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On May 31st, exactly eight months after our Kickstarter, we released Weather Factory’s debut game, Cultist Simulator. How did it go? Here’s a mini-retrospective.

Surviving the Launch

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

— endless screaming ⚧ (@infinite_scream) June 6, 2018

CS has done well. More on that in a moment. I’m very happy it has. But this means we’ve been much, much busier in the last week than we expected, and we expected to be busy. After six months of beta testing, the game is in pretty solid shape, but I have a helpdesk queue full of edge-case save issues and black screen crashes on older versions of OSX. We’ve also got a mountain of feedback, press attention and old acquaintances getting in touch to say nice things.

And there are only two of us. We’re digging ourselves out from under, and we’re bringing in some freelance help, but we’re bloody glad we cleared our calendars for the week after launch. We will be slow to reply to everything for a few days yet. Lesson: clear your calendar in launch week.

A special mention for feedback. We’ve got a lot of feedback: lots of enthusiasm, lots of very specific requests, lots of people asking for an autosort feature or other UI tweaks, and the usual round of Internet nastiness. One guy suggested that my approach to game design should land me in the Hague for trial for crimes against humanity. I have developed a thick skin over ten years, and all things considered the feedback, even the negative stuff, is an overwhelmingly good thing to have. But ladies and gentlemen and others, hear me when I say, if you release an unexpectedly popular indie game on the Internet in 2018, this is what you have to be ready for:

What’s up next?

• Bug fixing. The queue is beginning to look under control, but it’ll need a bit more work.
• Modding support. I really want to enable simple modding support, and it’s about a day’s work that never quite made it in.
• More content. I’m gagging to get back to work on this.
• Localisation. A lot of players are asking about this. Lottie’s got this covered, and we’ll have more news in a while.
• A mobile version. We had a porting partner nearly signed! and then they got offered a bigger and better project and (for reasons we sympathise with) couldn’t take the gig! We’ll get back to this. No timeline, though.
• Brazil! We’ve been nominated for three awards at the Brazilian Independent Games Festival. So we’re flying out to Sao Paulo end of June. If you live there, say hi.

July will, we hope, be more normal. Though Lottie’s speaking at Develop.

Sales Figures

Everyone’s been asking about this, so I won’t tease you.

I’ve talked before about the importance of always trying to predict your numbers. Here’s what I thought back in March:

My casual top-down prediction would be that, if itch is 3% of Steam, this will amount to about 20K sales, which would put us firmly in the black for the year and make me very happy. 

I did give this some more thought. The total budget of Cultist Simulator, including freelancer costs and marketing, was 130K GBP (ish – we’re a bit behind on calculating the actuals). With our Kickstarter money and our advance funds from Humble Publishing, we needed to sell about 3K copies to break even. You need to do more than break even in gamedev, though.

I thought we would almost certainly sell 10K, which would be enough to call it a limited success and mean that with another Kickstarter and good DLC sales we could make another game. I was reasonably confident of 20K. 30K was my most optimistic case. “It’s not going to be another Sunless Sea,” I kept telling people, especially myself. “It’s half the budget, half the team size, half the time in development and we can’t use Fallen London to promote it like we did at Failbetter with Sea.”

On day 6, across all platforms, we’ve already sold more than 35,000 copies . This is almost exactly the number that Sea sold in the week after launch. I mean, eerily close. This makes me very happy but it also makes me genuinely existentially troubled about my complete inability, ten years and eight launches into my career, to predict commercial success. Next time I might just throw yarrow stalks.

But here you go: I am going to use Jake Birkett’s formula to assume that in year 1 we will sell 157K copies. (Sea sold 350K but just because lightning strikes twice, I’m not going to assume it’ll strike three times.)  I’ll see you in June 2019 and we’ll talk about that. I should note that our publisher, Humble, gets (deservedly) 30% of whatever we earn from this, and that a lot of those copies will be at a discounted price for store sales, so working out final predicted revenue isn’t straightforward, but yes, we made a profit, yes, we will definitely be supporting CS with updates, and yes, Weather Factory will be making more games.

How Did That Happen?

