This article was originally posted as an update to our game’s Steam Greenlight campaign that started yesterday around noon time for Europe.
Accurate reports on how things are moving during a greenlight, or a kickstarter or any other part of a game development process are useful for other indie developers out there. Here is an overview of how our game fared after approximately 24 hours on Steam’s Greenlight process.
Gorescript is a fast paced doom-like FPS game, built in a custom C++ engine by a single person. Gorescript is the descendant of (the now renamed) Gorescript Classic, which was a 2014 web experiment to build an FPS game using Javascript. Gorescript Classic had great feedback, thus, enter Gorescript.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s move on to the real thing.
Our numbers on Greenlight so far:
I am not entirely sure if those numbers are good or bad. I have the feeling that we are on the slightly good side of things, based on reports of other greenlight campaigns I have seen online. Maybe you guys have some insights on that, please let me know in the comments.
Some of the comments we have received:
Well, this, is something that gets me excited, and I just can’t hide it. Reading all those positive and excited comments is the equivalent of “butterflies” for my marketing stomach!
Now that is all good and peachy, but how about addressing the elephant in every Greenlight room?
Traffic
This is our traffic source break down, since the beginning of the campaign 24 hours ago:
And here is a breakdown of all the social media traffic sources:
As you can see, Reddit was the biggest part of our traffic. A post I submitted on /r/gamedev a few hours after the Greenlight resulted in loads of traffic, and kept Sergiu up half the night to answer questions from other game developers.
With the end times of Steam’s Greenlight upon us, and the inflated number of games appearing daily on Greenlight, it is all the more important that you find alternative traffic sources for your campaign to be successful. Oh! And make the best of your Greenlight page formatting!
I hope that you find this article helpful on your game dev ventures. Let me know if you have further questions in the comments section, I would be more than happy to share my knowledge with you guys.