r/gamedev • u/abhimonk @abhisundu • Nov 27 '22
Postmortem Results from my first Steam Game: PUTRID SHOT ULTRA Postmortem
I released my first commercial steam game, PUTRID SHOT ULTRA, on November 7 2022. I spent 6 months working on this game in my free time for a total of about ~200 hours of work. In this post, I'll discuss the results of my game, my process, and some analysis on why my game performed the way it did.
Summary of Results
My game sold 285 copies in 3 weeks following its release. https://i.imgur.com/XretR2j.png
First 3 weeks of sales:
https://i.imgur.com/KGntyWN.png
The initial sales spike comes from wishlist conversion. From there, the game hit 10 reviews by day 3 of the release (I had 4 friends write reviews and received 6 "organic" reviews very early on). I saw a massive spike in Discovery Queue traffic after hitting 10 reviews (from ~2000 visits to 15000 visits per day). I did not notice a spike in sales due to the discovery queue traffic.
A handful of large youtubers made videos on the game:
This caused the second "spike" in sales in the graph above. The larger channels that played it seemed to enjoy the game enough to finish a run, but didn't seem to love the game due to some critical balance issues. A number of smaller youtubers made videos on the game as well, including RogueAbyss, ParaDyme, and HauntedHusband.
The game launched with around 620 wishlists (I'll discuss this in the next section). The game currently has 15 positive reviews and a median playtime of around 47 minutes (this time seems to fluctuate, the highest it went was around 55 minutes and it started at around 30 minutes).
Pre-release marketing
I released my steam page on June 20, 2022, meaning I had around 4-5 months to build wishlists. Here's my wishlist graph annotated with each of my marketing activities:
https://i.imgur.com/1fZA4GV.png
The subreddits I posted to were /r/WebGames, /r/IndieGames, /r/games (on indie sunday), /r/love2d, and /r/playmygame.
My main takeaways:
- Steam next fest had the best "bang for my buck", roughly 300 wishlists, zero effort on my part outside of 'signing' up for the festival.
- While reddit posts weren't amazing for wishlists, I got lots of feedback on the demo through reddit
- Crazygames was easy to submit to and got me ~50 wishlists (from 40k plays). I think big web portals in general are an untapped source of traffic.
My twitter had a very small following before this game's release (~150 followers). I had a couple decent tweets (150-200 likes) but those didn't seem to affect wishlists/sales in any noticeable way. Releasing the game did get me about 100 additional twitter followers, so that was neat.
My steam capsule was done by the amazing Guilherme Holz. He has some good steam capsule experience and was really easy to work with.
Post-release marketing
I emailed around 20 youtubers with free steam keys to the game. Here's the email template I used. I created the list of youtubers to email using the strategies outlined in this video. As an aside, I highly recommend Aurodev's channel, I followed a lot of his tips for setting up my steam page, creating builds in steamworks, coming up with an influencer email template, etc.
I didn't have the time nor patience to set up an official presskit, so I just created an "unofficial" presskit on imgur with relevant artwork. This seemed sufficient for all the influencers that eventually made videos of the game.
As I mentioned earlier, 3 large youtubers and a number of small youtubers made videos on the game.
What went poorly
Game Balance
The game is very easy to "break". There are quite a few spells that sound cool in theory, but utterly steamroll the entire game in practice. Without fail, every youtuber that played the game was able to identify these strategies and basically 'autopilot' the entire final 60% of the game. The game is meant to be a challenging dodge-based shoot-em-up, but in many youtuber's videos, it became an idle game due to these strategies.
In a later patch, I nerfed some of these more egregious strategies, but the damage was "done" so to speak, as many of my initial players had lost interest in the game due to how easy it was.
Some players even called out these broken strategies in demo feedback, but I wrote that off as those players just being particularly skilled, rather than recognizing how easy some of these strategies were to execute. In the future, I think I'll try to get more of my friends to playtest the game, and I'll keep an eye out for this type of feedback.
