Results of the X-mas offer
Raw numbers:
Over the three weeks the offer ran, 1436 free copies of the game got gifted.
During the same time, 361 copies
of the game were sold.
The average number of sales per day was 17.19 copies during this time.
The very first
day of the offer, the game sold 37 copies.
On the Dec 25, the game sold 25 copies.
The day after Dock was
announced as the artist, the game sold 38 copies.
In the three weeks before the offer, 209 copies were sold.
The three weeks the offer ran, the game sold 73% more
than the three weeks preceding the offer.
There was a two day 20% increase in visitors for two days after the
offer went live, and another 20% increase on Dec 23.
Traffic was down 20% on the 25th and has been slowly
recovering since.
I received 12 donations.
The total value of the donations was 67.78 EUR, making the value of the average donation
5.65 EUR.
The smallest donation was 0.1 EUR.
The largest was 15 EUR.
0.8% of everyone who gave away a copy
of the game also donated money.
I received 15 emails with the default X-mas greeting subject line.
I received several custom greeting emails, but
those are difficult to count. A rough estimate puts this at about 10-20
1% - 2.44% of everyone who game away a
copy also sent an X-mas greeting.
Some stabs at analysis:
Well, this was a triumph!
It’s hard to tell how much of it was the actual offer, and how much of it was just increased sales during X-mas, but the game sold a lot better than normal during the offer.
There were two major spikes in sales; the first day of the offer, and the day after Dock was announced as the artist. The last time the game sold that many copies in a single day was back when multiplayer was first released!
If everyone who got a free copy would have bought the game instead, I would’ve made 14288 EUR more. If I were the
record industry, I’d say that I’ve lost 14288 EUR on this deal. ;)
Instead, I count those 1436, and the 1436
people who sent their gifts, as having bought the game at a 50% discount.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any statistics on the registrations, so I don’t know what happened to those.
As for the donations and the X-mas greetings.. well..
Several people told me they purchased an extra copy of the
game instead of donating money, which makes sense. If I do this again, I’ll make that an official option (“Or buy
another copy of the game!”) so I can keep track of it.
I got a lot of informal X-mas greetings on IRC and twitter, but it would’ve been nice to just get flooded with emails. If only 20% had sent a greeting, I’d be getting 68 of them per day! That would’ve been awesome! :D
I really appreciate all the donations and greetings I got, thank you! :-)
I will be back on Sunday, and will get programming again on Monday.
I love you all!
Especially you, Elin.