Carpe Fulgur and the Purple Cow: Capitalism ho! Part II

Okay, so I know I said I'd do this yesterday, but... shutup. At one point I was trying to put everything in a Monday-Wednesday-Friday update schedule, or possibly even Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. Obviously that didn't pan out but I've come to really enjoy this whole "I'll post when I damn well please scenario." In reality, it probably means nothing since the handful of readers I have all follow the blog and are informed when I update. Even so, it gives me enormous satisfaction to imagine that there are people angrily stomping their feet and saying "where's my daily Crewd?" All dickery aside, here's the promised part II explanation of Carpe Fulgur's astonishing 110,000+ selling first project.

3. Digital Distribution. I'll go into more detail hopefully later this week about why traditional retail is, if not inherently evil (although it might BE evil at this point, I don't think that's inherent), it is at least unecessary and indeed damaging to some products. For purposes here, suffice to say that choosing to release Recettear only as a download resulted in several things including but possibly not limited to
A) Limiting risk. Since there is no per copy production cost, warehousing, shipping, or cost of returns beyond lost sales (normally returns add warehousing and shipping costs) a startup like Carpe Fulgur was able to meet an unexpectedly huge demand INSTANTLY and without having to allocate ANY MONEY AT ALL to the production of the item. In short, their only expenses were their own time.
B) It simplifies the amount of work they have to do. For one, they didn't have to attempt to contract any warehousing companies or attempt to ship stacks of the game from their basement. It also meant they didn't need to find a company to professionally burn the discs or print up flashy boxes, or glossy instructional manuals. They didn't need to convince major retailers like Gamestop to carry their product. Frankly, they'd probably have been laughed out of town anyway, and since Gamestop bought pretty much every other major software retailer, inclduing Electronic's Boutique, Software Etc. Babbages and CompUSA, and if memory serves, is owned in turn by Walmart, their refusal would've killed the project instantly. Even if it had survived, good luck trying to get indepently owned software and gaming stores to pick up on it. You have a lot of ground to cover there. Big companies would use sales reps for that sort of thing. Startups may not have that kind of dough. Or those connections.
C) Because of the difference in production costs and the smaller cut digital distributors such as Steam take when compared to the massive discounts copies are sold to retailers for, Carpe Fulgur was able to effectively charge less and maintain better margins. Likely as not, they actually made more money per copy, but I'm not privy to their accounts so I can only say for sure that their margins were a whole lot better. In other words- similar profits with virtually no risk. Great for the customer too, obviously. In retail, the game probably would've been 29.99. Online it was 19.99. I got it during the holiday sale for 10. I've played for 40 hours and I can guarantee I'll play it for another forty before I forget I own it or stop caring entirely. That's a pretty damn good deal. Consider this- a movie ticket round these parts is 15 for two hours of entertainment. So for the equivalent of 80 hours, movies would run me 600 bucks. That's a lot of entertainment for such a small investment. That'll spur sales, sure as shit.

4. Carpe Fulgur also promoted the ever loving FUCK out of that game. And let this be a lesson to you: it doesn't if you're good if no one knows it. You can't expect people to find you- at least not in large numbers. But thanks to the all mighty internet, finding interested parties isn't as hard as you would think. Carpe Fulgur made a non-stop circuit of interviews on all sorts of gaming websites- mostly these are non-profit fan run organizations which are and have been for sometime, of far more use especially to niche audiences than traditional gaming magazines. They also, just as an example, released a demo of the game. Most products don't do that sort of thing. Books are just beggining to put out sample chapters as e-books because they can do that now without it really costing any money to produce. However, game demos, like some sample chapters, are short, out of context, possibly an early version that will change. It's not really that good. And yes, it can catch interest and I see no reason NOT to release a sample, but the number of sales it translates into is usually...well, worthwhile but hardly overwhelming. Carpe Fulgur released a demo that was 2 hours long. Using the actual opening of the actual game, going so far as to allow the player to save and transfer the file to the finished version.

For more information, feel free to check out this article. Meantime, I think my focus will be on the importance as well as methods of self promotion next time, then on to matters of production and retail.

Oh, and in case anyone missed it, "Capitalism ho!" is the catchphrase of the main character (an adorable little girl) of Recettear, Carpe Fulgurs first game. The purple cow refers to Seth Godin- marketing Guru. I thought he'd be a good fit considering this old thing, which frankly, I'm a little surprised it took him as long as it did to announce.