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Should I start charging early? (AKA Oh god why is my public beta on the front page already?)

A topic by WarpZone created Mar 27, 2018 Views: 382 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 4
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AAAAA.  What do I DO?  The plan was to keep gradually building up the game, and start charging once people started donating.  That hasn't happened yet.  Zero donations.  But now somebody put my game on the front page!  It's listed among Most Popular in its genre tag!  I did an update with two new turret types but that's hardly enough to justify going from $0 to $2.  But if I don't switch it over now, I'll miss out on the biggest traffic spike ever.  Or is that just a misconception on my part and if it were on the front page at $2 right now, nobody would be downloading it?

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Aaaaand just like that, it's over.  My 15 minutes of fame are up.  Less than 1% of the people who saw the link clicked on it, but of those who did, slightly more than half of them chose to go ahead and download it for free.  Does anybody know if these numbers are good or bad?  Now that I'm off the front page, it's all Long Tail from here on out, so I need to figure out what I did wrong ASAP.

Moderator

Those numbers are fine, but yeah, convincing people to pay any price at all is a difficult proposition. Don't worry, your game may yet climb back to the first page of search results again.

"Climb?"  Is it hierarchical?  Do I do a thing to get it to go up?  I thought a mod or an admin just decided.  I also thought games only get one crack at the frontpage since that's how it works on Steam, appstore, istore, and pretty much every other games portal on the internet.

I is confused.

Admin

On the homepage, the fresh games section has to do with a human tagging your game to be a candidate. If you release any big updates then post again on release announcements and it may make it up there again. The other browse pages are sorted by an algorithm and there you can climb up.

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