If you have a look at the ModDB statistics you can clearly see that my playtest changelogs which also include some previews about what is going on here, on the bugtracker and IRC attract quite some clicks. The biggest peak was the surprising Desura release when a staff member uploaded the Windows version and featured us on their frontpage. I now extended it to the playtests (you can switch release channels on Desura) and uploaded a Linux version which is finally set up correctly. Although the initial authorization and setup procedure was cumbersome, releasing updates now is not that hard. I left some https://github.com/lodle/Desurium/wiki/ ... -On-Desura for interested developers because it is fairly undocumented from DesuraNET side and the technical support is often clueless, too.
Desura also offers the publishers extensive statistics on their user base. As we accumulated ~1000 installs they should be quite representative by now. This might be interesting to look behind the scenes because I believe Steam works similar although the big publishers will probably not share what their marketing department found out.