Category: News

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Development of multiplayer games has reached an inflection point: game developers have started supporting cross-platform play across all devices.  This is a significant shift that can create better player experiences while introducing new challenges for game developers. What makes this new development in cross-platform play so significant is that it challenges some long held beliefs and assumptions in multiplayer games:

• Players value competitive fairness of matches over being able to play with friends
• Mobile games can’t meet the same performance expectations as PC and console games
• Certain genres – like shooters – don’t translate directly to mobile
• Players only want to commit to playing a game on one gaming device

Why should you consider supporting cross-platform play for your game? 

1. It’s all about the players.  Players can now play with their friends who are on other platforms without having to buy another copy of a game or invest in an entirely new gaming device.  They can engage more frequently with a game across a number of screens throughout the day:  on the bus with a phone, at lunch on a laptop, at home on a PC or console, etc. 
2. Wait times go down and the competitiveness of matches go up. Combining all players into a single large pool allows matchmaking logic to handle where players intersect across gaming devices.  Players willing to opt-in across multiple gaming devices will find matches more easily, and with a larger pool of players to choose from, the likelihood of finding matches with similarly skilled players increases.  
3. Build and manage a single community of players. Cross-platform play eliminates the inherently fractional nature of isolated gaming devices and brings all players together to play, creating stronger and more loyal communities for game developers. And you’ll likely increase MAU and profit.
4. Simplify your backend infrastructure. With the right architecture, cross-platform play can simplify the backend services infrastructure around getting players matched and into games.  

This last point is what we are going to address in the remainder of this post by walking through an example using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon GameLift, the dedicated game server hosting and matchmaking solution.

How to design and support cross-platform play

Requirements for designing cross-platform play architecture

To get into the specifics of how your game can support cross-platform play on AWS, let’s explore the requirements of an end-to-end solution:

• Accept game requests from desired gaming devices such as Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, PC, Mac and mobile devices.
• Capture the device that the player is playing on
• Allow players to opt-in to or out of cross-platform play
• Capture player data for matchmaking such as skill and desired role
• Match players into games based on your defined rules
• Route player groups to a suitable game server for play

Figure 1 (below) shows a multiplayer back end architecture that supports cross-platform play. 

3 steps to implement a cross-platform play solution:

1. Process requests from multiple gaming devices
2. Match players across devices
3. Place players onto game servers

Let’s take a closer look at how to achieve these three steps.

1. Process requests from multiple gaming devices

First, you need to accept game requests from players on any gaming device the game supports and use the data from those requests to generate matchmaking requests.

In our multiplayer backend service architecture, we have a game service that acts as a front door to game clients. The game service is a custom part of the end-to-end process, and there are many options for implementing this service.  One solution is to use Amazon API Gateway with AWS Lambda, but you may already have your own service that interacts with clients which can be extended.

This game service provides a means to:

• Parse inbound game requests from clients
• Handle any necessary player authentication
• Perform any game specific logic for your game such as granting players permission to access a game mode or to check if a player is banned, for example
• Integrate with Amazon GameLift FlexMatch to process matchmaking requests and place players on game servers

Cross-platform play data is specifically provided in the matchmaking request to FlexMatch, so let’s dive into that integration next.

Integrate with Amazon GameLift SDK

The game service will be the point of integration with FlexMatch. This integration will enable the game service to create new matchmaking requests and have them processed. The integration can be implemented via the AWS SDK, and most popular languages are supported, including C++, C# and JavaScript.

Create StartMatchmaking Requests

Now that integration between your game service and FlexMatch is complete, your game service can create StartMatchmaking requests for FlexMatch. The information Amazon GameLift FlexMatch will need for your cross-platform solution includes:

• A unique matchmaking ticket ID
• PlayerAttributes
  • A unique player ID
  • The player’s current gaming device
  • A list of gaming devices the player has opted-in to playing with
  • Latency data to allow FlexMatch to determine where to place the match
  • Any other game-specific data the matchmaker should consider about the player like skill, maps, etc.

