Sunday, April 5, 2009

Portal: Prelude approaches the million downloads

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Almost six months passed since the first release of Portal: Prelude, and even if the team is now working hard on something else, we keep watching our big baby grow more and more every day. Six monthes after the release, the time has come for a little overview of the situation.

My Portal: Prelude folder in Thunderbird contains 2246 emails. I can't count the ones I didn't replied to, but it shouldn't be more than 3 or 4 hundred max. In fact, it means that we reveived approximately 13 messages a day since the release... but it's flawed by the fact we probably received 50% of them during the first month. Anyway, it's a lot of text.

The most important part of this article is that we made another approximation of the total download count since the release, because we're curious. We merged the download counts of each version (1.0.0, 1.1.0 and 1.1.5 only, not including patches) of each of our mirrors and browsed the whole Internet searching for alternate mirrors... and the result is quite impressive.

Evolution of downloads since the release

We listed 748,493 confirmed downloads, which means there was something like 450,000 new downloads between Christmas 2008 and today. At this rate, we'll reach the million downloads in more or less 2 months. That's crazy because it also means the mod is still downloaded more or less 4,000 times a day six months after the release. Two times more than during the first month.

'New' vs 'olds' downloads since the release

Well, no need to tell you it's far from what we've been expecting when we made this little project. The funniest part beeing that we probably already exceeded the million, because we can't count how many times the mod was distributed in DVD and CD-ROM along with famous magazines such as Igromania in Russia, PC Action in Germany, PC Games in UK or PC Powerplay in Australia.

For the few (or maybe not) of you that are still arriving on this website for the first time, welcome! Take your time to understand what's going on via the links on the right and feel free to download the mod if you wish, I added a bit more mirrors to the list since the flow of downloads doesn't seem to decrease.