget game, but it''s definately worth your while!

Take care,

Alex de Vries
http://www.crystal-interactive.com