Ten months ago I started selling online the source code of 12 commercial AS2 games through Instant Paypal Notification.

I thought it was a good way to market post-mortem games which do not produce earnings.

It’s time to share the results of this experience.

As of today, I got 754 purchases and 1461 downloads. You may think every buyer downloaded the package twice, but that’s not.

4 buyers never downloaded the package, while one buyer downloaded it 12 times.

The remaining amount of downloads per user:

Since a few more than an half of the users downloaded the file only once, you may imagine the importance of an automatic service like IPN. People buy your stuff and receive a download link. Then they can download the file whenever they want.

Another interesting thing to examine is the amount of buys in a given time span. I sold 97 copies in the first 24 hours, and another 286 copies in the first month, for a total of 383 copies. Then I never reached 70 sales per month, with the negative record of 15 copies in june.

So I can say 13% of the sales have been made on day zero, and 51% of the sales have been made on the first month. This is an important information as you can have an idea of what you are going to sell in a year according to what you sold in the first month.

Last but not least, 18 buyers never received the automatic email and wrote me about the issue. One of them started a refund process with Paypal because I wasn’t able to reply in the first hour.

I hope you will find this post useful, it’s just a few more than a bunch of data but I am going to try activeden so I will be able to compare self selling with marketplace selling.