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Postpartum of an Early Access Launch
Our game "Cashtronauts" launched on Steam Early Access last month. The reception has been positive, but sales are off to a sluggish start. Here we share stats and look at what went wrong, what went right, and what we can improve.
9 Min Read
This article is an improved version of a post from our dev blog, following discussion and feedback from a thread on /r/gamedev.
My name is Simon (@PixelPoutine), and I'm the main guy behind Cashtronauts, an top-down space combat & trading game. Our team is mostly comprised of veteran developers with experience in the industry, but this project straddles the line between hobby project and indie venture.
Last month we launched on Early Access I'm here now to share what went right, what went wrong, and what changes we are going to make to prepare for our eventual 1.0 release.
("The game's still in active development so it felt inaccurate to call this a "postmortem", hence my co-opting of "postpartum".)
Our Old Sales Predictions
Back in July, two weeks before our launch I wrote up a blog post containing sales predictions to try and guess how many copies our game would sell in its first month. It was hardly scientific; there were healthy doses of gut feeling and a lot of the games we compared ourselves to on SteamSpy had sold so few copies as to provide unreliable stats.
That said, here are the predictions I came up with in July:
Pessimistic - 500 copies sold
Realistic - 1,500 copies sold
Optimistic - 7,500 copies sold
Obviously we weren't expecting our game to be a breakout hit and nobody was planning on quitting their day job. So, how'd it go?
Our First Month's Sales
Obviously the Steam developer NDA prevents us from sharing specific number, so let's look at what SteamSpy says:
Now that could be interpreted as Cashtronauts selling between 23 and 2,000 copies, which falls between our "pessimistic" and "realistic" guesses. But honestly, our pessimistic sales projection of 500 copies sold in the first month turned out to be overly optimistic.
What Went Wrong
As I said earlier, I'm no statistician so it's not that surprising that our estimates were off. But launching on Early Access can serve as a good "dry run" for the eventual 1.0 release, so it's important to take a serious look at our mistakes so as not to repeat them.
I'm not one of those guys who just releases his game and sends out one generic PR emails on launch day, CC'd to every site under the sun. Nor did I just expects Cashtronauts to "go viral".
In the two weeks leading up to release I generated and gave out over 120 keys to the game to journalists, gaming sites, YouTubers, curators and other gaming folks. Each one was sent in a personalized, focused email that was written directly for the person being targeted... but about 95% of these messages got no reply, and only about 60 Steam keys were even activated. Why?
Rambling - I tried to be concise, but my emails still came out to over 300 words each. The first few dozen I sent didn't even have screenshots embedded in them either, just a link to our presskit.
Bad pitch - My "log line" was "Cashtronauts is a twin-stick space capitalism game starring spacefaring dinosaurs". That doesn't really explain much, and it sounds like a bullet hell shooter (which is isn't). SteamSpy also tells us that twin stick shooters and bullet hell games don't perform well on Steam.
The launch of a game is not news (especially on Early Access) - Hundreds of games are released weekly, so why would yours become a headline? It had better be something really unique (but understandable!) or come from an established team. Doubly so if it's only releasing on Early Access.
I didn't have a new launch trailer - This builds on that last point. The last trailer I made was for our Xbox One announcement at E3, so I used that as our main Store Page trailer. Sending out a new, never-before-seen trailer greatly increases your chances of being featured. You're sending out fresh, free content for them to use.
In passing, we've gotten some critiques on this trailer as well. We were aiming at something brief and high-energy, but failed to explain the game well.
The game looks nice in motion, but less so in static screen shots - I should have made better use of animated GIFs
Not much of a community behind the game already - I thought I'd been vocal onTwitter, Reddit, Facebook and in the Montreal gaming scene for a while. I knew my game wasn't a household name, of course, but I had enough of a posse to spread the word a bit on launch. My friends, family and followers did share the news, but that didn't do much.
What Went Right
But it wasn't all bad!
