December 24.  I wake up feeling a little impulsive.

I’ve been trying to get people to play Venture Arctic for a year and a half now.  I’m sure I haven’t done everything perfectly, but too few people played this game considering that it is (IMO) groundbreaking, fun, and noteworthy.

So I decided to give it away over the Christmas holiday, while people are at home, disappointed that the game they got under the tree sucks because it was made by a marketing department.  Here are the results of that experiment:

• Primary Objective Accomplished!  1548% increase in people playing Venture Arctic over the previous 7.5 day period.  A free game, coupled with being a newsworthy giveaway, made people flock to the site to try the game out.
• Secondary Objective Accomplished!  32.6% of people that got the free game also signed up for the newsletter.  Newsletter signups are typically much higher conversions than average customers, so it’s nice to have identified all of these interested customers.
• Tertiary Objective Accomplished!  This one wasn’t even on my radar: 117% increase in revenue compared to the previous 7.5 day period.  When you purchase a game at Pocketwatch, we offer 50% off any other game in our catalog.  With all the people coming in to get free version of Venture Arctic, a number of people bit on the cross-sell and bought Venture Africa for $9.99.  We also sold a site license of Venture Arctic to a school.

Some other interesting stats:

588 percent increase in traffic to the Pocketwatch Games site, largely due to postings on the front page of TigSource, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Mac4ever.com.  Mac4ever was the strongest referral, RPS was second, TigSource was third, though RPS gets credit for generating the site license sale.

I saw almost no change in the number of Venture Africa downloads from the previous period, though a much higher conversion rate, probably due to the cross-sell promotion.

I was also wondering if the increase in revenue was due to the fact that I was comparing Xmas week with the week before Xmas, so I compared those two weeks of revenue in 2007.  In 2007, I saw a 66% increase in revenue during that time period, so the Venture Arctic giveaway can more accurately be credited with a 51% increase in sales (117 – 66).

All this said, the real goal of this experiment was to get more people playing Venture Arctic.  It has always been severely overlooked.  There was some press about it when it came out, but even great coverage wasn’t capable of convincing people to try it out.  By making it free, I certainly wasn’t expecting an increase in revenue, but that’s what I ended up getting.

Ya gotta do drastic things to get attention in today’s world… *sigh*  Happy 2009 everyone!

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