The most important thing is your description and screenshots. If your description sounds interesting, and doesn't sound like it was written by a twelve-year-old, and your screens don't look like total arse, then people will be more inclined to download it once they're on the d/l page.
The more people that download it, the more chance you have of some of them telling their friends, or posting about it on their blog, or frontpaging it here or whatever. As long as your game doesn't suck. If it's a shitty game don't expect a lot of downloads ever.
If you want your game exposed a lot more you could submit it to http://www.caiman.us and http://www.download.com .Thoose to sites are big and if your game is good other smaller sites will spot them there and put them on their sites. Even if you have a quite crappy game you can easily get like 2k downloads by submitting to thoose two site.
I've since I submitted Blast Radius 1 to thoose two sites I have gotten like 15k downloads and been asked about occuring in a magazine. Blast Radius 2 is up at about 10k downloads. The only really bad thing about it is that the sites tend to direct link your game so you better have a good host with alot of bandwidth or you're screwed.
Another important factor is luck, for example Fishhead 3 was on the top of the frontpage for about 3 days, causing this crap game to be a hit. Hooghaar XL on the other hand is much better but was wiped off the frontpage in 2 hours so nobody knows what it is.
IOTM was the crappiest game I could imagine, more of a "why can't MMF make anything" game. I messed up at every possible place I could think of, cept that I made the mistake of using a custom movement engine rather than the default 8-dir one.
And it got +100 downloads. And a higher ranking than your game, thanks to ShadowCaster's flawed ranking system .
I really don't know how. Maybe it's the hype. Maybe it's the description. And maybe it's because I released it at a time when everyone hated me and wanted to do anything to make me look bad and had an easy time at it too. And I bet half the downloads were just to see if it really was that bad . My popularity actually got it rated 5/10.
That game should be a case study in marketing .
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Remakes are fan games at their truest. Guess technology isn't so bad when someone could make a better game in his free time than a whole PAID team could do. Kinda motivates me to get my game finished, at least for the next week or so..
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.