How Successful was our First Game's Launch?

hey everyone monix here and I'm together with Thomas you know him as our lead programmer often but he's also our co-founder here at Bite Me games so today we're going to be doing a little bit of a coping session because two weeks ago or well two weeks from recording this three weeks from when you're watching this video we released our first game Forge industry and has it been a mess of success not really but I like to be transparent with you guys and I like to teach you things as well so we're just gonna go through all of our stats basically our wish lists how much we've made like our returns and give some more insight into what went wrong why we think that something like some of the stats are what they are and also maybe address some of the common questions that you guys left us in our 23 mistakes we did when making our first game video so if you're a game developer and you're sick of seeing those my game made one million dollars in the first three days videos reality check time or maybe just suck I don't know you'll probably roast Us in the comments but whatever then this is the video for you so Thomas I think we can start with you so can you like summarize what did you find of our launch so it was launch day what did you expect and what was reality uh expectations were very hard because we haven't really released the game on Steam before so we did have quite a bit of wish lists before we started and if we were to believe the stats online we would have gotten quite a bit of sales based on our wish list count what did which wasn't big but it was not terrible either and then the sales came in we did get some sales and I think the first one or two days it was actually actually acceptable yeah I I was pretty happy however I don't want to jump too deep into it this yet but we didn't convert As Much from the wish list as we would hope yeah but I think that's in general the sentiment that we had is we came in quite confident still that we would have some sales we didn't expect that much because we'll jump into like the full craft of war wish list we currently we're sitting at a bit over 3000 I think it launched it was like 2 600. and we were like we'll get something first two days you know you press that release button and it's like I can't do anything anymore what do I do I just like refresh the entire time don't do that and then after those two days you know we start getting some feedback as well and we started to see more stats but it was a bit disappointing I think so maybe let's just dive into the stats and we'll talk you along through there this shouldn't be under NDA we have been like looking into it because the Steamworks SDK itself is under NDA but the sales and activation reports not know where it says that it's under NDA please don't sue us don't sue us don't kick us off um but I just really wanted to share these data with you because well it's the reality that we're living in so pulling up our wish lists we're currently sitting at about 3105 and we've already talked about our wishlist before and that was in our video about Steam nextfest and how steam nextfest really boosted the amount of wish list that we got and there is actually if you look at the graph there was one more enormous boost in wish lists and that was the day that our game released we suddenly got like what is it the 208 wish lists on launch day which surprised me honestly I didn't really expect any new wish lists to come in during launch so after next rest did come down and we were at like somewhere like I think yeah 10 or 12 every day which wasn't great and I was like okay whatever is this what it is but then suddenly you know launch day comes and we have this huge boom and it drops off again after like a few days but this also gave us a lot of extra wish lists so I think our wish lists are okay or don't think our wishlists are great you have these stats that are like you need 7 000 wish lists for steam to consider your game to be like popular and like start pushing it in the algorithm but you know there's a few things I want to address here for example all of you guys commented like oh why did you release your game so early why didn't you do more marketing there's the part that we didn't really have any budget for marketing everything we did was pretty much free I think yeah what did we do for marketing really I sent emails to influencers and I have this YouTube channel and that's all the marketing we did because we didn't we want to throw a lot of money at this because we have no funding we just funded this entire game ourselves if you have funding from like an investor or publisher it's definitely going to go a long way we'll probably try to get like more Marketing in our next game as well but we just couldn't do it for this one so that's we know we just had to press this release button also I said it before we were kind of done with this game we didn't want to keep like spending another half year on it like without knowing really if anyone was going to be interested in because if we spent another half year on the game maybe it would have launched like this maybe it would have launched slightly better but that's something that you can't tell in advance and we didn't assume it would be much better also one of the things that I think we talked about before in videos is your first project will almost never be a financial success but just making the entire Journey from start to begin uh to start to end where you release a game on Steam you actually see these stats and how they correlate the sales it will teach you so much because just from what we have seen in these stats we already we talked about this before about how we want to change things for our upcoming game like what do we want to do differently what were