I decided to end the poll early - 3 days with no new votes told me that it wasn't popular enough (or maybe had too many choices... think I'll do a "yes / no" poll next! :-D).  Here are the results:

The final one - backing it on Kickstarter etc - was probably a bit of a misnomer and could have been taken in different ways, considering that people often using funding campaigns effectively as a pre-order system.  I was a little surprised that the developer's reputation accounted for less than half the responses, and that it seems the possibility of getting a game in a bundle or from a trusted vendor is rather unimportant, with both of those less than 20%.

I would have liked to have more responses and have this be a more meaningful study of people's indie game buying habits, but I guess until site traffic increases quite considerably, I need to stick to less involved surveys that require very short think and click times!  Still, hopefully these results will be of interest (and possibly even use) to some indies out there.  The fact that genre was the most important thing shows the importance of well-targeted marketing and considering the experiences of indies I've talked to in the past, the importance of reviews / previews in buying decisions is actually surprisingly high (though again this probably has more to do with lot traffic to my sites).  

Shiny Loot - DRM-free indie games for PC, Mac and Linux

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