What was the first game you launched on Steam and how did it do?
This was a comment I wrote in response to: What was the first game you launched on Steam and how did it do?
1.Game: I was part of a team that created Ord. , a tiny text adventure released at the beginning of June: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079000/Ord/
2.Success or Failure: We failed to do the launch correctly, but I (personally) still consider the game launch a success. What did we do wrong? A lot of things. Mainly, our trailer was terrible. The game has no art, so the trailer was going to be a hard task but we didn't consider the best way to do this. We changed our trailer two weeks after launch to something slightly better and ( with a bunch of other small changes we made ) it increased our daily sales by 150%. Is it a success or a failure? It's a bit of both, not a binary outcome. Keep in mind we took the game from conception( the first mvp ) to release on Steam in exactly 7 weeks. We learned a lot, and we've made enough money to release an update to the game which will be coming out later this summer.
3.Expectations: It's important to have goals when releasing a game. Have an exact numbers of sales to measure your performance against. For our team, the goals were very low: 100 sales was our lower-bound, 500 sales as our upper and we weren't optimistic enough to even expect anything higher than this. We hit both these goals fairly quickly, and I'm incredibly happy about this. The problem is the game should've sold 6x better that what we reached when I crunched the numbers on our impressions, CPIs and sales conversion. What did we do wrong? Terrible marketing material.
We have 100% positive reviews though, which is a surprise. We are (in my opinion, not the whole teams') overcharging for what is on offer. 2$ for about 30 mins of entertainment is a big ask, and a few reviews mention this but we have straddled that line and people seem to be happy enough to still give positive reviews. We are hoping to really up the value proposition with our next update, but still chuffed by our review score :)
4.Marketing: The whole team was very burned by the time we were rolling round to the week before release. This was bad production and management and this is what I honestly think is the most important thing to focus on if you want to build great games. As the three of us were low morale, there was not much energy to complete these very important marketing tasks. We also had an incredibly tight schedule, so trying to have maximum polish was also ambitious when sometimes it can take weeks of tinkering and testing to get things just right. We didn't pay anyone external for marketing - we sent out keys to reviewers, streamers and youtubers. No big reviewers picked up our game naturally, because our marketing material is bad and does not look worth their time. Streamers and youtubers were much more receptive. We've had a bunch of small streamers playing and a very large Taiwanese streamer. It was a lot of fun to see their chat go crazy at certain moments in the game :D
We got some decent tweets out on Twitter. Twitter is not a platform to sell to your customers, it is mostly inhabited by other game devs. This was extremely noticeable in our google analytics. Even with 100s of likes and retweets, and 100,000s of impressions, barely did anything to our sales. Steam on the other-hand has been fantastic for our sales - the coverage we got via discovery queue, steam-likes etc. has been the real engine for our sales and I honestly have a lot larger respect for steam and how it works for indie devs. A big contribution factor to our great discovery on steam was the correct use of steam tags. You need to use as many as possible that relate to your game. Do not be shy, it's really important to do this in order to show up in searches and in the discovery queue for players trying to find a game in your genre.
5.Learning: Take your time. We rushed the launch, and end of development. I wouldn't go back and change this because it was an important lesson we learned to take forward, but the marketing campaign for your launch is important and it should be treated just as, or more important than the actual development. The trailer on a steam page IS the single most important piece of marketing material you will make, and it should be treated that way. Make sure it is absolutely the best god-damn thing ever. Those first 6 seconds should want me to buy the game.
6.Stats: We had maybe 100 wishlists before launch? - Wishlists are important, they are a direct correlation to your sales. This doesn't mean the wishlists will convert to sales, BUT wishlists are an indicator of sales, and pushes you higher in terms of discovery. For us, about every 2 wishlists correlates to 1 sales - and it's eerily correct. Don't know why this is the case but it is, and keep that in mind. I don't think our specific numbers are too interesting but the trends within them. Our CPI (clicks per impression) were high, our capsule image clearly did a lot of work to get people on to the page, but our conversion to sales was really low, way below average. With this information it was clear what we needed to improve, the trailer. Similarly, for anyone else wondering what to do, analyse your analytics - those numbers don't lie, they tell a story you can use to fix your problems. I'm not worried about our lost sales in the first 2 weeks, because I think we live in a time when players are open to checking out a game they might have dismissed a while back. Sure, we'd be in a way better position with more sales if we had fixed these things before launch but I don't think it has harmed us as much as in the past.
7.Advice: Take the time to do it properly. Good production schedules to give you the time to work on the game, and do these bizdev tasks and do all the admin etc. The better your management of the team's time, the better the work, the better the morale, and the better the game you will produce.
Fail a lot, and fail hard. I am thankful we made the mistakes we made, because it gives our team the opportunity to never have to make them again. It's a learning experience, and the best way to learn is through failure. We actually released a game in January of this year and it was a complete failure (and an un-fun game). We would not be where we are now with Ord. if not for this game either. Experience is necessary to creating successful game launches, so start racking up that experience now and begin the journey to making great games, it's a long road :P