True Fans and Making A Living

News

The ever-interesting Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has a blog which I read whenever he writes a new and usually very interesting article. Today he’s posted an article about another article (and, ahaha, I’m posting an article about an article about an article) about that popular internet business meme of getting 1,000 true fans.

The gist of the nested article is this: with 1,000 “true fans” of your products, you’re able to make a living if you, say, sell to said fans a product for $25 four times a year.

Jeff wisely points out that extracting $100 from someone every year is probably a bit unrealistic. He doesn’t mention I think also the difficulty of actually producing four products a year worth $25. It ain’t gonna happen. It takes us 6 months to make a game. The current one has actually taken 4 years to write but that’s a story for another blog post.

Instead, a more realistic figure is 4,000 true fans and selling one thing a year to them.

I got intrigued and wondered just how many true fans Puppygames has. So I ran this bit of SQL on our database, which is a rough-and-ready indicator:

select email, count(*)
from registrations
where ordernumber <> 'special'
group by email
having count(*) > 2
order by 2 desc

And it tells me that we’ve got 74 customers who have bought 3 or more of our games (at least, using the same email address, anyway). Bah. So we have 74 true fans by that reckoning, in 6 years of writing games. Only another 3,926 to go. That’ll take another 320 years or so.

13 thoughts on 'True Fans and Making A Living'

  1. Ouch ! Sounds like I’ll have to by more than one game.
    I own “Titan Attacks !”, but on CD ! Quite disappointed by the CD though, I expected something more appealing.

    Anyway, the next purchase will be “Droid Assault” when I’ll need a new game on my computer.
    It doesn’t mean I’m fan, it only means that I appreciate your works. Congratulations for the products made so far.

  3. Interesting data! If I’m not on that list I should be, to make certain I’ve just registered Ultratron. Looking forward to more blogging on the new game.

  4. On CD! I didn’t know you could even get it on CD 🙂 And appreciating our works and buying our games definitely makes you a fan!

    The Blog Engine is stepping up a gear as we home in on finishing the new game. Screenies coming “real soon now”.

  5. I’m really surprised that only 74 people have bought 3 games. Have you thought about marketing them as a package like pangea arcade?

    I played Titan to the point where my wife feared for my sanity. I’m getting that way about Ultratron as well.

    Have only dipped my toes into Droidassault…

    You deserve to make a fortune.

    Keep writing and I’ll Keep buying.

    And remember…

    Don’t get Chumpatized!

    Jeff (avid fan)

  6. Really looking forward for your next game(s)!.

    BTW, another one of these 74, I hope (bought Ultratron, Titan Attacks and Droid Assault).

    Keep ’em coming!.

  7. One of the 74:
    Alien Flux, Titan Attacks, and Droid Assault.
    Just downloaded the Ultratron demo. Gonna try it out this weekend.

    FYI: The download link for Alien Flux on the support page is broken. It’s pointing to localhost.

  8. Ah, we’ve not really supported Alien Flux for a few years now – too old, too broken, almost nobody ever bought it. There are plans to resurrect it.

  12. Wow, your blog post made me think and now i will go preorder “Revenge of the Titans” ..
    I really appreciate your hard work. Keep it up!.

  13. I own all your games and will buy all your future titles even if they munch hairy donkey balls (which I would never expect them to, but still =). I’m a huge, huge Puppygames fanboy. ^^

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