- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,228
Suddenly, doom and gloom: http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,6807.msg139950.html#msg139950
I feel a little guilty for coming up with the "urban intrigue simulator" moniker now...
Vince said:Our Steam sales went from 3-5 copies a day to 8-12 copies a day in the last 7 days. We sold 2 copies via BMT in the last 2 weeks (a copy a week, woohoo!).AbounI said:Since the final release date is now known, doesn't it have an impact on the latest pre-orders you can receive?Did you observe any form of increased number of the sales?RPGWatch, Codex and some others sites have published this great news, so I guess it can positively affect the sales stats.Or perhaps is it too early to let the stats talking about themselves?
Optimism should be based on something. Even blind faith requires a foundation, no matter how week. I had a lot more optimism and faith when we started. I hoped that we'd sell a few thousand copies in the first month when we released the full demo. It took us a year to sell a thousand copies. I hoped that we'd sell a few thousand copies in the first week when we launched on Steam since that's what most indie games were selling. We sold 282 copies in the first week. Etc.Scott said:Well, no one can beat your optimism: I don't think we can do better, but we can do a lot worse. -Vince D Weller, Lead Developer Age of Decadence
So literally everything I've seen so far sent the same message - it won't be easy, don't expect for the game to sell well because it won't. I think that Dead State did very well, compared to many recently released indies. Going by Steamspy's numbers which seems to be accurate (we sold 15,000 copies to-date):
Dead State - 58,788 ± 5,860
Serpent in the Stagland - 4,134 ± 1,554
Lords of Xulima - 35,671 ± 4,565
Legends of Eisenwald - 39,345 ± 4,794
Halfway - 25,567 ± 3,864
Other Early Access' titles:
Underrail - 22,658 ± 3,638
Sui Generis's combat game - 21,586 ± 3,551
We need to sell 30,000 copies in the first year (on top of what we already sold) to consider the game successful and secure our future, so roughly we need to sell 45k, i.e. 2/3 of what Dead State sold but more than many other indie RPGs sold. You don't need a crystal ball to know that it won't be easy and that it's far more likely that we'll fall short. Thus for me the only question is how short?
Dead State had more coverage, Brian Mitsoda has a strong following, and people do like zombie games a lot more than they like 'urban intrigue simulator' fantasy. We tried to get more coverage but what you see today is the absolute best we can do at the moment.
I'm not complaining. I know that AoD is a hard sell, both for the media and the gamers. I know that it won't be easy when we started, I just didn't know how hard it would be. It is what it is and honestly I'm ok with it. I'm not dreaming to triple DS sales and wake up swimming in money. I'm dreaming about selling enough to stay in business and make more games. I have 3 settings (other than AoD) that I want to explore and play with and then I can die in peace.
PS. The moral of this story is that it's best to expect the worse and be ready for it than hope for the best and be crashed by disappointments.
I feel a little guilty for coming up with the "urban intrigue simulator" moniker now...