2024 didn’t quite scale the dizzy heights of 2023 in terms of sales, but it was still pretty good. Sales slipped a bit in 2024, but it was our third-best year (after 2024 and 2019).
We’ve been doing these reviews since 2013 – you can read them here.
Best-selling games
Our best-selling games for 2023 were Way out West, Casino Fatale, and A Speakeasy Murder.
These three games are consistently our best-selling games.
FranceMurder’s bestsellers were Réunion Mortelle (Reunion with Death), Mort à Venise (Death in Venice), and Le Dernier Testament (A Will to Murder).
Die Besten Familienspiel’s bestsellers were Hollywoods Lügen (Hollywood Lies), Mord in der Flüsterkneipe (A Speakeasy Murder), and Dunkle Mächte in der Magierschule (Spellbound)
The French bestsellers are all smaller games, while the German bestsellers are larger. I don’t know if that reflects a difference in the markets.
(And recently we’ve had a couple of requests for Spanish translations. We have no idea if there’s a Spanish market for murder mystery parties, but if there is and you’d like to be our Spanish partner, get in touch!)
New and updated murder mystery games
We published one game in 2024: Backstage Business, a 1986 rock band themed game for 18-22 guests.
We planned to get Court in the Act updated (which is the last game in our old format), but we didn’t quite get that done. (It shouldn’t be long!)
Last year’s goals
We set ourselves a few goals in 2024:
Improve our website: So this became a major project in 2024, as we finally moved from the mix of WordPress sites and hand-coded sites that we had been running since 2001 to a single WordPress site.
The transfer took weeks, but now that we’ve moved, it’s much easier to maintain (and as a bonus, we have fewer problems with passwords and download links going astray).
One of the downsides of rebuilding our website is that for a few weeks, traffic dropped as Google needed to “understand” our site again. I have no doubt that we lost a few sales as a result, but hopefully, that was a one-off event.
Updated games: As I mentioned above, we didn’t quite get Court in the Act updated in 2024 (the website move took an awful lot of our time). We are putting the finishing touches to it, however, so it shouldn’t be long.
New games: While we had an overall goal to release new games, we didn’t actually commit to anything. However, we released Backstage Business in 2024.
So overall? Completely rebuilding our website wasn’t on our horizon this time last year – and while that was going on, pretty much everything else was put on the back burner. So it’s no wonder that we didn’t make as much progress on our new and updated games.
Plans for next year
Court in the Act: We’ll definitely publish the updated Court in the Act this year. Possibly this month!
Email newsletter: We’re moving our previously irregular newsletter (usually when we had a game to promote) to a quarterly basis. We’re not great at social media, so subscribing to it is likely to be the best way to keep up to date with what’s going on at Freeform Games.
The website: Maintaining a website is a never-ending project. There’s always something to update, and we’ll keep tweaking and improving it as the year progresses.
Two new games: We’ve got several games under development at the moment, and I think we’ll get two published in 2025.
The first will likely be The Show Must Go On, a murder mystery that can be played in under an hour. It’s currently in playtesting, so unless playtesting raises significant issues, we’re hoping to get it published before Easter.
After that, we have a horse racing game and a haunted house game in development. Hopefully, we’ll get both done by the end of 2025 (but we’re not committing to it – too many things can go awry!)
And customers have asked us whether we have a Jane Austen/Bridgerton-themed game, so we’ll explore that as well.
Summary
2024 was a pretty good year for us – particularly now that we have a new and improved site.
Here’s to 2025!
0 Comments