Penny Arcade. For gamers, it’s comedy and game reviews; for advertising execs, it’s gaming’s hard-to-impress gatekeeper.
For indie developers, it’s groceries.
There’s no question that an endorsement from Mike Krahulik (Gabe) and Jerry Holkins (Tycho) will have a noticeable effect: I can’t be the only one who first tried Minecraft after the “Mine All Mine” strips. Can the Penny Arcade Effect™ be quantified, though?
For Puppy Games co-owner Caspian Prince, a PA endorsement meant a jump in sales. Puppy Games’ Revenge of the Titans, a tower-defense/RTS hybrid with retro graphics, was name-dropped in Holkins’ newspost this Wednesday. Holkins was talking about how he’s been playing more indie games than AAA releases, mentioning Revenge in a single, twelve-word sentence with a link to Puppy Games’ homepage. By the end of the day, sales of Revenge were at 600% of an average day, $500 over the average take. It’s too early to tell the long-term effects, but the past few days have brought the January average to $200.
After a little division, it looks like the Penny Arcade Effect is a little over $41, per word, per day.
Which brings the subject back to groceries. Endorsements from sites like Penny Arcade or the IndieGames.com blog are a crucial part of the Puppy Games marketing plan: “get mentioned on one of these sites and you get to eat for another week.”
It’s not much of an exaggeration: Puppy Games averages just $100 in sales daily before costs or taxes, and that’s split between Prince and co-owner Chaz Willets. “I keep telling people we work for minimum wage but no-one believes us,” Prince says.
SpaceChem makes me glad I took advanced chemistry in high school.
That being said, it’s easy for industry rookies (ie. me) to get it stuck in our heads that Penny Arcade is the one key to a break-out success.
SpaceChem, by Zach Barth of Zachtronics Industries, was mentioned in the same newspost as Revenge, but Barth had a different take on the endorsement. It brought about 5,000 hits to his site, but Barth argued that the strength of the demo would be the key to whether people bought the game, rather than Holkins’ recommendation.
“It might sound like I’m just being snarky… [but] I wholeheartedly believe that the best way to sell a game is to make it awesome and something that people want to play and talk about.”
It’s hard to separate quality from word-of-mouth, of course: it’s a chicken-or-the-egg thing. Puppy Games might take a different stance than Zachtronics, but they haven’t ignored quality either. The team could have released Revenge of the Titans much sooner than its December 14th launch as part of The Humble Indie Bundle #2; it went through six months of a Minecraft-esque very functional beta, during which gameplay was tweaked with Steam players in mind. With the recent 100,000-sold success of the indie JRPG-item shop Recettear, there’s definitely a market for games like Revenge if they can get into Steam.
Revenge of the Titans: tower defense that isn't boring.
Revenge wouldn’t be the only indie game on Steam, of course, and it takes more than ever to get noticed in the crowd. For professional indie developers like Puppy Games, a marketing strategy can make the difference between a name-making hit and another year of ramen. Whether or not Penny Arcade is a game-changer for indies they mention — and for myself, I’m going to tentatively conclude that they are — the fact that they’re bringing traffic to developers is worth a round of non-ironic applause.
There’s just one question left, though: If a twelve-word sentence from Holkins was worth $500 the first day, and a picture is worth a thousand words — would a three-panel comic really be worth more than $120k?
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“Can the Penny Arcade Effect™ be quantified, though?”
No more than the SlashDot effect or the Groupon effect. It’s all advertising sure and PA is a more effective method than the others but still I’m sure it’s a lot more inconsistent than we would like to believe.