Could you please expound on the marketing you did? I have been in a comparable situation (indie games developer) but found myself a bit lost when it came to successful marketing. I basically ended up spending thousands of dollars on Google Adwords, and the return was questionable. I also dropped $1000 on GamesBannerNet, which had horrible return and was a waste of money. What worked for you?
I did Google advertising for over a year with very questionable returns and then I added a new landing page, tons more graphics and screen shots all over the web site, worked on the first 5 minutes of the game play experience a bunch, and added a lot more key words to the Google campaign and reduced my bids by a lot so I was only basically getting the dregs, but getting them cheap. All these changes took the ROI on advertising from about 1:1 to about 3:1 where it is now. It seems to be almost all about the landing page and the web site, at least in my experience.
Before I focused on marketing, I spent a solid year just improving the game with negligible financial effect. The first month I spent enhancing the website had 10x more effect than all the game play improvements I've ever done.
