Yeah, An Untitled Story has had a good run as a shareware title, and like I promised it will soon be released as freeware.  Huge thanks to everyone who donated, especially those who donated generously ($50+ from some people... wow), I made way more than I thought I would ('I'm making a note here: huge success').

It's looking like FLaiL, my next game, will be freeware.  As always, donations will be incredibly helpful and appreciated, but I'm going to try another game without forced donations and see how that goes.  I'm still looking for a comfortable place here where I can strike a balance between profit and getting the game out there to increase my audience, all while still having fun making it.  We'll see how it goes.

My to-do list for FLaiL is getting pretty short, so it shouldn't be much longer now.  Most of the design work is done and I'm just working on aesthetics, difficulty adjustments, and bonus features.  I still refuse to give a concrete release date, though.

-Matt

Awesome! Your games are the best! Will you still be running the if you donate over $20 you get the soundtrack as well? Then people would still have an incentive to donate.

-Elmernite

I still haven't tried out this game, but this was an interesting model for selling and I may try it one day, although I'm not sure what 'huge success' really means, that varies depending on what you expected. I consider 200 sales so far for ID in 8 months to be a huge success too, because I expected 100 in the first year, even though many other independent games get far more sales than that.

Out of curiosity (and feel free to keep this information secret if you prefer), did you record what percentage of the people who downloaded the game bought it / donated? I believe most indie games get between 0.5% and 1.5% (so for every 50 to 150 downloads, one sale). If you got much higher than that this might be a preferable model.

I had about a 1:20 ratio of full version downloads to demo downloads.  That, however, doesn't account for re-downloads, so my best guess would be somewhere between 1:40 and 1:50 for actual purchases to demo downloads, which is 2.0%-2.5%. 

Then there is the issue of piracy and how many of those downloads are genuine or are with 'borrowed' passwords.  In the end, though, it still stands that ~2.0%-2.5% of people who played the demo wanted the full version bad enough to get it, whether through piracy or honest means, and I'm told this is a good number for such an incredibly low-key game.  (Though one could postulate that the 'high' ratio is in fact because the game was so unknown - maybe only those interested in this sort of thing could find it?)

As for profit, I made almost triple what I expected to make, which is what was in my mind when I wrote the Portal quote, and is why the piracy isn't getting to me very much I suppose.

Overall I'd say it went pretty well.

-Matt

Thanks very much for the info, it seems it does about twice as well as an average indie shareware game that way (although the average price you get might also be twice as small as a normally priced game too, so it might balance out). I think I'll try this one day with one of my less mainstream / more niche games I have planned to test it out. Though I'm curious about the logistics of this -- did you email each person a link to the full version personally? That seems like it'd be pretty time consuming, especially once you reach the one or two sales a day rate. Or was it automated in any way?