How my Game Launch Went on Steam

72 000 that's how much my indie game will you snail made on steam so far i published it about one week ago and i would like to give you a quick update on how it's been going how did the launch go was it a success let's find out on launch day we were on the front page we were in this featured and recommended section at the very top of steam for like one or two hours on launch and we also we're at the top of new and trending actually we still are it's about five days after launch now and we're still new and trending we have 730 reviews and a 99 positive review rate that's fairly high i don't think it will stay that high but hopefully it will stay over 95 that would be great what you need to keep in mind is that the steam front page doesn't look the same for everybody or doesn't look the same in every country for example i did a quick survey on my second channel here can you still find will you snail on the front page for the majority that was still the case a couple of people could also not see it anymore so just keep that in mind obviously steam personalizes front pages a bit and stuff so always a little tricky to tell how much visibility you

got directly from steam but overall it seemed to go pretty well so far we have 7.5 000 copies sold that equals 72 000 us dollars and i'm sure you're like oh my god that's so insanely high i wish i could ever make this much from a game that would make me so happy i understand but please keep a few things in mind when looking at the number first of all steam will still take a cut from this taxes if you just remove steam's cut and taxes we end up with like 30 of this number which is around 25 000 usd maybe i will end up on my bank account and can stay there and then we also need to keep in mind that i spent quite a bit of money on making this game recently i made a video where i explained how i spent 20 000 on the game and now that number has gone up even more i spent quite a bit on marketing so between 30 and 40 000 was spent on making this game that means i'm currently still in the minus i made like minus 5 000 ufc or minus 10

000 usc something like that we're slowly approaching the break-even point which is fantastic and then another thing you need to keep in mind is that the sales curve usually looks like this right it starts out very very high and then fizzles out super quickly so here you can see we started with 3400 sales on the first day and then every day the number just went down and down and down and down and my assumption would be that it probably ends up leveling off at below 100 sales maybe if we're lucky you will get like 50 sales per day at some point like this curve will keep going down especially once the launch discount disappears once we're not on the front page anymore this will go down super hard there's like no doubt about it that's the bad news the good news is we'll also get console sales on top of that i don't have any numbers on console sales yet that will take a little longer and i'm also not sure if i can share console sales anyway but from my experience console sales are quite a bit less and i mean quite usually quite significantly less than

steam obviously that differs from game to game it really depends but my assumption my educated guess would be that console sales will not double the amount of sales or something will be like maybe 30 40 of what we made here on top so all in all financially speaking was this a success honestly it's too early to tell i'm not really sure it could still go either way it really depends on where this curve ends up leveling off i would say it definitely was not a flop that much i can say for certain and i can also say for certain it's enough for me to keep making games it's enough for me to keep supporting will you snail for a while and that's really all i wanted so looking at this from that angle it was a huge success 420 people refunded the game already that's 4.6 percent of all sales that's a normal range normal range is somewhere between two to ten percent most developers say around six percent that seems fine to me still it seems quite extreme right if you think about 420

people who just refunded the game okay okay so here's a very fun section where you can check out why the game was refunded and this is really good to ground yourself in reality a bit you know after reading compliments all day long i feel like i haven't checked these out yet so this is going to be interesting too difficult even on the easiest setting text lines are really frustrating i know it's the twist of the game but after only 20 minutes all fun is gone and i don't feel comfortable playing the game ah anymore i'm so sorry i didn't do it on purpose i thought i would like an ai guessing where i go but then i realized that i was only at the second level and i wouldn't last long before i turn insane damn bro i got cooked in this game too difficult okay damn yeah okay so a lot of people refunded because the game was too difficult fair enough not fun it's number two reason with 102 refunds so far the game doesn't have enough gameplay depth it's just the movement keys and a jump button nothing else yeah that was an intentional decision so you could focus on like the the traps and

the variety gameplay stuff but i understand if that's like not not enough for some people so fair enough random kill mechanic during a precision platform is just trolling i feel sorry for the idiotic developers that don't understand how to make something fun and challenging go back to school that's rough i mean fair enough if you didn't like it fair enough waterboarding and pulling my teeth out is more fun than this oh no i'm so sorry that's rough okay let's look at some nicer reviews right those are 99 positive so far let's read some of these as well to calm our nerves a bit so the top review is actually by my sister which is quite funny i know i'm probably a bit biased because i'm the deaf sister every time i play it it feels like my brother is sitting next to me and nagging me is that a good thing i died a couple of times thumbs up okay

let's let's be honest there are a lot of positive reviews the positive reviews are kinda boring let's try to find some negative ones not enough gameplay depth honestly i think the most reviews of this game are biased yeah 100 agree because obviously all of the people who went in at the beginning were my youtube communities and so obviously those first reviews are very biased because they've been following the development for a long time 100 agree to this the game is okay but not that good fair enough the gameplay is too bland just movement keys and jump button seriously once again i personally see this as a feature but i 100 understand everybody who doesn't so this is completely fair criticism in my opinion please don't attack anybody who says anything negative about the game right you can be friendly fanboys and i don't mind criticism okay let's see what we can find on youtube if we enter will you snail this is the first video that comes up let's see if i already know this i will link all the channels in the video description so if you like

