So… recently we released our latest 3rd-party title: Shadowhand, developed by Grey Alien games. Its a unique RPG/Solitaire/Visual-Novel hybrid where you play the role of a highway-woman in 18th century England. The game has been out just over a month, and its selling ok, and is getting extremely good reviews and playtime. Right now its steam reviews sit at 85% positive, and the median play-time is 4 hours 58, and an average of 10 hours 36. A large proportion of the players are playing 20 hours+, even slightly larger than for Production Line, which has been out for much longer.
We spent some money on release to get the game noticed, which worked to an extent, but because the game had dramatically overshot its original production schedule, we ended up releasing it before the steam Christmas sale, which possibly impacted its launch a bit. (although I still think this was the correct decision, you can ALWAYS find an excuse to put off releasing a game…people even lose their home whilst not realizing this…). The game is selling ok, but it is not a clear indie hit right now, and obviously me being me, I want to analyse why, and how we can change that.
We did get a few negative comments with the first release, saying basically that the game was too RNG-based, but since we got those, Jake patched the game to round-off the impact of the RNG and make it more clearly skill-based. This was more of a perception problem than reality, as when you get deeper in to the game its hugely skill-based. The very good reviews, and the extremely long playtime suggests to me that the *actual game* is very good, and should be selling better. For now, lets assume that changes to the core game are not going to make a positive difference to its sales. What other possibilities are there?
We know that the game sold well during the recent steam sale, more than its selling now, and that seems to be just that more people see the game during a sale. Also we got some coverage at giant bomb, which led to a small spike in sales too. It seems that when the game actually gets shown to people, they buy it, so the main problem here seems to be exposure. Exposure can either be organic, solicited, or paid.
Organic.
The steam algorithm should theoretically send people towards shadowhand who will like it. We may be a bit cursed here because the game is a bit RPG, a bit puzzler, a bit casual, a bit adventure…and when you have something *different* recommendation algorithms can really struggle. Are we getting the right people seeing the game? Sadly this is mostly out of our control, although it may be slightly influenced by the ‘tags’. As I understand it, the more people who upvote or apply a tag on a game page, the more that tag is seen as relevant by steam. Are there maybe some tags we are missing that we should have? It looks like not enough people have applied ‘solitaire’ which is a big surprise.
Another organic route is through user-reviews. the reviews are good, but as ever, the number of players who leave a review is always really low. We already have a decent review score, although it could always be higher. Obviously if you bought and enjoyed the game, we REALLY want you to leave a review of it. I think that this creates some more SEO too (within steam) as presumably reviews show up on users profile pages etc, all more ways to enable organic discovery.
When it comes to off-steam methods, it matters a lot if the game gets tweets or forum-posts about it, but again, this is something mostly beyond our control. We do have a facebook page for the game, which I think also helps.
Solicited
As you probably know, steam forbids (quite understandably) games from soliciting for reviews from within the game, especially for stuff like giving out free xp or whatever. This was a curse with mobile and tablet games. However, we are possibly not as creative as we should be when it comes to encouraging people to support the game. AFAIK its fine for me to post here that we really appreciate steam reviews, for example. Something I’ve seen other games do is to make more of a feature out of their social media presence from within the game. For example Democracy 3 has a link from the main menu to the games facebook page. We are probably being a bit meek there, but does that ruin the immersion of the game to include such stuff? Would Jake even do that? :D
Paid.
I’m on solid ground with paid promotion because I know how it works. My experiments with shadowhand show that I can get a click-through to the steam store page for about $0.27. In December the store page stats give me reason to believe that a visit to the shadowhand store page earns $0.11 in immediate gross revenue (before steams cut). SH currently has more wishlist adds than owners by a factor of five, suggesting a lot of the visitors will not necessarily buy the game, but they may well add it to their wishlists. Is that difference enough to justify a $0.27 click? Gah! its so hard to tell. Just for LOLs I checked the same stats for production line, and it looks like a store page visit there is worth $0.25. Gah!!! What is happening here? I strongly suspect that its price related. basically strategy gamers are prepared to pay more…and players of other games are more prepared to wait for a sale with a bigger discount.
I guess in conclusion I really need data on the conversion rate of all those tons of wish-list adds to actual shadowhand sales during an actual weekend/ weekly sale. In the meantime, there is a lot of staring at numbers.