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[RinkuHero]

A trailer is planned, yes yes.

This week's report (sorry for the delay, been a bit ill w/ sore throat and such).

56 sales out of 4600 demo downloads, 1.22% conversion rate. No marketing done this weak due to illness and excitement about planning my next game. I'll definitely at least do PAD files and finishing up the v1.06 patch this week though.

Traffic has gone much lower -- averages 200 hits per day now (half that of last week). I guess "doing nothing" really does nothing, a lot of the time. ^_^

[TeeGee]

So how are things going lately? It's been two weeks since the last report and I'm really curious to see how the sales developed. 

[AirFreshener]

They haven't

[JohnyZuper]

Any offers from publishers you might respond to?

[Melly-Me]

It seems that word-of-mouth alone isn't always enough. Guess you guys are gonna need to do some heavier advertisement on the game to boost sales. Or maybe you should wait until you let out a version you're totally satisfied with.

[RinkuHero]

I haven't been counting sales lately, they've been slower but they haven't vanished. I think it's somewhere between 60 and 65 now, so an average of 1 every 2 days. But the downloads have also been much lower, I haven't been keeping track of it but I think it's about the same conversion rate. I'll provide more details when I'm feeling more healthy (still some type of energy virus causing me to sleep 14+ hours a day and lie down in bed most of the rest of the day). I know, no excuses ^_^

We've had offers from some portals and publishers, but we don't plan on doing any of them until the game is completely finished (modding etc.).

We do intend to advertise some, once we actually get paid by BMT Micro for the sales we've had so far, which won't be for another month or so.

[RinkuHero]

Oh, and it's not a matter of word of mouth not working or lack of advertising etc., it's just a matter of us not doing any marketing for the past few weeks, leading to visitors going from 500-400 a day to 60-100 a day.

[JohnyZuper]

I'd be interested to see if you can get downloads and sales up simply by working on the marketing, That would ironic in a way since it would seem like you're being paid for doing the marketing rather than for making a game...

Get well soon.

[RinkuHero]

Sorry for the delay. I think I'm going to do this every month instead of every week due to it being time consuming.

Okay, over the last month (August 1 to August 29 to be exact, so slightly less than a month) there were 6219 visitors, an average of 200 per day.

There were 1500 downloads on this server; there are other places where the game is hosted too but those amounted to probably around 200 max. The game was also included in a UK magazine (see the announcement in this forum by a helpful informant), about which I have no data on its circulation.

The game was also reviewed on Game Tunnel, getting first place for that month and pretty glowing reviews.

Sales during this period were 36.

Because of the game's inclusion on a CD and the unknown about how many people found out about it through that, the conversion rate can't be accurately calculated. However, if we are to arbitrarily with no basis assume that there were about 300 people who actually played the game from the CD, then the conversion rate is 36/2000, or 1.8%. I probably underestimate the number of people who tried the game from the CD though. If it was 1300, conversion rate would be 1.2%. So I am guessing it's closer to that, since that was close to the average conversion rate of previous months.

I'm going to begin trying Google AdWords this month as an experiment. I'll let you know how it goes at the end of September.

[RinkuHero]

Oh, traffic referrals, I forgot about that, here are the biggest referrers of the 6219 visitors:

just-whatever.com - 30.50% (this one is still that one blog post that lists a bunch of tower defense games)
gametunnel.com - 12.78%
tigsource.com - 12.77%
(direct) - 11.55%
google - 6.67%

[ekniff]

What program do you use to track down where your customers come from?

[AirFreshener]

Tracking tool that comes preinstalled by the server's host of course!

[RinkuHero]

Actually I used to use that, but Drupal has its own system which is better than the kind that comes with the server, so I use that. Drupal is a content management system that I built the website in.

[RinkuHero]

Sorry for not updating this D:

Total sales are now at 150+. 20 sales in October, and 24 sales in September. Downloads in October were 1800 from this site, downloads in September were 1850 from this site. The "conversion rate" is thus 1.1% for October, and 1.3% for September. But again, the game is also hosted on other sites, included in magazines occasionally, so the actual download numbers are probably a bit higher than that.

I also met Wynand (the game's writer) for the first time in "real life" back in August in NYC. Later Wynand and I met with Manifesto Games over dinner about a month back; our game may be on that site soon within a month or two. I recommend checking out their site if you haven't seen it, it's the biggest independent games portal that doesn't deal primarily in "casual" games. We also entered the IGF, but that was mainly on a lark, I don't expect to win.

I bought a new external hard drive recently with part of the profits, mainly will be used to make a better ID trailer (the one on the site itself is pretty weak); hard drive space necessary to record game footage uncompressed (necessary in FRAPS, which is the only recording software that gives me a good frame rate with ID) goes into the GBs you see, and I had a small hard drive previously.

[JohnyZuper]

Don't you think those sales are low?

And whatever happened to your marketing strategies?