The Reflexive Arcade top sellers list is based on the last 30 days, and the User Favourites list is based on the last 30 or 60 days (not sure which). The User Favourites is based on the Conversion Rate – that’s the number of sales divided by the number downloads, not by the user reviews. This is sensible because it’s based on what people do (i.e. buying a game) not what they say…
I tracked the rise and fall of all my games on Reflexive through the Top Sellers and User Favourites lists and put them in a graph and looked at the correlation between the two. It was pretty interesting.
Say for example, your game has a peak for 1-2 weeks then fades away a bit, it will keep on rising in the top sellers chart until the 30th day and then will rapidly drop as the sample period goes through your 1-2 week peak (thus reducing the total sales in the last 30 days).
The best I ever did was reach position 33 in top sellers (out of 610 games!). I don’t think that’s breaching my NDA contract as the information is publically available via looking at the charts. Anyway, that mean that 32 games had sold more than mine in the last 30 days. They were new games that were coming out that were hotter than mine and made more sales AND some were older games that were STILL selling more than mine did in 30 days – and I sold a pretty reasonable number. I found it pretty interesting that some “classic” games just kept on selling bucket loads month in month out.
Anyway my next game will be right up there 🙂