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PyTom
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Popularity

#1 Post by PyTom »

Well, now that Moonlight Walks has been out for a month, I thought I would run the numbers and see how many times it has been downloaded. It's my hope that this information will encourage people by showing them the size of our audience, and help those people planning to commercially develop a game evaluate the size of the market.

So, without further ado, I'll just say that Moonlight Walks was downloaded a total of 471 times in the past month.

These statistics are from both Bishoujo.us and Renai.us. They include both the cross platform zip and the windows exe installer version of Moonlight Walks. For any given file, each IP address is counted only once, which should eliminate the effect of download managers. The breakdown is as follows:

bishoujo.us, exe: 265
renai.us, exe: 126
bishoujo.us, zip: 61
renai.us, zip: 19

The only advertising I did was to announce the game here and on the Megatokyo DSVN forum. This lead to several other people linking it, including the DSVN faq.

To let people compare MW with an existing game, Lemma has agreed to let me post the download number for ToL1 from the same time period. ToL1 was downloaded 278 times from renai.us, which was AFIK its primary download site for this time. This gives me hope for the enduring popularity of our games after initial release.

Hope you found this interesting.

--
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#2 Post by Jerails »

Whoa...So...We is popular now? Well, kind of?
It's been a while, folks!

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#3 Post by Dre »

How did you figure out how many people downloaded a certain file?

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#4 Post by Jerails »

I believe most places feature a hit counter that tracks how many times the link has been downloaded from. Not too savvy with this, so somebody back me up.
It's been a while, folks!

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#5 Post by mikey »

I used to watch my site traffic once, but ever since I do games, i don't anymore. The 3 years before I made games my site had around 5000 hits (in 3 years).

But, I submitted the site in September to some search engines, such as Anipike, Animespy etc... but since my only feedback are the posts at LS, I don't know any figures. The only thing I know is that from September 2700 people visited my site from Anipike.

I asked the manga.sk admin whether there were some details about downloads, and he'll try to find some old logs, but I don't have many hopes.

I tried to post on Animesuki for instance, but no one replied, on Megatokyo the response wasn't too great either, so I didn't even post Milk Swim, and on my club forum, well, I post it in the general bishoujo games thread (and no response either).

So I'm really surprised how many people d/loaded the games! You can post my stats too if you like, I don't really mind even if the figures are poor, since popularity is not why I do it :wink:

Nevertheless I am really for any kind of activity that supports the creation of fan-games (ren'ai). I fully support NaNoRenO, and I'd be happy to join other activities from the LSForum-Ren'Py-renai.us group :D

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#6 Post by PyTom »

Some notes:

I look at server logs to figure out how many times a file is download, and I process these logs to eliminate double downloads and the like. So these are more accurate than a simple counter on a web page.

mikey's games have gotten between 55 (Black Pencil part 2) and 128 (Milk Swim part 1) downloads. It's weird how different parts of his games get slightly different download numbers. However, since the games are available from the ATP web site, I would expect this to be a small fraction of the total number of downloads for those games, even in a month.

I actually got a number of replies on the MT forums, and a large number of downloads from there, more than from here IIRC. I think it's because there are a large number of lurking game players there, while here we're a smaller community of game creators.

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#7 Post by Megaman Z »

Some day, ren'ai games will be a mainstream genre... but then again, I could be in an asylum (asylem, asylam, how do you spell it?!?) talking to myself... and getting responses (bad news: I'm already having two-sided conversations with myself!). still, this gives hope for the people (me included) that support the ren'ai genre. until then, we can always make our own, right?
(notices nobody paying attention)
RIGHT?!?!?!?
(locals wake up)
(locals: "SHUT UP ALREADY!!!!")
ouch... I think I'm deaf now...
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#8 Post by mikey »

OMG, are they really that popular??
I just received processed stats from the manga.sk site logs and they are as follows:

from July 2004 (just around when River Trap was released),

Black Pencil - 1889 (that's starting 5 months after its release)
River Trap - 1613
Kaori - 1122
Milk Swim - 526 (in one month and it was only announced here)

I was so surprised, I thought in all honesty that just a few people were playing it, but seeing the stats, I am truly overwhelmed. :oops: I guess there are a lot of people playing these games, but few post or share their opinions :( so I tended to think that for instance Milk Swim wasn't as well received as Kaori, but of course, I was only judging it from the number of posts, as I had no other reference value. A big thankyou to all the players.