The StartMatchmaking request gets a MatchmakingTicket in response. This ticket includes the information that was part of the original request, including Ticket ID and a status of “SEARCHING”. For more information about integrating a game service with Amazon GameLift FlexMatch please see this guide.

2. Match players across gaming devices

Now that you have integrated with FlexMatch and are successfully making matchmaking requests, you now need to configure FlexMatch to use the request data to match players across gaming devices.  Configuring FlexMatch is done via the rule set.  Here is an example of a simple rule set that configures FlexMatch to match across gaming devices, considering latency as well:
 

{ "ruleLanguageVersion": "1.0", "name": "Cross platform matching with latency and expansions", "playerAttributes": [{ "name": "acceptablePlatforms", "type": "string_list" }, { "name": "myPlatform", "type": "string_list" }], "teams": [{ "name": "red", "minPlayers": 2, "maxPlayers": 2 }, { "name": "blue", "minPlayers": 2, "maxPlayers": 2 }], "rules": [{ "description": "Find the common set of platforms among players in the match”, "name": "PlatformMatch", "type": "collection", "operation": "reference_intersection_count", "measurements": [ "flatten(teams[*].players.attributes[myPlatform])" ], "referenceValue": "set_intersection(flatten(teams[*].players.attributes[acceptablePlatforms]))", "minCount":1 }, { "name": "FastConnection", "description": "Prefer matches with fast player connections first", "type": "latency", "maxLatency": 50 }], "expansions": [{ "target": "rules[FastConnection].maxLatency", "steps": [{ "waitTimeSeconds": 10, "value": 100 }, { "waitTimeSeconds": 20, "value": 150 }] }] }

 
Let’s look at each section of the rule set.

This first section is a bit of booking that includes the name of the rule set and the rule set language:

 "ruleLanguageVersion": "1.0", "name": "Cross platform matching with latency and expansions",

Next, you tell the rule set what player attributes to expect.  Latency is actually a special attribute that is passed directly from the matchmaking request to the rules engine that evaluates rule sets, so you only need to include the platform data in the playerAttributes.

  "playerAttributes": [{  "name": "acceptablePlatforms",  "type": "string_list"  }, {  "name": "myPlatform",  "type": "string_list"  }],

acceptablePlatforms is a string list of the platforms that the player has opted-in to playing with others on, and myPlatform is the platform of the player.

Next, you define the teams for the match.  In this case, there are two teams – a “red” team and a “blue” team – with two players required for each team (minPlayers and maxPlayers are equal):

 "teams": [{ "name": "red", "minPlayers": 2, "maxPlayers": 2 }, { "name": "blue", "minPlayers": 2, "maxPlayers": 2 }],

After that, you define the rules used to match players with the passed in player data.  The rules sections is where the core part of the cross-platform play evaluation happens:

 "rules": [{ "description": "Find the common set of platforms among players in the match”, "name": "PlatformMatch", "type": "collection", "operation": "reference_intersection_count", "measurements": [ "flatten(teams[*].players.attributes[myPlatform])" ], "referenceValue": "set_intersection(flatten(teams[*].players.attributes[acceptablePlatforms]))", "minCount":1 }, { "name": "FastConnection", "description": "Prefer matches with fast player connections first", "type": "latency", "maxLatency": 50 }],

In this case, we have defined two rules:

• The PlatformMatch rule does a reference_intersection_count operation between the acceptablePlatforms of the players in the match and the myPlatform value to determine if the platform of the current player being evaluated by the rules engine intersects with the rest of the players in the match.  If the values intersect, then the current player is added to the match.
• The FastConnection rule indicates that only players that have 50 milliseconds of latency or less can be added to the match.

