This journal entry is a post mortem on Balloon Art, discussing how the launch went and what improvements could be made to Balloon Art going forward, and what learnings I’ve taken for future games. This will probably be the last design journal that I make on Balloon Art for some time, so let’s dig in.
Build up to launch
I first advertised Balloon Art at PAX West last September, handing out a free demo with a QR code for folks to join my mailing list to be notified about its release. This worked out well, or so I had thought.
I handed out 58 demos and received 21 new mailing list signups; that’s a great conversion rate!
Yet…When I launched Balloon Art on itch, I got little to no interest. Zero sales. Only 20 or so views. A lot of impressions, but not much interest. It was disheartening, to say the least. This was the first game where I had a thoughtful advertising campaign beforehand, and it didn’t sell. I did little to no advertising for my other games, just launch announcements on social media and my site, and they all sold at least some number of copies. Why didn’t Balloon Art sell?
[Dramatic Pause] Why?!?!?!
I can’t know for sure, but I have some speculations.
Small online footprint
I don’t expect to do many sales online, simply because I have difficulty interacting with the community online. I’m more of an in-person type of person. But online sales are important to the future success of my ability to remain in the board game industry.
I’m not on instagram or facebook or threads or twitter. I hate those platforms with a passion. I refuse to interact with them. I only exist on mastodon, bluesky, and my website. I’m prepared to “leave money on the table” as it were by not advertising or posting on those other platforms. I also don’t buy ad space for my games. This is mostly because, after reviewing info on how advertising has worked for others, and from lightly experimenting with it myself in the past, I can’t justify spending money on ads for my games. It’s highly unlikely I will see ad dollars convert into views on my site, my shop, to lead to the eventual sale. Even games with a more commercial appeal have trouble doing this, spending hundreds, even thousands on ads that barely convert into enough sales to justify the ad spend. My games are much more niche, indie, overall out of the mainstream to see that kind of traction. This isn’t a dig on myself or an insult to more commercial games. I play commercial games. I’m not against them, I’m just not a commercial game designer. Finding my audience is more difficult due to this, and I don’t think ads or a broad social media prescience will do much to improve that. I’ll only end up having to divert more time away from game design.
Another thing is I simply loathe the lack of humanity in advertising, so I wish to promote my games more organically. This means that any growth I see will likely be slower, for any of my games, and that’s okay with me.
But for Balloon Art, specifically…this was the first game I launched to zero sales. I don’t think it was just the lack of traditional advertising that led to this, as it is an outlier from my other games.
I’m new-ish to itch.io
I don’t have much of an audience on itch, the platform I’ve exclusively released Balloon Art on.
I’m planning on bringing Balloon Art to my store, using a password protected page on my site that I’ll email to purchasers for access. I’ve never really done something like this before and I’m hesitant to pull the trigger. (What if my payment software doesn’t collect your email address and you don’t get the link?!)
I wish to build up more of an audience on itch as a platform because I like the way it works. Itch is a creator-friendly platform that allows people to sell any number of things: video games, zines, comics, and of course print and play games such as Balloon Art.
That means that it’s probably going to take me a while before I start to see meaningful sales of my games on itch, specifically. I need to learn to live with that and figure out how to build up trust and excitement for my games on there. Part of my plan is to release more games. I have a TTRPG that I’ll begin work on soon, and I think it’ll be a good fit for itch.
My offering was overpriced and messy
I originally intented to sell Balloon Art for $3, which grants you five different categories of the game. But at the end of the day, it’s five sheets of paper. Sure, I did a lot of work to create the request generation system and keep it fresh and interesting and thematic for each category, but these are still variations on the same game. Was this game really worth $3? After launch, I decided it wasn’t.
So I dropped the price to $1. I think that’s much more fair.
The game is available in Letter and A4 sizes. I decided to offer this in PNG format, because I thought the quality would be better for print. In doing so, though, I didn’t think about how it’d look to someone interested in my game. That’s ten items for download! If you want to download all five categories, you’d need to download five different things in your preferred size.
I’ve since seen the light and reformatted the game as a five page PDF booklet (in Letter and A4). Now, you simply download the whole booklet in the size you want and you can choose which pages you want to print. It’s much cleaner.
The game art is simple and colorless
Okay, this one is a stretch, but one of the reasons people could be turned off by Balloon Art is that it doesn’t have color. That was a deliberate choice, I stand by it, and I’m not going to change that. It’s supposed to resemble a childish doodling style because that’s what you do in the game.
But we can’t ignore aesthetic preference, and most people enjoy something with color to it. It’s possible that people see Balloon Art as unfinished or amateurish due to the game’s style, though.
It’s time to move on…
Unless I suddenly see an uptick of interest in the game, all future categories I had planned to add to it are now canceled. I’ve already moved on to other projects. One of them is in the same vein as Balloon Art.
That’s a wrap on Balloon Art, for now. On to new adventures…
