[Idea for Desura] Alpha Funding Sales Counter Thread

I was thinking that maybe it might be wise for Desura to adopt something that seems to be a major factor in Kickstarters success. It'd be nice to actually publicly show how much money we've raised. I made a small mockup for what I'm thinking of. Its just it'd add a bit more transparency I feel.

I think the goal should be to pretty much start copying kickstarter now that most people are used to it just so we can get more people dealing with those developers on Desura. Plus I'm sick of Amazon making so much money.. how about an Australian company gets a fair go for a change.

Anyway having something there to convince people to support the game would be awesome and I feel that totals like this really do help from a rhetorical/marketing standpoint.

I really like this. It would be great to see, even if it just showed how many people had purchased it. Along with this it would be great to add voting on games only if the person voting owns the game.

I really like this idea.
+1

figalot wrote: Along with this it would be great to add voting on games only if the person voting owns the game.

so divided into
1) community member ratings and reviews
2) customer reviews and ratings

So reviews/ratings of customers would be pushed to the top or somehow specially marked on Mod DB / Slide DB / Indie DB, while on Desura only customers' votes and reviews would be shown.

Edited by: feillyne

I think this sounds good, but I'm not entirely sure. I don't know of any sites that publish the sales figures for games, even those in alpha (as a developer planning on releasing an alpha, that certainly would be nice for market research purposes) but I can't help wondering if there's a good reason why these numbers aren't put out there. I'm not sure that putting the amount of money raised would convince anyone to buy the alpha who wouldn't already, since there is after all no stated goal amount to reach like there is on kickstarter. I wonder if this could lead to a snowball effect for popular games and further discourage people from buying games with already low sales since unprofitable games might seem to have a greater risk of being abandoned before they're finished. (or it could have the opposite effect, personally I don't really know enough about marketing to say one way or the other)

GaldorStudios wrote: I wonder if this could lead to a snowball effect for popular games and further discourage people from buying games with already low sales since unprofitable games might seem to have a greater risk of being abandoned before they're finished. (or it could have the opposite effect, personally I don't really know enough about marketing to say one way or the other)

this is exactly why we "Should" do it. Projects that have low sales were going to fail anyway, if its not profitable then the devs simply won't bother developing it further. We want to attract people to the projects that are likely to succeed, the only way to really do this is to show that those projects are having a lot of success. Further more, the deadlines on kickstarter are a joke anyway, all those projects end up using PayPal, and they end up getting far more funding via paypal than they did KS. Before kickstarter existed people were crowdsourcing with PayPal and it was actually more successful than Kickstarter. Case in point, look at what RSI did with Star Citizen.

RSI: $5,298,191 Kickstarter: $2,134,374

RSI are creditcard/paypal transactions. So we can clearly see this is not exclusive to Kickstarter, and having a funding deadline actually DOES hurt the project in its earning potential. RSI today is now the most successful crowdsourced game project right now and its worth noting that majority of developers have started employing it as well.

Another thing I'm interested in is community contributions like Planetary Anihiliation and Wasteland 2 are doing. It was suggested in the past that Desura move towards creating an art assets shop similar to that of the Unity3d Store.. It might be worth reconsidering. Their idea was to make your community a workforce. If we can allow modders to make money from their works that'd be AMAZING.

Edited by: formerlyknownasMrCP

Hey so we do not publish sales data for games. The idea has merit but this is not a kickstarter, we simply allow developers to sell games they are currently working on. We already know the direction we are taking Desura and it is not to clone other sites. Also it is worth noting you have mentioned the extreme exceptions to the funding idea, but generally most will never be successful by those standards.

We sell Indie games because they are awesome, regardless of what they are or what issues they might be having.

Someone wrote: We already know the direction we are taking Desura and it is not to clone other sites. Also it is worth noting you have mentioned the extreme exceptions to the funding idea, but generally most will never be successful by those standards.

Of course, I was merely pointing out credible numbers to prove that we don't need kickstarter, we can quite easily do it with PayPal and in many cases have much more success than we would have with KS. I could also say the same for Minecraft and "Mount and Blade" because these two were also crowd sourced using PayPal. What Desura offers us though is actual distribution of the product and offers the consumer a bit more protection on their end because its a pre-order.

Someone wrote: Hey so we do not publish sales data for games. The idea has merit but this is not a kickstarter, we simply allow developers to sell games they are currently working on.

Pretty sure you guys created Alpha Funding as a result of Kickstarter.. I mean if you remember rightly we brought up the fact that people were unethically using kickstarter and we needed a system in place to ensure that it could be policed. That's kinda what I thought the function of Alpha Funding was, that it was going to correct where Kickstarter was ultimately lacking and failing.

I'm not asking you guys to copy Kickstarter completely, but I am asking that you make it possible to publish some kind of sales data to encourage people to use the system. And Tbh I'd rather use Desura than Kickstarter because you guys handle distribution which is much more attractive than the KS model. But you have to admit that the main reason why Kickstarter has been successful is because of its ability to publish sales.

Right now I can't tell if any of your developers on Desura have had any success or not.. unless they specifically published it.

Edited by: formerlyknownasMrCP

formerlyknownasMrCP wrote: Pretty sure you guys created Alpha Funding as a result of Kickstarter.. I mean if you remember rightly we brought up the fact that people were unethically using kickstarter and we needed a system in place to ensure that it could be policed. That's kinda what I thought the function of Alpha Funding was, that it was going to correct where Kickstarter was ultimately lacking and failing.

Alpha Funding came about because we built features to help Project Zomboid get out of the strife they where in. Nothing to do with competing with kickstarter. We simply saw that the idea could work with other games, now the Alpha Funding program on Desura is our best feature and most games that come through it reach some success. However just being on Desura does not warrant sales, sometimes it comes down to just the right place at the right time.

formerlyknownasMrCP wrote: I'm not asking you guys to copy Kickstarter completely, but I am asking that you make it possible to publish some kind of sales data to encourage people to use the system. And Tbh I'd rather use Desura than Kickstarter because you guys handle distribution which is much more attractive than the KS model. But you have to admit that the main reason why Kickstarter has been successful is because of its ability to publish sales.

Right now I can't tell if any of your developers on Desura have had any success or not.. unless they specifically published it.

As I have mentioned, if you are not privy to that information then you do not get to see it. Just like how your doctor would not tell other people your private information.

That's ok, if you guys are doing well with Alpha Funding as is then that's awesome. I was a bit concerned because a lot of developers tend to dismiss anything that's not kickstarter.. they're very narrow minded, so if you're having success with the way it is now all good then and I'll be interested to see what direction you guys end up taking it in.

Eventually I intend to use Desura's alpha funding myself in time, so if its all working out good for you guys then ignore my suggestion. As I said its really hard to gauge the success of it, I can only go from what Desura and your associated developers (such as Zomboid) talk about.

Edited by: formerlyknownasMrCP