Finally, you can also tune the rules to relax their constraints over time to find the sweet spot in balancing matchmaking for your players by utilizing the expansions section of the rule set:

  "expansions": [{  "target": "rules[FastConnection].maxLatency",  "steps": [{  "waitTimeSeconds": 10,  "value": 100  }, {  "waitTimeSeconds": 20,  "value": 150  }]

This section indicates that if a match has not been found after evaluating the current set of players for 10 seconds, relax the rules[FastConnection].maxLatency requirement from the original 50 milliseconds defined in the FastConnection rule to 100 milliseconds.  If no match has been found after 20 seconds, relax that constraint again to 150 milliseconds.

3. Place players onto game servers

Now that you are processing requests from multiple gaming devices and matching players across them, you need to connect the players in those matches to game servers.

Once FlexMatch has found a group of players that meet your matchmaking rule set requirements, it will create a game session placement request and place this in to a queue to find the lowest latency game server for the match. FlexMatch is wired up to Amazon GameLift Queues to automate the process of efficiently allocating new game sessions onto game servers.

Queues are configurable and allow you to determine several options that are used when Amazon GameLift places a session onto a game server:

• Queue Timeout
• Member Fleets
• Fleet Priority
• Latency policies

Your rule set used player latency data to match players that had a similar latency value to one another. You can then use that same latency data to find an Amazon GameLift Fleet in your Queue with the lowest average latency value for the match. To do this, you set a latency policy.

Like the expansions section of the rule set, latency policies define how long you want the Queue to spend trying to meet a specific latency target for the match of players, and policies can be made up of one or more rules.

Once the Queue has determined the best Fleet for the game session to be placed in, Amazon GameLift will request that a server in that Fleet reserve sessions for our group of players.

Fleets in Amazon GameLift represent the deployed state of your game server. They enable you to define how your build should be hosted within Amazon GameLift including:

• Instance Type
• Region
• Scaling Policies
• Capacity Limits
• Number of processes per instance

Now that Amazon GameLift has a game session for the players to connect to on a game server, it associates the server ip address and port number of the game server with the players in the MatchmakingTicket. This data is ready to be retrieved by the game service either through polling or via an SNS notification once the session has been placed.

Once the game clients have the server ip address and port, they can connect directly to the game server using that information. As a result, Amazon GameLift adds no latency between your game clients and the dedicated server when playing a game.

Start building a stronger community with cross-platform play

The design explored here allows you to start with a cross-platform configuration that works for you and evolve it over time with minimal overhead and impact. If you would like to learn more about supporting cross-platform play for your multiplayer game, join AWS and Gamasutra on April 24^th at 2 PM EST (11 AM PST) for a live webinar. We’ll explain design patterns and backend architecture that allow you to accept game requests from multiple gaming devices, match players into games, and route player groups to suitable game servers. Register here >>

Bruce Brown is the Software Development Manager of the Amazon GameLift Player Experience team responsible for building the FlexMatch matchmaking service. He has been in the software industry for 12 years including time spent at Microsoft on the Xbox Live Cloud Compute and Xbox Multiplayer teams and at Riot Games working on the League of Legends Live Gameplay and Personalization teams. Currently, he is playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild with his 6 year old son, and he enjoys designing games with his wife in his free time.

Peter Chapman is a Solutions Architect in the Amazon GameLift and Lumberyard teams. He has over 13 years of software development and architecture experience. He has designed solutions in many industry sectors including Retail, Healthcare, and Gaming. Currently, he is having a great time playing Axiom Verge on his Switch.

Learn more about cross-platform game development during our live webinar. Register today!

Hearthstone lead developer Ben Brode has some interesting thoughts on how the popular card-battler manages to balance player agency and strategy with randomness. 

Speaking to TouchArcade during a recent interview, Brode explaines the genre is driven by the notion of randomness, and the idea that players are continuously thrust into new and unfamiliar situations. 

In card-battlers, for instance, each deck is usually shuffled before each round. While the result of that shuffle might be considered lucky or unlucky depending on the outcome, the best players will be able defy the odds by thinking outside the box and cooking up new strategies.

