Sorry for the delay in getting these up, my IPR numbers came in as I was in transit to New Zealand and my fall there has held me up since I've been back.
Anyway...
Best Friends
PDFs: 5
Books: 14 IPR (and sold out of copies), 5 Cons
Total: 24
Three Sixteen
IPR: 173 (120 books, 53 PDFs -- 24 were bundles)
Con Direct: 31 (31 books)
OBS: 186 (186 PDFs)
Direct: 7 (7 books)
Total: 397 Books and PDFs (158 books, 239 PDFs)
LIFETIME: 1017 (489 books, 528 PDFs)
And I have some numbers for January and the first week of February (I'll report these officially as part of Q1 2009)...
Best Friends: 2 PDFs
Three Sixteen: 64 Books and 41 PDFs
So 3:16 has a LIFETIME of 1122 copies so far.
Best Friends
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Tue, 10/02/2009 - 18:44.
Oh, I should note the lifetime number for Best Friends too.
LIFETIME: 500 copies (give or take a small handful) sold, which is about 436 books sold and 64 PDFs.
The fourth printing is now sold out at IPR (and I think there are only 3 or 4 copies with the guys who were at Conception? and that's it). I've not included comp. copies to my realtives and con charity auctions.
It's likely it'll be in print again in the next few months, probably in a 6x9 format that I can get printed in small numbers through LULU.
Your thoughts?
Submitted by Malcolm Craig on Wed, 11/02/2009 - 23:55.
An excellent year for BoxNinja. Congratulations are extremely well deserved.
I realise you're probably sick of talking about this by now, but for those who might be new to the site, would you be able to give your brief thoughts on why 3:16 has achieved such great success in such a short space of time?
The sales figures are absolutely brilliant and a concise analysis of how thee sales came about would be of great benefit for those who might not have been reading the site over the past six months.
Cheers
Malcolm
Contested Ground Studios
Good question
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Fri, 13/02/2009 - 19:34.
Would you be able to give your brief thoughts on why 3:16 has achieved such great success in such a short space of time?
The short answer is Actual Play and then Word of Mouth.
The caveat to that is that the game is very good, tres cool, "grabby" (easy to get buy in and hits a popular sweet spot) and looks professional with a great cover by Paul Bourne.
Basically...
All those things did help push it along afterwards and give credibility to it, though.
What did give me sales were when people picked it up as a PDF in that first two weeks and played it. Then they started talking about it, very enthusiastically, sometimes to the point of selling people temporarily off the game with their frothing. Still, the book had sold only 20 or 30 copies by the time GenCon started on 14 August (it had sold over 100 PDFs though). It then hit big with people able to pick it up and play, and other people seeing and hearing the games had a look and bought it too. There was a little buzz pre-con from that initial 4 weeks of PDF play, but it burst out of the indie ghetto at GenCon. John Harper ran it for maybe 30 people, but not all of those people bought the game. Surely some of their friends did though and it created a "scene". I reckon it maybe sold 60 or so to the "indie crowd" with the other 50-odd being outside of that market.
I think a lot of people will try and catch lightning in a bottle and repeat what 3:16 did. I feel this will only work if the game is at least as good as 3:16 is.
Still, the lessons to be learned are:
* people want fun games
* people want games that are easy to read and play, and to get to play quickly
* there is a "sweet spot" before GenCon to release a game and build "buzz" so people are at least going to check you out at the con (not guaranteed buys, but they will look)
* play and the positive feedback after it is way better than a review
* having an award certainly doesn't hurt, if you can back them up with a good game
It's funny, some troll (now gone) on the internet suggested that 3:16 wouldn't be any good (how he knew I have no idea) and mocked its lack of AP when released. He wrote it off and suggested that I wrangle up some AP, if I could. Well, there are now 30 APs on the website, mostly not by me. And it's been played countless times more. He was right in a way -- AP will let people see what fun you are, or are not, having with a game and it's a useful tool for people to use when evaluating whether they will like a game or not.
The advantage, he couldn't see, for 3:16 is that it is so very easy to get to play and have that experience.
My advice is just to make a good game that plays well, really.
Just to say, that Q1 2009 numbers are due in by mid-month
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Wed, 01/04/2009 - 16:41.
I have some provisional numbers, but they under-report the IPR sales (since they don't include any non-web sales from IPR).
End Q4 2008: 1017 total sales.
Interim numbers for Q1 2009 are...
Direct: 28 books
IPR: 120 books, 31 PDFs (provisional)
OBS: 50 PDFs
Total: 148 books, 81 PDFs [Total: 229 sales] (provisional)
For a lifetime of 637 books, 609 PDFs [Total: 1246 sales].