Just wondering about *actual* purchase and download rates for shareware games...yours or anyone elses - Especially solitaire collections. I''m hoping to get maybe around 2% when version 1.0 of my game is finished, but I would like to get a realistic picture of other peoples download and purchase rates sit now or sat at the start of game sales.

From what people have said here, it''s around 1%.

I would agree, I''ve seen people giving figures from 1:100 to as low as 1:250 for their download to purchase ratio.

It depends on how good the game is and how strong the registration incentives are. There''s no entitlement here, so a registration rate of 0.00% is entirely possible if your incentives are weak. 0.5 - 2.0% is fairly common for decent games, but some can see as high as 5%. In my experience games that see a higher conversion are those that people will specifically search for. Examples are solitaire, hearts, spades, chess, checkers, etc.

There''s a fairly long article about creating effective registration incentives for your demo here.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

Thanks for the figures everybody. They''re pretty much what I imagined they would be. BTW, I never knew there was such a market for solitaire collections. I was browsing CNet downloads and I saw that SolSuite 2002 gets around 20000 downloads a week from downloads.com alone...If they''re getting say, a 1% turnover, that is 200 sales a week....holy crap.

Steve: Thanks for the link, but I''ve already read all of your articles

Im pretty sure the people that made that hacking simulation game actually got something like a 1:20 ratio of buy to download. That game rocked though.