Furious Music -- Official Feet of Fury Swap Disc

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nz17
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Post by nz17 »

Time to clean up a little confusion on things by clearing the air.

First of all I am really happy with the amount of interest shown thus far and all the valuable opinions on the matter. Everyone's opinion counts because you all are the crowd these discs are to apply to. We really would like more people's opinions on which genre to include though.

Next I would like to mention how were are leaning on the discs' layout and pricing. As stated before each release is planned to include complimentary musical genres. A lot of people have mentioned that we should make a CD containing much more music than initially planned. After musing over things for awhile, I'm starting to concur.

Though it was always thought that Furious Music should retail for less than the original game of Feet of Fury, a disc with a large number of tracks doesn't become a realistic "cheapie" release as more music is included. After a certain point the scales tip and the balance collapses. Thus don't expect a mammoth sixty track release for Furious Music Vol. 1.

However, the opposite is true as well. After a certain point, regardless of how low the price of a CD is, it won't make a difference in the number of sales it will generate. So thus comes up the subject of balancing quantity with price, and by extention, the number of releases.

With multiple releases with only one or two genres apiece we would make an "ala carte" sales model where customers would only buy the release(s) that would appeal to them. With most people this would only be one release, and as mentioned previously that would mean they would only be spending $4.95.

With a single release containing all the genres we plan to cover, the situation is reversed. People don't get to pick only their favorites, but in turn pay a higher price for additional music they may not like.

At the moment what we are thinking might be the wiser path of the two is to make a single release featuring a range of genres with only one or two songs per genre, unless it is a popular genre, in which case it would have more. The total number of tracks would be around twenty. The price would be approximately $10 (before shipping) and would include a jewel case.

The other path, the "small" release, would have ten tracks per release for $5, and include sampler tracks of the other three releases on the disc. This release would be in a paper sleeve.

Why include a jewel case? The price difference between paper and plastic isn't much, and paper sleeves don't fit well on a shelf unlike regular games.

Either way the releases would be pressed on CD-R's. From local stores I can purchase these much cheaper than getting Furious Music professionally pressed.

So how to costs break down? Well, since the music is in the public domain, there are no royalties that need to be paid, so that cost is zero. There are the physical CDs themselves: these cost about $0.50 each. Then there is official CA Games endoursement: that would cost (estimate) about 10% of the sales price per disc. So we're up to $1(.50) or so. Funny thing is that consumer CD labels cost more than the discs, so that would be an additional $2 per release for the "large" release. Thus the total cost (before shipping and handling) is $3.50 for the large release or $1.50 for the small release, with either $6.50 or $3.50 of profit per sold unit. S&H would be $2.

What I need to know is how many people would buy the "large" release, how many would buy a single "small" release, and how many people would buy all four of the "small" releases.

Though Nz17 Production Interactive would profit more from selling all four small releases rather than selling one large release, I realize most people would only buy at most two of the small releases, and would be more likely to buy a slightly more expensive larger release.

Also, who likes Mini-CDs? We might print on these if interest shows since we'd only be storing a quaint amount of data within Furious Music.
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Post by nz17 »

goatdan wrote:Anywho, it doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all, and I would definitely like to carry some in the future if it happens :)
Thanks for the compliment goatdan; you're an asset to this whole community. I would be honored to have Furious Music carried by your establishment either as a stand-alone product or bundled with Feet of Fury. May we see a double-CD special edition jewelcase bundle in the near future? :P
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Post by Prophet][ »

S&H $2? If your only selling to the US you won't sell much. You might have not noticed I live in Aus, this is why I said before it would be hard to offer me a good price. Europe is also a big market which you owuld have to consider when selling it.
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Post by aisupikku »

I personally like "large" releases! :mrgreen:
I would see them as the "limited edition" release... more content, fancier packaging, that sort of thing. Then again, I could imagine purchasing the "singles" as well, if they perhaps had a bonus track each that I liked a lot. About the mini CD-Rs; Would those be bad for the DC's drive unit, or am I still stuck in mythville?

Prophet][; I think that shipping to Aus or, say, the UK would be something like $5-$6... Not too bad, but, you're right; it's definitely something to consider.
Mr Robinson, perhaps you could have "affiliates" in other regions to receive supply and mail out at an averaged shipping cost? Or, perhaps they could serve as "overseas division" branches and manufacture the product on location! "First things first," though, I know...
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Post by MetaFox »

I hate to bring the idea down a bit, as I'm the one who attempted to start to get the interest up on the project, but I don't like the idea of CD-Rs.

Commercial CD-R releases don't seem the same as pressed CD releases. I have personally purchased a little known CD-R commercial Dreamcast game, Japanese Strip Poker, on eBay. The disc and packaging were well done, but it doesn't have a home with my Dreamcast commercial game collection, just for the sole reason that it's on CD-R.

You can get CDs pressed for less than a buck a piece, even at a low amount of 500 pieces. I'm getting 500 pieces of Chikugoyaku pressed for $470, as well as 500 pieces of the magazine CD for the same price.