THIS IS NOT TRUE: ‘A game made by two people in a flat has a good chance of hitting #1 on Steam.’
THIS IS ALSO NOT TRUE: ‘As an indie, I should multiply my best-case sales estimates by about five’.

If you take either of those lessons away from this post, I have done you tremendous harm. Commercial indie game dev is not a lottery, not exactly, but it’s certainly a jungle in a storm. You might walk right past that path to safety, into the river, if you blink at the wrong moment.

But here are the things that I think helped us do this well, and that I tentatively recommend.

• Luck. Unquestionably, and probably the biggest factor.
• Community. We have a really nice, really active, really engaged community, and we talk to them constantly. This takes effort but it seems to have paid off.
• Kickstarter. A successful Kickstarter campaign gives you an initial boost in buzz, the core of a community, pre-sales of your game, an opportunity to beta-test both your game and your marketing. I haven’t used other crowdfunding options, but I like KS a lot.
• Humble’s support. We’ll never know how much difference this made, but we think a lot, obviously, or we wouldn’t have gone with them! Humble are a new name in publishing but they have reach and muscle. They put our name in front of their customers, they arranged a cross-promo with Slay the Spire, they helped connect us to press, they helped a lot with connecting us to streamers.
• Lottie. My business partner, and better half, did a bloody good job of marketing the game. It’s not a job she loved, either, but it’s been her life for about two months. Even if you’re a small team, you probably need to make marketing someone’s job. (And if you ever have the opportunity to work with someone really smart who you trust completely… I recommend it.)
• Streamers. Cultist Simulator streams surprisingly well, for a chilled, chatty sort of stream. This worked much better than we expected.
• Existing reputation. I built Fallen London, I was creative director on Sunless Sea, I’ve worked at Bioware and Telltale and Paradox, and people know what an Alexis Kennedy project is like. It’s much tougher for first-timers.
• Reviews. We got some really nice reviews on Day 1. It’s always hard to know how much press helps, but it can’t have bloody hurt.
• Innovation. Everyone says ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ This is a total bastard when you’re trying to figure out who to show the game to (we kept asking people ‘If you like x, you’ll like Cultist Simulator. What is x?’ and never got many useful answers) but it does make us stand out.
• CONTROVERSY!! A lot of people really, really like CS. Some people find it dull or incomprehensible. I think the game’s divisive nature has helped, actually. People who love it really love it, so they’re inclined to champion it.
• A quick start. It’s a slow-paced game, but it runs in a window and starts up quickly. You get things happening in the first ten seconds of play. Sunless Sea, it’s like two minutes before anything really happens. I was very conscious that the first couple of minutes of a game are where you win or lose people.
• I let my eight-year-old daughter press the button that released the game. I can’t absolutely guarantee this had anything to do with it, but if you have a small child about the place, it’s worth a shot.

There’s more, but…

I’m taking the rest of the weekend off. More retrospective stuff from me and Lottie soon. I hope this was useful! if you’ve got qs, stick ’em in the comments.

[A minutely different version of this blog post appeared at www.weatherfactory.biz.]

© 2018 Valve Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries.

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Beta Ring will begin receiving the latest Xbox One system update (1806.180531-1920). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 1806 system update.

New Features:

Additional Accessibility Options – New Narrator languages

• Users can now enable the new Narrator languages: Spanish (es-MX, es-AR, es-CO, es-CL), English (en-AU), Portuguese (pt-BR), Polish (pl), Swedish (sv-SE), and Dutch (nl-NL, nl-NB).

Fixes:

My Games & Apps

• Fixed an issue where users were seeing multiple Games & Apps categories appearing in their category lists.

Groups

• Fixed an issue where users would have issues navigating Groups within the Guide.

Localization

• Various localization issues fixed in this build.

Search

• Pressing Y button anywhere in the dashboard now will bring up search as designed.

Settings

• Fixed an issue in which the console would turn back on after a full shutdown.

System Performance

• Misc. performance fixes in the platform.

