Feep said:
You know what I really need is a control group from an alternate universe, where I decided not to do this.
Well, lets give a rough estimate of 2000 copies are going away for free (discussion happening in the thread means the post count wont do us much good so I am just ballparking it)
From our peak members who may have 60+ friends on Steam to people like me with maybe 5 or 6 (I'm so new to PC gaming
No friends with PC yet even though peer pressure is to the max) we can say an average of 15 people who "see" us playing the game.
Plus of course we get it free and GAF is vocal, but the majority of GAF is probably "normal" people on the outside (I hope) who aside from their nerdy friends (I have a few friends of the nerd variety that I can geek out with) act fairly normal in reality so the majority of our gaming discussion happens on the forum.
So really, lets keep it to the people who we share this information with on Steam.
Really though, your best bet for "hype up" might just come from this game going up the ranks in Steam and being played by multiple users. Do these downloads go to your "top sellers" thing? I mean, it can't hurt to have Sequence in the Top Sellers section at all.
Of course as word of mouth spreads it might also spread to the 360 version, so really all we have to go by are your launch 360 sales vs. your launch Steam sales, subtract however many free versions you give away. You can probably give us that number roughly in a month and we can take the normal "might have bought" and figure what kind of push you got for it.
Plus y'know, however many donations you get.
(Oh, and I forgot my rough estimate, I was going to say maybe at an output of 1.5 for every free one sold, not including sales that would have happened regardless, but on top of that if an additional 1.5 copies were sold for every free one given out due to word of mouth, would that be a success for you?