I’m in the process of creating a new site: http://www.justgamedemos.com I will host your game demos (up to 50MB) and provide you with free bandwidth (up to 100 downloads). My site is still in an early beta phase and I’m looking for authors to upload their demos to get it going. Simply register for a free account and upload away. Check out the Author FAQ if you have any questions. Demos will be subject to review before being posted to the live site. After creating your account, you will be provided with a personalized login page to track your downloads, comments, and user ratings on the demos you’ve uploaded. If you don't feel like setting things up yourself, I'll even do the work for you. Simply send me an email (christos at justgamedemos dot com) and point me to your demo. I will upload the executable, screenshots and descriptions for you and send you your login information to track your demo statistics. I have most of the functionality working at this point and am adding features daily. I’m also currently working on the cosmetics of the site. In the mean time, I figured now is a good time to reach out to authors to get things going. Once I have a sufficient amount of demos, I will begin marketing to the general population. Thank you for your time.

I don't have any demos to up load, but the site looks good!

Really? Thanks. I just started working on the site in my spare time yesterday morning. I plan to do a lot of cosmetic changes in the coming weeks to improve the look and feel, as well as adding additional functionality (such as forums).

I'm hoping to develop the author portal portion of the site even further. Currently authors can view real time stats on their downloads, user comments, avg user ratings, etc. I hope to add more to this portal to really distinguish it from other sites and give the author something valuable and worthwhile.

Quick Update: I now have what I feel is a pretty solid beta version of the site up and running( http://www.justgamedemos.com ). I've had several authors submit and upload their demos, as well as several downloads (even though I have yet to market to anyone aside from authors).

I am still in need of quite a few more demos before officially going live, so if you are interested, create a free account and upload your demo(s) to the site (or just point me to your site, let me know which demo(s) to include, and I'll do the upload work). Once a member, you will be able to track your stats in the author portal and see reports such as average user rating, comments, downloads, etc, for all of your uploaded files.

Thank you for your time.

The details of my pricing structure are still not finalized, but here is my thinking.

Assume your game is $20 and converts at 1%.

Let's say a portal gives you 40% of the sale.

100 downloads from the portal = Free to you.
1 Sale = $8 to you.
Net for you = $8.

I plan on charging .05 per download, less if your game has high volume and you want unlimited downloads.

100 downloads from my site = $5
1 Sale = $20 to you.
Net for you = $15.

Obviously you can adjust the numbers for different conversion rates, prices, etc.

My whole idea was to simply provide the demos. Market the site to get people interested in downloading your games. Get customers to you. If the person is interested in buying your game, that person would be directed back to you and your site for the purchase.

Working on a game myself (due to be completed this coming spring), I also was thinking about pay per click advertising (which I currently use for various projects I'm working on). As an author, I'd rather use that nickle for a guaranteed download of my demo.

Please let me have your feedback on this idea. I've received both positive and negative on other forums and am working to make this a win win situation as best I can.

Thanks.

Quote:Original post by HopeDagger

Quote:Original post by FetaBoy
100 downloads from my site = $5

I can't see that flying. Given how cheap web hosting is, one could easily get hosting that would allow them well over 1000 downloads a month for a little more than twice your price.

Thank you for the feedback. So, in your opinion, is the price the issue, or the concept itself? If price, what would you be willing to pay for me to market, host, and get interested people in downloading your demo?

My whole line of thought was to offer an alternative to taking a cut of the sale, as the portals do. Yes, hosting is cheap, but marketing and getting interested consumers to visit the site and download/buy the games may not always be.

In your opinion, would I be better off not charging 5 cents (actually right now I double the clicks, so it's only 2.5 cents) per demo downloaded, and trying a business model as the portals do?

The way I envisioned things was, for a $20 game, as long as your conversion rate is more than .25 percent, you will come out ahead of using a portal which only gives you 40% of the sale.