Sensational start

New Star Soccer 4 started extremely well, exceeding the first day sales of NSS3 within a few hours. Unfortunately things couldn't stay quite so positive for long and after a couple of weeks sales dipped back down to normal levels. However, we have yet to see any magazine reviews and have had only 1 web review so far, so very few people who weren't on the mailing list actually know about the game yet. NSS3 sales peaked when we had 2 or 3 magazine reviews in the same month, so hopefully we still have that to look forward to. The first web review NSS4 (that I know of) appeared today on unigamesity.com and gave us a favourable 3.5 out of 5. No too bad considering Football Manager 2009 got 4 out of 5! You can read the review here. 

So my mind is focused on getting the news out there that NSS4 exists and aside from reviews I hope that the game will feature on magazine cover discs. Macworld are the first to confirm that the game will feature on their January edition (out in mid-December) and hopefully that will be the first of many. NSS4 is currently being translated by some avid fans (apply here) and will hopefully be localised in 16 languages. That should gain us some international interest when they go live. Getting on download sites such as Download.com is another priority although these are not as important as they used to be (and the service of that particular site leaves a lot to be desired). I will also need to advertise on some gaming sites but until I actually receive some money from the game sales advertising funds are low (make that non-existant).

The New Star Socccer 4 Goal Of The Month competition will get underway this month, so make sure you are saving those replays. I will announce more details on this soon but as always there will be prizes for the top goal of the month.

Finally, I decided that a good way to get traffic on the New Star website would be to make Sensational Soccer a free web game. This is Windows only and may only be compatible with Internet Explorer at the moment, but you can check it out here. I'd forgotten just how much fun the game was!