I use to think that cnet and zdnet were the best places to get downloads (and hence, sales) from, as this was the case for the first few months Starships Unlimited (STUN) was out. (Note: cnet being better than zdnet). In this respect, Brad Wardell''s article of 1% sales/download figure seems to be right (e.g. only 1% of people who download your s/w will buy it). But you couldn''t survive on this.

For me, things started to happen when people started talking about STUN on the newsgroups. Like wildfire, it spread to discussions in various forums, some of them being related space games. At this point conversion rates were more like 4%, an awareness was created.

Once this happened, plus some real press, the download sites like cnet and zdnet, rarely made the top 10 referrers anymore. People came directly to my website or through forums or review pages.

As for getting really good reviews on a zdnet-like site. I don''t think it really matters at all. Look at some of the top downloads and see the kind of reviews they got. There doesn''t seem to be any correlation between good reviews and high downloads. If you really want high download rates, just make the game controversial like Dope Wars.

The key to selling your games isn''t just the quality of the game. You have to market it by talking to people about the game, making yourself known in different communities. Kind of like what I''m doing here. It is nice to find a forum to talk shop in.

Anyways, no one can give you a sales # that will be accurate. There are too many variables outside your influence. This is part of what makes this business so exciting and so scary.




ApeZone
http://www.apezone.com/
Starships Unlimited: Try the free game demo

What do you mean by "good?" A good FPS has a much less chance of making money than a good RPG. A good FPS might be overshadowed by better advertised games. For example, the AWESOME!!! No One Lives Forever. Amazing game, horrible sales - after 6 months, the total sales were around 10,000 copies. And that''s a boxed shelved game. Also, I would, like Ape said, post on newsgroups. Get yourself access to as many FTP servers as you can and upload them. Don''t just put it on websites like download.com, cnet, and zdnet. If you do that (and the game is innovative enough) you should get a decent price.

Did "No One Lives Forever" sell that poorly?

Here''s a link to a link that could give you some more info on the shareware biz and some links to submit your s/w too.
http://upload.it/
Check out the following link for sites to submit to:
http://upload.it/upload_000009.htm

If you''re looking for a cheap site to host your s/w try tera-byte.com, I''ve used them for months without any problems.






ApeZone
http://www.apezone.com/
Starships Unlimited: Try the free game demo

Sadly, yes. Maybe about 20,000 by now, but really bad sales.

No One Lives Forever was horribly under advdertised, and under hyped. Games require alot of this kind of thing to sell well. Some publishers will cause a game to sell poorly simply because they do not want to risk over hype. Black and White was over-hyped. It is a good game, not everyones cup of tea, but fun enough. However a lot of people have been sorely disappointed as they were expecting sooooo much more. It has sold very well up to this point though.

If you ask me the worst thing you can do to any new venture or product is fail to advertise it effectively. Better to over-hype than under advertise. From a financial standpoint it is better to get good sales for a short time, than very very few sales for a long time. Of course the best is to get a fair bit of hype for your game, so that people know its coming and are excited, but if the hype grows beyond the game its good to have some undisclosed features, or a motherload of good levels, or something else that is unexpected, but will make the player say "Well features X,Y, and Z are not as good as I expected, but gee features A&B are pretty cool"

Most of this is not particularly relevant for shareware, but it is certainly important to advertise, and get people talking about your game.

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Why run? You''''ll only die tired.
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