TWP # players on steam revealed

I’m really glad! And switch came only several months after the initial developing.

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Indeed. That is great news!!

@RonGilbert Would this mean that perhaps in the future doing another classic adventure game is not such a bad idea (sales-wise) after all?

Great stuff! Go switch.

I never thought of that, as feedback that rocks. You can tell how difficult each section was and where you could you know use some balance of difficulty.

It is a shame that such tactics were not in play ‘in the old days’, Jak and Daxter 2 has one of the hardest levels I have ever played and I consider myself a decent player.

Since they have to install and boot them up at least I think those numbers should work OK for comparing the games among each other for PC platforms.

This ratio is probably similar on GOG too (although much lower in total numbers).
But I wonder how many they have sold of their own games on their platform vs. Steam (particularly The Witcher 3).

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Yeah, but games that are on sale for $1.99 are going to have horrible skewed numbers from games that are $19 and rarely go on sale. When a game gets past a point, it’s bargain binned and if you only look at units, you not getting the whole story. I’ve bought several $1.99 games, booted them once and never again. I don’t think this is a “valid” sale when comparing to other games (it’s even worse for games that have been in a Humble bundle). As a dev, you’re moving a lot of units at $1.99 but making very little money. If the game is 5 years old, that’s OK. Just don’t compare units from that 5 year old game to a 2 year old game that’s rarely been on sale. It’s not a realistic or even useful picture.

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If I want to look at money then yes, it will be horrible wrong.

But if I just want to know something about their popularity I think it works well.
My assumption is that people not caring or really wanting to play a game (right away) won’t start the game at all. Or even install it or (regarding Humble) maybe not even claim the game on Steam.
(This assumption is based on my behaviour: I don’t start games until I want to play them.)

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I agree with @Nor_Treblig, but:

Same here: I haven’t played a lot of the games I got with Humble Bundles and I’ve never redeemed a Steam key. But I’m (we?) not the majority. A lot of people redeem the key on Steam and start the game just to look what kind of game that is.

That’s me.

You’d still have to factor in their age, sales and bundles, but yeah. If you compare games of similar age, you get a pretty good indication. For me, it was kind of eye-opening how little a lot of these games are actually played. Sure, there are many games competing for an audience, but there are also a lot of players, and some of the games I checked have been out for quite long.

Yes, but 1) This is how I make a living, so money is important and 2) People look at these lists and do translate it into money/success. They see a game that did 500K units and think it’s a successful game. I was just talking to a dev that has sold 3x what TWP did, but TWP has made almost 2x the money. He doesn’t consider his game a success but I bet people looking at these lists do.

I’m not sure I agree with that. Curiosity might be a better word. I buy a game at $1.99 and I play once and it will show up on this list, but they are crap and I never play them again, but it counts towards “popularity” which is wrong.

If you want to know raw units “shoved out the door”, then these lists are pretty accurate, but if you want to make any kind of meaningful evaluation, they can be very misleading and even dangerous if you base decisions off them.

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all valid points… but this is what happens when you throw a bone to a hungry dog :plate_with_cutlery:

Any tiny bit of info about TWP or anything coming from their favorite devs would inevitable be turn into a thread.

But starting it a little to see if it works is pretty much just part of the install. Installing something just means I might want to play it within the next few months. I just did it the other day with that Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island game @Sushi pointed out for $1.

And with things like Humble Bundle games I’ve definitely started games just to see if it’s something I might like. There’s some supposedly rhythmic racing game called Neon or something that looked like something I might like (cf. SkyRoads) but… I didn’t. Anyway, it was just bundle baggage. (But I’ve gotten some really cool unintended baggage too.)

As someone who has developed games and tried to get them published through traditional channels (the gatekeepers). I did a lot of number crunching.

Your best bet as a game dev is to pitch your game at the right price point to start with and hold firm on that price for as long as possible. With steady sales you will do alright.

You could discount your game and get 50,000 sales you wouldn’t have but if the price is much reduced so is your take.

70% of £14.99 will get you far more than 70% of £8.99 (A price I paid for TWP on a one day sale on GOG).

Or less.

Games older than 5 years do good to discount a lot of sales of an older game makes sense. They’ve had a lot of sales at full price, and have gone into the second run budget market much like the Lucasarts games did when they went Kixx XL back in the day.

For recently released games going the bundle/cheap sale price does you no favours at all
all it does is devalue your brand. Plus if your target audience has seen the drop and not got the game yet (even if they wanted to) they will want to hang on until the price goes down again, not wanting to buy it for more than they had seen it previously

These are my personal observations in my endeavours (I’ve only released one game commercially to date. I’ve written a great number though)…

If you knocked up something quick and cost effectively then low price high sales makes sense too but when you’ve laboured long and hard over a project for years it doesn’t.

Thimbleweed Park isn’t listed in this leak. Where did you get that figure from?

Edit: Ugh. Why couldn’t I find it in the spreadsheet before? Doh. Updated the Mojo article.