“Hearthstone is much less random than other card games. Having that guaranteed mana each round means we have to go and look for ways to keep it from each match being too similar,” says Brode.

“We don’t want there to be one ideal class or deck that just wins the majority of the matches so we spend a lot of time looking for ways to keep matches fresh. We want you as a player to find yourself in situations that require you to think on the fly. 

“One of the things people often get wrong is that they say this game is luck based or skill based. Games don’t really work like that though. Tic-tac-toe is low skill and low luck whereas poker is high skill and high luck. It’s not a slider that you go one direction or the other on.”

He suggests Hearthstone is extremely similar to poker in that regard, positing that the game’s high skill requirement exists because of its random events and abilities. He believes the skill required to succeed increases when the game becomes more diverse, raising the stakes and pushing players to make the best plays possible. 

You can hear more from Brode by checking out the full interview over on TouchArcade. 

The developers at Eugen Systems have ceased their strike after negotiations with management came to a standstill.

It’s an acrimonious end to proceedings, with those on strike deciding to conserve their resources for future endeavors after management refused to budge. 

The strike began back in February, when the Wargame and Steel Division maker saw 21 of its 44 employees walk out in protest over unfair treatment. 

The studio was lambasted by staff for failing to compensate them for overtime, ignoring minimum wage laws, and refusing to acknowledge employee contracts. 

The strike lasted almost two months, but those protesting admitted they were struggling to make any headway, having hit out at management just two weeks ago for ignoring their demands and refusing to negotiate. 

“After six weeks on strike and an obvious lack of will to change the situation, Eugen Systems’ management finally show their true colors and aren’t trying to hide the fact they have no intention negotiating anymore,” wrote Eugen’s striking workers towards the end of March. 

“Our last meeting of Friday, March 23, lasted only a quarter of an hour. And for good reason, confronted with systematic rejection from management, we asked whether they would accept to negotiate anything. Their answer was brief and precise: no.”

The Eugen management team clearly hasn’t experienced a change of heart in the two weeks since, but even though the strike has petered out, the company’s employees claim the battle is far from over. 

“We will continue to fight for our rights with the legal means at our disposal. Therefore, approximately fifteen Eugen Systems employees and ex-employees have seized the prud’hommes (French labor tribunal),” they wrote in a new post on the Union of Video Game Workers website.

“It is thanks to the support we received that we were able to hold out for more than a month and a half. The public interest (media, politicians, players…) for this novel social movement reinforces us in the idea that it was not in vain, and that we were right to fight for our rights. We want this industry to mature, to recognize the value of our work and of our skills.”

Veteran animator and animation director Kristjan Zadziuk, whose credits include Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Watch Dogs 2, has posted the first in a new video series of gameplay breakdowns dissecting the mechanics behind popular titles. 

The subject for Zadziuk’s debut video is Sony Santa Monica’s impressive-looking God of War reboot, with the former Ubisoft man keen to explore how the studio created some of the game’s wonderfully fluid combat animations. 

Throughout the video, Zadziuk serves up an wonderfully detailed deconstruction of one of Kratos’ new movesets, analyzing everything from how the camera reacts to the God of War’s movements through to the transition animations that glue everything together. 

“Here is where we see the entry into the defense stance,” he explains, referring to the moment Kratos deploys his new retractable shield. “They’ve been really smart here, and instead of creating a ton of transition animations to do this stance, they’ve basically let the blend do the work. 

“You can see here, it looks like it’s about a three to five frame full-body blend, and when you look closely you can actually see where this transition happens.”

Naturally, Zadziuk’s commentary works best when its accompanied by the reference material in the video itself, so be sure to give it a watch if you’re in the market for some rather insightful game dev tidbits.

Failbetter Games, that far-off British emporium of text-driven tales, made waves a few years ago with the release of Sunless Seas, a horror-themed storytelling game that wove its way through Early Access before filling players with terror, dread, and arousement as a complete package. 

