Smugglers 2 is finished and should be released very soon. My problem now is that the (packaged) demo size is 10 MB and I was wondering whether this is too big? Any experiences? suggestions? ideas?

In my experience...5MB is breaking point for application packages. It''s important to be lower than that. For games, though, the number is 10MB. If you can come in less than 10MB you have a much better chance of being downloaded. At 10MB people have to decide whether they want to take the time (though that doesn''t really affect people with cable modems or DSL).

Your mileage may vary.

-David


DavidRM
Samu Games

I say the lower the better. I have 2 10MB games (now 5MB) and one 1.8MB game available as shareware. guess which sells more? the 1.8MB one, even though the other 2 are easily 20 times better games. I can get 25,000 downloads on downlaod.com of a 2MB game, but maybe 5000 of a 6MB one. I say small is good. The problem is there are people who resent paying over $10 for such a small game so its swings and roundabouts.
If you can make the demo much smaller than the full version then you get the best of both worlds, but with shareware, this isn''t always possible.
good luck with the game anyway!

http://www.positech.co.uk

Thanks to you too for the answers.
The problem is all those cool pics and music simply take up a lot of space. I am cutting stuff out now - but its a pitty, even if its only a demo.

Well, the Tropico demo used lower detail textures than the retail version. Maybe you can do something like that?

The difference is the customers knew that the fullversion of Tropico had high-detail textures. In a shareware game people might get supicious...

Something else, after throwing out stuff I have a different problem:
My InstallShield maker zipped the files to 7 MB
My ZIP maker zipped the files to 5 MB

Do you think everyone has a ZIP unzipper now??

installers can add lots of junk. try inno setup, its totally free and i find it makes very small installers.

http://www.positech.co.uk

Well, you can always make it a self extracting zip file.

If I were you, I''d stick with InstallShield, though. It nabs a bunch of errors and stuff behind the scenes, and just generally makes your product appear that much more professional. (This is assuming you''re using a full version of IS, and not the garbage that comes with MSVC.)

Id rather have a smaller filesize (and hence many more sales) than pay for installsheild and put up with its filesize bloat. I never do much registry stuff, so all i need is a file-copying and compression program. I do wonder what the hell installshield puts in its files to bloat them so much....

http://www.positech.co.uk

quote: Original post by cliffski
Id rather have a smaller filesize (and hence many more sales) than pay for installsheild and put up with its filesize bloat. I never do much registry stuff, so all i need is a file-copying and compression program. I do wonder what the hell installshield puts in its files to bloat them so much....

http://www.positech.co.uk

My Installshield CAB file is the same size as a zip file with my 40MB application. The only thing taking up more space appears to be the installshield kernel/dialogs.

That''s about a 2MB overhead, but then I''m using Windows Installer Edition, so I''m getting uninstall, repair, and modify functions for that 2MB.