Saga Download Tally (March 29, 2012)

KrisV

Administrator
It's been about a week since Wing Commander Saga was released and so far our visitors have downloaded roughly 2.6 terabytes worth, or about 800 complete copies. The first 48 hours were particularly busy. Our 100mbit connection was maxed out almost the entire time, and some smaller download locations were knocked offline. Fortunately there was a good supply of download mirrors. File hits outnumber complete downloads 25:1, so fans were eager to play and turned their download accelerators up to eleven.






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Original update published on March 29, 2012
 
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I've seen some gaming websites reporting that 50,000 copies of the game have been downloaded so far. Where are they getting that number from?
 
The 50.000 downloads is the number thats posted on the WC-Saga site, claiming that it was downloaded that much in the first 24 hours. Guessing that the news post is from the CIC the 800 downloads probably only take account of the downloads from the CIC servers.
 
that's correct. Demonews and Gamershell report about 20000 each, Chip.de reported over 35000 when I last checked. We don't know exact numbers about the torrents of course but several other mirrors report over 1000 downloads already as well. most of that was in the first 24h.

edit: typos fixed.
 
that's correct. Demonews and Gamershell report about 20000 each, Chip.de reported over 35000 when I last checked. We don't know exact numbers about the torrents of course but several other mirrors report over 1000 downloads already as well. most of that was in the first 24h.
Considering it would take most people all day to download 3.5 GB I would suggest that we really don't know how many of these are complete downloads. 50000 people clicked the download link... how many of them are completed downloads. Unless we have actual numbers from the sites about the amount of terabytes transfered I don't think we can be addament about exact numbers.

Though we do have that data from the CIC... just not from the others.
 
Considering it would take most people all day to download 3.5 GB I would suggest that we really don't know how many of these are complete downloads. 50000 people clicked the download link... how many of them are completed downloads. Unless we have actual numbers from the sites about the amount of terabytes transfered I don't think we can be addament about exact numbers.

Though we do have that data from the CIC... just not from the others.

Chip.de normaly is a very relyable host when it comes to fast downloads, and considering that WC-Saga has quite a bit of a following within the German speaking area I wouldnt be surprised if most of the 35.000 downloads were actually completed (at much lower times than 24 hours - I dont know about your region, but most Germans are sitting on high speed connections that if the host allows should be able to download it within 2 hours). 500 KB per second realy isnt that much nowadays. With fast hosts I tend to be able to get quite a bit more and Im not on the fastest possible connection available around here.
 
EDIT: Zelvik beat me to it^^

All day for 3.5 Gigabytes?
I don't know how it is in the US but in Germany I don't know many people who have Internet connection that slow (I have one that slow at home, though, so I download big things somewhere else).

Anyway, I think the exact number really doesn't matter that much. The important fact is that it was downloaded quite often, which is a good thing for Saga and for Wing Commander in general because people start talking about WC again.
btw: I heard of quite a few people already who say they also want to try UE and Standoff because they want more Wing Commander, which is always a good thing.
Do you have download statistics for that as well? Is there a significant increase in UE and Standoff downloads? If not it may come yet, when people finished the Saga campaign and hunger for more WC action. :D
 
Obviously the number was an educated guess - we do not have download statistics for half of the mirrors and that does not take torrents and file hosters (which are very popular in the Eastern Europe) into account. It is safe to say though that Saga has been downloaded over 100k times during the first week, which is quite a remarkable number for a fan made space combat game. It also shows that the market for mission based sims is very small - a tripple A production along the lines of Wing Commander 3/4 would be a ... risky investment.
 
Yes, I guess that's the bad news.
Unless a miracle happens a space combat sim like Wing Commander isn't likely to succeed on the market, and I bet EA knows that (I'm sure they know it by now since I guess some of them kept an eye on Saga to see if there is a market, If they did they saw that there is no market, unfortunately).
 
Then again, with an appropriate PR campaign you can sell almost everything these days.

According to our website statistics most visitors come, unsuprisingly, from Germany. Think of the possibilities with better media coverage. ;)
 
If you think on it If you went with cg fmv or scripted real time sequences, and artwork for background flight scenery (like planets and nebulae) there'd be quite a bit of assets that wouldn't need to be made in comparison with a good fps or rpg. If you had an existing engine or a licensed one that would cut down on development time as well. Live action in video games though is much more expensive from what I understand and takes quite a bit to justify. In the '90s when the wc titles were in full swing it made sense to use live action, nowadays though it's completely unnecessary. It's a nice addition as the C&C titles show but unnecessary. You'd be stretched to get a multimillion dollar production off the ground but cut out the publisher and the fat that comes with that and it'd be a much better thing all around. Platforms like Steam and Impulse are advertisement in themselves. I don't know how much those distribution platforms charge for their use but if a games sells 100,000 copies at $40 that's four million dollars (i'd be willing to pay that for a good space sim, and the x series is still going strong). There'd be some money spent in localization in all honesty (I get the idea that germany is a good market for a 3d space sim) but other than that, It'd work. It couldn't be a big dollar production but let's be honest here, if a game like prophecy were made today with scripted sequences in place of live action to tell the story with the characters and without a publisher you'd be able to get by with four million dollars. You'd have a great deal of freedom with stunts and character look as well. There's always kickstarter for help with inital funding. With technologies being developed now like using the kinect to record facial animations and hopefully body language It could be really awesome if done the right way. With that and VR modeling technologies being developed now the next few years could see some remarkable changes. I used to code in C back in the early 90's and used some cad software at the time. I tried firing up some software like blender and visual studio but I was lost. (was looking at tying to help out deathsnake with engima 2666 but found I had a LOT to catch up on. If you're reading this, I'm still working on it but I'm finding my retirement busier than I thought.) The amount of things that can be done today with even current tools are extraordinary. (And you could use pornstars for your acting and not get caught on it ) :)
 
