So on Friday Hacker News turned its firehose of people on the One Man MMO Project blog - thank you larksimian whoever you are! The blog made it to number 1 on Hacker News around 9am, and had dropped to #13 by the time I found out about it late Friday night. The 100+ comments on the Hacker News page were entirely positive, which was really nice.
I was also pretty pleased that the blog's hosting worked exactly as it is supposed to and happily served up tens of thousands of pages to all those people without falling over.
So if you don't do this for a living, this is an astonishing number of people to visit an indie game. I've been at this ten years and this is 100x larger than my previous largest traffic spike. A post from a smaller news site typically generates only a couple dozen visitors. A spike like this Hacker News one will typically generate sales to support months of work. If I was paying for ads to get that traffic, Adwords would charge me on average $97,542. My ISP charged me $23 for the traffic.
So at this point, people usually talk about sales funnels -- how many of those people were "converted" into paying customers. The best funnels turn 11.45% of visitors into customers, so if they bought Standard Editions, they would have purchased $165,796. If I had an average sales funnel, that's 2.35% or $34,028. If just 1% of those people thought "hey that's cool I'd like to support that" it would have been $14,480.
My actual total sales for all those visitors was zero. That's crushing. 36,261 people looked at my game and every single one said, "nope, don't want that."
I looked pretty hard at that number on Saturday morning.
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Homepage: onemanmmo.com email:one at onemanmmo dot com
Homepage: email:calebgrollins at gmail dot com
1. It wasn't immediately obvious to me where to get this, or that it was available to the general public at all yet.
You need an eye catching "BUY" button. For that reason, I didn't even look at the store page until now.
This is a nit, but "Shop" brings to mind physical merchandise.
2. Your itch.io page should be more visual. You should have gifs or videos that immediately show what sets your game apart. Then the text can provide more detail.
For example, "Create the base of your dreams using standard buildings, or custom design your own" sounds really interesting to me, but I have no idea what that would actually look like.
What I see is some screenshots of vehicles and buildings. Frankly, the screenshots aren't visually appealing and don't mean much to me.
3. Again, really emphasize what sets your game apart. Many of the bullet points (Complete Missions, Collect Achievements, Win Loot, etc.) could apply to almost any game. Then one of the most interesting parts (the single-shard design) is at the bottom - long after you lost my attention.
You've got to get people's attention first, then provide the additional details if they want them. Order the bullet points by importance.
4. The sidebar should have quick bullet points for what each edition includes, similar to a Kickstarter page. If you really want someone to drop $500 on you, you've got to make it as frictionless as possible.
All that said, the court of public opinion voted against your game. I'm sure it hurts. It should be taken into consideration. But after looking into this further, I'm interested and I've bought the standard edition. I don't think you made it clear to the casual passer-through what makes this game worth buying.
You're passionate enough about this to work on it for ten years. You need to demonstrate to people what makes it that special.
Thanks for the blog.
Homepage: onemanmmo.com email:one at onemanmmo dot com