We all know the life cycle of a casual game in the marketplace: slow sales, followed by a huge (but short-lived) spike when you are ‘discovered’ by the gamer faithful, followed by a long tail of limited sales.
Once a consumer picks your game, the chances are they’re going to go looking for one ‘like it’ more quickly than you can push out a sequel – the laws of time/space make it impossible to keep up with the voracious appetites of the gaming consumer! So, unless you can start building games at a superhuman pace, you need to either find another way of filling your product portfolio or risk losing your relationship with your customer.
That’s ultimately why large distributors like Bigfish are able to keep building a market – the consumer returns to their site and finds more offerings. Sadly for the game developer, that can mean a deep dilution of your brand, and a complete loss of a direct business relationship.
But there’s a way to avoid this: cross-marketing. Team up with another developer or two to cross-market one another’s products from your own site, ensuring there’s more to consume each time the customer returns – and that they’ll be primed and ready for your next release.
Working together, you can reduce the time it takes to grow a new title’s popularity: simply cross-market it each time a current title is purchased. You can also maintain the volume on recent (but dipping) games, by returning the favor as new blockbusters take their place at the top of the charts.
Set up a standard business relationship, where you agree a commission for each sale of one another’s titles, and then let Plimus take on the effort of distributing revenues. This is found money for the most part – or at least money that would otherwise go to a distributor and can now be used to keep the quality of new games up.
Jason Kiwaluk
Sales Director, North America
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