Defining the success of The Chills - A 2D indie horror game created by a solo dev!

 

The Chills is one of my so-called Successful game which I have ever created. I know many will call it a failure but I am happy that it has got around 19 reviews,at the time of writing the post, given that I did not do any marketing to begin with. How cool is that! It happened on its own organically.

GOALS: Here are my goals. I will update the data from time to time. I will strike through them as soon as I reach my goals. Success is different for different people but for me my goal is realistic and it is quite achievable at a price point of $0.99 because it has already got so many positive reviews which actually increased sales. 

a) Making A Living: The goal is to make a living creating video games. It is very much possible because I am from a country(IN) with a low cost of living. I basically need $200 a month to survive. It does not have to be from one game but from multiple titles.

b) Marketing: No, I am not going to invest in marketing. I might do some free marketing here and there. I want to see how many copies it sells with $0 marketing budget.

Milestones: 

Review milestone:

Target : 20 Reviews

- Got First review!

- Got 5 reviews!

- Got 10 reviews!

- Got 20 reviews!

Target Added: 50 Reviews

- Got 30 reviews!

- Got 40 reviews!

- Got 50 reviews!

  Reached 20 out of 20 reviews.

    Reached 21 out of 50 reviews.

 

 

Net Revenue milestone:

- Made $50 in sales

- Made $300 in sales

- Made $500 in sales

- Made $1000 in sales

- Made $1600 in sales.

Anything above that is anomaly.

Also, I will get back Steam direct fee which I paid after my game makes $1000 in net revenue. That should be my target for now.

 

Ayako's Mission Steam Launch Numbers so far - Sales Figure

Name: Ayako's Mission

Launch Date: 22nd June, 2023

Price: $0.99

Launch Discount: 40%

 Copies Sold: 73

Gross Revenue: $39

Wishlists: 140+

RESULTS: FAILED LAUNCH!

My Thoughts:

The fact that this game sold even a single copy with zero marketing budget is quite astonishing. This game has sold over 50 copies so that's good. Since it is still below $40 gross revenue, it is still considered a failed launch. Things have changed within a year. It's no longer working it seems. I won't give up though.

You can check out "Defining success of Ayako's Mission" to see my goals with this project.

Jaxon The Thief - A 2D Stealth Platform Game - Mini Postmortem

Today, I am gonna talk about the game Jaxon The Thief and how it did on Steam. Due to the NDA I am afraid I can't expose exact sales figure. So, I apologize in advance for that.

Jaxon The Thief is a 2D Stealth Platformer based on the story of an infamous thief called Jaxon who mostly targets the richest houses in the various cities in the US. 

Check out the game on Steam and support me if you want. Thank You!

One day, I came to know about The Master Spy game on Steam and I fell in love with the ideas that I got from that game. I thought it would be fun to create a game like that and hopefully be liked by some players. So, I created the game within a month and a half working 16 hours a day including Saturdays and Sundays and finally launched it on Steam.

I had priced it just at $1.99 and probably, this pricing was a bit higher for customers probably as per the sales data of the first week after the launch. 

So, how did it do on Steam? Terrible. Just terrible. Many developers don't want to admit that they sucked and that their games did not sell well. But I will share it even if it had sold 0 copies.  I am not scared to fail because I have failed a lot already and it just excites me more than making me depressed. 

I have sold around 20 copies(Won't provide specific number due to NDA). But that's okay.

But I will share the Google Analytics visitor graph for the first week of release:

Verdict:

I have learned something out of this experience. I would say until you can create something much more unique in simple platformer genre I would not encourage anyone to create platformer. The genre is super competitive and making simple platformer is no longer a viable option. Action platformer do sell better now-a-days on Steam. However, I did not run any paid advertising or marketing. Sometimes, the games don't do well on Steam at launch but it might take off later.

So, will I create platformer again sometime in the future?
Simple platformer - Probably never again. I will make action platformer instead with an effective story behind it. That would be much better option even now on Steam I believe.

Don't be disheartened after reading this post. I am sure there are lots of great other genres which I have not even created the games for. I am currently expanding to try making games of different genre and see what works the best.

I will keep making more postmortem of my future releases. If you have questions feel free to comment below. I will get back to you. Thank you!