Well, it's been a really interesting week.

A week ago, I soft launched Cursed Silence (Demo) on this platform. Like my previous prototypes, I expected a few downloads, maybe sending the link to some Reddit communities. I needed playtesting for my game.

I wasn't expecting it to blow up (modestly). I was very pleased to see views, downloads, and even some YouTube gameplays!

What was different this time? What did I learn? Well, here are the main points I think were the most important:

• Genre: Unlike my previous games, I leaned heavily towards horror this time around. I discovered this genre is well recieved by small and medium sized YouTube channels. There are even channels dedicated specifically to horror games, unlike most other game genres. These channels tend to have lots of videos (hundreds or even thousands), most of them free indies from itch.io. These channels reflect a niche that's alive and well. Even though I found 10 gameplays, and even a mention in a south korean streaming website, I got 89 total downloads. Most of these were from itch.io horror, new, and popular tags.
• Polish: Although the game is far (very far) from being a commercially viable product, this demo is much more complete than my previous prototypes. Unlike them, this game has a story, a gameplay loop, and an end. It has decent UI compared to my previous games, and it's the one with the most development hours behind it (600 hours at the moment). 
• Presentation: I was really careful with the presentation of my game page. I carefully selected screenshots, made a teaser trailer, used a consistent color palette, and selected the thumbnail. The thumbnail has proven to be the most important aspect for getting views. I think the name also helped a lot, as it is quite unique (There are very few things named "Cursed Silence" in Google and YouTube results, and none of them are games).
• File size: Even though my game is about 800Mb in size, I created a solid rar file that weighs only 307Mb. This has an effect on users that don't have much storage space, or have low internet speeds.
  

Well, here below I'll present you all my graphs and my best interpretation of them:

I got 351 views, and from those, 89 downloads. This is a 25.36% of downloads per views, about a 1 in 4 ratio. I think this is an incredible start for a first demo. I also got 6 users commenting, 1 five-star rating, and my game added to 10 collections. Clickthrough rate was about 2.5% in the first 3 days, but went down in the last days (I believe this is normal, as the game starts washing away from the new and popular tabs, and starts mixing with other genres). 

I launched my game Saturday 2, really late, so download started the next day. The first two days had quite a lot of views, which started going down by Tuesday. That day I discovered 3 YouTube gameplay videos, so I decided to change the thumbnail, making it more outstanding. I believe views went up again as a result of this change, and the YouTube videos, as most of YouTube traffic started the next day.

As expected, the download graph is quite similar to the views graph. However, there were two spikes in download to view ratio: 26.58% on Monday, and 30.73% on Wednesday. Wednesday was the best day, when almost 1/3 of all people viewing the game that day, downloaded it. In the last two days, this ratio started going down, as more people entered the game page. This means more people that aren't strictly from the horror niche are viewing, but not downloading (a normal behaviour in my opinion).

These are the major referrers to my game. As expected, most were from itch.io. I got 15 views from YouTube also. I don't know if any of these views became downloads, since the YouTube gameplays spoiled all the story. 

What did I learn?

I've been developing prototypes as a hobby since 2017. In that time I learned that game dev is really hard. I have a full time job, some health issues, and all the time I got left for devving is nighttime. Even so, I could put myself together at the beginning of this year, and start a (hopefulle commercially) viable product. I achieved consistency in my workflow, and my game looked quite good for me.

However, when I started looking at the download rate and the gameplays, I realized how much work is still to be done. I'm really happy with the results, but some things I thought were a good idea, seem not to be so when other people play your game.

I intend to continue developing Cursed Silence. I'll hopefully launch the demo fully in December, with all the improvements I could implement thanks to everyone viewing and playing my little game. I also intend to extend that demo next year, and make a full game. Who knows? I may be able to achieve my childhood dream this time around.

I thank every one of you reading this post. If you downloaded and played Cursed Silence, I thank you also. You're the reason I love game dev.