Over the past few months, Hyperspace Pinball has been available for Desura for $3.99. In all that time, only 13 units actually sold. It's squarely my fault for not doing a better job of promoting it; and the game just hasn't really excited those who played it enough to spread the word around.
So rather than to just have it linger doing nothing for nobody, I decided to make it free for a while, see what happens, and then just go back to working on my other games.
What happened next went way beyond my expectations.
Since going free, the Hyperspace Pinball Desura page has had almost 20,000 visits, it made the RockPaperShotgun news feed among many others, and I've gotten e-mails and tweets from people asking questions about the game and my efforts to get it lit on Steam Greenlight.
To everyone who would like to see it on Greenlight, here are the stats as of April 14th 2013:
Current rank: 14% of the way to the top 100
Unique visitors: 16,233
Yes votes: 2,255
No votes: 12,730
Followers: 84
I'd like to make an important note: The majority of votes were made between Sep 1 and Oct 1 2012. This was before I did the major redux where I addressed a number of game play issues, and back when Greenlight was new and free for everyone.
I've also read a lot of the comments about the game, and I wanted to share my two cents real fast:
I think the idea of mixing pinball and an arcade shooter is awesome ("Adventure Pinball" games are also great), but Hyperspace Pinball could have been better if I had pulled a dedicated team together to develop and polish it instead of doing all the work myself (except for the art and sound assets which I bought from other studios). I appreciate everyone's feedback, and I think it does have a number of shortcomings that don't make it "one of those Indie games you just gotta have." Nonetheless, all in all I'm happy that a game I casually worked on in my free time has gotten this far on the PC and mobile platforms (with over 40,000 downloads on Google Play alone since its release).
Twitter will be the best place to check for news and updates; but I probably won't update Greenlight stats unless I see major changes (such as 10% increases in the current rank, or maybe every thousand Yes votes).
Thanks to everyone who downloaded it and who helped get the word out!
And my projects!
Steam Greenlight link : Steamcommunity.com , thank you for Upvoting.