Aztaka - Developers's Edition Sale

Dhruin said:

I would imagine it's as simple as four staff @ $50k/year, licensing music perhaps and some office expenses and your $235k is gone in a year. Two staff if it took two years and so on. Braid cost $200k, as another example.

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This is exactly it. They rented an office, they had some staff. Even with minimal salaries, that is going to eat up money real quick.

azarhal said:

Aztaka low sells are linked to poor marketing, well lack of it.

I might buy the special edition, I passed on it because I don't like side scrollers.

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Agree. It looks fun and I'm sure I can get $10 worth of enjoyment out of it. (I generally try to relate my expenditures against going to the movies. For $10 or so, I can see a 2-3hr film. Can I get 2-3 hours worth of enjoyment out of this? Probably), but their real problem is marketing. Outside of the few mentions here, I have never heard of it.

To be fair, it's not like I religiously follow all the gaming sites and such, but seems like they haven't marketed it well.

It's DRM free, will it show up on GOG? That seems to be where I hear about games the most now, outside of this site!

zzajin said:

As another data point, Jeff Vogel has detailed Geneforge 4 costs before - that came in at roughly 120K. And "it used a lot of code and graphics and sound assets from previous games."

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If he can make his money back on that (and I believe in the article he laid out the costs, he felt strongly that he could), then these gusy should be able to make their money back on this game with enough exposure.

On a side note, I've often wondered why someone deosn't develop an application/store for PC's that come with integrated video (like the Dell's, HP's, and most laptops). Most integrated video is pretty low powered, so you aren't going to be able to play the most recent games, but stuff like you find on GOG or from indies with lower system requirements runs fine. But I bet most people that buy these computers don't really think about it. You already get a ton of bloatware on these machines, so it's not like the manufacturers are against it.

A nice little app that shows games that are guaranteed to run on your machine could be pretty successful IMO.

blatantninja said:

If he [= Vogel] can make his money back on that (and I believe in the article he laid out the costs, he felt strongly that he could), then these gusy should be able to make their money back on this game with enough exposure.

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Maybe with enough exposure. As I understand it's their first indie game and it's only available on PC. In hindsight it might have been a good idea to make a couple of smaller games with focus on one genre (RPG or platform) to (a) build the tech, (b) budget a couple reusable assets, (c) ramp up their own online shop (very important -> margin * own customers), (d) open the distribution channels and establish business partnerships for the big game, (e) make sure their games also run on Mac and (f) generally establish and optimize the processes.
As it is they're ca. $300k short. That's ca. 200k to reach 235k, plus interest for a couple of years, plus bonus for the risk taken. I don't see how the game can make so much money back.

If Penny Arcade mentioned the game then sales would be a lot better. Vic Davis talked about how his numbers increased dramatically after PA mentioned Armageddon Empires.

They should have also visited forums that cater to that crowd. Specifically they should have come to sites like this one and others. Not to just pimp their game, but talk shop, so to speak, and happen to mention their game if anyone asked. For example: If Coyote never came here or Dhruin never mentioned Frayed Knights then it might have slipped under my radar. That is, if I was a normal human being and didn't hunt these games down religiously

In any event, indies need to get as much free press as they can get and forums are a good way to do it. You have to be careful not to just come to them to sell your game, but actually come there because you enjoy that genre. That's what I think anyways. PR is a bitch, but there are tons of sites like RPGWatch that cater to niche crowds that these guys could have gone to. Live and learn I guess.

@skavenhorde: I agree completely. There are many indie developers who really miss the boat on maximizing sales. You MUST do PR and you need to do it everywhere that caters to your potential buyers. Rampant does a great job and Steven Peeler did okay. Many, many others miss the boat completely. Corwin pimped the free games Lazarus and U6P much better than most indie developers promote the games they're trying to make money from.

Yes, and me too. You need to build a community to "evangelise" to others and spread the word. Hell, even releasing some screens or a video every couple of months will often get you a free newsbit on Bluesnews, here or wherever. It drives me mad when an indie launches a new game out of nowhere to silence - you need to build some anticipation in core fans.

It also helps to have a core market. I don't know about side-scrollers (not my thing) but being able to engage fans here for an RPG or Space Sim Central for a space-sim and build a community goes a long way. If there isn't a good website/community for the type of game you want to make, it's going to be all the harder.

