Title: Crystal Cave & Crystal Cave GOLD
Description: Crystal Cave and Crystal Cave Gold are family-fun puzzle games.
Developer: 300AD
Released: 1st March 2004, GOLD August 2004, Mac August 2005
Team size: 2
Time of development (all version together): 2 months (not fulltime, only 3-4 hours/day). 2 weeks programming + graphics, 3 weeks levels design, 1 week testings and one month creating level hints (due to customer requests, because some levels are really hard).
Platform: Windows, Mac OS X
Sales:
Price: US $12.95 (Crystal Cave), US $19.95 (Gold)
Direct sales:
- Crystal Cave: 334 copies
- Crystal Cave Gold: 252 copies
- Crystal Cave Gold MAC: 74 copies
Net sales: (Net sales is the cash received. Gross sales is the sales before payment processing fees.)
- Crystal Cave: US $3328.09 USD (Gross sales: US $4649.84, including sales taxes)
- Crystal Cave Gold: US $3450.78 (Gross: US $5427.36, including sales taxes)
- Crystal Cave Gold MAC: US $1211.72 (Gross: US $1559.54, including sales taxes)
Other sales:
- Portals, distributors: US $4000 - $5000 (Gross: not allowed to say - Gameproducer’s guess: near $15000)
TOTAL: US $11000 - $12000
Conversion rates: (counted from files requests, not from full download files)
- Windows: 1.0%
- Mac: 0.7%
Downloads:
Windows: 55000 (25.000 download.com, 30.000 primary and secondary servers)
Mac: 12100
Expenses:
- press release: US $100
- porting the mac version: US $150
- other (download.com, google adwords, etc.): US $650
TOTAL: US $900
Promotion methods:
- Manually submitted to download sites first year
- PromoSoft
- Press release
- Google adwords
- Download.com (US $99 program for 4 months)
- newsletters to friends
- competitions (that were self made)
- sending infor to several news conferences
Additional comments:
Pavel Tovarys:
Citat:
Tip for developers - don’t do very hard logic levels. Some of levels in Crystal Cave GOLD are extremelly hard and there are no many people who finish them and casual players have usually problems with middle difficulty levels, so we got hundreds of level support request “how could I finish the level” and we had to create a special hints page for the players. Some of players send us tens of support mails ;)
Thanks for the sales statistics Pavel, and good luck with the sales.