Would be interesting how much money one could get together for a good old fashioned Space Sim through a crowd funding atempt. Double Fine productions got like 3,3 Mio. Dollars for a point and click adventure through crowd funding. Thats not enough for an AAA game, but thats enough money to make quite some things possible.
 
In our rough estimation, creating a game like Saga with a medium-sized team and middleware technology would have cost as 2 millions at the very least. Do the math how many copies you need to sell to just start making profit. ;)
 
In our rough estimation, creating a game like Saga with a medium-sized team and middleware technology would have cost as 2 millions at the very least. Do the math how many copies you need to sell to just start making profit. ;)

2 million is peanuts these days for game development (at least for major titles... not for things like facebook games and phone apps.) Back in the day that might have paid for half of Wing Commander 3's budget but not anymore.

Still, I don't think 100,000 is as dire a number as you are making it sound. Saga's advertising budget was... zero. Public awareness outside the internet is pretty much zero as well. Free or not, general interest in a fan game is limited as well to the odd curious internetizen as well as core Wing Commander / Descent: Freespace fans. On average 2 to 3000 people visit the CIC every day. These are people that are actively looking for Wing Commander info. Everyone else is a bonus.

Regarding download speeds... I know that many in Europe and even in the US and Canada have reasonably fast connections. That also isn't the normal though for the most part. Not eveyone here for example has the luxury or the option of reliable fiber connections.. DSL and Cable internet here rarely give you downloads at the supposed rated speeds (besides potential torrent throttling). I sometimes get downloads at 600 Kbps but normally they average around 150Kbps (oddly xbox live seems to download stuff really fast). Technically I should have 5Mbps down and 1 up... but that never happens. Most people not familiar with either space sims or Wing Commander will look at the estimated download times and say "this is going to take all day? I'm not that curious..." In that respect I would say 100000 is actually a major accomplishment.
 
With regards to download speeds I have get 16 MB when I do a speed test and im only paying for 20MB speeds but when I downloaded Saga within minutes of it coming out I was getting download speeds of over 50MB/sec I had it ready to play so quick. I really have no idea how it was downloading that quick we dont have fiber optics here.
 
During the first day, the downloading was choked off on multiple sites. Even at the CIC I was getting a mere 100 kb/s.

I actually lucked out and found a mirror that wasn't being overwhelmed and got some 800 kb/s. Had it downloaded in less than an hour.
 
Obviously the number was an educated guess - we do not have download statistics for half of the mirrors and that does not take torrents and file hosters (which are very popular in the Eastern Europe) into account. It is safe to say though that Saga has been downloaded over 100k times during the first week, which is quite a remarkable number for a fan made space combat game. It also shows that the market for mission based sims is very small - a tripple A production along the lines of Wing Commander 3/4 would be a ... risky investment.
If 100k is correct, then that's an awesome number! I can't imagine Saga downloads amounting to more than a fraction of the entire market that would go for a new Wing Commander game (because you had no advertising, and because many people don't care about fan projects), so the maths is definitely very promising.
 
btw: I heard of quite a few people already who say they also want to try UE and Standoff because they want more Wing Commander, which is always a good thing.
Do you have download statistics for that as well? Is there a significant increase in UE and Standoff downloads? If not it may come yet, when people finished the Saga campaign and hunger for more WC action. :D

Standoff and UE downloads have been noticeably higher. We *should* still have all download statistics post-Standoff, but it would take some time to go over 6 years of data. The picture will always be incomplete because both games had multiple mirrors and have appeared on bittorrent trackers.
 
I know Pete still checks Standoff downloads and updates from time to time. I think he said last month around 250 auto-updates were run along with a 100 or so downloads. But don't quote me on that. He can provide the exact numbers.

I'm with AD about hard download numbers. Until there is data, I'd be carefully pulling numbers out. And at the same time, who cares? If it was a labor of love than those numbers shouldn't matter. Be happy it's completed and people are enjoying it.
 
I know Pete still checks Standoff downloads and updates from time to time. I think he said last month around 250 auto-updates were run along with a 100 or so downloads. But don't quote me on that. He can provide the exact numbers.
I don't have access to all the download stats, just the parts related to the website and autoupdate mechanism.

People with autoupdate enabled have launched Standoff 1211 times so far this month, 150 installations have been updated to the lastest version (presumably those are new installs for the most part). Standoff has been released for quite a while now.
 
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