Get out there, indies!

Just bought the game, thanks to RPGwatch. I will play it eventually as it looks nice and the music sounds great.

I would be great to get a Steam code to download it from there so that I don't need to keep a 928MB install file somewhere. I am sure it costs too much for them to do that though and the whole point with this sale is to make money. So I am okay with that.

I think they'd make back their money a lot faster if they:
a) get on Steam or Impulse, this is not negotiable
b) drop the price to $5
c) [optional] port for Mac and/or iPad, sell for $0.99

I don't think it's out of the question they could make back their investment in a year or so, but they need to be very aggressive selling it.

They're on Impulse. That's where I got that game from. (just realized that after my first post.)

They are on Steam too.

It's totally unclear whether or not a lower price leads to higher earnings. It works for some, it doesn't for others.

some answers from the developers…

Hi everyone,

It was really interesting reading all your good (and really good) suggestions and comments. To be honest, the bigger mistake we made was to take all the money for the production of the game. I innocently thought that the game was the most important, valuable thing… and I was wrong. One important thing too is being able to show it (and eventually sell it if its good enough). If I had to do Aztaka again, I would probably cut a level or two and hire someone for marketing and public relations.

We love crafting games but… we might not be that good at selling them Anyone interested in helping us with the marketing ?

Also, FYI, we were a team of five people and we worked on Aztaka for about a year and half, then my brother and myself continued (with no salaries) for another six months.

In any case, I just hope you guys will enjoy the game or the demo. Its not perfect, but for those who love old school action/rpg , give it a try, I'm sure you will love it.

Cheers!

Pretty impressive that you were able to create a game of that high quality in only 2 years with a max of 5 people. Did you use much in the way of open source material as a jump start, or was everything from scratch?

@jmercier I was wondering how you did your research on the Aztecs? There is a ton of lore in there on the real life aztecs.

Actually that was one of the things that I loved about the game as well. Fantasy mixed in with historical facts about how they lived back then.

As for PR, dude, just keep doing this (posting ). Go to a few more sites that cater to indies as well the rpg genre and sidescrollers (not sure about those sites).

It really is a unique game and fun to boot.

I was one of the few people that bought the game. Shame it didnt succeed commercially. Perhaps you can reduce the price later to $10 on steam for example. A lot of people buy games at that price when they normally wouldnt even if they arent sure because they think "hey its only 10 bucks".

@Blatantninja we did pretty much everything from scratch, except for the sound engine (we used FMOD) and for some file reading (Tiny XML)

@Damian we will probably do some sales on Steam after we are done updating them with the new version and a demo.

I would do the sale only temporarily - and make sure the clock is ticking.

Did you consider to recycle 90% of the assets for a new game, maybe a pure RPG in a different setting? Jeff Vogel and others prove that they can sell their games for a much higher price.

Gorath said:

Did you consider to recycle 90% of the assets for a new game, maybe a pure RPG in a different setting? Jeff Vogel and others prove that they can sell their games for a much higher price.

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That's true.

To be honest, at this point, I'm not too sure what to do next And I'm usually not that kind of guy. Its just that I don't want to do the same mistakes twice...

Dark Savant said:

Ok, found it myself for 8 EUR and paypal payment option. Now I just need to know if there is an English language option on dvd. Any German friends who had already bought this retail version on this forum?

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To answer my own question

I received German retail version and yes it does have multi-language option with English, German and French selection and it is already updated to latest 1.04 version. Case and manual is in German. The cheapest option to buy this version is this shop.
http://www.medimops.de/Aztaka.html?&fcsearchparam=aztaka

They ship world-wide for 4€ (EU for 3€).

Please don't support this version as our German publisher declared bankruptcy few months ago and its pretty hard now to get reports,data and money from the new one.
(see info : http://www.the-games-company.com/)

Yes, I know TGC ; they were developing the TDE game called "Demonicon".

A part of their portfolio has been bought up by Kalypso. Maybe you could ask if they bought up the publishing rights ?

The other company mentioned there is called "BitComposer", who are currently doing "Jagged Alliance 2 Reloaded".

But Thanks for the information anyway !!!