If you’re an (aspiring) indie game developer, this is a topic you should be interested in! I know I am!

Although some indie developers say that sales data from others is irrelevant, I think it’s interesting to see how others are doing. And it can be motivating to see what the possibilities are!

Recently, GameProducer.net, a very interesting blog for game developers, started publishing sales statistics for several games, including Cactus Bruce and the Corporate Monkeys, Xmas Bonus and Democracy.

But, although these games seem to be doing very well, keep in mind that there are a lot more games doing a lot worse! I’m experiencing this first hand, with less then stellar results.

Other sources for sales data are forums, like the excellent IndieGamer forum, and the iDevGames forum. The latter has a thread in which several Mac game developers disclose their download and sales stats!

And maybe some day, when I have decent sales to show, I’ll put my own sales stats in this blog also…

After reading Steve Pavlina’s article about Adsense revenue, I decided to add Google Adsense advertisements to this blog. These are the ads you can see on the left of this page. I tried to make them as non-intrusive as possible, since I’m not really fond of big flashing banners.

A few months ago, I already added adsense to my shareware games site. Up till now, it made me about 10$. So it’s a start…
If you’re interested in adding adsense to your own site, you can click on the Google Adsense button on the left, halfway down this page!

I realize this blog still has very little content, and as a consequence, very low traffic. But I plan to grow these, and it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment. My hope is to eventually be able to pay my web hosting with it! My current host is Canaca, and I’m rather happy with them. Their cheapest offer is 3.95$ per month, for 20GB of web space and 500GB monthly bandwidth! So it’s ideal for hosting shareware and music!

Yes, I know it’s only been 10 days…
But when I see the online topscores, I have the impression that a lot of people find the game rather confusing in the very beginning. So I added an in-game help system, that makes clear that the player should catch the big bubbles, and avoid the red bubbles

I’m also doing an experiment with the registration scheme. There are 2 schemes, and the game chooses the scheme on first run with a 50% probability.
The first one limits the game to 5 games for each game mode, and 10 for the easy mode.
The second limits the game to 60 minutes of gameplay (this is frequently used for games downloaded from portals).
My hope is to find out which scheme results in the best conversion rate! Or better, my biggest hope is to actually have some registrations