Ripple Sales

I have sales data on Ripple's first 5 days on the marketplace.  It's part good news and part bad news.  The good news is over 1700 downloads occurred in those 5 days, which is over 340 downloads per day.  Bad news is less than 5% of those downloads were actually purchases.  Here are my theories on why the conversion precentage was so low. 

1) The game uses all primitives for graphics and does not look particularly stunning.  People often don't admit it but graphics can often times be a big reason why people buy a game.
2) The dual analog shooter genre is very crowded on indie games.  There are many to choose from and several of them are superb.  I feel that mine was of good quality but if your only going to buy one there are several others that well executed.
3) The difficult is rather steep and may turn off some casual gamers.  I consider myself a casual gamer but better than average at this type of game.  I still found it difficult to beat the game, I only did it 3 times during my weeks of play testing.

There are probably a miriad of reasons why this did not perform great from a sales standpoint but decent download numbers and a solid 3 star rating are not bad for never having programmed a game before.

Here are the actual sales figures
10/22/2010
Downloads: 643
Purchases: 22
10/23/2010
Downloads: 496
Purchase: 21
10/24/2010
Downloads: 276
Purchases: 15
10/25/2010
Downloads: 178
Purchases: 11
10/26/2010
Downloads: 131
Purchase: 3

On the Barrage front I am still making good progress.  Much of the ground work has been laid and I will continue to add to the game.  I think that one lesson I learned from looking at other top games online is polish.  I will have to spend a lot of time ironing out the fine details of the game and making all aspects as smooth as I can make them.