Does anyone have an idea of how many downloads of a shareware game get registered?

I assume that this would depend on multiple factors: quality of game, ease of registration, etc but I'm guessing that after taking all the various factors into account it's possible to reach a rough figure.

Brian Azzopardi

Could range from 0.00% on the low end to roughly 5% on the high end. The high end of the range is more common for games that people might search for explicitly (solitaire, hearts, spades, chess, checkers, etc) and for some puzzle games that are highly addictive. 0.5% - 2.0% is typical for most decent shareware games. There's no entitlement though -- if your incentives are weak, you could very well sell 10,000 downloads and zero sales.

Across shareware in general, some products see reg rates as high as 50%, such as particular vertical market apps that people wouldn't download unless they were already looking to buy.

It really does depend on many factors. I know of one game that gets 5%.

Think of it this way: why does a child ask his parents again and again for something he/she wants? Because they know that if they keep asking, eventually they will catch the parents at the right time and the parents will say yes :-)

I need to follow that advice more myself!

Another big thing is patience. When I first started, I barely any registrations with the same product that sells well now- and it STILL has pretty weak registration incentives. You just need to learn and allow time for your marketing efforts to pay off. I have a feeling that many indie game developers give up before their game really builds up some steam.