Hi Steve,

I noticed that your home page is re-arranged and now it has Top free game downloads, also I noticed that the games list on left side is not in the order of publishing!!

May I ask according to what you did these updates?!!
And for how long the featured game will stay?!

Kind regards,

Optimization is an important part of our strategy. This is one of the more visible changes to the site, but there are tweaks and changes to the site happening almost every week that you're probably not aware of. The revised home page is just one of many experiments. In this particular case, after spending several hours cross-analyzing our web logs with our database/sales records, I found some interesting patterns and came up with some ideas to test. In the end we simply measure by results. If a new feature improves sales, we keep it. If it hurts sales, we abandon it.

We'll rotate titles in and out of the featured spot periodically, giving preference to the Platinum (exclusive) games and also using this to make new releases stand out more prominently. Stockboy will be featured until Once Twice Thrice launches later this week.

Ideally, in the long run I'd like to add enough tracking and measurement code to the site such that it can self-optimize the ordering of products on the home page in real-time. This would take some programming work, but it's certainly achieveable. Amazon.com does something like this by showing a custom home page for each visitor, based on your past shopping preferences. So if we detect a visit from a customer of a level-based puzzle game, we might want to present a home page that features all the puzzle games at the top. The possibilities for optimization are endless....

Ultimately every experiment of this nature is measured by sales. If sales are higher when game A is featured vs. game B, we're going to feature game A a lot more.