I talked with another dev and he was very pissed by yet another affiliate using the infamous “steal google queries” tecnique 🙂
What is that? easy, you search for the best keywords for a game and make a webpage with the game affiliated, using all the best SEO systems.
So for example for a search like “YOURGAMENAME DOWNLOAD” instead of your site you would see www.competitorsite.com selling your game with affiliation.
We both agreed (me and my friend) that this system isn’t very polite and is more like to stealing money 🙂
An affiliate should really bring MORE visitors to your site, not stealing the visitors FROM your website to get affiliation credit…! LOL

A thing not many indie devs notice is that some (not going to make names) tend to “inflate” their figures a bit 🙂
Like saying they got 5.000 daily visitors, 50 sales/day and so on. I remember getting a banner on a site, claiming they had 10.000 daily visitors, for one month. Well I had less than 12 referral from that site. Quite strange since the banner was right in middle of the HOMEPAGE…!
About the “false sales stats” that can be quickly checked. When I saw Atlantis and Professor Fizzwizzle sales report, I was a bit dubious, so I affiliated them.
After one month I can be sure that they were telling the truth: I managed to sell several copies of both games even from my site which is clearly targeting a different audience…!

The summer has ended and I’ve seen with disappointment that even this year many woods were burned by men (not accidentally). This really sucks. The world is lucky that the might Ent exist only in my upcoming Magic Stones game! 🙂
It’s one of my favourite avatar in the game because of his special attack, the Stomp which “hit all 1st line targets at once for 3-7 damage”.

September is a strange month, all boys and girls going back to school, the wheater changes and in general I feel inspired to make new games 🙂
Just one year ago I was finishing my game “The Goalkeeper” and now I just received the new voiceovers to complete the interview section.
I don’t know where I’m heading to with that game: I want to add for sure more soccer related elements like new competition (cups, national teams etc) but also more “life simulation” elements.
For example I am thinking about adding the possibility to choose the goalkeeper living place, his car (you know those soccer guys have always luxurious cars!) and in general put some choices also for his private life.
This would let me add more strategy, talking about money. Now the goalkeeper salary doesn’t matter when changing team. If I add those new elements, the player could also watch for the team that makes the best offer, to be able to continue his luxurious life-style!

Just got the quote for the car repair cost… over 4000 euros!! 🙁
Crap, I now need to think if is better to repair that one or buy a new one… anyway can’t complain about Toyota at all . Their cars are of absolute quality, I wonder what would have happened with the accident if I was driving my old Fiat Punto instead… 😀