Post by mythmere on Mar 4, 2009 13:03:04 GMT -6
I also posted this at DF..
Although I'm no statistician or web expert, I think the stats for downloads of Swords & Wizardry illustrate that the retro-clone movement has some traction outside the world of the old-school message boards. The numbers seem pretty high, even though I assume a lot of this must be repeat visits, or something.
In February, there were 10,745 downloads of the Swords & Wizardry Core Rules pdf, and 797 downloads of the WhiteBox pdf.
January shows the core rules were downloaded 13,675 times, and the WhiteBox rules were downloaded 7,038 times.
December shows 11,096 Core Rules downloads. (WhiteBox doesn't show - I guess it wasn't out yet, can't remember the release date).
This doesn't include the downloads of the MS Word documents, but those were less than 300 per month.
Also, I have about a thousand downloads of the Core Rules from Lulu, as well.
Print sales are just shy of 150, but I've been actively telling people not to buy the Core Rules in print until we get the second printing out.
Bottom line, it seems like Swords & Wizardry is reaching out beyond the active-internet-oldschooler crowd to some unknown degree, the same way OSRIC did. I haven't seen anything like the discussion of S&W as there was about OSRIC, and IIRC the OSRIC download numbers were about 3-4 times this many. Nevertheless, I think it's a very good sign for the old school gaming community that the clones are gaining general attention from people. It's good advertisement for our style of gaming.
EDIT: from what I can tell, those are all actual downloads, but they don't weed out repeat users - so if someone goes back and downloads it 4 or 5 times, it's still a "hit" each time. 5.5 million Kb of Core Rules pdf was downloaded in February. It's a 9Mb document.
Although I'm no statistician or web expert, I think the stats for downloads of Swords & Wizardry illustrate that the retro-clone movement has some traction outside the world of the old-school message boards. The numbers seem pretty high, even though I assume a lot of this must be repeat visits, or something.
In February, there were 10,745 downloads of the Swords & Wizardry Core Rules pdf, and 797 downloads of the WhiteBox pdf.
January shows the core rules were downloaded 13,675 times, and the WhiteBox rules were downloaded 7,038 times.
December shows 11,096 Core Rules downloads. (WhiteBox doesn't show - I guess it wasn't out yet, can't remember the release date).
This doesn't include the downloads of the MS Word documents, but those were less than 300 per month.
Also, I have about a thousand downloads of the Core Rules from Lulu, as well.
Print sales are just shy of 150, but I've been actively telling people not to buy the Core Rules in print until we get the second printing out.
Bottom line, it seems like Swords & Wizardry is reaching out beyond the active-internet-oldschooler crowd to some unknown degree, the same way OSRIC did. I haven't seen anything like the discussion of S&W as there was about OSRIC, and IIRC the OSRIC download numbers were about 3-4 times this many. Nevertheless, I think it's a very good sign for the old school gaming community that the clones are gaining general attention from people. It's good advertisement for our style of gaming.
EDIT: from what I can tell, those are all actual downloads, but they don't weed out repeat users - so if someone goes back and downloads it 4 or 5 times, it's still a "hit" each time. 5.5 million Kb of Core Rules pdf was downloaded in February. It's a 9Mb document.
