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[mirosurabu]

I am interested in what's the usual number of downloads for short and optionally experimental freeware games? What's your experience with this?

Another thing I was always interested to know about is how people market short and experimental games? How did Tale of Tales market 'The Graveyard'?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

You could ask tale-of-tales, rohrer, etc. directly.

This also depends on what you consider short and optionally experimental. Does cactus count as experimental (he definitely has short covered)? Does Glum Buster (about 4 hours long if you speed through it) count as short?

I do know that Glum Buster got around 9,000 downloads in the first few days / first week (and only about 28 donations out of that), CosMind kindly supplied me with that info when I asked.

[mirosurabu]

Cactus and Rohrer are good examples of what I consider to be short and optionally experimental. Purho's rapid prototyping efforts as well. Glum Buster - no.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

So the dividing line is about, say, shorter than one or two hours?

[mirosurabu]

Yes, not more than two hours.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Okay, my own numbers on this are:

The Myth of Sisyphus RPG: technically this game is of infinite length, but practically nobody will play it for more than 2 hours. You push a rock up a hill, forever. Every button pushes it up the hill, even escape. No way to exit the game. About 1000 downloads.

My TIGSource Love Letter competition entry. Also very short and fairly experimental, attempts to form a continuously breaking-down analogy between love and gravity (both forms of physical attraction) which breaks down the further you look into the analogy. About 700 plays/downloads of the .swf file. This doesn't count the love letter competition collection .zip, which I don't know how many times was downloaded.

Note that I didn't particularly promote either. Neither is linked to from my site except in hidden places (one in the freeware collection, the other in the blog).

[mirosurabu]

My limited experience with short/experimental games goes like this:

Uneksians
Downloads: 200 in 5 months
Dev-time: 3 weeks
Dev-kit: C++
Serious attempt

Made for TIGSource CPB competition. I posted it on several forums just to experiment with things.

The result was pretty bad, considering it's the one I worked on hardly compared to other. It's also the longest in the series of my short games.

Ironically, it's also the one people I know like most.

I Love You
Downloads: 2000+ in 3 months (1000 in first two days)
Dev-time: 4 days
Dev-kit: Construct
Joke attempt

Came of as a surprise. I did no marketing virtually. And I thought it was pretty bland.

Mistakes
Downloads: 500 in 2 months
Dev-time: 2 days
Dev-kit: Construct
Attempt out of desperation

I expected more, but oh well. Surprisingly, I get around 10-15 downloads a day for this one since recently. I posted it on TIGS forums and experimented with mailing lists.

Nolegs
Downloads: 160 in 1 month
Dev-time: 1 hour
Dev-kit: Construct
Made for the Poppenkast, based on the prototype I made previously

This is the least marketed one.

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Internet-wise, I usually post these on TIGS forums, Construct forums, upload it to Serbian free games repository (which works really well even though the site doesn't have much traffic), some forums with low traffic and such. I didn't want to experiment with these much because they aren't that great games, but since I'm having one decent coming soon I thought I should see how other people deal with this kind of thing.

[agj]

According to Mochibot, Viewpoints has had 3626 views (in 1 month), and Heart, 969 (in 5 days, since I didn't add Mochibot immediately). The Lake has had a total of 4425 downloads since it was released 5 months ago.

[mirosurabu]

What do you think contributed to these figures?

[agj]

The fact that they're in the three-digits and above range is simply because they were submissions to well-regarded contests. The only publicity I did was for Viewpoints, which I submitted to StumbleUpon and Digg, move which got me, I believe, no views anyway. The rest was automatic, as some blogs and stuff picked the games from the contests, plus the exposure you get from Flash portals.

Not a big revelation: entering contests nets you more exposure.

[Sam]

I 'published' my Valentine's compo game on Kongregrate so that its intended target could actually play it (I should get some webspace of my own) and as a trial run of using their service.  In the first few hours of being added, it got about 1,000 plays.  I am certain that these were almost all from people clicking through from the "newly added" list on that portal.

Portals are certainly good for getting raw exposure, although it's up to you to decide if the people you're getting exposed to are the people who would enjoy your game.  Publishing in Flash generally seems like a good way to get more exposure - websites are just much more accessible than a loose .exe.  Of course, there are plenty of downsides too.

(I really liked "I Love You", maybe easy to play it without realising the humour, which just made it all the better when you do)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Maybe I should try adding mine there, I didn't actually think of doing that. I think mine (mentioned earlier) is a bit too unpolished for that though, I'd like to improve it a bit first if I get time.

[cactus]

I don't keep track on downloads unfortunately, so I have no idea really. I've seen my games posted on other sites where the downloads have ranged from 20-ish (on sites without screenshots and only brief descriptions) to 2-9000 on bigger sites.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

your site host should at least have a stats page / figures you could look at with bandwidth usage and sometimes download numbers for individual files. for instance, i got to studioeres.com/stats/ and enter my name and password and it has all that info for me automatically. it probably varies from host to host though.

[cactus]

your site host should at least have a stats page / figures you could look at with bandwidth usage and sometimes download numbers for individual files. for instance, i got to studioeres.com/stats/ and enter my name and password and it has all that info for me automatically. it probably varies from host to host though.

I have a bandwidth usage per day thing, but that's all. No other stats, like hits or whatever. I'm only using free services at the moment, and I haven't even bothered to try and find the best ones.

[GregWS]

your site host should at least have a stats page / figures you could look at with bandwidth usage and sometimes download numbers for individual files. for instance, i got to studioeres.com/stats/ and enter my name and password and it has all that info for me automatically. it probably varies from host to host though.

I have a bandwidth usage per day thing, but that's all. No other stats, like hits or whatever. I'm only using free services at the moment, and I haven't even bothered to try and find the best ones.

So fucking indie. 

[Craig Stern]

I'm not sure if it provides a way to track bandwidth or downloads, but Google Analytics is free, and it provides some pretty good stats for the money.

In all seriousness though, I love how Analytics breaks down visitors by geographic area, from the world view down to individual cities in, for example, France. (This past month, the vast majority of my French visitors were people living in Nantes.) It's brilliant. If I knew a damn thing about marketing, it would probably be very helpful to me.

[cactus]

I used to use analytics, so I had stats on visitors (around 100-500 a day), but with the latest site redesign I don't think I kept it. As far as I know, analytics doesn't track downloads though, right? And I think a lot of sites hotlink my files (which I'm totally ok with).

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

you can set it up to track downloads but it doesn't track it natively. there's a guide to setting it up to track downloads somewhere or other.

[mirosurabu]

FileBuzz seems like a useful file repository. Doubled Mistakes download count within one week. Will be interesting to see if downloads will remain constant.