[Sales Projection] What to believe in

[Yang Sei Fu]

OK...business plan is beginning to scare me by the day.
This is what I have so far...

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Assuming product would be sold online, with data CD burn on demand, the only expenses would be web site overhead, web advertising and project member commissions. The following chart gives a conservative projection for game sales in the first fiscal year by month:
Month Transactions (per month)
1 10
2 30
3 40
4 80
5 100
6 120
7 70
8 80
9 60
10 40
11 50
12 70


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These projections too conservative for the American/European market, or are these already over expectations? I need a second opinion and insights please.

[PyTom]

As to the exact magnitude of the numbers, I really have no idea. Releasing an original english-language Ren'Ai game for sale is something noone has done yet (except arguably nintendo with some of its DS titles, and I don't think that's a good model for a small company), and so I don't know what to compare it to, so I can't give really good feedback as to the actual numbers.

I can tell you that the most popular game on the renai.us site is experiencing about 50 downloads a week, while the least popular gets around 17. Actually, a little more, as this is based on stats only to the start of the month (12.something days), which I normalized to 2 weeks to make the math easier.

The problem I have with your numbers is that you say that there will be a peak at 6 months out, and that seems a bit unrealistic to me.

I think there's basically 2 types of people who will buy your game:

Class A people are people who are into bishoujo/Ren'Ai games right now (where now is the time of the game's release). Just about everyone active on this forum falls into this category.

Class B people are people who are not yet into b/r'a games right now, but will become interested at some time in the future.

I would expect class A people to buy the game fairly into its release cycle. While some people will probably hold back waiting for reviews and things like that, I would expect many of these people to have bought the games within a month or two of release, assuming it gets widely known. (Probably one of the best ways to promote it is with a small ad on Megatokyo... $30-$40 for 2 days, and it probably reaches the target audience quite well.)

But I would think that, assuming the game is of high quality and gets decent publicity and reviews, most of the purchases by class A people will take place early, say within the first 3-4 months. I think by 6, the class A people that were going to buy the game would already have it... so I think the hump in your curve is too far in the future.

(A way to asses the market would be to make posts here and/or at megatokyo's forums (if that's allowed) asking people if they would buy an original game with x characters, y endings, for z dollars, with the options being something like "Definitely", "Depends on the Reviews", and "Probably Not.")

So once we're done with the class A people buying it, then sales will probably be to class B people... people who are new to b/r'a gaming. These are the people downloading games from renai.us right now, I think... since I assume class A people would have downloaded the games from the creators sites before renai.us went operational. Of course, not everyone willing to download a game for free would pay for a game.

The class B people would probably provide a steady "background radiation" to the sales after the initial hump was past. As new b-gamers come into exisitence, they will probably buy some older games... and so continued sales would mostly cater to these people. I'm optimistic that the b-game market and the original english anime/manga/j-like-products market is an growth area (What with stuff like Rising Stars of Manga, Seven Seas Entertainment, and the like), so I would expect this demographic to slowly increase... but how slowly, and how many people this totals is still up in the air. And perhaps by the time such increases overwhelm the tails of class A, your next game will come out and moot the analysis.

Just some thoughts, free of charge and worth double that.

[Yang Sei Fu]

Note to self: Advertising info on MT is http://www.megatokyo.com/support.php
.

[papillon]

A standard 'good' conversion ratio for shareware games is one sale for every 100 downloads of the demo. Most people will struggle to do that on their first game - newbies often start off at more like 1:1000 and have to fight up from there.

For games that don't have demos, I don't have any idea - but not every person who visits a site downloads a demo, so it's far less than 1:100 visitors that buy.

Any projection needs to think about how many eyeballs you can get to your game.