Fun Infused Games 2010 Wrap-up
Fun Infused Games appeared as a real Indie game development company in 2009 and released our first game Nasty. 2010 marked our first full year of literal existence. During this year we released two games, Abduction Action and Hypership Out of Control, that were well received by gamers and critics. Sales fell short of expectations but we're building a solid foundation of a game company and we actually made a profit this year. Growth as a company and improving the games we are making is more important at this juncture than sales numbers. As we get better at making games, gamers will improve at buying our games.
Important 2010 Dates for Fun Infused Games
- 4/18/2010 - Abduction Action! released for Xbox Live Indie Games.
- 4/26/2010 - Released 1.1 version of Abduction Action! to fix various bugs.
- 9/15/2010 - Hypership Out of Control released for Xbox Live Indie Games.
- 10/14/2010 - Released 1.1 version of Hypership Out of Control for minor improvements and bug fixes.
- 11/17/2010 - Ate some very delicious pizza.
- 12/2/2010 - Released 1.2 version of Hypership Out of Control as part of the Indie Games Winter Uprising. Added reversing of waves (effectively doubling the size of the game) and a few other improvements.
Critical Acclaim
"Blessed with an incessant one-more-go appeal, multiple gameplay modes and even global online leaderboards, Hypership will have you quite happy to live in the past for the duration."
9 out of 10
- EuroGamer
Both our 2010 releases received good reviews from critics, Hypership especially so. Abduction Action reviews can be found here and Hypership reviews can be found here. Many of the comments on Hypership make me particularly proud, it is not faux praise when so many people go on and on about how much they enjoyed the game.
Hypership was also an IGN.com Pick on the Xbox Dashboard and a charter member of the Indie Game Winter Uprising. The later promotion even lead to Hypership being mentioned in a Winter Uprising article in the Official Xbox Magazine (a big deal for someone like me who grew up reading these types of magazines).
Sales
Abduction Action! did well on sales overall (our number one seller to date) and Hypership, while not doing terrible, was a disappointment. I had hoped to exceed the sales of Abduction Action! by a large margin (my feeling is that Hypership is a much better game) but it did not even meet the sales of Abduction Action!. Despite a better conversion rate on trials, the overall downloads were much lower. Timing of the release (up against Halo Reach and during a time when kids are preparing to get back to school), genre of the game, and difficulty of the game are what I believe to be the most likely culprits of the lower sales.
Overall game sales numbers did vastly improve over 2009 (though for what it is worth 2009 includes only 4 months of time).
2009
Trials: 6299
Units Sold: 201
Conversion Rate: 3.19%
2010
Trials: 24652
Units Sold: 4178
Conversion Rate: 16.95%
The most promising aspect I take from these sales numbers is the improved conversion rate, 6 times better than the previous year. If we improve 6 times again in 2011, we will sell slightly more games than people download. We also had 24,000 gamers trying our games. That is a pretty significant improvement too though we still need that to be higher next year. We will do well as a company if we can continue these trends in 2011.
Going Forward
2011 looks to be a busy year for Fun Infused Games. We've got three titles far along in development, Nastier (a sequel to our first release Nasty), Trivia Or Die, and an unnamed platformer project. We've got a fourth title that is in earlier stages of development though looking good so far too. Trivia or Die will be our next release, likely this week or next.
While we have enjoyed developing for Xbox Live Indie Games, we are also coming to the realization that other markets may be more lucrative. Sadly our games have sold well initially but they maintain very little residual sales. There should be a long-tail effect where games sell a lot upfront and then sell a few copies here and there for a while. Thus far our game sales have rapidly fell off the face of the Earth within a few months of release. We need to maintain better long term sales on our games and honestly I have my doubts if this will ever be possible on Xbox Live Indie Games.
We are currently working on an HTML5 version of Hypership for play in your browser and have done some early work on a PC port of Hypership as well. We plan to also explore mobile markets (WP7 and possibly iPhone/Android) and try out tools such as Unity 3D (which would allow us to easily port games from one platform to another). While many of our games will likely appear on Xbox Live Indie Games first, ports to other platforms are likely after that. It is hard to say if Xbox Live Indie Games will continue to be our first market for release after our currently in development games are finished. I do hope so, as it is my preferred platform to develop for, but in order to build Fun Infused Games into an Indie game powerhouse (which is my goal), I may need to look elsewhere.
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