the mistakes here and we learned from it yeah there's no better way to realize that you're marketing sucks than to look at this graph of wish lists and then look at your graph of sales and be like you know we did mess up here let's let's get better at this maybe another thing we can talk about is a few days before launch we actually re-released our demo yeah and that's also very interesting to see because on our graph we see a slight bump in wish lists just before our release and after the launch our demos still probably converted into more wishlists because our wishlist numbers were higher than before so it's interesting to pull up the demo too so what I have here to cover that demo a bit is our daily active user graph so this is how many people actually played a demo on a certain day there's I think this is the best graph that we can get from the the portal here and as you can see next Fest was our biggest day with like where we had the day with 250 people who played the game and you know it dropped down because we didn't have a demo up for like three weeks between next Fest and just a few days before launch but then once that our game launched we actually had a very high or like a moderately high amount of demo people I think and we do keep we actually have the same amount of daily active uses for our demos we're having wishlist now which I think is also quite interesting it means that there are at least some people who are still playing our game in that regard and there are are interested in it I want to talk also about one Quirk that I don't really understand of the Steam portal for the the demo and that is that we have two kinds of stats we have the lifetime unique users which is 1605 so that's how many unique people have like played the game it looks pretty obvious but then we also have this thing called lifetime free licenses and maybe you guys know more about it we're at like 9 000 in a bunch and I don't really understand what's the difference between the the license I think it's when someone claims the game like this and maybe install but not play yeah they like install it but they never play it but even then I think this is a really weird number because 9000 people install a game and never play it I mean I don't understand it maybe but maybe there's no comments know more about it so because at first we're like oh wow we have like so many like free licenses that have been given out but then in reality like the amount of players that actually play the game is quite low but if you still see like in the last week we this is post launch by the way this was from one week after launch till now 2 000 of those licenses have been given out which you know is very weird in my opinion it's a daily of still 300 and a bit I don't know what it is maybe you know it but I wouldn't if you also have this dashboard don't look at the free licenses I think it gives a very wrong image of your game there's also basically confirms what we've been saying to you guys is you want to demo up as soon as possible because even though they don't maybe contribute a lot a lot they still drip feed your wish lists and I can convert into sales later on because from those 316 that were playing this last week some of them are probably converted to wish lists and maybe even actual sales that brings us to the elephant in the room and probably the reason that you clicked on this video we won't like hold it back any longer this is the exact amount of sales that we've made to this date so in two weeks we have a whopping 104 sales of a game that is about 16 euros 17 is the price we have and then you know the conversion you don't need to calculate the number is right here on the screen because whatever I don't care but I still want to go through these stats and talk a bit more about them maybe I think the first one is what we were surprised by is the the conversion rate of wish lists wasn't really there if you look at like GDC talks or any of those talks they're always like you know 10 of your wish lists convert to sales on day one and then 20 of your total wish listed launch convert into your first month sales we're at three and a half percent really right now of sales before refunds even and I don't we have some ideas where it went wrong actually there are a couple of reasons first of all we launched two weeks after a steam nextfest first of all we were going to launch in it which would have been even worse probably so that's already a big kicker because people just spend all their hard earned money are probably broke and can't buy the game another thing is we didn't start with a launch sale yeah I think this was a very big one as well that people generally psychologically want to see like the green discount button instead of just paying full price immediately and this is probably also a big mistake on our part to not do this we were contemplating doing it and in the end we thought eh let's just try without I think if you launch just launched like a 10 discount give back to the people that's well are your hardcore audience and want to support you so they know that you also care about them it's also a pretty big thing yeah because now we're like looking at when this we're almost in like panic mode right now being like okay when is the next like actual sale that we can join join in on and hope to still convert like for those 3 000 wish lists some more people and then one other reason I think that we didn't really get that many sales is we actually don't have any reviews almost I think we have two reviews from paying customers right now which is just horrible and we've been trying to get more people to to get reviews even if they're good or bad so far it's only good which I don't really like that much because we're seeing a lot of refunds we'll get into that in a