DCDayDreamer wrote:So what you are saying here is you have dabbled with some tools but have not exploited them to the same capacity as RSG.
Sure, and others we've exploited far better than them. There are only so many hours in a day, and you have to pick and choose what battles you fight. Using methods that do not get nearly the return on investment that other methods do isn't smart, it's stupid.
But, what you're missing is that RSG is getting down to 'business' and not getting bogged down with being 'disappointed' whilst harping on about the success of MGC.
I came on here to explain my statement. I said that I am disappointed with how this all turned out because of the thousands of dollars that we have put into it, and how because I am a fan of the Dreamcast I stupidly and naively gave away those thousands of dollars worth of work. I'm not disappointed in our game sales, quite the opposite.
That in itself is a nice promotional statement - so why isn't that anywhere else apart from here?
What do you find to be the nice promotional statement? Buy our Dreamcast games, we do a bunch of other cool stuff? Doesn't work that way.
So quit the envy over RSG then!
Complimenting a competitor does not equal envying a competitor.
But you still haven't learnt to KEEP ON promoting your products the same way as RSG have you?
Funny, we *just* ran a promotion for Feet of Fury at Big Bang in Ottuwma, Iowa this weekend. But, I didn't feel the need to tweet about it and post it all over the GOAT Store, because the goal isn't to tell the same people that have already bought the game about how now we're going to bundle it with something else.
I feel that we did a really good job marketing Feet of Fury and every release that we have done. We focus our money on promoting them to new potential customers, instead of focusing on the same group of people who are the hardcore fans. As a business, it doesn't make sense. For the GOAT Store, which carries a ton more than just the games we have done, it makes little sense to continue to promote the fact that we have the same thing over and over and over.
This is common sense business stuff. At the end of the day, it would hurt the rest of our business if we neglected it and instead focused entirely on Dreamcast promotions. And, although we don't promote our Dreamcast products with a new special every week or two or whatever, the fact is that because we continue to have new customers come to our site and learn about the products that we have, I have zero issues with how we do things.
If you do, don't buy from us. That's the most potent way to get someone to change their ways.
It's all about exploiting the retro climate, I've already given you a few tips, if you really need to find out how it was done just Google and do some research.
I respect your opinions, I really do, but I don't think that you have any idea what we built up and how we do things, or else you would definitely not be thinking that what we did was so horrible.
So learn how they did it, you stated that RSG used what GOAT had spent a lot of money on, just use the groundwork that they have mapped out now.
To do what? Is your suggestion that we sell the GOAT Store and just focus on publishing? The only reason *any* independent games have come out for the Dreamcast period is because we used what we had accomplished with the GOAT Store and leveraged that to start the Dreamcast publishing. The money came from the business of the GOAT Store itself. Again, you have to be in the situation where you look at all of your resources and figure out how to do it best, and I'm not concerned about that...
So pick something and promote it.
Okay, just for the record in the past two months...
GOAT Store News:
GOAT Store Sponsors Big Bang | 2010.08.05
GOAT Store Announces Upcoming Relaunch of GOAT Store Publishing | 2010.08.03
More than 100 Imports Added | 2010.07.11
Free Order Pick Up for Video Game Summit Showgoers | 2010.07.09
Front Page and Product Categories Updated | 2010.07.02
Midwest Gaming Classic news:
Midwest Tetris Championship to be Expanded | 08/08/2010
VGEvo Events to Anchor Events-within-an-Event Again | 08/05/2010
Museum Slated To Return | 08/04/2010
MGC News Starts Early This Year | 08/01/2010
We've also been working on huge cross promotions with the Midwest Gaming Classic (and the GOAT Store too) that will be revealed later this week, and have at least two planned GOAT Store announcement not tied to that which will probably run this week.
If you are one of the thousands of people who receive our emails, you would have gotten additional info in your email box about these. During this time, we have also distributed flyers at two video game shows.
Between the two sites, we've had six announcements in the month of August, which is double what Red Spot Games has had so far. If you just look at the GOAT Store site, we're one less than them. July was different, we did three, Red Spot Games did seven -- but, we spent a ton of time that month working on behind the scenes stuff including these cross promotions that required meetings and whatnot, and will result in a bunch of announcements this month. So I really don't feel like our frequency of promotions is any issue here.
I did not say that you were not doing a fine job with 'running all of these', but it's obvious you have a problem with negative comments.
I have no problem with negative comments, I have problems with ignorant comments. Your posts made it out that we needed to be led around by the hand to be shown this great new world of marketing that apparently Red Spot Games had discovered and we hadn't.
