Continuing along with my promise about sales figures, September's just finishing and we see...

13 sales!

Which just covers the cost of the server but sadly doesn't cover the cost of download.com.

Total downloads is 3,000 this month again.

The blanket conversion rate is approximately 0.43% - an improvement. The latest tweaks have increased conversion rate but we won't know until next month how they affect it for sure.

Nerdy statistic:
28% of our downloaders fail to run the game once downloaded.

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec

Nerdy statistic:
28% of our downloaders fail to run the game once downloaded.

Cas :)

Interesting... how do you come up with this statistic?

Here's a thought though... distribute your game as an EXE installer if you're not already doing this, then encourage people to click on "Run this" instead of saving it to disk, by putting that in the download instructions. That way it launches immediately. Then have that "play now" checkbox checked by default when the installer finishes.

Maybe you're already doing all this...

I get that statistic because Alien Flux writes a log when it's launched and sends it to us to tell us whether it worked or not. Very shortly it's going to open a page on our website with the correct latest OpenGL drivers on too. I can't wait to see what having the correct drivers immediately to hand is going to do for that 28% failure rate. Stay tuned!

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec
I get that statistic because Alien Flux writes a log when it's launched and sends it to us to tell us whether it worked or not.

Have you considered that maybe your notification is being blocked by a firewall on the user's machine? That might account for at least part of this figure.

Pete

Or that they're on a dialup and logged off after downloading it.

Once again: Many thanks for sharing this information!

And I wish you the best of luck for the future.

On the log send: or they use a proxy, if your send uses HTTP and doesn't pull that setting out of IE (or similiar).

No, you've got it all wrong! The data I get is from a success or a fail; if I don't get any data, I never know one way or the other. Therefore the data I've got is basically a statistical sample of the downloaders, comprising only of people who run the game while online. Since I released 1.4h 2.5 days ago I've had 160 logs out of around 320 downloads, which means about 50% of downloaders don't play online or block the outgoing communication - sounds about right, I wouldn't leave a dialup connection on if I was playing a game. The number of users using outgoing firewalls is very small.

Next month: the great big video drivers database statistics thread which will put all your fear, uncertainty and doubt and minformation to rest. Finally. Permanently.


Cas :)

So you're saying that 28% of people who try to run the game can't because of some failure or other (e.g. GL drivers), not that 28% download it and then never try to run it (e.g. they forgot about it).

Incidentally, you say that few people use outgoing firewalls, is this an assumption or do you have evidence? I thought that quite a lot of people used ZoneAlarm for example, although I suspect it's a lot more common amongst techies than the general public.

Cheers - Steve

Amongst the general public, almost no-one uses Zonealarm - a software firewall is a complex idea that's waaaay beyond 99% of the population. Hell, 28% of them can't even get the drivers for their graphics cards installed and that's not rocket science.

Techies tend to avoid ZA as well as it can seriously screw things up when it goes wrong.

So yes - out of 100 downloads, 28 of them will run the game and be told they need GL drivers and it opens our support page telling them so. In a few days it'll present a link to the drivers too.

Cas :)

Did you do some basic research about the developer Mountain King Studios http://www.mking.com. Did you contact him to ask how he did it? I contacted in the past several shareware developers who succeed and most developers were very helpfull :) So I am curious about the results of your research and contacting.

Not quite sure what you mean there.
As it happens I did contact Mountain King yesterday with a view to getting affiliate sales up there but no response yet.

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec
Not quite sure what you mean there.
As it happens I did contact Mountain King yesterday with a view to getting affiliate sales up there but no response yet.

Cas :)

Try to find out where he submit his games, if the prices are different (Demonstar for instance), review places etc. Try to find clues.

Hey Cas, I've been curious about something. Your OpenGL failure rate seems really high (no proof on my part, just a feeling). Do you think it's really just drivers, or is there possibly an issue with your library?

When you get the error log, does it specifically tell you that it was an OpenGL problem? You mentioned before having problems with Matrox cards, it would be interesting to whip up a minimal OpenGL program in C and send that to them, that would at least help pin down where the problem is.

These are actual logs of when we find out the customer genuinely has no OpenGL capability. I've also got crash logs when the game is started up after a forced shutdown.

So there it is, in black and white: 28% of people don't have OpenGL drivers. Actually that's slightly untrue; there's a very small percentage of weirdos that do have OpenGL, and then who watch the title screen for five minutes, but never actually bother to play a game!!! And this after an 11MB download!!!!

<edit>Oh yes, and we finally got Matrox cards working. glSwapIntervalEXT is broken and crashes the drivers; you have to use SwapBuffers instead of wglSwapLayerBuffer; and EXT_compiled_vertex_array is broken and displays garbage if you use it.

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec
there's a very small percentage of weirdos that do have OpenGL, and then who watch the title screen for five minutes, but never actually bother to play a game!!! And this after an 11MB download!!!!
I tried the game yesterday. The player is greeted with the instructions window... if someone doesn't click on "close" at once and reads everything (like I did), then that's a lot of information to digest and it *could* be that someone with a fast connection decided that this is too complicated for him/her... Anyway I thought that there was way too much to be read.

(impressive game otherwise, though the background sound effects are not really... enjoyable)

I'm guilty of being a weirdo that sometimes will download a demo and never bother to try it, or run it just to see what it looks like but never actually play it. I think this behavior is mostly a result of being busy and not really having a todo list for entertainment. I'll download/bookmark something that looks interesting and then forget all about it until it's time to clean up the hd, which unfortunately results in most demos being deleted. I also use ZoneAlarm and Norton AV so I guess I'm every indie's nightmare ;)

Glad to hear your conversion rate is improving. 0.43% is almost half of 1% so double your sales again and you are getting somewhere! I imagine your improved site will go a long way as well. :)

Hello,

Just wondering if you have found out anything more about opengl usage. I have got a game comming up which uses opengl, so I am quite interested in this :)

Is there some code around which figures out the video card/windows version, and then gets the correct driver for the user?

glsetup was supposed to do this, but it does not look at all up to date.

Probably most of the people are winXP people who never update their machine. Are you finding this is the case?

Also, are you sure those are completed downloads? Or are the % of people you didn't get a log from people who had failed downloads?

One option I was thinking of is using messa. But that is quite slow except on really new/quick processors. Also you need to optimize your game for it in different ways.

The other option would be to use an opengl directx wrapper. Have not really looked a lot for a good implementation yet. Anyone know of a good one? Will keep you posted if I find something good.

The last option I am considering is using crystal space for its software renderer. But would rather not do this, as it would require quite a refactor of my code ;)

Rene Dudfield,
http://www.holepit.com/

hi,

Some good news is that the code from GLdirect, which is an opengl wrapper around directx 7,8,9 is being integrated into the main mesa3d source.

It looks like this integration was started around july. So there is a good chance that it is nearing completion(or perhaps has stopped).

If you want to use it straight away, I guess you could check out the cvs source. I'll probably wait a while in the hope they will release a new version soon with direct3d support included.

There is this old one as well. Which may work for you. It worked for one of my old games, that used a very limited number og GL calls. My currect game crashes.
http://www.altsoftware.com/products/opengl-directx.html


Have fun!

Rene Dudfield,
http://www.holepit.com/