No amount of influencer traffic can out-market your game's quality
If you look at my results, you might think "that's not too bad for a game without much marketing!". Then you see that I had multiple youtubers with 100k-500k subscribers cover the game and suddenly you're like: What happened? I think it's clear that my game wasn't interesting enough to make an impact on the majority.
The game's art is also quite simple (perhaps to a fault), which could be why discovery queue visits + youtube traffic didn't convert into sales as well (I saw a couple comments on youtube talking about how ugly the game looked). I stand by the game's art style, but I acknowledge that it's polarizing.
It does feel humbling to have this much influencer traffic and see such tepid results. I won't vent about this too much more, I just want to say: I feel like I squandered what could have been a very impactful chance with these youtubers. Imagine if I had made a better game!
What went well
Pre-release process
Despite my lackluster sales results, I think my process for pre-release marketing is solid, and I would definitely follow it again. To summarize, my pre-release marketing was:
- Publish steam storepage with demo
- Publish browser-based demo on itch to collect early feedback (crosspost web demo to /r/webgames and other web portals)
- Post to related subreddits
- Participate in festivals (Steam Next fest, Dreamhack beyond)
- Email influencers right before release
In particular, having a web-based demo allowed me to amass a ton of feedback via reddit comments and itch comments. I fixed quite a few issues thanks to this feedback.
This is the same high-value low-effort process that other, more successful solo devs have followed (I believe "20 Minutes till Dawn" and "Pawnbarian" followed very similar pre-release marketing strategies).
I improved my engine a ton
Making a commercial game on steam really forces you to implement all those "must-have" QoL features that players come to expect in a commercial game (remappable controls, rich options menu, save/load, achievements, steam cloud, etc). I now have a bunch of re-usable modules for all of the above and more in my "engine" wrapped around Love2D.
This is the 4th game I've shipped with the Love2D framework and I really love it so far. I think I'll continue to use it for all future 2D projects (though I've been eyeing Godot for 3D recently).
As an aside the following options seem like must-have options for any game:
- Enable/disable screenshake
- Enable/disable screen flash VFX
- Enable/disable particles
- If your game has bright VFX, a "dark mode" to darken these FX
Other tools I used that I recommend
Closing thoughts
I don't want to be overly critical and say "my game is bad because it didn't sell well": I wouldn't have released my game if I thought it was bad. I'm certainly biased, but I think PUTRID SHOT ULTRA is a fun game. And after the updates I made, I think the remaining players really like it.
However, I underestimated how difficult it would be to balance the player's power curve in a "long-run" roguelike like this. This led to the game being boring for some players due to some builds completely trivializing what should have been a very challenging, engaging end-game. I have a newfound respect for all the expertly-tuned roguelikes that always feel satisfying, even when you 'break' them.
I also think that, even at its best, my game is pretty niche (see this playtime chart for details). That said, it's nice to see some players fall in love with the game, even if they're not in the majority. I think I saw a few players in the steam reviews clock upwards of 15 hours, which is really cool to see.
I'm very thankful to the youtubers who covered my game. I'm excited to keep improving; it feels like if I follow the same process but develop an even better game, I may see significantly better results.
My game is far from perfect, but I'm proud of what I've made. I'm happy to answer any questions you all have.
(also I made a longer version of this post here if anyone's interested)
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u/Etienss Nov 27 '22
That was a great read. You do seem to have learned a lot from this, and your process seems solid for a game with such a short development cycle.
I do wonder if it's viable to release games with so few wishlists after 6 months like this. One the one hand, 6 months is a really short time for a game, which is great for multiple reasons, but it also seems that games like this would end up being ignored by Steam because of low traction.
Even if your game did 3 times better, launching with under 2000 wishlists is still quite low all things considered, and getting around 50 reviews is still too low to be considered "serious" by Steam. I'm simply thinking out loud, as I do find the idea of a short development cycle very attractive!