This year, Sunless Skies is making the same journey, taking the Failbetter world from the ocean’s depths into the void of space. It’s still in Early Access, but that makes it the perfect opportunity to chat with the folks at Failbetter about how things are going in development and asking what they’ve learned, and what they think they have yet to learn. 

So today at 1PM EDT (2 hours earlier than our usual jaunts), we’re going to be chatting with QA lead Lesleyann White while streaming Sunless Skies for your terror and amusement. Be sure to join us and ask your questions! 

And while you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables, and gameplay commentary. 

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Crossposted from Sharkbomb Studios blog.

For most people Early Access is synonymous with Steam. But with me being a solo-developer and Steam being such a big and important marketplace, I did not want to start with my game there. So instead, I launched Nowhere Prophet on itch.io.

Now, 6 months later I can say it was the right decision. So far I’ve made more than $10.000 in gross revenue on and a noticeable amount of that is from voluntary tips and the kickstarter-like rewards I offer, things that would not have been possible on Steam.

However Steam still plays a role, even when you’re selling elsewhere. Nowhere Prophet has been on Steam ever since the death of greenlight and a visible chunk of traffic and purchases comes from Steam, but more importantly: The sales spikes on itch.io correlate with increased wishlist additions, a key factor for launch success on Steam.

So, read on to find out what I did and how it all shakes out. Including all the interesting numbers for Nowhere Prophet. And as a little bonus: I’ve got some sales data from other itch.io titles for comparison, so you can look forward to even more graphs!

The Basics

Nowhere Prophet is a roguelike deck-building game that I’ve started working on in May of 2014. It’s been a long and winding road but since the 10th of October 2017 the game has been available in what I’ve dubbed First Access on the indie game store itch.io.

[embedded content]

It’s Early Access and Crowdfunding in one. That means you can buy and play the game while I’m still developing it. That’s the Early Access part. However you can also spend even more money than the $19.99 price tag to have something of yours (like your name, your face etc.) become a part of the game.

First Access Goals

I’ve decided to run a First Access phase for three key reasons:

1. My Happiness

I’m a solo developer. That means I’ve been working on Nowhere Prophet mostly by myself. Granted there are a bunch of people helping out here and there but all in all it’s me against the world. And I’ve been doing that for long enough that development had become draining. I just knew I had to make the game ready for actual players. I had to get it out there. To see how it is received.

2. Their Feedback

I want to make this game as good as I can and that means I need some help. Again, working on it by myself means I have only one constant point of view on the systems and content. There’s no back and forth within a team on the daily issues. And that’s not good enough. So another goal was to get some actually player feedback to inform the design going forward.

3. Our Community

And lastly I wanted to start building a community around the game. Get people involved and excited. After all it’s consistently been one of the most rewarding things to see folks play the game at conventions so a lively community sounds like fun. It’s also helpful for spreading the word and making the launch a success, I hope.

I wrote an article on the first few weeks of the First Access, which also explains my reasons for going with itch over Steam. But now, let’s get into the numbers.

Gross Revenue

Let’s start with the most obvious graph, the sales of the last six months.

Note that these amounts (and all others, unless otherwise specified) are gross revenue. That is they are the money paid by the buyers to itch, without any deductions in place yet. The money that ends up in my hands is less than that. I’ll go over how this breaks down in a bit, but first, let’s look at the graph:

As you can see there’s a soft upwards movement in the valleys over time (until recently), but clearly more interesting are those spikes that are in there.

Let’s do some detective work on those dates.

The first one is obviously the launch spike, right at the gate. The second spike coincides with SplatterCatGaming’s two YouTube Videos showing off Nowhere Prophet. The one towards the end is from one backer that purchased the 350$ THE TALE option. And then there’s the towering spike in the middle of the graph, and that one’s clearly from the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun preview. There also is a slightly elevated plateau from when Pladd started streaming the game on Twitch (correctly named Follower Death Simulator 2018 on his streams) but that’s hard to pick out in the graph above.

