Dark Moon – I didn’t want to place those sorts of restrictions on people. Like I said before, sending out a free game costs me nothing. I’m not looking at it as sales lost, but as potential sales gained.

Please note that the number of contacts shows 4 – which is just a test number, the real number is in hundreds who *subscribe* to our service. The main idea of the service is to let press people to subscribe. We won’t grap their emails and spam them – the people who end up in the list are agreed to join.

I did consider putting everything on http://www.binarysun.co.uk/ but decided that was just asking for trouble.

Mike – sorry, no. There are a few rules to stop this :)

As for losing $20 per review – I don’t see it that way. It’s all virtual, real world costs for sending out a game are nothing, and if people want a free game then they were less likely to part with their cash anyway.

Let me explain what I meant:
- Let’s suppose there’s a person who wants to buy your game
- He think whether or not to purchase it…
- …and sees your ad.
- Now he goes with haste to write that review and get that game
in this send – it’s *potentially lost $20* (notice: I said ‘potentially’). Now, if for in exchange you get a a low-traffic site to link couple of players to you, in this sense it could mean quite high cost.

But – in the case where a player who searches for ‘free games’ (any free games), and writes a review – then you are right that it won’t cost you that $20 – he wouldn’t have bought it anyway.

But – if the user was likely to purchase your game, now he has chance to get it for free. That’s the risk.

Anyway – good luck with it!
(Maybe next time you could put ‘Get my story to -dugg-, get a -free- game’ prmotion going? ;)

The theory behind the idea is that any traffic is good traffic. If I can get people to talk about the games on my site AND link to me then the relevancy to google would increase, and the way I see it all links are good links.

As for losing $20 per review – I don’t see it that way. It’s all virtual, real world costs for sending out a game are nothing, and if people want a free game then they were less likely to part with their cash anyway.

As for results, so far it’s been underwhelming. There was a spurt of extra traffic when I started things but it’s all gone back down to normal now. I need a big news site like Digg (It has been dugg – no one clicked :( ) or boing boing to pick up on the story and make my web host collapse under the strain. There are a few more places that have said they would post about it though – and I have a couple of other ideas for promoting it all.

“I like Seth’s Puzzle Boxes. It is the best game. I like it very much”.

Now gimme the free game! :)