I guess it's my turn to tell my experience since it's been 1.5 months I published my first game (Goofy Soccer 1.0).

http://www.dragonom.com/games/goofysoccer/GoofySoccerDemoSetup.exe

I published Goofy Soccer 1.0 about 1.5 months ago. In the first two weeks I posted it to several (9-10) places as gamealbum.com etc. In the first two weeks I got some feedback from people (mostly from this forum) and revised the game. The game got ~2000 downloads in the first 15 days. Then I submitted to download.com and got about 20000 downloads in one month. Now there is a total of ~25000 downloads. There are only 18 sales though. My expectation was about 1/1000 CR, but it's now around 1/1500.

The game got quite popular at download.com. It stayed at #1 of popular sports games for 2 weeks. It competed with 3 EA games including Fifa 2004 :).

Two publishers were interested in the game. I am now negotiating, but I do not have serious expectations because I know my game isn't that quality.

I had developed the game for experimental purposes only. I was expecting 10000 downloads and 10 sales. Now it has already surpassed some of my expectations. I'm hopeful for the future :D because I have learned so much from this experience. I learned that;

* Americans buy games even if it's soccer (most of my customers are US citizens)
* OpenGL is a risk (I knew it before, but I know it better now :) )
* it's ironic that download.com users are very good downloaders