Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Nuking BlueSnap

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 14, 2013

I’m going to be officially canceling my account with BlueSnap (formerly Plimus) in the next few days. They’ve got some new policies that make them a very poor partner for low-volume indies (and courtesy of The Long Tail, since I quit using them as a primary distribution partner a long time ago, I’m permanently low-volume).

I’m not sure if I’ll be keeping my affiliate account. If I can keep it, I will. Otherwise, it’ll be time for a long-overdue house-cleaning at RampantGames.com. I’m dreading this, as I have a LOT of older games there available as an affiliate via Plimus / BlueSnap. At one point, they were the best deal for small indies, but since getting bought out… not so much. Actually, it was sucking for a long time before that.

That’s one of the other fun things about being an indie… while you’d rather spend 100% of your time making your game (or making your game and talking about your game), you have to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of jobs that aren’t that much fun. This is one.

 

 


Filed Under: Rampant Games - Comments: 10 Comments to Read



  • Albert1 said,

    I always thougth that BMTMicro was indie’ best friend.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Yeah, BMT has been better for several years (arguably always, according to some indies…) Which is why I put my Plimus account into “life support” mode… it brought in a trickle of revenue for me and for them, so it worked out okay.

    Until now.

    I’m hearing rumors that there’s a mass exodus of indies from BlueSnap going on right now. So I’m not the only one doing this. Hopefully we can sort out each other’s affiliate links and keep things going with a minimum of interruption.

  • getter77 said,

    How in the world did I miss this entire Bluesnap thing even being a thing..?

    I guess that just leaves BMTMicro and Fastspring then as far as the established heavy hitters. Hopefully they can avoid some oddball future acquisitions and/or nonsense as the barrier for entry on this sort of thing is rather high, and when the other side of the room is a drunken, spiteful elephant like Paypal… :shudder:

  • Albert1 said,

    Am I wrong or there aren’t that many indies using one of the Digital River (RegNow, SWREG, esellerate, etc) service. I wonder why.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Yeah, well, apparently a bunch of us missed the updated fee schedule they sent out a couple of months back, but a bunch of indies *DID* see the impact on our payment emails we received last night. They basically figured out a way to avoid paying any of the smaller indies and affiliates ever again.

    Or, in other words, how to get rid of most developers selling less than $30,000 / year through their service and take our money as they booted us out the door.

    So I guess today is something of a mass exodus.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    @Albert1 – they have really obnoxious contractual agreements (last time I saw, at least) and not the best fees in the world.

    I originally went with Plimus because they were the cheapest for the price range I was going for, and offered the most flexibility. Later, I discovered that simplicity was often better than flexibility, and now they have gotten pretty dang expensive for low-volume indies. And BMT Micro has improved its rates (which I guess they *COULD* raise now, now that they don’t have to worry about Plimus lowballing them).

  • William Bundy said,

    I’ve been seeing the Humble Store Widget around more and more recently, but I don’t know what the barriers are to use that.

  • Cuthalion said,

    Ick. Let us know what you end up doing. I’m curious, as I hope to sell something online eventually. 😛

  • Claire said,

    Have written a post on this just the other day. If you have an affiliate account with Plimus/Bluesnap, I suggest you review it immediately. You can expect charges if your sales fall below $2500 monthly… and if you want to close your account to avoid the charges, it’s anyone’s guess how long they will choose to hold your funds before releasing them. Total nightmare.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Yep, the cost is coming out to nearly $100 a month if you have both a merchant and affiliate account – or over $1000 / year for a low-producing indie. In addition to them taking 10%+ off the top for every sale you make. It’s messed up.

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