Update- 28 November
So we just had to pay Epic for Q3 and it was actually a pretty positive experience. Normally you’d think paying bills or royalties would suck but it was more of a vindication that we were developers than anything else. I always wondered when/if I would get that feeling of “I’m officially and Indie Dev”. Not that it really means anything other than a sense of personal accomplishment. Paying Epic actually gave me that feeling. Epic basically said - “You’re important enough that you owe us money.” and all I heard was - “You’re important enough.”
Take that how you will but the main point of this post is to talk about sales and the review system (without hard numbers). Contrary to the norm, we’ve made more each month than we did the last. I just made this horrible graph so I’ll spend the rest of the time talking about it:
So we released with a 40% discount and were not featured on the EA page. The is the first blue part that is descending. Generally Mondays were the worst selling days and then things would pick up Thursday through Sunday. You can see the spike around the 5th week when we used one of the 5 visibility rounds. We consistently sold each week and then on a Thursday in the ~6th week I noticed a huge jump in sales. I thought maybe some famous person made a youtube video about the game but it turns out we actually clawed our way back up the the featured page. Let all the rumors lay to rest that you can in fact make it back to being featured. The way the EA featured page works is that your game can only sit there for 2 months so you can’t do another sale before you leave (every 8 weeks).
We did the next sale at 10% off as soon as we could. Valve warns about putting you game on sale for too much and it’s true. I don’t think there is much of a difference between 40% off and 10% off. It’s more about having that little green tag.
We did this the same Friday that the Halloween sale was happening because I wanted to see if it had any effect. I don’t think it did but the Halloween sale isn’t a big event. Nothing like the summer sale. you’ll noticed a huge spike during that sale. I decided to use another visibility round while we were on sale. It was awesome. Visibility rounds essentially put you in the “Recently Updated” section of the steam front page for a guaranteed 500k views. It only lasts about an hour but, in true Steam fashion, if you do good you get to stay. After the visibility round was up we stayed for rest of the day. It was the biggest day we had and it was over 2 months after release. From now on we will only use visibility rounds while we are on sale.
Note - A new found respect for Steam’s review system*
So you’ll notice on the graph there is a dip after we were featured, this is to be expected. What’s important (and what I can’t show in this graph) was that the dip occurred while we were still featured. We had been teetering on the edge of 80%(very positive) and 79%(mostly positive) and then we got another negative review. Steam essentially uses a tier system to parse bad games from good so they don’t pop up in your queue. Here’s more proof of this:
If you searched for “cat” while we were Very Positive this is the result:
However, If you searched for it while we were Mostly Positive this was the result:
In the second image all the games above us had a Very positive review. What I think is happening is that you game is ranked based on its review score first and then how well it’s selling. Both of these contribute to how often you appear in someones queue.
My Complaint
This system is better than nothing but I think that the reviews should also be vetted for helpfulness (just like games are). If a review isn’t helpful, regardless of whether it’s good or bad, it shouldn’t count as much against you as a more helpful review. What a lot of Unreal and VR developers are going to run into is that people wont be able to run your game and they’ll blame you for it. They won’t read the minimum requirements and leave a negative review about how the game simply crashes without mentioning the fact that they have an integrated graphics card (50% of Steam users has integrated cards). With 1 exception this is the only reason the game has ever crashed. If you look at the negative reviews for games that are entirely VR and require an oculus rift you’ll find the vast majority of negative reviews are from people who don’t have any type of VR system. In my opinion this really undermines the PCs advantage of graphically superior games and promotes 2D pixel art games. That’s just my opinion though.