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Life Is Full Of Disappointments (so what's another one?)

So, this project has been around for a while and unfortunately while I appreciate the subscribers and downloads that it's gotten, they aren't ANYWHERE NEAR the amount I was looking for to indicate a level of interest that justified continuing this project as a commercial game. The other half did much better than this half (wish I knew why), but it still did not have enough interest to justify continuing commercially. And I stand by my resolution that this would be continued commercially, or not at all.

So: I am putting this game project on Hiatus as soon as I'm done with this post. A friend told me that (I'm paraphrasing) nothing is ever gained by cancelling something or deleting it, because leaving yourself the option to go back and pick up a project years later has no downsides, so that is why Road To Paradise will be on Hiatus, not Cancelled.

Please understand how much I appreciate the comments, feedback, and reviews that I've gotten. I am very grateful to everyone who played this, especially if they found the time to tell me what they thought.

Sorry to any of you who were still interested in/anticipating this project. I have at least one or two projects that I'm at least several months remiss in uploading game pages for: hopefully one of those will grab your attention like it did mine.

Keep on truckin',
- StormCrow

Posts

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kentona
Bunnyhug
21027
09/25/2019 09:48 PM
Try not to let response on RMN be the sole metric for measuring the merits of your game.
StormCrow
2877
09/25/2019 09:53 PM
Don't worry, I'm taking into account response from everywhere else I posted the game too (I put it up on RPGMakerweb and a couple other places I think; downloads from there should be reflected in the download count here, if not the subscribers).

I know RMN is pretty quiet these days and seems more popular with devs than end-users.

Like I said on the other half of this Hiatus'd project (but not this half because putting up two completely identical blogposts felt weird):

author=me
To a certain degree, I feel like I "failed" Road To Paradise by not hyping it or promoting it hard enough or often enough in the right places. I'm not going to beat myself up over this, but I will make a note to be more proactive about "marketing" any and all future projects.

It's a shame in some ways. I really like RMN. I like the community here and most of the folks that make it up and I like the infrastructure of the site itself. I wish this place was the swarming heart of the RM scene (it would make sense, since this is where like all the games are actually hosted!), because that way I could do all of my game-"selling" in the place I host my games and discuss my game-making (one-stop shopping so to speak), but I know that's not exactly the case and I need to advertise elsewhere. : )
Tw0Face
5579
09/26/2019 03:39 PM
You have two games with more than 100 downloads. One of them even 505, which, for example, I (and many others) don't have. I don't think that's too bad.

That said, it's the sheer amount of games hosted here that make some projects not stand out as much as others do. That isn't a general problem of your game here.
StormCrow
2877
09/26/2019 05:55 PM
It's not too bad*, you're right, and I'm not exactly complaining about it either. (One of the games you mentioned must be Chapelwaite which got frontpaged when I was new which is huge. Getting frontpaged here is undeniably huge.)

It's just nowhere near enough to justify the time and money investment of continuing commercially. Esp. now that I'm kind of broke and have less free time. I have some idea what the conversion rate will look like from free downloads to actual buyers, and even if I take the most wildly optimistic view of it...this still has nowhere near enough interest. Which is fine.

* I have games made and distributed under a different handle that have been downloaded at least 10,000 times and translated into multiple foreign languages, so that informs my perspective on this. Even those games are still small fry compared to some of the juggernauts on RMN. The most downloaded of those games has been around since 2006-2008. Some games released on RMN between 2016 and now have 10x the downloads. See, it's all perspective. But I didn't and don't mean to come off as whinging.
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