Breaking down the impact of these sales periods is hard to do precisely, but here’s my best guess.

Revenue Spikes

First let’s look at a stretch without any spikes: The 70 days from 4th November to 12th of January. During that time period the sales stayed more or less level.

And these 70 days give us an average of revenue per day ($23.76). That’s going to be our baseline. Next we look at the general spike duration (~8 days) and track the revenue for each of the spikes for that time. And that gets us:

And lastly, we can do something pretty useless, but funny: Compare the “attributable revenue” from that spike with the number of views, followers or subscriptions. Let’s take a look at that.

SplatterCatGaming (YouTube)

SplatterCatGaming has 440,000 subscribers and both videos have a total of 95.141 views (82,391 for the first plus 12,750 for the second). Of course these are the numbers for now, not the numbers right after the 8 day period, but this is more for fun than anything really useful.

• $0.0091 per view on the videos
• $0.0020 per subscriber

Rock Paper Shotgun

To measure the “reach” of Rock Paper Shotgun I took a look at their Facebook page likes (98,505) and Twitter followers (191,000). Obviously these aren’t the best way to estimate the visits on the article but it’s something.

• $0.0250 per Facebook like
• $0.0129 per Twitter follower

Pladd (Twitch)

Pladd has a total of 3,120 followers on twitch. That makes for a whopping:

• $0.1384 per Follower

Some more thoughts:

My game updates don’t seem to correlate with any spikes. I’ve heard from other teams that big updates can actually create a visible push in the sales numbers, even without coverage, but that is probably due to those team having good reach and more time to advertise their changes.

Also I think the active development is probably what contributes to that soft rise over time. However the recent drop off is harder to pin down – maybe I’ve reached saturation on itch?

Revenue by Region

Another thing I can do with the data is to look at how the purchases and revenue are spread across different countries. In total there’s purchases from 46 different countries.

It’s not surprising that the US makes up the bulk of the purchases. Germany comes second, probably because I’m a German developer and I’m well connected here. That’s followed by Great Britain, the Netherlands, Canada and then France.

If we split it by continent, with Canada and the US lumped into their own thing, the graph becomes a bit easier to read. And you can see, unsurprisingly that the majority of the sales come from North America and Europe.

Revenue by Reward

Alright, now for the key thing that’s different from regular First Access, and one of my main reasons for Itch: The Rewards!

Considering I invested about 2 days to design, plan, get feedback on the tier rewards, and about a day to set up the page, make the graphics, write the descriptions, we come out at $290,11 per day spent on the tiers. That’s decent.

But that does not include the time spent to communicate with backers nor the time spent working on the actual content. So this number again, is more fun than actually useful.

However what is maybe slightly more interesting:

I have reached out to all my 38 reward-level backers via e-mail, some of them multiple times, but so far the amount of replies (and thus the implementation and fulfillment) is just above 50%. That means almost half of all reward-tier backers never reached out to me with the details of their reward. This includes a few of the people who paid $80 for the THE FACE reward.

I’m still a bit baffled by this, but not overly surprised, since this seems to be the case for many kickstarters as well. One would think that this might be friends and family supporting the game but not wanting the reward but that doesn’t seem to be the case. All the non-responsive backers are e-mails I do not recognize.

Revenue by Source

And one final thing on the revenue: Itch.io allows buyers to tip the developer, by setting a custom price themselves. This means there’s three sources of revenue: The base price, the difference to a reward price an the tips. Here’s how those break down:

What I found surprising in that is the sheer amount of tips. I have made some experiments with donations in games in the past but with very little success. It feels as if the itch.io buyer community is very much pro indie and willing to support developers with a little extra, if they can. It’s much appreciated.

Steam Wishlists

Another interesting set of data is related to Steam. The Nowhere Prophet store page and the community page have been available on Steam since Mid 2017, about half a year prior to the Early Access.

