State of the Industry
In the end though, the author believes that the Internet will help out those who are having problems getting their games onto shelves but of course it will mean a big change of game distribution.So if you don't get your game onto retail shelves you're left with electronic distribution. Here's the flat out numbers based on experience and talking to other publishers and developers. If you put your game on a download site, you can expect it to get about a 1% conversion rate -- downloads converted to an actual sale.
Try it for fun: Go find a game that displays how many downloads it's received. Let's say it got 100,000 downloads. That means the demo generated around 1,000 sales on that site. Sounds unbelievable? Probably but it's true, ask any game developer.