And the site had *gulp* 700 000 hits in the last half year! Pinch me, please!!

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#9 Post by PyTom »

Any chance that we could get month-by-month breakdowns of these stats? It would be interesting to see how a game's popularity tails off, and what it tails off to. My guess is that we'll see a core audience of about 300-400 core fans, with about 100-200 people a month just coming in and downloading the games. It would be interested to see how fast that core audience is growing... once it passes a few thousand, that's when I think commercial games might become feasible.

Also, are these logs filtered in any way to eliminate the effects of download managers?

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#10 Post by mikey »

I was also wondering whether there were not any such effects, but as for the files, I'm pretty sure they are okay, the webmaster runs the site since forever, so I don't think he'd not take into account same IPs. My middle man told me that was all he could fish out, so I was kind of happy that I had figures at all :D Anyway, I'll see what I can do - probably bug him after NaNoRenO is over though... he's a busy guy.

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PyTom
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#11 Post by PyTom »

Okay, it's been another month, and so I've run the numbers on Moonlight Walks's download statistics. The bottom line is that it has been downloaded a total of 713 times since its release, and 242 times in the past month. So, after the initial surge of downloads, we're down to half as much traffic.

Since I wanted to leard the Rpy (no relation to Ren'Py) package, I produced the following graph showing how many times MW has been downloaded. Behold:

Image

Okay, so what are we seeing here? First of all, let me point out that (for various technical reasons), the weeks are from sunday to sunday. So that means that week 0, the current week, isn't complete, and the numbers are a bit smaller than they will probably rise to.

So, let's look at the numbers. 8 WBP (weeks before the present week) was when I first released the game. There's an anomalously large number of downloads of the zip in that week, but that's because it took me a day or two to get the installer up and running.

7 WBP is the biggest week. That's when the game was spread to the largest number of new places. Most notably, that's when I posted about it to the Megatokyo DSVN forum.

From 6 to 4 WBP, it got a fairly constant number of downloads. 3 WBP was a week of transition, as that's when MW fell off of Megatokyo's DSVN forum's front page. That explains the fairly sharp falloff in bishoujo.us downloads between 4 WBP and 2 WBP.

It looks like downloads have levelled off to around 50 or so a week... but with 2 weeks of data, it's really premature to say that. I'll see what the data looks like next month.

The highlight of this, I think, is that the renai.us downloads have remained fairly constant throughout, at around 25 or so a week. So that is interesting, and it gives us an idea of how the community is growing.

Hm... anything else to report? Yeah. I noticed the other day that MW got it's first link from Japan. Make of it what you will, or at least what babelfish or Google's language tools will.

http://undine.sakura.ne.jp/diary/d200503b.html#r15-1
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#12 Post by mikey »

How do you find out about such things? I mean the Japan link. Do you just search google? :?

For my part I'm afraid I won't have stats available on a regular basis, maybe I'll talk to the admins or dunno.

It's nice to see the community growing. In fact lots of people announced new projects, maybe even because of NaNoRenO and all the buzz around it ^_^. We'll see how the new games will do then.

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#13 Post by PyTom »

mikey wrote:How do you find out about such things? I mean the Japan link. Do you just search google? :?
One of the things logged by most web servers is the referer URL... the page that someone was at when they clicked a link to your page. I do a lot of crunching on my logs, using a set of python scripts I wrote. I guess it's because I'm an unapologetic left-brain kind of guy, wanting numbers and data.
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#14 Post by Herumutsu »

mikey wrote:How do you find out about such things? I mean the Japan link. Do you just search google? :?
That's a possibility.

My guess would be that he read through the referer logs for a bit, looking for notable entries and finding that some people came to the site from that specific page on undine.sakura.ne.jp. As you may be aware, when clicking on a link, information about where you are coming from is being submitted to the referer logs (usually accessible by the site-administration) of where you are going to. If your browser supports this feature, that is.

I could tell you a lot more about it, how it works and how to control it, but that would take things way too far off-topic. If it does, however, really interest you, feel free to contact me privately about it.



As for the download statistics, it would seem that I was in one of the smallest groups, having downloaded Moonlight Walks zipped, and from renai.us, if I remember correctly. The statistics are interesting to follow - thanks for sharing them.

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#15 Post by RedSlash »

Did you find out if many Japanese people download the game after following through with the link? Just interesting to know.

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