If you had said, "Why haven't you explored mediums that Red Spot Games uses, like Twitter, FaceBook and YouTube?" I would have replied with the reasons that we don't use those. Instead, you blamed us for poor promotion of Irides: Master of Blocks, and then stated, "you guys really need to get to grips with the current retro climate." That's not a negative comment, that's an ignorant comment to what we actually do, and if you actually don't know because you don't follow us -- as is apparent or you would have known how much news we pump out on average -- then I would suggest before you make a comment like that to actually look into it or ask.
I'll say it again, we are only two people and we run a lot of different stuff. We have to balance time, money and resources to devote to everything that we do. While we have enjoyed every moment of Dreamcast Publishing, it is not the only thing that we do. Because of that, a lot of our promotional muscle is focused on other things, but because of the synergy that we have between everything that we do, we have what both Gary and I believe is an extremely synergic-stic network of promotional tools, so when we use them to promote things that we do, we get a much bigger bang for the buck than if we do a ton of small things.
When you have one project that you are doing every quarter and that is really the only thing that you are doing, it makes sense to generate news like what Red Spot does. I am in no way jealous of them for having to do that, and would much rather utilize the networks that we have developed in other ways to sell our products.
Pretending for a moment that instead of being insulting, you were merely suggesting those methods, I'll run through each with true pros and cons to them. You can reply to them if you like, and I will happily and seriously consider any and all comments that you or anyone else makes in the future as we come up with additional marketing plans.
Twitter - The Midwest Gaming Classic has Twitter and so does the GOAT Store, although the GOAT Store's actually doesn't tie into anything yet and I'm not sure if the MGC page does either. We have this on our list to update them when we get a chance to and integrate them into the news releases so that any time we post anything, it Tweets everyone automatically but our focus right now has been on other aspects of the business. For the GOAT Store, we recently redesigned our front page, are 98% through with a checkout redesign and have a list of about 10 other things that we definitely want to incorporate first -- including pictures for every item we carry and more information on every system we carry -- that we feel will increase the site's usefulness to browsers. Once all that is done, which I'm guessing will be later this year, we'll work on Tweeting, with the MGC site probably getting this upgrade first.
Facebook - The MGC does have a Facebook page, the GOAT Store does not at this time. The Facebook page is relatively new, we've actually hosted a MySpace page for a much longer time (over 2500 followers, I believe). We haven't done one yet for the GOAT Store because, frankly, both of us find it hard to keep multiple pages of the same content updated. The MGC MySpace and Facebook pages have been run for us by others basically, which has helped. We have, however, used Facebook advertising for both the GOAT Store and the Midwest Gaming Classic in the past, which is one of the most cost-effective advertising methods out there we have found.
Flickr - Rarely does anyone stumble across a Flickr picture and then go to a site because of it. Instead, they are often looking for the particular item in question and they happen to show up at Flickr. For our way of thinking, it is better to host your own pages of pictures so that when people go searching on a site like Google to find your pictures, they go directly to your site and not an in-between. It works the same for showing people pictures on your site, we feel that instead of driving them to another site, it is best to keep them at your own. The GOAT Store picture stuff we're working on is designed with the same principal.
YouTube - For the GOAT Store, we've only never used YouTube because the stuff that we have carried other than the GOAT Store Publishing games I have no time to make a video for them all and post and link to them. I'm all for embedding videos on the site -- in fact, we have done this with the Midwest Gaming Classic already -- but we haven't done our own channel just because of this. I'd love to eventually get some stuff out there for gameplay videos of the GOAT Store Publishing games, and I wish that we had more time to do that before Irides: Master of Blocks was released.
eBay - eBay is an expensive, expensive way to sell products, and one which does not get a return to your own web site from the sale of those products. We have sold many things on eBay, and never once did we get a follow up purchase from our site. With the amount of money that eBay takes, it makes a LOT more sense for us to drive them to our own site to find the products they are looking for and keep that amount of money for ourselves, or for advertising or whatever. This also doesn't even touch on how much time it takes to list products individually for sale.
Social Bookmarking - The Midwest Gaming Classic site utilizes Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. These are also all on the charts to get integrated with the GOAT Store site, and are sitting probably right after the Twitter upgrade.
RSS feed -
http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com/News/rss/ and
http://www.goatstore.com/news/rss/ The GOAT Store did lose the link for this on the front page with the latest update and the link is obviously not working right with the new news system. I really didn't realize that until today, so we'll get that back up sooner than later.
Thanks for those suggestions, we try to do what is the best upgrades for each thing that we do, and what isn't even in here is all of the cross-promotion that we do where we often involve both the GOAT Store and the Midwest Gaming Classic at the same time. Just wait until everyone sees what we have up our sleeves for an event on September 3rd and another on November 5th, neither of which have been announced yet but they both should come out this week. We've got some cool stuff up our sleeves!