Tomato Blaster

I created this image for a speed modelling competition at http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?t=57868&page=11 back in August last year. The idea is that they give you a topic and you have to create a model within the time given, in this case 60 minutes. To my surprise it won first prize!

I have been interviewed about Tomato Blaster by ExL Studios. So if you should like to know a bit of history about Tomato Blaster and myself then have a read here:

 http://exlstudios.synthasite.com/developer-interview---tomato-blaster.php

I've now got the sales numbers for Tomato Blaster (Feb 22nd to 28th March):

- Trial Downloads: 704
- Total Sales: 25
- Sales Ratio: 3.6%
- Earnings: £42

I'm now only getting about 5 trial downloads a day.

More detail on other games: http://www.gamerbytes.com/2009/03/gamerbytes_analysis_xna_commun.php

For some reason Tomato Blaster seems to have a very low number of Trial downloads compared to other games. For example a game called Exhaust with the same sales ratio got over 27000 downloads and 990 sales. Here are some reason why I think it went wrong:

- People got a wrong idea of what the game was about because of the name. Some people seem to think it would be just some crappy game about firing tomatoes.

- When Tomato Blaster was released the poplarity rating order on the Marketplace wasn't working, which meant Tomato Blaster was right at the bottom of the list for the first 2 weeks it was out.

- Unlike many other games Tomato Blaster seems to of been completely bug free, therefore there has never been an update for it. Up to a couple of weeks ago if you updated your game it became at the top of the new arrivals list, which by looking at the number of daily downloads makes a massive different to the download numbers. I feel a bit cheated by this as I ended up getting a bad number of downloads due to the fact that I didn't update Tomato Blaster unnecessarily.

Anyway, there's not much I can do about it now. Hopefully I'll continue to get some more good reviews which will get people interested in it again.