@NG
ev.Team
Firstly, I have to say your game looks amazing. In fact so good I'd rather refer to it as an Independant Release, than a 'homebrew'.
However, you business plan is seriously flawed. It seems you haven't conducted any real market research. Being the nice guy I am, I've done this for you and compiled the results:
The news of your game has spread from N-G.com to Shmups!, Digital Press and ASSEMbler. In total, around 2500 people have read about the game across these 4 forums, with about 70 people replying.
1. People are incredibly impressed with the look of the game and also the fact that a new Neo game is coming out. Excellent.
2. People aren't happy you're only doing an AES release at a rediculous $700.
OK, so lets try and sort this out. Why are you limiting yourself to a release of 30 units at $700 each? This is a total of around $21,000. Now, I believe you're doing cart conversions for the game (may explain the 30units)? Normal cart conversions I've seen go for about $200. That's including the price of an AES cart, MVS donor and someone's time and effort. Minus that from your $700, and you seem to expect a $500 profit from each game ($15,000 total)? That is very, very unrealistic.
Simple fact - you may have an amazing game, but as the replies across the various Forums have shown, you're realy not selling any at $700.
So what about a wider release for a game that looks like it deserves to be played by as many people as possible? What about getting new Neo carts manufactured? I've no idea how much this would cost over in the USA, but bootleg Neo carts seem to be very common in HongKong. See if you can hunt down one of these bootleg manufacturers and get them to make you a quantity of AES and MVS carts with eeprom sockets. It's not real SNK parts, but realistically a very cheap way of making these massive games. Getting new carts made in the USA is gonna be a lot more costly, but still, if you get an initial run of 1000 manufactured, the costs will be more acceptable. People seem to be happy with paying maybe $200 - 250 for the game. If you look at making a $50 profit per cart, that leaves $150 - 200 to pay for the manufacturing of the cart, the shock box and lables/manual. Considering on a scale of 1000, cases and labels/manual are only gonna cost $15 - 20 per unit, leaving a whopping $130 - 180 to pay for each newly manufactured cart.
Secondly, consider a CD release. Although you still have to pay for the printing of disk, covers and a manual, you could easily get 1000/2000 copies made for a very reasonable price. Also, as people have suggested, consider allowing the ROM to be downloaded for a fee, and packaging the game with an Emulator for a PC release (good idea whoever that was).
Thirdly, what about a Dreamcast conversion. Trust me, the DC scene would jump on this.
This way, if you sell you initial batch of 1000 Neo CD games, with $25 pure profit, that's $2500. I'm sure you'd also be able to sell 1000 MVS and 1000 AES carts. Obviously the manufacturing cost of carts is going to affect the end price, but still, even if you only make $50 pure profit from each cart, that's another $10,000. That's without even considering a DC conversion, or a second print run of any of the Neo versions.
This way you gain respect from the scene, have 3000 happy Neo owners and make enough cash to do another game. Otherwise you'll have a couple of people that buy the game and everyone else will be pissed at you, not want to pay $700 and blatantly download the ineviatable ROM dump.
Most new businesses fail in the first year. Most of the time this is due to lack of research and refusal to change. Don't let that happen to you. The people have spoken. Ignore them at your own peril.
P.S. - Hello everyone.
I normally lurk, but I though it was about time I registered to share my views on this.
Si