An idea that you may consider is printing out the jewel case inserts, and let people supply their own jewel cases. This is what I most likely will be doing with the magazine CDs. You can wrap the CDs in the paper inserts, and mail them in ordinary disc-sized mailing envelopes. The cost would be relatively low, and you'd have a professionally pressed CD that would look as good as any official commercial release once someone supplied the clear jewel case.

There is also the used jewel cases option which I stated earlier. It's a trick used by the Atari homebrewers to refurbish old carts for new games. The same tactic could easily be employed with jewel cases, and the return on your investment would be high, since you could sell the games or music that came in the cases for the same or more than the price of which you purchased it.
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Post by goatdan »

MetaFox wrote:I hate to bring the idea down a bit, as I'm the one who attempted to start to get the interest up on the project, but I don't like the idea of CD-Rs.

Commercial CD-R releases don't seem the same as pressed CD releases.
MetaFox,

You're right, however with the market of Feet of Fury how it is, I wouldn't expect there to be sales of more than 200 of these disks. While CD-R's aren't the most professional way to go about doing a release like this, I think they would be the most cost effective. Consider:

If all of the copies of Feet of Fury sell out,, we will have sold 5000 copies.

If they print 500 copies of each version, that means that 10% of the people that bought the original game would need to purchase the packs for them to sell out. If you have multiple packs, that number would be even harder to achieve.

A lot of the people who have bought Feet of Fury purchased it at shows like Classic Gaming Expo, Austin Gaming Expo, the Midwest Gaming Classic or purchased it thanks to articles on Slashdot or in EGM or whatever. I don't think that most of these people regularly check on the Dreamcast boards or the GOAT Store, so I think that their ability to find the games would be limited strictly because of that fact.

If they produced 500 copies of the game and did no additional packaging, they would need to sell at least 100 copies to break even. Add packaging, and the cost goes up even higher. While producing a disk at a time is a lot less cost effective if the addition sells in high quantities, producing it one disk at a time would prove more cost effective if the disk sells around 200 copies.

Just my two cents :) I don't want to discourage you from doing it in any way, but I don't want to sound too optimistic on the sales outlook and cause you to lose a lot of money either :)
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Post by OneThirty8 »

I just wanted to offer my two cents based on my own experience with 'pressing' (or burning) my own music CD's. As you mentioned, the cost of the CD labels is more than the disc itself. What I hope you're also taking into account is that ink for an inkjet printer can get quite expensive for such a project. If you can get the labels run at a local print shop, I'd do that or maybe even have them xeroxed if you can design the label so it looks 'cool' in black and white. For the jewel case inserts, definitely get them run off at a print shop. You may have to order more copies than you're going to need for your production, but you will probably still save some cash. I made about 100 CD's for my old band. I spent about $80 - $100 on CD's with Jewel cases, and about twice that on other miscellaneous supplies.
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Post by MetaFox »

goatdan wrote:You're right, however with the market of Feet of Fury how it is, I wouldn't expect there to be sales of more than 200 of these disks. While CD-R's aren't the most professional way to go about doing a release like this, I think they would be the most cost effective. Consider:

If all of the copies of Feet of Fury sell out,, we will have sold 5000 copies.

If they print 500 copies of each version, that means that 10% of the people that bought the original game would need to purchase the packs for them to sell out. If you have multiple packs, that number would be even harder to achieve.
I'm not sure how Dan Potter set up the swap feature on the demo, but if these discs are compatible with the demo, it would be easier for the discs to sell out. It's a sad case, but it's unfortunately true. People won't pay $15 to buy the game, but they'll pay $5 for addons. In fact, there was already someone in this very thread questioning about this.

Even if the discs weren't compatible with the demo, I still see the potential for a sell-out. As long as the discs stayed at the $5 range, and were professionally pressed, it could be good for both Feet Of Fury and the Swap Discs. Stores could offer a Feet Of Fury/Swap Disc bundle in which you could buy both for $19.90.

I'd stand behind the Swap Discs 100% only if they were professionally pressed. They'd get complete advertising from me. I'd set up a banner on Consolevision for them, Give them ad space and an article in Dream On magazine, and of course, post news about them on every site for which I post news. I'd even give them an ad at the back of the inserts for the games I produce.
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Post by SONICR »

I say a set of expansion music discs would be great! the more songs the better!
SEGA!!! WELCOME TO THE NEXT LEVEL
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Post by Freeze »

I agree 100% with MetaFox... "commercial" CD-R releases can't be sold, those times are over for a long time now (I personally also woudn't pay for CD-R releases). It would be a good decision if you would wait for the next release after... let's say... 30% of the previous discs are sold. Unwise if you would press three genre CDs and than you can't sell it. Press the Funk disc first for example, if you see you get rid of them, produce the Jazz disc, and so on until you feel the customers can't take it anymore.
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Post by statusjones »

depending on the music, i might buy the large release, but i'm more likely to prefer a couple of smaller ones

as for it being on a cdr - that's fine, and if it's on a mini cd, that'd be cool too, but aren't they generally more expensive?
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