During that time it had accumulated almost 500 wishlist additions without being very active there. That’s neat. But what’s even more interesting is if we take the wishlist additions (and deletions) during the First Access period and compare them to the itch.io purchases:

As you can see these two are linked! That means that when the game’s being bought during spikes, those people that don’t buy it probably wishlist it on Steam. That’s good to know. Especially since wishlists seem to be a good indicator for Steam launch success.

Revenue and Earnings

So, and as mentioned earlier all the numbers given so far are gross revenue. That is they are what comes in to itch. That’s not what actually ends up on my end. From the revenue you have to deduct VAT (where added, not all countries), payment provider fees and of course the itch store fees. The result are the net earnings.

For example, you sell something for $20. Based on that amount the itch fees and payment fees (based on the payment provider used by the buyer) are set. In countries where VAT (the height of which is based on the country of the buyer) is added, that is put on top.

Now depending on the payment model you selected (direct to you, or via dedicated payouts), Itch can either pay the VAT for you, deducting it from your revenue, or you pay VAT yourself. Regardless, what remains are your earnings.

With my share for itch set to 10%, the default, I come out with about 85% of the revenue. On Steam, with the platform share set to 30% and the VAT (again, where applicable) being deducted from the sale price (not put on top as with itch) that share will turn out to be around 65%.

Total Revenue

So, with all these numbers, where do I stand currently in regards to the moolah?

• Purchases: 450
• Gross Revenue: $10,201.93
• Net Earnings: $8,704.60

That does look good. It certainly is better than I had expected. Granted I have set my expectation purposefully low but still, this is encouraging when it comes to a full launch on steam.

However these figures need some context to really make sense. So let’s compare them to other games on itch, and to the estimated Nowhere Prophet the development cost.

Cross-Game Comparison

Now what’s interesting is to see how all this that compares to other games sold on itch. Let’s look at Overland, Cultist Simulator, Solitune and two more anonymous games which were all generous enough to share their data with me.

At first glance it looks like Overland is a lot more successful, which isn’t really surprising – it’s been generating a good amount of buzz. However Overland has been available for two years now. This data gets a bit more interesting if you break that down to a graph of gross revenue per day since launch. Ideally I’d have compared the first six months for each game but that’d require appropriately detailed data.

Anyway, here you go:

That gives an interesting perspective and a surprisingly wide range. However what’s less surprising that even in this small cross-section you can already see how only a few games are really successful and then it quickly dips down. It’s the same in Steam and probably on any other digital marketplace.

However with that said, Nowhere Prophet seems to be in a good place. That’s reassuring.

Also, here’s some info on the games, to provide additional context.

Solitune

Launched in November 2016, Solitune is a small playable experience sold for $2 a piece. It’s also available on Steam.

Anoynmous 1

This game was also launched without Early Access in late 2017. It’s been available on a variety of platforms and interestingly their Itch.io sales amount to about 12% of total revenue.

Anonymous 2

This game’s Early Access was made available exclusively on itch starting mid 2017. It’s comparable to Nowhere Prophet in terms of genre and price. As a small note: The price of the game has varied over time.

Cultist Simulator

Launched in October 2017 it was available for an Early Access sale until end of February. Interestingly that creates a solid sales peak on the last days it was available. You can find out more about the numbers in this article.

Overland

Launched its First Access in the middle of April 2016, it’s probably one of the more successful titles. It’s not available elsewhere. Overland is an interesting data point because it’s a similar game and price point to Nowhere Prophet.

One point of note is that none of these games have offered kickstarter-like rewards and not all of them had been in Early Access.

Now it would be interesting to compare these figures to the development cost. Unfortunately that’s not something I can do for the other games, but it’s something I can do for Nowhere Prophet!

Do you even Break Even?

And something else we can do with the total earnings is: We can hold them against the development costs and do a projection for Steam.

Quoting Alexis Kennedy who roughly and anecdotally assumes itch to make up about 3% of the final Steam sales. That feels a tad optimistic, but it’s as good a number as any. So with that applied I could reasonably sell about 15,000 Units in a similar time period on Steam.

