Site Update: Better Graphs!
We updated the site today! Here’s some notes about what changed and why.
Monthly Sales Graph Improved
The biggest feedback we received from our Developer Survey was that you want more stats: more charts, more graphs, more data. So we’ve been hard at work gathering tons of data for you. Over the next few months we’ll be revealing lots of new charts and graphs. Some of them will be simple and some will be big … really big! But for our first foray back into charts-and-graphs land, it seemed like we should revisit the already existing chart.
The classic Monthly Sales Chart has been revised in lots of ways:
- Click on a column in the chart to see a detailed breakdown of sales prices. This lets you get a really good feel for sale prices. (To protect privacy, we’ve obfuscated the prices a bit, and we only show breakdowns if there are at least 20 data points.)
- You can now see the Median sale prices, instead of the Mean (which was often misleading)
- We now show non-exclusive bidding licenses as “game shop sales” because that’s closer to the spirit of what they are. Now all non-exclusive sales are listed under “Game Shop Sales”.
This chart is just the beginning, though; we have some very cool new charts and graphs on deck that will be ready soon!
“Favorite Bid” Improvements
One of the best ways for developers to communicate seamlessly with sponsors is to use the Favorite Bid feature to indicate what bid is “winning”. But a problem occurs when developers don’t update their Favorite Bid near the end of bidding — the sponsor who is “favorited” won’t realize they need to bid again if developers don’t keep the Favorite Bid up to date.
To help solve this problem, the site now warns you if you are about to accept a bid that isn’t your Favorite Bid, and suggests you make the new bid your Favorite for a few days to let your old favorite bidder know.
To make sure sponsors notice when you change Favorite Bids, the website now sends nightly email to any sponsor who stopped being the favorite bid on a game.
No, Really, Icons Must Be 100×100
Since we believe icon quality is very important to maximizing sponsor views, we want developers to think carefully about the composition of their icons. Unfortunately far too many developers continue to upload raw screenshots of their game or menu. The system would shrink these down to 100×100 automatically, but the results were generally very poor icons.
The system now requires you to upload an icon that is exactly 100×100. This ensures that the icon is displayed exactly as you’ve envisioned it. (And ensures that you think about your icon, at least a bit!)
Proxy Bids Are Marked as Such
A recurring complaint from sponsors is the fear that developers are abusing the Proxy Bid system to artificially create bidding wars. This happens very rarely, but we’ve never really been able to allay sponsors’ fears. Since sponsors couldn’t tell what bids were proxies, there was a continuing fear that developers were abusing the system.
After much consideration, we’ve decided to show all proxy bids with a special tag so that sponsors can tell they are proxy bids at a glance. We hope this will ally sponsors’ fears of bid manipulation: it will be obvious that in the vast majority of games, not more than one or two bids are proxy bids, and for most games, there are no proxy bids at all.
And The Rest
Miscellaneous Fixes/Improvements:
- Approved game trailers are now automatically shown above a game’s description. Previously our approval staff would edit your description to insert the link to the trailer, which sometimes caused problems. If your game now shows two copies of the trailer, edit your game’s description to remove the trailer from it.
- There was a bug that caused some Buy It Now purchases to request the commission from the sponsor instead of the developer, which is not what the Buy It Now page said would happen — the developer is supposed to pay the commission on those cases. This bug has been fixed.
- Games that end their 72 hour Last Call, but that aren’t yet hidden from the sponsor catalog, now continue to say that they are in last call. (Previously, the game stopped looking like it was in Last Call for those last few “bonus” hours, which was occasionally confusing.)
- We now give out the usual First Impressions rewards for market and community levels above 10. (Another bug.)