Playtest, playtest, playtest! - I'm lucky to live in Montreal. There are countless game dev meetups, conferences, parties and events where you can bring your game on a laptop and get feedback from others. It can be disheartening, but step back and say nothing at all and let people jump into your game. I could write a whole blog post about this, but even doing a few nights of playtests in the weeks leading up to launch helped me fix some problems and points of confusion I'd never have seen coming
@Cashtronauts first time testing with us....hope it's not their last! pic.twitter.com/CzdjoA9sc1
— GamePlaySpace MTL (@GamePlaySpace) July 23, 2015The game has received a positive reception - As of this moment, the 13 user reviews on the game's Steam page are all positive. The YouTubers who did play the game often did long, multi-part Let's Plays of the game and were vocal about how much they liked it. There was even a review on Radio-Canada Saskatchewan that gushed about how much fun the game was!
Populate your Community Hub before launch - YouTubers were given keys to the game much in advance of release and were given no embargo date, and encouraged to share their videos there. I started pinned discussion threads for bug reports, suggestions and other topics. This all meant that on launch day Steam users saw an active Hub and could easily jump into the community. It also pays active to be positive and present in the discussion threads!
Small, frequent updates - Don't plan on taking a vacation the day after your game launches. We had a private beta for about a month before the general release, but there we still surprise issues on launch day. These were patched quickly and might have saved me from a bad review or two.
Launching with a discount - A lot of the traffic to our game came from the "specials" tab. There are also Twitter bots, blogs and subreddits dedicated solely to gaming deals. We did a 15% discount, and I think that was a good number, but even if you do 10% you'll definitely make up that discount with the increased exposure a sale brings.
Reaching out to niche outlets - Cashtronauts can be played co-op, so I reached out to Co-Optimus and they wrote about it twice! It's also a space game, so SpaceGameJunkie was an obvious choice as well. He did a hilarious Let's Play series and became the game's biggest Steam Curator as well.
More Stats!
Before you launch on Steam you're given estimates on how many views and visits your Store Page will receive, but there's no way to know how many of those visits will turn into sales until after you launch. Now that we've been on the store for long enough, we have a few basic stats:
About 3% of our impressions turn into visits - An impression is when your game's icon appears on Steam: Coming soon list, Recommended For You, etc. A visit is when someone goes to your actual store page, either by clicking on it or via the Discovery Queue.
Less than 1% of visits to our page turned into sales - This will hopefully get better as we improve our presentation, trailers and leave Early Access.
3% - 5% Wishlist fulfillment - This stat comes from our own experience, and from a similar blog post from Lars Doucet here on Gamasutra in 2014.
There are a few different ways to give a bump to your impressions, like "visibility rounds" and your move from Early Access to full Release. Valve gives estimates on how many impressions and visits these will provide, so now we can more accurately predict our future sales.
So What's Next?
In terms of marketing and promotion we made a lot of mistakes, so in an odd way I'm glad that our game didn't get that much exposure. Our Early Access launch has not only helped us polish and improve the game, but it's also been an incredible way to improve our PR and marketing skills as well.
So what are we going to do differently now?
Focus on big updates - There'll still be quick bug fixes and balance patches here and there, but new content to the game is going to come in big, Titled Updates with their own trailers. These will be timed with visibility rounds and PR pushes
Smaller, more concise emails - I tried to keep my messages short but my targets are swamped. The next round of emails are going to have 3 or 4 sentences, some screenshots, a link to the trailer and some Steam keys. That's it.
Improve Our Store Page Text - A lot of people thought this game was built for controllers, or that it was a bullet hell game, or missed out on other features. Clearly we need to improve our communication skills.
More GFYs - Animated gifs. So hot right now.
More Promo - Whenever I've got a down moment I'm going to keep poking journalists and YouTubers. I should also write some game dev advice blog posts. I mean, I enjoy helping people out of course but hey it's also free eyeballs for your game and Cashtronauts Cashtronauts Cashtronauts Cashtronauts.
Thank you for reading!
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