Hard Light Productions Forums

Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: General Battuta on September 16, 2010, 01:27:58 pm

Title: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: General Battuta on September 16, 2010, 01:27:58 pm
Hey folks,

We've taken a quick look at our numbers, and while they are sort of confusing, it seems like anywhere from 4500 to more than 8000 people have downloaded War in Heaven in the slightly-more-than-a-month since its release. This is better than our wildest hopes (we were hoping we'd break 1000 in our first month.)

We are tremendously grateful to everyone, and we hope we can continue to provide campaigns of this quality in the future. Moreover, we hope that people who played this campaign move on to enjoy the rest of the great work on HLP.

These kind of download numbers mean that people seem to pay some sort of attention to us. That means we'd like to support campaigns that are of equal (or greater, some would say!) quality that could use more time in the spotlight. Let us know.

EDIT: And in what is either a commentary on our good fortune or EA's bad marketing, this actually puts War in Heaven in competitive range with first month sales of notoriously under-selling professionally developed title Dead Space Extraction.

EDIT 2: Oh god, poor FreeSpace 2. It also occurred to me that if War in Heaven were to be downloaded at this rate for six months (it won't be), it would move as many copies as FreeSpace 2 did in its first six months, and - if you go with our higher range - even beat it by a fair margin. Poor Volition.  :(
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: -Sara- on September 16, 2010, 02:14:53 pm
Can I stop clicking the download button now Mr. Battuta sir?  :D Joking aside, GREAT achievement. How does this compare to AoA? An even better download count for WiH?
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: The E on September 16, 2010, 02:15:58 pm
Well, since WiH requires AoA, we know that everyone who has WiH will also have AoA.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Kolgena on September 16, 2010, 02:23:14 pm
Only 4.5k-8k?

Ungrateful internet.  :hopping:

Just kidding. Very good turnout, and I hope it increases in the coming months (especially when part 2 comes out)
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Rodo on September 16, 2010, 02:32:55 pm
Well considering it's a huge file, that amount of download is incredible.


FS community is definitely not THAT big (regarding active members), so there's got to be some word spreading reaching outsiders.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Kolgena on September 16, 2010, 03:31:37 pm
Wasn't WiH Mod highlight (front page) on moddb a while ago?

That would have done it.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Jellyfish on September 16, 2010, 03:33:53 pm
That's quite a feat for a non-commercial mod, isn't it? Specially for a game as relatively unknown as FS2.
Certainly a feat, but by no means undeserved. I think you can expect this for WiH P2 and BP3, too.

How about candidating for moddb's Mod of the Year? I know it's usually taken by Valve games, but it's worth a shot.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Kolgena on September 16, 2010, 03:36:52 pm
Especially after VAing is done (lol, who knows when that'll be though), I see this being an easy win for BP.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: General Battuta on September 16, 2010, 03:37:55 pm
That's quite a feat for a non-commercial mod, isn't it? Specially for a game as relatively unknown as FS2.
Certainly a feat, but by no means undeserved. I think you can expect this for WiH P2 and BP3, too.

How about candidating for moddb's Mod of the Year? I know it's usually taken by Valve games, but it's worth a shot.

Especially after VAing is done (lol, who knows when that'll be though), I see this being an easy win for BP.

I very much doubt it. As I understand it Mod of the Year is done by popular vote, and I don't think an FS2 mod has a shot at it. We all appreciate the thought, though!
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Topgun on September 16, 2010, 03:43:04 pm
It deserves mod of the year tho.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: -Norbert- on September 16, 2010, 04:15:15 pm
I even have a friend who's said he's going to buy FreeSpace 2 to play this, after I showed him some videos (mostly the audio commentaries). Though he's looking for a physical copy rather than a download.

And I agree, while it's unlikely BP will get one, it would really deserva that award. BP has everything a full game should have, even though it's "only" a mod.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: -Sara- on September 16, 2010, 04:20:42 pm
When WiH 2 and Chapter 3 are released, voice acted and all. Someone should boxart it. :P
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: -Norbert- on September 16, 2010, 04:26:31 pm
I have the suspicion that you would be involved in that, since a box of such a game just has to have pictures of the main characters somewhere on it  ;)
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Snail on September 16, 2010, 05:13:36 pm
To be honest I'm wondering exactly how easy it was for most of the non-FS community members to actually get it all set up.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: The E on September 16, 2010, 05:17:46 pm
One can only hope they either used the installer, or followed the install instructions.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: General Battuta on September 16, 2010, 05:30:32 pm
In an ideal world I would love to have an .exe installer. Or even a standalone. We looked at coding one at one point but the documentation was weird.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Jellyfish on September 16, 2010, 05:35:02 pm
It's not like making a folder in the game's directory, dumping all the .vp files there and renaming that folder to whatever it has to be renamed is rocket science.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: The E on September 16, 2010, 05:39:31 pm
You'd be surprised.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: General Battuta on September 16, 2010, 05:43:44 pm
It's not like making a folder in the game's directory, dumping all the .vp files there and renaming that folder to whatever it has to be renamed is rocket science.

Technically you should extract directly to the game directory as it creates a folder itself.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Klaustrophobia on September 16, 2010, 06:00:25 pm
It's not like making a folder in the game's directory, dumping all the .vp files there and renaming that folder to whatever it has to be renamed is rocket science.

