I’m the CEO of 3RD sense, the guys behind the Swords and Sandals games. There are some very interesting points here and Dan, you have hit a lot of the same problems and challenges we have had and still have.

Couple of things we’ve found out. First off, a very small percentage of people who play a game buy a ‘deluxe’ version. However, we’ve also found that within reason, the price doesn’t matter. In other words Dan, I think you would have had almost as many conversions if you had charged $15 or $20 for your game. The really hard thing to achieve is getting the players to get their wallet out. If you had, you would have made a lot more money. Let’s say you would have got 50% of the sales, but made 414 dollars per sale, then your numbers would have bought a lot more than a 6 pack.

All in all though, this is a really tough problem to solve for any individual game developer. From the comments here, I guess that you’re not aware that we’ve opened up Fizzy.com to allow developers to sell their ‘deluxe’ games on Fizzy. Take a look at http://www.fizzy.com/developers and you can sign up today, get access to an SDK, get online reporting, marketing and all the transaction stuff. It’s still in beta, but we are trying to create with this developer portal, what you are looking for.

Either way, best of luck with your ongoing game development!

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I’d be really interested in what happened with StormWinds. I remember seeing the in-game pitch for the premium version- it was an awesome game.

My understanding is that Kongregate is planning to implement a system like the one you propose, but I have no idea when it will actually happen.