Tracking the Pirate Kart Koverage

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 11:45 — kirkjerk

Chatting with Good Ol' SpindleyQ he pointed out that a lot of the action (including brief reviews) is happening on Twitter...
https://twitter.com/#!/SpindleyQ
https://twitter.com/#!/captain_panties
https://twitter.com/#!/realnoyb
https://twitter.com/#!/auntiepixelante
were all doing capsule reviews (in the same way some KotMKs I try to give feedback on every entry...)

SpindleyQ pointed out its been getting some coverage in interesting places!
http://www.diygamer.com/2011/10/2012-igf-pirate-kart-download/
http://kotaku.com/5851316/more-than-300-tiny-indie-games-in-one-free-pirate-kart-bundle
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/19/this-is-indie-the-300-game-pirate-kart/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/21/digging-for-gold-the-2012-igf-pirate-kart/ -- has some reviews
http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/lhyab/igf_pirate_kart_released_300_indie_games_for_free/
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/20/igf-pirate-kart

I love the logo btw, who made that?

It's funny, because I think there on GT "Pirate Kart" had its roots in the carts of pirated games, and the way that one way to generate craploads of games would be the same kind of sprite swaps those carts used. But now, I think people assume it means something different, as a way to shanghai the IGF, and/or maybe a nod to the "pirate parties" in various european countries...

any more interesting links?

Locomotive Engineers

Add new comment

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 11:45 — kirkjerk

someone should try getting

someone should try getting boingboing in on this, it seems like their cuppa...

Add new comment

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 12:31 — SpindleyQ

http://igf.ludonaut.de/2012/p

http://igf.ludonaut.de/2012/piratekart/ scrapes Twitter for #igfreviews, and correlates tweets with game titles.

Add new comment

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 17:30 — Blueberry Soft

TIGSource

TIGSource has an article: http://www.tigsource.com/2011/10/20/2012-igf-pirate-kart/

But this is my favourite: http://averagejoegamers.com/game/the-igf-pirate-kart-is-a-single-chance-at-glory-for-over-a-hundred-indie-sport-builders/

Are you the most indie sport builder?

Add new comment

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 17:52 — juliette

Hah, the comments on that

Hah, the comments on that TIGSource article are amazing.

Add new comment

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 18:59 — Noyb

Border House Blog

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=6481

Add new comment

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 21:05 — ExciteMike

Oh hey. I answered the logo

Oh hey. I answered the logo question over on Anna's blog but I'll do it here too just in case:

I made it! It’s a play on the IGF logo (http://www.igf.com/) if that wasn’t already obvious. I can’t really take credit for their snazzy design.

I do think a somewhat-derpy-looking skull and crossbones is cooler than the letter i.

Add new comment

Fri, 10/21/2011 - 22:56 — ExciteMike

Somewhat related: STATS In

Somewhat related: STATS

In my hurry to get the thing out there I didn't set up decent good tracking for how many times it got downloaded or anything. But to record what I do know (as of Oct 22, 2011) for future-us to look back on:
Fileplanet: 1827 downloads
Shack News: 249 downloads
Amazon S3: Dunno how many downloads. I do know combined outgoing bandwidth between the direct download and seeding the torrents: 27,415.518 GB
Google Analytics info for piratekart.com:

75,413 Visits
70,979 Absolute Unique Visitors
104,407 Pageviews
1.38 Pages/Visit
70.00% Bounce Rate
00:00:38 Avg. Time on Site
92.83% New Visits

Breakdown by country:

By browser:

Chrome 46.81%
Firefox 36.94%
Nothing else over 5%

Traffic sources:

Playtomic stats: Well, some of it is public: http://playtomic.com/stats/4690-igflauncher-2011
Unfortunately the per-game data both cannot be made public and also screenshots don't work very well for it (needs mouseovers and/or quite a bit of scrolling). Here's what it looks like.
It ought to be a bar graph rather than lines the way we are using it. Each dot is a game and they are arranged alphabetically (A's on the left). The biggest spikes actually indicate the game was broken and people clicked many times because nothing seemed to happen. That nice exponential beginning is, I assume, because sorting by game title was kind of popular even though it wasn't the default. The crazy exciting number here for me is average play time, unless we goofed up the stats, people are bringing up the launcher and playing cart games for nearly an hour on average!? I guess I'm skeptical that people are leaving it minimized and forgetting about it while they do facebook or whatever, but wow!

And because it is hilariously useless data, here is how many times the random game button chose each game. We recorded that for some reason. For some reason, Frolicking Furballs Safari Resort was randomly picked 88 times while poor Bushido Code only got 31.