second but we don't really know where it is all going wrong so if you bought the game and you have played It Go and review I don't care if you just think it's horrible and you just bought it to support us or whatever give us some feedback because actually the way Steam Works is until you have 10 reviews from people who have actually bought the game so they've paid through Steam they haven't like gotten a key or something they're the game doesn't really exist it's not a valid Gaming's team's opinion and it's not pushed as much in for example the discovery queue it's not put into that or even it's not even counted in like your total list of games that you have until you have like the 10 reviews and steam actually acknowledges it so it's really hard we're like contacting everyone we know really to be like play our game play our game give us a review if you bought it because we really need it yeah but the problem here is also we we went to gameforce and we actually sold early keys to people and that means our most die-hard audience is basically ineligible to give us reviews or they can give us reviews but the reviews are worthless to steam because steam didn't get their 30 cut off it yeah so I think for our next game we also probably want to early keys so that actually the real big fans can have access via steam so steam things yeah you're doing a good job yeah instead we would probably do Like An Early Access demo yeah instead of an actual key to the game and then let them buy it once the game is out with a launch discount I think is the better approach that's our sale number I want to quickly go through maybe our countries because there's one thing that I think we did quite well actually in our marketing always look at the bright side always look at them so we here have our our regions or I think it's more interesting to look at our countries so the first two ones we kind of expected because there's a very big overlap in okay our YouTube statistics is mainly America and then second biggest country is Germany so to all the German and American game devs hello Brothers but then number three was actually something that we didn't expect and that is that Japan is our third biggest country and the reason for this is we we talked about in our 23 mistakes video as well I think is we had the problem that tectonica and other like automation game was releasing a few days before us and they had a marketing budget so they paid every English-speaking YouTuber to go and do an early access coverage of their game they had like a whole like coordinated launch of like their YouTube videos and things like that and we couldn't compete we reached out to the exact same influencers but we didn't have a big bag of money to give them so most of them didn't respond to us so what did we do we ventured outside of the English-speaking YouTube world and one of those countries that we reached out a lot to is Japan because we I've been there for a while you know I have like an affinity with it at this point and I know it a bit so we sent them an email we sent a whole bunch of influencers from Japan like automation YouTubers and email very polite we had someone help us out with the email and we just gave them a code same as with the English people but a lot of the Japanese ones were actually like covering the game really and they even interacted with us a bit they sent us some other back and forth emails and it got us a lot of views there so I think that that way that marketing thing still saved us a bit or like boosted up our numbers a little bit it's still nothing dramatic 16 sales but it's something we expected like two so that's our sales but you know the sales weren't great but you know we can't be too happy here so let's talk about refunds and how well not great our refund rate is as well the first week I think we're quite hopeful because we were actually at a about eight percent yeah eight percent refund rate which is below average which is good being below average this time is good yeah so your your general what I find online is a refund rate for your first game between like 12 and 18 as of right now you know we're over that but that's only gone on very recently but there's some things that I want to talk about there that's you know I want to talk about I want to vent my frustration as a developer maybe and that is that we've got 21 refunded units so we have the 104 sold minus the 21 and the main reason why people like refund it is because the game is not fun this is my rant we have a demo why don't you play the demo before you buy the game doesn't matter because at first we're like oh yeah we probably have this low of a refund rate because of the demo we were so good because we put up the demo and people played the game and if they didn't like it then they wouldn't buy it and well now we just get punched in the face because we were like too eager and nobody wrote a response to why did they not find the game fun we also didn't really get any Steam Community posts or any other ways of feedback as to what actually isn't fun so we have no idea really what we have to change people just don't like it that's all we know and we of course we have some ideas maybe the genre is not for everyone I think it definitely isn't for everyone can attest to that one but it's still you know you're you're playing in the dark I'm getting some feedback but it's like this is not it's like yo your UI is clunky but that's not like you don't play a game for the UI usually you play a game for like the mechanics in it we have some other issues as well we got one comment there which is that the game crashed this is actually one that I want to look at you at is wait what did I do you did nothing but this is like code twice we've been having like a lot of very weird crashes there's also for