[ad_1]
Every few days, I type the eShop icon on my Nintendo switch. I'm going to watch the new games released that week, but honestly, I just want to see what's on sale. I especially want to see what really on sale.
One of the few categories in which you can browse switch games on the eShop is Great Deals. Leading this section is perhaps a popular game that now costs a few dollars less, but sometimes a ridiculous discount will grab my attention, like a recent one that puts the rhythm game at $ 30 Superbeat: Xonic on sale for an amazing 89 cents. My Switch is full of games I had never heard of before I could get them back for pocket money. I wonder then: what is the reason for these massive rebates and after, the game developers believe they have benefited? All the developers I talked to during this story said that the significant reduction of their games for a short time was a success.
As a market, the eShop Switch is a bit of a black hole. Unlike the main showcases such as Steam, the eShop only offers a few options to navigate the games. In addition to the exceptional offers section mentioned above, you will find recent publications, featured titles, bestsellers and upcoming ones. You can search by name, genre and price range, but only the most popular games are at the top of the list.
Once a game is out of the Latest Releases section, or if it's not selling well enough to figure in the top 30 list of top sellers, it may be that it's not a good game. Does not exist. Putting a game up for sale is "a way to play the system," said Matt Bitner, creator of the roguelite Metroidgameplay style A robot named fight. "For developers who have not had the expected success, it's a good way to better watch your game," said Bitner – and the lower the price, the more the effect is pronounced.
Bitner released A robot named fight for Switch on April 25, 2018. Initially, sales were better than Steam's, where he had already published it. But then they slowed down to a trickle.
His publisher Hitcents had a similar problem with another game, Draw a Stickman: EPIC 2a few months after its release in January 2018. The price of the game, which was $ 6.99, was reduced by 30% and sales increased tenfold. It was the first time the publisher had organized a sale for one of his titles, said studio director Jordan Taylor. Then in late August of this year, Hitcents put Draw a Stickman: EPIC 2 on sale for 99 cents.
"This one has made me a bit nervous," Taylor said. His concerns were quickly resolved. The sale was massively paying, with 1,000 times more copies sold per day. This earned him a place in the list of best sellers. "We certainly did not expect such a substantial increase," he said.
Hitcents suggested Bitner to do the same for A robot named fight. "I was vaguely afraid that the game would be devalued, but the store had already been in this store for a year and a half, so I did not have a lot of reserves," said Bitner. It has gone on sale for $ 1.99, compared to its usual price of $ 12.99. "It was night and day," he said. "During this sale, he performed better than the launch."
A robot named fight Outside the eShop, smaller gaming sites have published articles on the sale, players have started to broadcast the gameplay and people have tweeted about it.
Bitner would not share the results of its sales, but stated that unit sales of A robot named fight increased by 1,500% when it went on sale compared to the previous month. "It's pretty good for me to keep creating games," said Bitner.
One of the goals of Seth Scott's life was to launch a game on a Nintendo console. Thanks to his Perfect Hat Games development studio, he achieved this goal on February 22, 2018, when the psychedelic puzzle platform Membrane press the eShop for $ 9.99.
But before Scott launched his game, he had studied the operation of the eShop.
"We had some visibility in the section Coming Soon," he said. "But we found that once we were out of this page, our sales would be reduced to virtually nothing. We had the idea to start trying to put it up for sale and, hopefully, to get into the special offers section. "
Membrane has been on sale a few times now, Perfect Hat experimenting with different prices – ranging from 50% to 99% – to see what works best. He found that what worked best was the price of 9 cents.
"We want to find the perfect place where people buy it without thinking," said Scott, who added that most of the money earned by the game had been sold. "We just eclipse 100,000 sales with our latest 99% discount," he said. Only 1% of these sales were made when the game was priced high.
Scott also found that the drastic sale had helped MembraneVisibility in places outside the Gateway of Switch's eShop. "Usually, when we put it on sale, random Reddit publications appear and people post videos from YouTube," he said.
While Scott and Bitner were willing to sell their games at discounted prices, Bigosaur's Milan Babuškov said he could not do the same for his game. Witch's Son. He had spent three years developing it, he said, so he did not want to have the impression of devaluing his work or reducing the purchase of customers who were paying the game for $ 15. or at the modest 30% discount that he had purchased. had once offered. Rather than put an extreme discount on Witch's Sonhe changed the way he developed games in the future.
"I can not compete with companies like Forever Entertainment or QubicGames, which develop small games and offer new ones all the time," he wrote in an email. "So I decided to join me in smaller games as well. I had developed a lot of small games in the past, most of those open source or downloadable for free. I started transferring some of my old projects to Switch, with updated graphics and improved game mechanics. I've sold these games for as little as 19 cents on eShop. "
The strategy seems to work for Babuškov. One of his games, Quest for the Golden Duck, is listed in the all-digital bestseller list after rising from $ 9.99 to 39 cents.
"The price does not matter much and it might even be good to keep the price high," he said. "But the rankings are in number of copies sold.The more you sell units, the more you gain visibility."
Taylor warned developers looking to update their own games. "I will not make big discounts on a product that I'm not sure will not provide something valuable to the player," he said. "That is, I'm not going to publish a lousy game, and then sell after sale to increase the numbers. Consumers have to struggle to buy really fun games. That's why I really would not want to see a market filled with countless half-cooked titles, all reduced to one dollar just to get similar results. "
Although Bitner, Scott and Babuškov have all agreed that the Nintendo eShop could be significantly improved in terms of control and curation of users, the discount remains for the moment the best solution for developers who want to put their games in the hands of players , and maybe create enough goodwill for players to buy their future projects.
"When people play Membrane and post about it and reach out, these are the ultimate moments that are satisfying as a game developer, "Scott said. "Yes [sales] help this more often, it's worth it. "
Stephen J. Bronner (@Stephen JBronner) is a freelance writer based in New York. His favorite games are the sidecrollers, Souls-love and / or those with stealth mechanisms.
[ad_2]
Source link