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Survivor Squad - 200 days of Greenlight
Watch the journey of an unknown PC/Mac title through the Greenlight ladder.
Howdy Gamasutra folks!
My name is Hugo Cardoso and I'm the developer behind Survivor Squad. I wrote an article one month after it was released and I hope it has helped some people have a more clear picture as to how well you can expect your average indie game to do.
Survivor Squad has just hit 200 days on Greenlight and as a result I decided to make a small video with some info on what happened in these 200 days.
Stats from the video:
It was released on 14/May/2013. ($8.99, €6.99, £5.99)
Currently available on 8 stores (Humble Widget, GamersGate, Desura, GreenManGaming, Amazon, ShinyLoot, IndieGameStand, GetGamesGo)
Survivor Squad has sold 983 copies direct and 8928 copies in bundles generating $7700.
The bundle sales were from IndieGameStand (887) and IndieGala which sold a total 33452 bundles but only 8041 redeemed their Desura key.
It took 7 months to develop with a one man team and a budget of $350.
With this blog post I hope to provide another data point that may help someone decide if indie game development is viable for them.
Regarding Greenlight
My opinion on Greenlight is a rather positive one, especially right now where to get to the top you need around 15k upvotes. It was certainly not very good when you needed 60k+ since there are plenty of good games that cannot hit those numbers. If the current rate of approval keeps up (~30 every 2 weeks) then pretty soon in order to get to the top you will only need 10k which should be attainable to most titles.
I see a lot of people saying how they think Greenlight is horrible and how they wish it would go away but the way I see it, it's a system with some flaws but much better than their old system.
Based on what I read online, in their previous system you would just send the game to Valve and 3 months later you'd get a "Yes" or "No" and that was about it. If Valve were still using this method I don't think that Survivor Squad, along with many other games that have been accepted, would ever get on Steam.
With Greenlight I can try to prove that there's an audience for the game by getting people to vote on it and as a result I may climb the Greenlight ladder and one day get on Steam.
Thanks for reading!
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