Tongits

I am now earning a relatively significant (considering I live in a 3rd world country) amount from my Tongits game. Way higher than my job back in 2005 as a graphic designer working 8 hours a day 6 days a week.

I would like to attribute this early but still minor success to a few critical factors, aside from the obvious charm of the game itself:

1. PayPal. Without PayPal’s decision to fully support the Philippines, it would have been very difficult to sell the game online. Also I noticed that the Buy Now button with the logos of the supported major credit cards below is the most effective PayPal button. Potential buyers don’t want to Pay Now, they want to Buy. And besides, asking someone to Pay Now! seems rude. Plus the existence of the logos of the credit cards asserts the fact that PayPal supports them and avoids any potential confusion on the part of the buyer.
2. Blogs. Without the help from YugaTech.com, Technogra.ph, TechAtHand.net, PinoyTechBlog.com, CasualGamerChick.com and the other blogs that mentioned Tongits in one way or another, noone would have known the game exists.
3. Testimonials. Positive reviews from the early registrants of the game played a significant role as well in promoting and convincing potential buyers that the game is worth the 5 bucks. And displaying them near the Registration section of the site must have also affected the final decision of the potential buyer to click on the PayPal button.
4. Updates. Regular updates on the game including minor security fixes, optimizations, graphical improvements, etc. have a positive impact. Potential buyers may not care about the technical details of the updates but they are aware that the game is alive and being taken cared of. This gives them assurance that the game’s quality will remain high and will continuously improve over time.

I would have added Adobe® AIR™ to the list but it contributed both positive and negative. It contributed most to the development part of the game. It enabled me to rapidly program the game and release it in less than 3 months. Unfortunately having the game run on AIR means that large game distribution portals won’t accept the game since they only accept games with a traditional installation procedure.

But then having a game with an exe installer doesn’t really guarantee inclusion in these portals, quality and potential to become a hit is still what’s important. Still, one good thing with the AIR platform is it will enable me to easily modify the game to run on the browser and add multiplayer support to it in the future. I’m looking forward to that day.

Tongits now runs on the official Adobe® AIR™ 1.0 release. This update also includes minor security fixes.

Download Tongits 1.0.6

Jennifer the Casual Gamer Chick wrote a nice review of Tongits plus a brief and clear overview of the rules. To be featured in such a high profile blog that caters to casual gamers is great news for my little game which badly needs some exposure. I hope more people will be encouraged to try out Tongits, the most addictive card game of all!

After much deliberation and feedback from potential customers, Tongits is now back to $5 from the original $10 price, permanently. I hope this will increase the sales figures. A major update or revision (perhaps a version 2) might be priced a bit higher though in the future.

Register Tongits now!

Tongits.net comes up #1 with Yahoo’s search using the keyword tongits while it doesn’t even appear in page 1 with Google (although most of the top results still point to www.tongits.net so I don’t really mind). Yahoo must be doing something right with their own search engine algorithms.

Update on Feb 20, 2008:

Just found out that www.tongits.net is now #2 on Google on search keyword tongits. Thanks Google! The #1 result is my free tongits game so still aok.

I just launched Game.dev.ph. It’s a frequently updated portal to all the best game development blogs out there. It’s a one stop shop to all your game development news needs.

Visit  Game.dev.ph.