My Indie Game Launch was a Failure - Steam Sales Numbers & Lessons Learned

so last year end of April I finally decided to launch my indie game Summit a 2d mountain climbing metroidvania I've worked on for 3 years I started working on the game in early 2020 right at the start of the pandemic uh initially I made a lot of progress I tried YouTube devlogs the very first time and they actually did decently well which gave me the motivation and momentum I needed then of course reality set in the scope of the game grew in size and I had to split my time between multiple projects in short the game fell into a state of development hell so last year I posted this video where I explained all of this and my realization that if I don't release the game right now it will likely end up rotting away on my hard drive so why not take one last effort to polish and then release it on Steam it wasn't a completely silent launch I mean the game still had some exposure through my YouTube death vogs and trailers and a whopping a thousand wish lists on Steam but of course I was fully aware that without proper marketing there wasn't going to be a lot of people playing the game so on the day of my launch I prepared everything on Steam uploaded the final build set the launch discount to 40% and finally hit the release button woo game is shipped so how are we doing well as expected not much happened there were a few wish list conversions there were like two negative reviews neither was really a scathing review both actually had some nice things to say about the game so I guess it's time to finally reveal the sales numbers right well since last year's April the game has made a grand total of $326 us steam net revenue which after deducting steam's 30% cut translates to an hourly rate of approximately 15 cents so in the end this whole situation is really not that tramatic to me I had a blast working on the game and gained a ton of knowledge and experience still since my goal for the future is to create awesome games ideally in a profitable and sustainable way it is important to analyze what worked out and what didn't so let's go through some of the biggest reasons I think my game failed 2D Platformers but also in particular Metras are among the most popular genres for Indie developers there's a big group of people who enjoy these kind of games but there's also a tremendous amount of games competing for these people I think the mountain climbing setting of summit is still quite unique in the realm of Metroid vanas but it's still incredibly hard to stand out out without having a really unique twist or art style speaking of art style I am primarily a programmer and when working solo artwork has always been one of my pain points over the years I developed this kind of flat Vector art style often mixed with some texture overlay for more detail because of the huge game world I had to optimize my art creation pipeline as much as possible which resulted in a bit of a qu quantity over quality mindset I for myself knowing my skills and workload am honestly rather proud of how the art in many areas turned out but I'm also fully aware that it doesn't hold up against other games with dedicated artists who knew what they were doing as a result I'm sure a lot of people see the game and think it looks kind of boring or even ugly so I think my learning for the future is to develop an art style that really stands out while at the same time being simple enough for me to execute at scale there are some obvious examples of games which might look ugly at first side but actually in a Charming way that really stands out the way I structured my game is that you start with a really basic move set and get access to all of the awesome moves and abilities only later in the game of course this is what most Metras are doing so often these types of games games tend to have a rather slow start which can be a problem if you're not a household name and have at least some level of trust from players to hold on my game takes well over 10 hours to complete that first playthrough but I know that not a lot of people made it past the first hour which is a shame and really shows how important it is to focus on the first impression and make it as awesome as possible speaking of focus as a player I love vast game worlds with tons of stuff to explore so naturally I wanted to replicate this feeling in my game which is not the wisest thing to do as a solo Dev filling a huge world with beautiful art and interesting things to do is something that just requires Manpower there is no real way around unless you're working with procedural generation or probably sooner or later generative AI as a small in the one thing you don't have his Manpower so you have to play through your strengths for my next project I would really like to focus on one single mechanic or concept and go into crazy levels of detail with that I think it's a lot easier to compete with bigger games that way then if you try to outperform them in terms of sheer content if I were to build a game around space exploration for instance I wouldn't want to compete with Starfield by making my world as big as possible and creating thousands of assets but rather up by focusing on a single aspect of space exploration and making that one a 100 times better than in Starfield we can see this in a lot of successful indie games which really go all in on one single creative idea and build the entire game around that Summit was a big passion project for me as a player I've always loved 2D Platformers especially the Metroid Vania formula so I really wanted to see how far I can take my skills as a game developer and make one of my own naturally since this was my first game project of a larger scale mistakes were made time investment was underestimated and feature creep was very real still from the start I never expected to make a ton of money I never worked on it fulltime and was never financially dependent on its outcome so I just thought it would be a cool learning experience which turned into a little bit more than that while it probably would have been better to make a few more smaller games for learning before starting on such a big one I don't regret it in fact I think there are several things that you can only learn in a project of a certain scale there is a huge difference between creating a working prototype with a test level and turning it into a fully realized game with a large world at the very least I can now confidently say that I know how to create a fully flashed out game with a big interconnect Ed World containing well over 10 hours of gameplay running on a smooth frame rate and all that with a somewhat clean code base that would be fairly easy to expand or reuse in the end I got a taste of what it means to commercially release a game and I saw that by fixing some of the mistakes I made and improving on what already worked it might actually be possible to release a profitable game in the future I'm currently in the process of finding ideas for my next game project my goal would be to create a smaller project next for a little change and after that I'm ready to tackle a bigger one again maybe even of the scale of summit um currently have a huge stack of paper full of game ideas lying around on my desk I just really like collecting those ideas on paper and evolving them over time sometimes there comes a spark which motivates me to work more intensely on one specific concept and start a little prototype uh in unity even if you've got that spark on one of your ideas I would really advise you to go ahead and just start working on it even if it seems way too big at first you never know where your creativity takes you building a game is so incredibly hard that you really cannot afford to build it on an idea you're only half passionate about so far I haven't quite found my next sparkling idea year but I do have several promising prototypes so hopefully it's only a matter of time until I find those missing pieces until then have fun creating and hopefully see you soon with a brand new game The Journey [Music]

Channel: Dominik Hackl

Views: 68,023

Keywords: unity, unity dev log, unity indie game, indie game sales, indie game numbers, steam sales numbers, indie game money, steam money

Id: 40VFZcWiXg4

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024