Here my humble opinion. 20 purchase on 5000 downloads is 0.4% conversion rate. Such conversion rate, while below average "successful" rate is not considered a falure for shareware games. Successful shareware game have conversion rate 1% ( that would be 50 purchase for 5000 download). The problems seems that during the year game pulled only 5000 downloads.That is clearly not enough. May be you should make your game more appealing to download, work marketing, your website etc...NOt that I''m much qualified to judge, I''m still in the process making my own game

Look at how PopCap does their system. They get lots of traffic and downloads.

You''re clearly correct that more downloads will lead to better sales. But I am suprised that a conversion rate of 1% is considered successful. If true, it may prove very challenging. Downloads of that quantity are not easy to get. In fact, it''s possible Popcap''s success is due in part to the fact that you don''t even need to download many of their games. I don''t know about most people, but I know I''m more willing to play a game I don''t have to download.

Then again, that''s only half of the problem; you need to have the traffic too.

By the way, good luck on your game.

Metagenic, based on what superpig writes your game is fun... you just need to polish it a bit.. so why not write a v1.01/... patch and try again?

If you take a good look, many succesfull games have got sometimes a high version number... example - dexterity''x dweep (currently sold as dweep gold) has had over 40 upgrades during the last 7 or so years.... that''s one upgrade every second month... and it sells better then ever. (partially because his website has got much larger audience... but as you write your second game and gain audience with it, why not use it to sell the first game as well and vice-versa?)

The conversation rate... good games have got between 1-2% conversation rate, with very few games going as high as 5%.
Anything under 1% is a failure. Of course there might be several reasons... from poor gameplay to marketting working towards the wrong type of customer.

Downloads.. 5000 downloads isn''t much... you can go much better here. If you can''t push this numebr with your current game, what makes you think you will do better with your new game?

If I may advice you, try to fix your "problem" zones(mentioned above), maybe add something little to your game, give the game some more marketting and see how it goes... maybe this year you will get 200 sales instead 20 and learn a whole lot of new things... and writing a small patch is always much easier/faster then writing a new game...