Survey for Those with Commercially Available Games

News & General Discussion
1

Hi there! Please take some time to answer some questions if you have experienced working on a game title that’s now commercially available :slight_smile:

  1. How many people are in your team?

  2. Do you have an office or do you work from different locations? If you work from different locations, what software or methods do you use to be able to work together while being geographically separated?

  3. How did you raise your funds to make your game?

  4. Are your team members paid with a salary? Is it hourly pay? Is it profit sharing or something else?

  5. Do you do your own marketing or do you hire advertising companies to help you? If you do your own marketing, how do you do it?

  6. Was your game a financial success? If not, did each team member get paid and what was the team’s reaction?

  7. Do you keep the same team members when working on a new game project or do you replace them? Do you plan to expand and add more team members?

  8. After releasing a game, how do you handle customer service for problems like game glitches, refunds, and other things? Do you hire separate customer service representatives to handle these matters or does each team member handle it as well?

  9. For how long do you plan on providing customer service support to the last game you released?

  10. Where do you think is the best place to release your game? Retail stores, online distribution solutions like Steam, or your own game’s website?

Optional Info:
Name:

Job Position:

Game Company/Team:

Games Released You Were Involved With (please include links/websites if you want to):

Average Money Earned:

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

If I may say so, this seems more than a little one sided. You’re asking us to be completely open with information for you, but at the same time don’t tell us even so much as why you’re collecting it or what you’re going to use it for. You also don’t say if you’ll be making the collected information available to others afterwards or if you’re just keeping it to yourself.

Also, you might get more responses if you put this into something like a Google Form and make answering as quick as possible, e.g.: use radio buttons where possible instead of asking us to type.

3

  1. How many people are in your team?
    All of them

  2. Do you have an office or do you work from different locations? If you work from different locations, what software or methods do you use to be able to work together while being geographically separated?
    Maybe.

  3. How did you raise your funds to make your game?
    Hustlen.

  4. Are your team members paid with a salary? Is it hourly pay? Is it profit sharing or something else?
    Threats.

  5. Do you do your own marketing or do you hire advertising companies to help you? If you do your own marketing, how do you do it?
    Ain’t need no marketing.

  6. Was your game a financial success? If not, did each team member get paid and what was the team’s reaction?
    OH YEAH.

  7. Do you keep the same team members when working on a new game project or do you replace them? Do you plan to expand and add more team members?
    Nah dawg, always.

  8. After releasing a game, how do you handle customer service for problems like game glitches, refunds, and other things? Do you hire separate customer service representatives to handle these matters or does each team member handle it as well?
    Ain’t important yo.

  9. For how long do you plan on providing customer service support to the last game you released?
    Neva.

  10. Where do you think is the best place to release your game? Retail stores, online distribution solutions like Steam, or your own game’s website?
    On thestreet, get mad street cred dawg.

Optional Info:
Name:
T-Dawg Easy-Muny

Job Position:
Idea guy

Game Company/Team:
BethEAtendo

Games Released You Were Involved With (please include links/websites if you want to):
http://www.callofduty.com/mw3

Average Money Earned:
straight fidys, cash muny yo

4

Put it on a SurveyMonkey. I don’t even want to read the questions in here.

5

You have just made my day :smile:

6

I’ll answer your questions to stop this stupid trolling :wink:

1. How many people are in your team?
For Highway Run we were 2, one artist and one programmer (me).

2. Do you have an office or do you work from different locations? If you work from different locations, what software or methods do you use to be able to work together while being geographically separated?
Didn’t need versioncontrol since i was the only programmer. We just used a FTP.

3. How did you raise your funds to make your game?
Out of own pockets! Highway Run didn’t cost us that much. Just t he Unity licenses, a bit of marketing (like €140) and some 3d models and scripts from the Asset Store.

4. Are your team members paid with a salary? Is it hourly pay? Is it profit sharing or something else?
We haven’t even decided when we released, because we didn’t think it would make that much money.
After the first days we decided to just split the pot.

5. Do you do your own marketing or do you hire advertising companies to help you? If you do your own marketing, how do you do it?
Own marketing - we just made a press release for this game and posted it around the internet.
Publishing our press release on www.gamespress.com got us on Gamasutra!

6. Was your game a financial success? If not, did each team member get paid and what was the team’s reaction?
Not really, we made a few thousand bucks out of a few hundred thousand downloads, which is not the best conversion rate.
But still we learned A LOT and i love to put those learned lessons in my next game which will be much more successful (hopefully). :slight_smile:

7. Do you keep the same team members when working on a new game project or do you replace them? Do you plan to expand and add more team members?
At the moment i was quitting my job as Software Dev to create games fulltime while my artist (and colleague) sticked with his job. That means i am working with my freelancers again.

8. After releasing a game, how do you handle customer service for problems like game glitches, refunds, and other things? Do you hire separate customer service representatives to handle these matters or does each team member handle it as well?
That’s not a big deal if you’re selling on the AppStore … so no i handle it myself.

9. For how long do you plan on providing customer service support to the last game you released?
Quite none at all to be honest :wink:

10. Where do you think is the best place to release your game? Retail stores, online distribution solutions like Steam, or your own game’s website?
AppStore and Steam if you get in
Android if iOS version was successful

Optional Info:
Name:
Gabriel Morgenstern

Job Position:
Owner/Programmer

Game Company/Team:

Games Released You Were Involved With (please include links/websites if you want to):
Highway Run (iOS) - get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/app/highway-run/id492097046
higwayrun.vidiludi.com

Average Money Earned:
As said a few thousand bucks from IAPs after a few hundred thousand free downloads.

7

Thank you very much for sharing your very professional and informative answers, I wish you more success :slight_smile:

8

So, what do you need that info for? I might answer your questions, but only if I know what they are used for.

9

This is just an informal survey for educational purposes. The aim is to have a general idea of how most teams (in this case mostly independent teams) in general deal with distribution of money as well as handle customer service. No part of any information supplied will be sold or compiled for any other purpose. Most of what could be considered very important or personal information are optional, not required to be answered. Thank you very much!

10

Indeed a google form or anything similar would be better for you and us, because you could analyse the results better and we could participate anonymously.