example we have a community postal back when we had a demo it was already crashing and we can't reproduce anything really the lock reports we get back they're not really helpful and we just can't get the game to break so once again it's like we have no clue where it's going wrong because it just crashes and it's like what how do you debug that you can't really and if nobody can make the game Crash well it's really hard to do yeah I think someone had it like upon launch instantly crashes I was like well thank you for your Steam Community post but I have no clue how I can reproduce this yeah and it's like okay we even like made virtual machines with like the specific like build number of their operating system and things like that to like try and validate like it does it boot and it always works so it's it's really frustrating as a developer there also someone purchased the game by accident I feel like how do you do that I'm not going to ask any questions to that one even we manage our money better and bite me which is not a high bar to set so yeah I think that's the main stats oh it's not all doom and gloom of course because like Mark said we don't get a lot of feedback from the people that refund but there are still people posting a steam Community with valid feedback so we do take all the feedback at the heart and I think this is a great segue actually to talk a bit more about what the hell are we going to do now we we've made some money steam hasn't paid us out yet because steam only pays out like four weeks after launch earliest so I think the good thing to do next is actually open a restaurant uh I think kingdom is totally doomed yeah I've always had this dream of starting a donor shop so oh I do love the owner maybe we'll do that but no in all seriousness what are we gonna do next well we're gonna keep working we still have the budget Thomas is still working on other jobs so he does this on the side we can still make games we're not going away yet our YouTube has also been going pretty solid so thank you to all the new viewers I hope you like it here and that's also giving us a big motivation boost and even if you don't like it please stay anyway and watch the video don't skip the ads but we're gonna keep working but we're not gonna abandon fortunately I think that's the big thing that we've learned is we need to keep pushing updates and that is also what we're doing we are taking the little feedback that we do get we are working on it we're also planning a big update still where we are addressing like all of the quality of life issues for example like the UI being a bit clunky that's not something that you can bug fix in a day but we are working on like overhauling all of those things as well to improve it so if this game interests you well we are still going to support it so if you give feedback please give us feedback about the game and we will take it at heart we will try to like change as much as we can without having to like rewrite everything of course but we're not like just abandoning this because it's still an income even if we have three sales a day that's still three sales that we're getting and it's better than not having a game released and not getting any sales because you have no game out not to mention there are a lot of games that are failures at first but over time can become they can have their Redemption Arc basically I don't think fortunately will make a big comeback like a massive one but I do think we can at least convert some of those wish lists back to sales and have some happy customers our goal now is to have once we go and do that first sale if we do get that conversion then that there won't be as many refunds anymore so that's basically the stats that I wanted to share with you I think those are all the main ones we've covered if you have any other questions leave a comment down below we'll probably answer it and give you some more insight in like a specific part but I hope that this gives you another like realistic idea of how could it look like if you launch a game if you don't have that enough wish list if you don't have an avid fan base who will write those reviews for you at lunch so you can become a first like a true game in steam's opinion this is what might happen to you so it's not always just like I think we have too many of those devlogs where it's like I released my first game and it has like 80 000 sales 95 positive those are great but those are more the exceptions than the rule I think we are maybe also not the best launch but we're by far not the worst launch on Steam as well even though we only have 100 sales also keep in mind our game is much more expensive if you're selling a game that's like four dollars versus one that's 17 you'd need to sell a lot more to make the same amount of money so yeah I still wish you the best of luck with your gamedaf career and I hope that you do it better than us and and we will do better than us too in the future so if that's something that you're interesting to see how we come back from this tragedy of a launch let's call it that do make sure to subscribe like all those things and you will see updates about our upcoming games but also things like videos we make like this where we share our journey Vlogs tutorials how you should do something yeah General game design stuff everything we upload two times a week so that if that's something that interests you as Thomas said go ahead and subscribe that's all we really have to say thanks for watching and we'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 123,188

Keywords: gamedev, indie, indie developer, game development, unity, c#, blender, game design, game studio, devlog, development, startup, forge industry, flega, steam

Id: yY4NmtNlac4

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023