Gamasutra
April 24, 1998
Vol. 2: Issue 17
Past Scores
Selling stuff on the Net: Take 2 - Auction Time
[04.10.98]
Nintendo Stands Alone
[03.13.98]
Everything Old is New Again
[02.13.98]
Settle the Score?
[View Thread]
Haven't joined yet? [Join Now]
Getting into the retail channel is the one great pain that we all share. Nothing is more frustrating then developing a great game and then finding out you don't have the magic beans to get the sucker on the shelves. Whether 'tis better to suffer the outrageous profit cuts of a publisher, or to throw alms at a sea of retailers, and by bribing, penetrate them? Traditionally, every game company I've worked with has used one of the other big game companies as the publisher, and just ended up in abject pain from the whole process. The publishers end up taking between a 50-70% cut of the profits, and their sales people just seem to have this strange tendency to sell the hell out of their own stuff, and not spend quite as much time on yours.
Strange how that works.
If your game takes off on its own, they'll spend tons of bucks and time on you, but despite promises to the contrary, usually do very little in the beginning to help. Let's face it, their doors aren't going to close from the $50k of inventory they printed. You, on the other hand, are starving and desperate. Just the way they like ya when it's time to negotiate. It used to be that they paid most of your bills through the middle and to the end of the development cycle, which wasn't so bad. But now they're cherry picking from completed, or near completed software, so all they're really offering you is what they learned by having to go through channel hell themselves. That, and an economy of scale that says "hey, if I'm already doing three pages of advertising with you, you're going to give me a reeeaaal good deal, right?"
But it's an awful lot of money…so you get fed up and decide this is the time to do the retail channel yourself. After all, how expensive can it really be? Well, here's a sneak peek into one of the main retail/channel specific shows and what scurries out when you pull up this particular rock.
RetailVison, seemingly like everything related to the retail channel, is expensive and full of closed doors. To just show up cost $3000 bucks per person. For this you get to staff a booth. They stick your product on a shelf and the buyers theoretically come by and see what pops off at them. The first thing they do is the ten foot test. They stand about ten feet away and see if your box 1) gets their attention, and 2) explains what the hell it is. The boxes that do the best try to say one thing only. And say it very, very loud.
The problem is that nobody is coming by the show floor. That's because everybody is in the closed sessions. The closed sessions are where you rent out a room, and ask for groups who are interested in a particular area to come through. They come through for about 10-20 minutes each, and the group is a bunch of retailers/distributors who said they were interested in products in your group. You have no clue or control of who they happen to be. Just wait for the door to open and pray. For this privilege, you pay $6000 for twenty minutes of time.
Now THAT's a game! You bet $6000 that the people coming through the door aren't a bunch of losers from a three-store Mom and Pop chain.
Then say you do get somebody on the hook and ready to buy. "So, who's your distributor?" That's just a silly question these days, when you can get a printer that will do your boxes and CDs and ship to whomever you want while taking care of the billings and returns. Why the heck do you need Ingram/Micro anymore? Well, turns out that's how the good old boys like to work. They want to take all the old software that doesn't sell at the end of the quarter, shrink-wrap it on a palette, and send it in for their money back, thank you very much for playing…we've got some wonderful parting gifts for you. The old time distributors are in this weird state, with e-commerce nipping at their heels. But try and sell to Egghead Online, and they want you to tell them who you're distributing with. If, during any of the trade shows where you first sneak looks at your new game, a guy in a suit from Ingram or one of the big distributors comes up to say hi, shake his damn hand, and get a few copies of his card. Then shut up and listen when he gives you a few over-the-top suggestions about how the box should look, and how the start up screen should work. These guys on your side and they can help big time.
So what's the bottom line on getting into the channel? Well, the price tag seemed to be between 5-10 million. Spend at least half on advertising, ("So where are you advertising your product?"), another quarter on end-caps and free goodies for the channel drones that sell your stuff a little better than the Windows Uninstaller that's next on their list. Spend the rest hiring a sales staff. And hope the guy you hired can sell more than just himself into a VP of sales job.
The only big antidote to the Channel blues seems to be pull. Lots of pull…massive pull. Basically that means that all the betas you let out, the press sneaks you do and the limited versions you give away help big time in getting people to go knock on CompUSA's door and ask for your stuff. The channel guys read the press, and if they think that other people think you're a winner, then you are. Do your user groups, get into peoples booths at trade shows…create your buzz. If you create a big enough one, than you can get the channel to come to you.
Man…I'm just going to sell software to my friends out of the back of the car from now on.
-B
| Unemployed with a Theater Degree
from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica has been making a living in the computer
and gaming business in various incarnations since then, Including: Founding
Editor of New Media Magazine, First Toys Editor for Wired, one of the few
single boys to write for Parents Magazine. Product Manager for the multimedia
authoring system, SuperCard Director of Production for CyberFlix; (design
credits on Lunicus, Creepy Castle, and conceptual design for Skull Cracker)
Product Manger for the ill-fated modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for
AT&T [which, by the way, we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe
I'd better tell that another time]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get into
real good argument with Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind Apple
Game Sprockets... He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work. Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish, an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs. He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then he'd have to kill you. |