Merch sales

imjustmike

Been thinking about this for a little while now. It seems all of the big boys make a huge amount of money from merch sales, tshirts, cuddly toys etc right through to movie deals. And when I used to run a webcomic I spoke to a few comic artists who gave their game away for free and essentially made all their income from tshirts, posters and hard copies of their comic.

With services like redbubble, cafepress etc you can host your artwork online and they will print it onto mugs etc. It's print on demand which means that I don't have to go through the hassle of getting them printed and shipped myself, though it does mean I don't make anywhere near as much money from the sale. At the moment I'm happy for this trade off, and since I won the copyright on the artwork, if I chose to I could always start printing myself if demand became high enough. I've actually been doing this a little while with some cards and t-shirts back from my webcomic days (here if you're interested) and whilst it hasn't made me rich, there's a small trickle and I've never really pushed it. But I'm thinking I might give it a go with games, it seems like a natural fit to me.

Questions are:

1. has anyone here considered/is doing something similar?

2. does apple allow you to link to products that you don't buy via the app (thereby avoiding the 30% commission)?

willkesling

I think for this to work your game would have to have a big user base. How many got me? I'm still trying to figure out how to get more users.

I think you can link to other URL's from your app. If you could do it for free or low cost, it wouldn't hurt to try merch.

Personally, I think merch is the result of a popular and well liked title first.

jamie_c

I think it's a valid option to try, with services like cafepress and zazzle you don't have anything to lose since it's free to make your products, they just take a percentage of the sale. But I think @willkesling‌ is right in suggesting that you won't likely get many sales without having a very popular game first with lots of users.

imjustmike

@willkesling‌ @jamie_c‌ absolutely I think that this only works when you have a large user base. But I guess so does advertising and in app purchases, though most IAPs tend to be cheaper the the cost of, say, a tshirt.

I think it also depends on the type of game and art you have. If you have a character based game, or a game with humour, they lend themselves to selling tshirts and prints more than, say, flappy birds. That said, I've seen countless kids with little angry bird stuffed toys...