any of these let's plays and you want to see the full videos then definitely go check those creators out i'm very grateful for everybody who played the game and featured it on their channel maybe try to be a bit less predictable next time okay that i mean that is actually insanely good it knew exactly where i was gonna jump we we we got this there we go because i really dislike seeing you proceed okay i mean it doesn't seem to be too difficult the pinnacle of what humans are capable of this this this ramped up yeah the bottom part is the easier one anyway yeah i i realized that you idiot you still need to at least try you you cannot get to the top uh you're in general grievous [Music] okay like it i like it i like it i like it

those were some strong moves great platforming skills right then robotic press made a video showing all the boss fights oh spoiler warning i mean the game is already out who cares about spoilers at this point so that's a cool video showing all the bosses all of the secret endings maybe yeah cool video check it out if you're interested will you snail a rage platformer that adapts to the player i mean um sometimes the concept of the ai is still misunderstood it just predicts your movement it really doesn't really and it adjusts the difficulty that's the only way so that it adapts to you also note that it's very normal to be stuck in a level for a while even on the lower difficulty see even doing some expectation management in the game here to make sure people go in into the correct mindset man maybe if i keep pushing [Laughter] continues it i suggest you take that one for now damn it the the path predicting is actually they

must i'm gonna die a hundred times here soon is actually messing with me so badly yeah the bottom part is the easier one anyway is it now oh god oh god no no i'm always curious to see how like this video did compared with other to his other videos oh okay you see the wooly snail video did very well compared to his other videos so if you're a content creator maybe you should play will you snail too that's awesome love it oh yeah exactly this was such a great video as well by road tucker not really about the game but i definitely need to give this channel a shout out as well check out rotaker's video he's like brand new on youtube this is his first video and just just i'll show you the first second and you'll see that this is like a must-watch jonah's tie rollers game will you snail is releasing today and i just bet my friend 100 i can create the game

from scratch before it even comes out great editing very entertaining video definitely go check it out wow that's a giant snail it's now about four weeks before my game comes out and i'm currently putting up a schedule on the wall like most of these dates have already been set into stone a while ago but i kind of like having it on the wall because it's easy to see and it reminds you of what needs to be done every day just got it started with that red stuff these important announcements or like launch for example and then the blue cards so far are the videos the youtube videos i want to release on that day and then if they're already done like here for example the soundtrack with visualization they have a little x check mark in the corner so that way i know i don't have to worry about that anymore i just have to click publish could even just schedule these videos yeah and then of course the smiley that's today i'll just move that

every day to kind of see where i'm at now i guess i'll write a couple more because there's more stuff to do it's sunday i've been working through the weekend quite a bit so this is the store page right now and according to my plan this week we'll announce the release date and all of the emails so the press will basically go out right there so i want to make sure that my store page and my all of my social accounts they look pretty on point so if somebody checks them out they should look nice so i'm actually quite stressed this is the to-do list for uh for the the week yeah i still need to do a trailer for the release sale announcement if somebody asked me what's the most difficult thing about launching a game it's prioritization doing the right things at the right time i find very difficult there's just so much to do so much and i can't do everything so i have to do the right things at this at the right time and yeah that is that is difficult that is very difficult

another question some of you asked me was how did it feel to launch the game honestly it was not as stressful as i thought it would i think big part of that is because we did play testing for a long time right i had a team of play testers on discord for like two or three years so i was relatively certain that like nothing not everything would like completely burn to the ground unfortunately the time passed way quicker than i thought i thought if i focus four weeks on marketing i'll have to do i'll have time for everything and yeah that didn't turn out to be true like for example i would have loved to do maybe some posts on reddit or something give that a go see how that works but there were just a lot of things i didn't find time for unfortunately which is a shame which i guess is one of the downsides of making games alone everything just takes so long i think in retrospect i should have prepared a lot of those assets earlier maybe launch itself was not as stressful as i thought it was launch overall went pretty well i'm fairly happy with how it went reception's been fine so far now

after launch things are equally weird because now i'm just getting a lot of messages like basically what i'm doing all day is i'm cycling between twitter discord and my email inbox and whenever i'm done answering all messages i get in one of them there are new messages in the other two so i spent the entire day just answering emails and discord messages and twitter messages basically yes i hope that's that should probably stop soon i hope so i can bet get back into like doing other things than just answering messages all day but obviously if there are people who have bugs or like urgent community management stuff or key requests and a lot of that stuff at the moment i still handle myself even though i have some people helping me out with that a lot of it i still have to do myself so at the moment i'm just spinning in circles making sure i have my eyes everywhere and that eats up all of my time and i hope that soon i can get back into doing actual updates for the game making new fresh youtube

content and starting a new game learning from the mistakes i made this time and doing better next time happy to have you around and see you next time bye