I searched for uDevGames on IMG news page. It didn't come up for our current contest. Was it posted? I did send them news. We have had 72 referrals from IMG since 2/8, so I assume they haven't posted the news. Actually, Unity3D's forum send more traffic to uDevGames.com.

Quote:I'm very curious what outlets you all have found to promote the contest,

Basically, if the site is mentioned on MacSurfer.com, then I have send them the PR.

Quote:I'm wondering if we could get away with posting at MacGameFiles and the like

I think it must be a direct download. I did add many uDevGames 2001 games back in 2001.

Quote:I'm also wondering if in the future it might not be best to have a uDevGames forum of some kind for the people who play our games, somewhere that we

That's actually a good idea.

Quote:InsideMacGames, no sign of uDevGames on the front page.

They might be too busy these days with their 'commercial ventures'. lol
I do believe some of their reporters lurk here.

Quote:Nothing at Macworld magazines site either.

I've hit Peter Cohen twice. He is usually pretty good about that.

I think the year that they featured our games on the Apple game's page we had the most interest.

I arranged for PRWeb to carry news of uDevGames. They release to major news sites. However, they are not able to publish until 3/13!

I think in hindsight, it would have been best to keep voting open for 3 weeks. If devs want the most exposure and feedback, then I think its good. But I would only do this if the majority of devs asked me to.


Cheers,
Carlos


Other Coverage:
http://themacgamer.com/2009/03/09/udev-voting-begins/
http://prmac.com/release-id-4702.htm

Thanks iGame3D:
http://forums.macworld.com/thread/110982...B?tstart=0

Carlos Camacho Wrote:I think in hindsight, it would have been best to keep voting open for 3 weeks.
If devs want the most exposure and feedback, then I think its good.
But I would only do this if the majority of devs asked me to.

Oh my, you'd have to get us some prescription drugs at low cost via spam!
But yeah maybe a long drawn out voting process is for the best, even if the devs chew their fingernails down to the elbows.

I had a thought, leave all the voting pages up and running after the contest is done, reset the counters to zero,
and then see what happens in a month, two, and three.
It will give us an idea of longer vote period results and how many people are slow to respond.

A uDevGames forum may take a whole year and an entirely new contest to kick
in to full force. A side effect of such a forum might be a "Mac Game Mods" forum
that doesn't involve overwhelming chatter about 20,000 Xbox and PC games.

Its just a theory.
Would be better to cultivate the community around current and past games before risking a whole future contest on it.
Best to re-think this stuff when the smoke has cleared and a few months worth of traffic can be evaluated.
Its going to take one to three months for printed media to have any coverage of the contest and games.

I'm starting to think that a "Make crap mac games contest" would be a fun
little endevour, we make up fake names for ourselves, we create really awful games
we flood the market, and tick off the whole population of Mac gamers.
Winner is he who gets the most irate reviews.
Then when we have uDevGames they'll appreciate it more.

April Fool's Day is not far off.

igame3d Wrote:I'm starting to think that a "Make crap mac games contest" would be a fun
little endevour, we make up fake names for ourselves, we create really awful games
we flood the market, and tick off the whole population of Mac gamers.

We already have iPhone for that. (I wish I was kidding when I said that)

I'm not a contestant, so I don't know how I'd feel about it personally, but as a voter, I would actually like a little more time to vote if you could swing it. I want to be thorough, but I have a bunch of other stuff to do right now, so fitting in game testing is a little tough at the moment for me. A little more time would be great.

Wow what a difference MacUpdate makes.

From the looks of it people have acquired the URL and put it somewhere.
Macupdate shows 292 downloads but our German server,( primary link there), took on 482 downloads in 24 hours.
I didn't post the German link anywhere else and in just one day we picked up more
Mac downloads than all downloads combined since March 3rd.

Of course the feedback from all those downloads has been zero. Which is why I didn't post there until the last minute.
Not that forums feedback around the net was much better, I guess one or two messages a week is better than nothing.

Maybe if the press releases were sent out *in time*, they would've gotten posted. In addition to that, the udevgames.com main page is full of inconsistencies, so I am not entirely surprised that others hesitate to make this front-page news. Don't extend the voting period, drawing out the long tail isn't gonna do any good.

Ho ho ho, whats this?

Dean from Retro-Zone.org showed up in the Mattel Aquarius Yahoo Group about a month or so ago
and what do I find at the top of the front page tonight after checking out his version of the Aquarius Guide to Home Computing?

Quote: 2009.03.09 uDevGames (Homebrew Games for the Mac) contest voting is now Open

with a little bit of news blurb, some screenshots and a link to uDevGames.

Thanks Dean!

Quote:From the looks of it people have acquired the URL and put it somewhere.

I've noticed that a lot of those sites pick up links from each other. I only ever post my stuff on the Apple site, but a day or two later it appears on several links sites, including the aforementioned softpedia.com, macupdate.com and iusethis.com (and I'll bet they don't) to name a few.

A little late, but I think any exposure for the contest and the developers is a great thing:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20090313/b...b2227984_1

Now that voting is ended, what do everyone's downloads look like?

Quote:A little late, but I think any exposure for the contest and the developers is a great thing:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/200903...prweb2227984_1

Umm, that is titled 'Mac Game Development Contest uDevGames 2008 Voting Period Begins', and it's posted a day after the voting ended.

Silly Yahoo.
Quick Carlos reset voting to zero and we'll see what kind of effect that Yahoo article does!

As of midnight March 13th, 898 Mac and 414 Windows downloads.
March 5th and March 12th were the days of highest traffic on my servers.

I dropped in the local host on the UDG page once two of the servers exceeded bandwidth.
Maybe at some point Carlos can tell us stats from there.

igame3d Wrote:Silly Yahoo.
Quick Carlos reset voting to zero and we'll see what kind of effect that Yahoo article does!

As of midnight March 13th, 898 Mac and 414 Windows downloads.
March 5th and March 12th were the days of highest traffic on my servers.

I dropped in the local host on the UDG page once two of the servers exceeded bandwidth.
Maybe at some point Carlos can tell us stats from there.

I think I'm pretty safe regarding bandwidth: I have 300 GB and I've used 62.
The source package is pretty huge, though, so when the source is released, that could provide some pretty big bandwidth usage.

As of the 13th, I have 2800 downloads, which comes out to ~92 GB of bandwidth. It's kind of odd: I got roughly 500 downloads for the first days after I started tracking my stats, another 500 on the 12th, and then it jumped by about 1000 on the 13th(No Windows build until Unity 2.5 comes out ). MacUpdate froze at about 260.

Hairball183 Wrote:The source package is pretty huge, though, so when the source is released, that could provide some pretty big bandwidth usage.

As of the 13th, I have 2800 downloads

Wow! I had less than 200 overall!
Maybe you'd be a good guy to hire for game promotion!
As to the source, won't that be something people download from the UDevGames site?

pinguoren Wrote:As to the source, won't that be something people download from the UDevGames site?

I wouldn't know, but I'd assume I'd still be the one hosting it...

pinguoren Wrote:Wow! I had less than 200 overall!
Maybe you'd be a good guy to hire for game promotion!

Thats all Apple.com. You post to Apple and you get crazy mad hits.
I was going to post that earlier, but thought it was just an obvious thing that didn't need to be said.

I forgot who it was here, maybe it can be searched.
But he posted a game to Apple and it was like 52,000 downloads
in just a very short time, a day, or a month, I forget.
I just remember reading that post and thinking "ouch.",
that was a few years back before the new age of cheap hosting.