So where does that put me in regards to break even? To answer that we first have to figure out how much development has and will cost.

For my freelancers and assorted costs I have invoices that I can put down and that amount to about $65,000. But for my own (mostly unpaid work) it is a little trickier.

Luckily I have tracked the time I’ve spent on the game. And that comes out at a total of – oh god – 4275 hours, or about 534 working days so far. Since there’s going to be a few more months of hard work ahead, let’s just round up to a full 600 days of work and let’s put a daily rate of $300. That gets us to $180,000 for 3-4 years of development time. That wouldn’t be what you’d call a stellar yearly salary but what are you gonna do.

So add these two things together and the game will have cost about $245,000. Let’s just round that up to $250.000, a cool quarter mil.

(Note: I’m based in Germany so all my internal calculations are in Euro. To make this properly line up with US Dollars I’m assuming a conversion rate of $1.2 to 1.0€)

So?

With all these numbers laid out, how am I faring?

Let’s say I’ll get some more sales on itch to amount to $10,000 in earnings, that leaves a hole of $240,000. So how much would I have to sell on Steam to hit that?

Assuming a $19.99 price and 65% profit from that, that means $13 per unit sold. But wait, most people on Steam will probably buy during a sale – that’s the reality, so let’s take off another 20% so it’s more like $10 per unit.

That means I’d have to sell about 24,000 copies on Steam. That’s a good lot more than the currently projected 15,000, so… Uh… I guess that means I’ll have to pump those rookie numbers up and hope for some good coverage from press and influencers.

Results

Right, so that was a long and rambling article. What can I take away from all these numbers?

Success Story?

Firstly, after six months of First Access, did it meet my goals?

Yes, yes and no.

I’m definitely happier now that the game’s been out in the wild. It’s great seeing people interact, watching streamers engage with the game and seeing people share the game in reddit thread. Going to Discord also was a great decision. My forum is still pretty inactive and most of the activity is in the Discord chat.

Feedback has also been great. I have a few engaged players that help me fine tune the game and it’s been great hearing what people like and not like. For example I’ve started focusing more on adding depth to the unlockables, because I’ve found out that people want some more meat there.

However I have less of a community than I had hoped for. There are a few very active players that provide feedback and ideas, and there are bunch more fans that idle in the channel and that show up around the larger updates. However what it comes down to is: There’s not really any activity unless I’m around. And that’s unfortunately not quite what I would call a healthy community.

Surprising Surges!

Sales have been higher than expected. The itch.io featuring around launch and the game showing up at a good spot in the roguelike tag of the store are a constant source of visits. Also the spikes from the streamers that have picked up the game unprompted and the RPS article have been great.

However these have also been random. I have reached out to many press outlets around launch but with very little success. Almost all the coverage I have gotten has been chance encounters or them discovering the game. That’s not really heartening going forward, but that’s how I’ve experienced things so far. Granted I might just be bad at reaching out.

Small Sources.

One interesting thing is how consistently a few reddit threads and the steam page brings in traffic. It’s not a lot – just about 100 hits each month in total. But that’s good. Compared with the wishlist surges it probably pays to have the Steam page up as early as possible. Also note that itch shows me the traffic source for the purchases and I can tie 14 out of all 450 purchases to the Steam page. That’s neat.

Also the reddit threads are especially interesting since these are examples of fans sharing the game in an appropriate post. That’s been super motivating for me and since a few of these posts are in a slightly slow-moving subreddit (r/roguelikes) they’ve been bringing in traffic for a while now.

What’s next

Well, I keep working on the game, of course. I just detailed the roadmap for Q2 the other day (you can read more here) and I hope to have it in a final shape this year.

And that’s all I’ve got for now.

Thanks for reading and if you’ve got any questions, do ask! You can reach me on twitter (@mnerurkar). Also if you’re interested in digital card games, maybe go check out Nowhere Prophet, buy it on itch.io or just wishlist the game on Steam.