Known Issues:

Groups

• Enabling Groups after taking the update: Groups may not appear for you on first sign in unless you do a full console reboot after taking the system update. This is being fixed in an upcoming build and should only affect having just taken this system update.
• The Groups tab in My games & apps may not show after sign in even though you can access Groups in Guide, or you may see “This group does not exist” on Home on first sign-in for your existing Groups.  Workaround: Sign in / out to refresh these pages.
• Some changes might not be reflected when editing Groups between multiple consoles after coming out of connected standby. Sign in/out to fix.
• Adding the Rewards app to Groups causes you to be unable to access your Groups. This is fixed for an upcoming build.
• Using special characters in Group names (e.g. &,”) causes issues during Group creation or using the “Add more” flow. Note: emojis are fine. This is being fixed in an upcoming build.
• You may see issues with Groups if you frequently switch between your non-Preview console and your Preview console. Workaround: Reset your Groups locally on the Preview console through “My games & apps” > Groups, then using the “Reset groups” button at the bottom of the page to resync from the service.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter an incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

Networking

• Work continues on the stability of the Wi-Fi connectivity.  If you see any issues please report the problem for investigation by performing a Full system software via the dashboard as opposed to just pressing the Xbox Power button.

YouTube

• Some users are encountering an issue where their YouTube account is being signed out whenever they launch the app.
  
  • Workaround: Uninstall/re-install the app and sign in with your account again.

Nintendo’s share value has been all over the place just recently; a large jump in price was seen after the Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! reveals, followed by an equally large drop after reports that Nintendo’s Quality of Life project had died. Now it seems to have dropped even further still in response to yesterday’s E3 Direct.

As you can see in the chart below, yesterday saw a drop of 6.21% in the company’s share value. Nintendo has seen bigger fluctuations than this in the past, but it’s still a rather hefty change in percentage. It has been suggested that analysts are currently doubting whether or not Nintendo can achieve its hardware and software sales having seen the line up from E3. Of course, an awful lot now appears to be riding on the shoulders of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and the new Pokémon titles later this year.

It would seem that further specific concerns point to slightly lower than expected Switch sales this calendar year, the launch of Nintendo Labo, and the future of Nintendo’s Online service.

What do you think about this next period in the Switch’s life? Do you think 2018 is feeling a little quiet, or are you happy with the number of games and the services available with Switch? Let us know your thoughts below.

Tim Schafer and the team at Double Fine have seemingly just realised the Nintendo Switch exists as they’ve announced not one game for the hybrid platform, but two. First we got news that classic point and click adventure Grim Fandango Remastered is headed to the eShop, and now it’s been confirmed Broken Age is also getting the same treatment.

Broken Age remains one of the most highly-backed games to ever appear on Kickstarter, arriving in 2014 in two parts due to how vast the game grew in size and scope. It’s already been out on PS Vita for a while now, so we know a handheld version works. Double Fine says the port will be coming sometime, “in the coming months.”

Have you played Broken Age before? Do you think it’s a good fit for Nintendo Switch? Share your thoughts on this new addition below…

Moss is Now Available on Steam!

Moss™ is a single-player action-adventure puzzle game and new IP from Polyarc tailor-made for the VR platform. It takes classic components of a great game—such as compelling characters, gripping combat, and captivating world exploration—and combines them with the exciting opportunities of virtual reality.

The post Co.Design: ‘3 brilliant design details from the new Microsoft Office’ appeared first on Stories.

By Malcolm Owen
Wednesday, June 13, 2018, 10:36 am PT (01:36 pm ET)

Apple has made available the second beta of watchOS 4.3.2 to developers for testing, two days after the company released the second betas for iOS 11.4.1, tvOS 11.4.1, and macOS 10.13.6.

Code for the latest beta can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Center, as well as through an over-the-air update on Apple Watch units enrolled into the testing program. The public version of the beta release is usually provided a few days after the developer variants.

The second watchOS 4.3.2 beta replaces the first beta that used build number 15U5053b.

As with the betas of Apple’s other operating systems, the small incremental version change suggests the update includes bug fixes and performance enhancements, rather than any new features. It is likely this is due to the upcoming release of watchOS 5, currently undergoing its own beta testing and expected to ship this fall.

AppleInsider is currently testing out all of the new betas released this week, including the iOS 11.4.1, tvOS 11.4.1, and macOS 10.13.6 releases from Monday, to find what features are included, if any.

AppleInsider, and Apple itself, strongly advise against installing beta release software on mission-critical hardware, due to the potential loss of data that can occur.