DaVince This fool just HAD to have a custom rating
Registered 04/09/2004
Points 7998
20th July, 2007 at 05:47:25 -
"But out of the millions of freeware games there are only a few that actually become well known and it's not because they're the best."
It's a matter of releasing it at the right places on the right time. Also you should build up enough momentum (hype) so people will be willing to spread the game around and tell others of it.
For't record I loved Knytt because it didn't play like every other game before it and is inspirational on so many levels. It felt empty, but I liked that. Don't hold much hope for the sequel - I'd rather see the guy work on something entirely new.
Some of you guys need to learn when to cheer for a fellow game developer when he's doing well.
Knytt is doing well because it's an awesome game. Pure exploration is not really my kind of thing, but I can appreciate what Nifflas was aiming for and I think he definitely achieved it, and the game deserves the attention it's getting now. Knytt Stories looks like it has just as much atmosphere as Super Metroid.
Have you ever wondered, by the way, if one of the reasons Knytt has been so successful is because he's broadened his audience beyond TDC? I like TDC, but you're lucky if you get over 200 downloads here, whereas you would easily get 3000 elsewhere. (this is probably a subject for another thread, let's not let it sway the topic here)
As for his music, I love it. He writes in other styles besides ambient.
I tried to get some of my games submitted to gamehippo, but they're all morons over there. And i'm not entirely sure how you get your game out to a wider audience.
My last big game, Buzz the squirrel 2 was picked up by Caiman, which was great except the massive amount of leeching that makes the Ectoprods site die quicker. It's died down a bit now though.
And what do you know? suddenly it's featured on about 5 different websites.
And that is because like i said, people don't look very deep to find good games. They go go for the ones that are shoved in their face because they're on every freeware game site.
Games always seem to get good amounts of downloads at Download.com.
Foreign sites often pick up quite a nice amount of traffic, too. Getting on the bigger sites like indygamer gamehippo and caiman just takes a certain amount of appeal really. Obviously it depends mostly on the status and attitude of the site at hand... Caiman have loads of links to SilverNova, but when I asked GameHippo some months back I never recieved a reponse.
Usually you just need to get it on to one site, before others' then start selecting it. They feel that they lack if they do not have equal / more than their competitor sites, naturally. Planet Free Play are nice too - them and Caiman
People like that dude from the ArseCast all stay semi-mainstream and wait for news to come to them - they never really search for themselves, which is most often why good games get forgotton and left behind. Also it's largely to do with the timing, release dates etc.
Though perhaps most of all, the quality of your game.
It's as easy as that. No one wants a crappy pong clone with awful graphics, no matter how much you hype it. And in the other hand, if you make an awesome game but don't tell anyone about it, then you're not likely to get many downloads either.
Gamehippo destroyed my last host. It's reasons like that why I go for these claimed "unlimited" bandwidth hosts. When Sam got onto that G4 show thing my downloads jumped up to almost double what I got during its launch week. Around that time it turned up on Gamespy too and some Steam-like program which really pushed up bandwidth.
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