How and Where to Sell Your Game?

I’ll try to describe ways to sell your game briefly;

a) Paypal;

Paypal is some kind of e-commerce which serves as an electronic alternative to paper methods such as cheques and money orders. Currently Paypal is wholly owned by eBay which makes it trustworthy. For Paypal, you need a credit card which you are able to use with electronic transfers.

There are three kinds of account types in Paypal which are;

1.) Buyers

With this type of account, you can send money online within 190 countries and regions. There will be no money charged by Paypal as it’s free for buyers. You don’t need to share financial information like your credit card number or adress. But as we want to sell our game, this account type doesn’t concern us.

2.) eBay Sellers

This account is tottaly tweaked for eBay sellers as it’s name tell this. Simply, there are tools which makes selling on eBay easier. There is nothing we can use with this account.

3.) Merchants

Now this type of account is what we can use to sell our game. With this account; you will be able to accept credit cards worldwide online. Get paid by phone, fax and mail by the system called Virtual Terminal. It is said to be secure.

As you can see, I don’t have much experience with Paypal as it’s not supporting my country. So I won’t be able to give any more detailed option.

b) E-Commerce;

It is the most used way to sell independent software and games. With every transaction e-commerce charges a percent of fee from your income. It may vary from e-commerce to e-commerce. But mostly it doesn’t go more than %5.

With e-commorce, all the money you gain will directly go into your pocket but there is a catch of course. You have to promote your game and raise the sells. We will talk about it more in the next chapter so let’s meet some of those e-commerce companies.

1.) Plimus – http://www.plimus.com/

Plimus is my favorite and I’m planning to use it with StarFighter. Here are the Plimus’ specifications.

• No fees at all. No setup fees, no upkeep or hosting fees and no other fees at all.
• Commision fees are low. 4.5%.
• Customized order pages and special needs are made by plimus for free.
• There are tools that let you monitor your buying pages activity 7/24. You can even access to user information even the order is not complete.
• You can customize promotions, additional charges on shipping, completely customized buy pages, CD version on demand, order confirmation e-mails.
• You can sell your software as shareware via Shareware solution, add server side licence registration and authentication to your software.
• And finally you can charge money on a weekly, monthly or any time interval basis via Subscription solution. ( Good for MMO games )

Here are the other well-known eCommerce Solutions;

2.) Share*It – http://www.shareit.com/
3.) eSellerate – http://www.esellerate.net/
4.) Element5 – http://www.element5.com/
5.) SWReg – http://www.swreg.org/
6.) Digital River – http://www.digitalriver.com/
7.) RegNow – http://www.regnow.com/

c) Game Portals;

Simply, game portals are well known places that takes your game, promotes it, sells it and gives you a percent amount of the profit, something like %50.

But it’s not that easy. First of all you have to get your game accepted. Graphics, sounds, gameplay, game elements must be suitable for the portals principles. If they like your game they can help you find better artists for graphics.

The diffrence between selling your own game and selling it on a portal is obvious that when you sell it yourself all the money goes directly into your pocket but you have to promote your game. When you work with a portal they do all the promotions and sales management but they cut %50 of the profit.

Here’s a little list of well known game portals;

Reflexive Arcade – http://www.reflexive.com/

Big Fish Games – http://www.bigfishgames.com/

Garage Games – http://www.garagegames.com/

Alten8 – http://www.alten8.com/