{"id":17110,"date":"2018-04-11T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/316440"},"modified":"2018-04-11T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T15:00:00","slug":"blog-early-access-without-steam-lets-break-down-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/04\/11\/blog-early-access-without-steam-lets-break-down-the-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: Early Access without Steam? Let’s break down the numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u2019s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.<\/small><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Crossposted from Sharkbomb Studios blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/a> on itch.io<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, 6 months later I can say it was the right decision. So far I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

However Steam still plays a role, even when you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve got some sales data from other itch.io titles for comparison, so you can look forward to even more graphs!<\/p>\n

The Basics<\/h2>\n

Nowhere Prophet is a roguelike deck-building game that I\u2019ve started working on in May of 2014. It\u2019s been a long and winding road but since the 10th of October 2017 the game has been available in what I\u2019ve dubbed First Access on the indie game store itch.io.<\/a><\/p>\n

[embedded content]<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Early Access and Crowdfunding in one. That means you can buy and play the game while I\u2019m still developing it. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

First Access Goals<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve decided to run a First Access phase for three key reasons:<\/p>\n

1. My Happiness<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a solo developer. That means I\u2019ve 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\u2019s me against the world. And I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

2. Their Feedback<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s no back and forth within a team on the daily issues. And that\u2019s not good enough. So another goal was to get some actually player feedback to inform the design going forward.<\/p>\n

3. Our Community<\/strong><\/p>\n

And lastly I wanted to start building a community around the game. Get people involved and excited. After all it\u2019s consistently been one of the most rewarding things to see folks play the game at conventions so a lively community sounds like fun. It\u2019s also helpful for spreading the word and making the launch a success, I hope.<\/p>\n

I wrote an article on the first few weeks of the First Access<\/a>, which also explains my reasons for going with itch over Steam. But now, let\u2019s get into the numbers.<\/p>\n

Gross Revenue<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s start with the most obvious graph, the sales of the last six months.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll go over how this breaks down in a bit, but first, let\u2019s look at the graph:<\/p>\n

As you can see there\u2019s a soft upwards movement in the valleys over time (until recently), but clearly more interesting are those spikes that are in there.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s do some detective work on those dates.<\/p>\n

The first one is obviously the launch spike, right at the gate. The second spike coincides with SplatterCatGaming\u2019s two YouTube<\/a> Videos<\/a> showing off Nowhere Prophet. The one towards the end is from one backer that purchased the 350$ THE TALE option. And then there\u2019s the towering spike in the middle of the graph, and that one\u2019s clearly from the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun preview<\/a>. There also is a slightly elevated plateau from when Pladd<\/a> started streaming the game on Twitch (correctly named Follower Death Simulator 2018 on his streams) but that\u2019s hard to pick out in the graph above.<\/p>\n

Breaking down the impact of these sales periods is hard to do precisely, but here\u2019s my best guess.<\/p>\n

Revenue Spikes<\/h2>\n

First let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

And these 70 days give us an average of revenue per day ($23.76). That\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u2019s take a look at that.<\/p>\n

SplatterCatGaming (YouTube)<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n