Technically you should extract directly to the game directory as it creates a folder itself.

i've done the double-foldering many times, because the majority of mods i've installed DON'T automatically create their own folder.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Spoon on September 16, 2010, 06:19:21 pm
Congrats, those are some nice numbers  :)
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Solatar on September 16, 2010, 07:47:33 pm
As an aside; it'd be interesting to see GOG.com's sales numbers for Freespace 2 in the last, say year.  Comparing any spikes in that data with major MOD releases (such as WiH) could be very intersting.

Good show gents.  :yes:
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Topgun on September 16, 2010, 07:48:46 pm
someone should email GoG and see if they would release data like, it wouldn't hurt to ask.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Pr011 on September 16, 2010, 08:28:37 pm
Well deserved, a sign of good things to come.

Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Shivan Hunter on September 17, 2010, 12:38:10 am
Good work and kudos to the BP team! You've worked damn hard for this :)

Also... it may be just me, but isn't "4500 to 8000" a fairly wide range? Is there any way of getting a more precise count?
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: General Battuta on September 17, 2010, 01:01:31 am
Good work and kudos to the BP team! You've worked damn hard for this :)

Also... it may be just me, but isn't "4500 to 8000" a fairly wide range? Is there any way of getting a more precise count?

That's a minimum possible and maximum possible based on whether you count requests for the core file or the visuals file. For some reason many more downloads of the visuals and audio files have taken place - we think this may be because the core count could have been reset while patching?

Our mirror doesn't track downloads directly, so we have to go off of more indirect stats.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Qent on September 17, 2010, 02:48:43 am
I think that larger files probably have a higher chance of getting corrupted during the download, because they're... larger.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Spoon on September 17, 2010, 07:32:04 am
Good work and kudos to the BP team! You've worked damn hard for this :)

Also... it may be just me, but isn't "4500 to 8000" a fairly wide range? Is there any way of getting a more precise count?

That's a minimum possible and maximum possible based on whether you count requests for the core file or the visuals file. For some reason many more downloads of the visuals and audio files have taken place - we think this may be because the core count could have been reset while patching?

Our mirror doesn't track downloads directly, so we have to go off of more indirect stats.
I've noticed exactly the same thing for WoD downloads. The visual/sound files have almost twice the requests as the core file.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Colonol Dekker on September 17, 2010, 09:15:49 am
Six of these were me attempting to get it from various places. ;)
 
 
It was touched upon, but i'd hope at least a few thousand were using LEGALLY obtained retail Freespace 2. :yes:
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Rodo on September 17, 2010, 10:56:18 am
The large file theory is correct, large files tend to be downloaded more times because:

File gets corrupted.
Download is canceled.
Connection gets canceled.

There you have core file x3 for all huge files (if your count is on the hits and not on the completion of download).

the other 2 reasons... I can't think of any, and btw:

The file size is one of the few things I didn't like about BP, I know it's necessary to download all that stuff, but a different way of downloading (such as a torrent) would have been welcomed.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: General Battuta on September 17, 2010, 11:02:26 am
The large file theory is correct, large files tend to be downloaded more times because:

File gets corrupted.
Download is canceled.
Connection gets canceled.

There you have core file x3 for all huge files (if your count is on the hits and not on the completion of download).

the other 2 reasons... I can't think of any, and btw:

The file size is one of the few things I didn't like about BP, I know it's necessary to download all that stuff, but a different way of downloading (such as a torrent) would have been welcomed.

We could seed a torrent, but it'd make updating a *****.

I assume your connection's an old hand?
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Rodo on September 17, 2010, 11:42:10 am
yeah, ISP's around here suck really bad.

Download speed is quite bad, and if you want good speed you need to pay a lot, also there's that little problem with telephone lines and the loss of connection that can hit any moment, so a download of 500MB is a torture.

Not because of the time it takes to download, I could just put my notebook to download it and go do something else while it finishes, the problem is that I can loose connection at any moment :mad:

Still, the download for BP:WiH took only half a day aprox, not so bad as I initially thought it would be.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Qent on September 17, 2010, 09:20:19 pm
I doubt that a torrent would have been any better.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Mongoose on September 18, 2010, 12:52:29 pm
I doubt that a torrent would have been any better.
Torrents can be stopped and restarted at will, and there's no real chance of the download becoming corrupted at some point.  I'm not saying the BP team should necessarily go that route, but I could see how people on crappy connections would prefer it.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Scourge of Ages on September 18, 2010, 03:31:23 pm
Free download manager? It's what I used on my old dodgy connection.

http://getright.com/
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: The E on September 18, 2010, 03:45:56 pm
For a second there, I thought you were a spambot.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Scourge of Ages on September 18, 2010, 05:02:19 pm
For a second there, I thought you were a spambot.
I realized the danger, but did it anyway  :lol:
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Rodo on September 18, 2010, 05:21:11 pm
Thanks, but I like my pc spam free as it is.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Bob-san on September 18, 2010, 06:08:37 pm
Thanks, but I like my pc spam free as it is.
I personally use DownThemAll! for Firefox as my download manager of choice. But yeah--I actually prefer torrents now for big files.
Title: Re: Our download count at the 1+ month mark
Post by: Jellyfish on September 18, 2010, 10:28:34 pm
I'm using JDownloader. But it doesn't work with torrents...