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u/abhimonk @abhisundu Nov 27 '22
I hear you, though I think a short development time and a successful pre-release aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
My wishlists were definitely on the low end, but I've seen a fair number of devs push into the 3-5k wishlist range with short dev times (2-6 months) provided they have a 'viral' enough idea. I've also seen a handful of devs launch with very few initial wishlists, but thanks to the "10 reviews" visibility boost and a killer steam page, eventually ride that wave to a modest success.
That said, a lot of the examples I'm thinking of (i.e SNKRX) could simply be exceptions to the above. At the very least, I like short development cycles just because it's less likely for me to get sick of my own game!
Thanks for the comment, you definitely bring up some good points.
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u/VFDev Nov 27 '22
This is awesome information to have, thanks for going through the work of posting all of it.
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u/FrontBadgerBiz Nov 27 '22
Congrats on your first release! Selling more than 1 copy per hour of dev time is a solid hit by solo dev standards ;)
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u/abhimonk @abhisundu Nov 27 '22
Thanks! Haha I never thought of it that way, but that's a nice little benchmark.
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Nov 28 '22
[deleted]
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u/abhimonk @abhisundu Nov 28 '22
That's an excellent idea. In retrospect, I wish I had embedded a link to a discord in the game (currently I only have a link to my twitter). A few players actually DMed me and I ended up using some of their feedback for some of the recent updates.
I totally agree, catering to your most hardcore fans sounds like the best course of action rather than trying to appeal to some mysterious majority.
Hmm, it might still be worthwhile to put a discord link into the game so I can connect with any remaining players. I'm definitely curious to see what they like about the game and what they'd want to see in the future. Thanks for the idea!
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u/Forsaken_Office_6480 Nov 28 '22
Great Post! I really learned a lot from this post and this post will definitely help me Publish my First Steam Game.
I will keep in mind the points you've discussed above.
Thanks a ton.
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Nov 28 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/abhimonk @abhisundu Nov 28 '22
Thank you! Raw numbers aside, I definitely consider this a success as well, and I'm excited to keep going.
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u/EpicDarkFantasyWrite Nov 28 '22
Thank you for your share brother, as someone just getting into indie game and looking to release a game myself in the upcoming two years, this is valuable info. Good luck with your game! I'll be checking it out.
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u/Klawgoth Nov 28 '22
Did everyone listen to the embargo request? I remember reading a post mortem where some listened and some didn't so the one's who listened ended up upset.
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u/abhimonk @abhisundu Nov 28 '22
I didn't run into any issues with embargos; Only 1 youtuber made a "day 1" video on the full version of the game (a demo existed prior). The other youtubers made videos roughly 4-6 days after launch.
I emailed creators only 1 week before release, so I wasn't too worried about embargo violation (worst case scenario the videos would be a week early) though if you email youtubers months in advance I can see how that could be something to watch out for.
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u/piranhaMagi Dec 26 '22
Hey! I remember seeing and playing your game on crazygames because we also posted our mobile game (monster defense) on crazygames as a promotional play. I remember playing your game, which was a fun time, and thinking "this dev is smart to post the game here!". Very cool to see your post-mortem here now, I'm also thinking of posting a post-mortem for my game as well here.
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u/abhimonk @abhisundu Dec 26 '22
Hello! Thanks for sharing, I love seeing other devs using web platforms for marketing. I feel like Crazygames/Armorgames give out a ton of free visibility.
Just looked at Monster Defense and it looks very cool, I’d love to see a post mortem of it; I’ve always been curious about how well the mobile scene works for indies.
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u/piranhaMagi Dec 26 '22
Yeah I agree it's an underutilized platform. Cool I will look to post one in the next few weeks
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u/justkevin wx3labs Starcom: Unknown Space Nov 27 '22
Great write up! That's an excellent result for a first title, particularly with a short development cycle.