"I Had 100,000 Wish-lists for my game..." and then THIS Happened...

I had an amazing conversation with my buddy Joe who spent years working on his beautiful game song of iron but frankly I was shocked by what he told me see he had over a 100,000 wish lists for his game before he launched he had an amazing concept and he launched the game only to find well stick around cuz everything you thought you knew about building marketing and selling your indie game could change you went full-time Indie yeah and then it didn't kind of work out right and so you went back and got a job and now you're sort of going for round two yeah totally so it it worked out enough I could have gone for the stretch and made it to part two but it felt tight and it's never so easy to just keep rolling you know and uh and so I kind of I slowed down and then that kind of made it harder and Tighter and so I decided to get a real job again and uh quote unquote a real job and and it's been tough it's been hard for me actually to like keep motivation for Song 2 so I've kind of I've weaved in and out of it your first commercial release was song of iron

correct correct yeah okay to launch your first game and have it Go Gang Busters is so rare yeah so I would say it was a success I would say the launch is a success however based on our conversation before this podcast you feel like it wasn't so do you want to like give us that the the pre-launch like when you you finished up the game you wrapped up the game you prepared it for launch you were collecting wish lists everything looked like it was correct and ready to launch and then tell me a little bit about the launch and how it went and how it felt so I was working at 343 still when I started I think I was probably a year in but before I quit into the development and I had gone front page to Reddit twice with song of iron um I just little GIF on you know our gaming and and like blew up 132,000 on one 140 something thousand on the other like monster and so that drove drove a ton of wish lists to me that kind of gave me this confidence to move forward so I kept going and you know I've watched all the Indie videos the

gdc's all the stuff about numbers and all that so going into launch I had this huge sort of fan base and this sort of internal understanding that I was I had success coming I had 10,000 wish lists going into launch and I think probably like 50,000 of that came in the last four months uh it didn't like swell right before launch there was kind of like a down month right before which maybe leads to what's coming here but monster numbers those numbers are pretty obscene I think for your average person I mean for your average person they're they're nonsense they're oh dude it's it's what we're aspiring for right now for Twisted Tower our current game it's an insane number and I still have like 80,000 wish lists which leads you to understand where this is going and um it just didn't work it didn't it didn't happen I have a buddy who I uh who's also inie solo developer and we were looking at the numbers we were rounding down trying to play it cool but we were like this is a thing thing this could sell 100,000 copies

easy in a month you'd be set for life yeah just it could just those those um Reddit post caught Xbox's attention so I I had a a little partnership with them so it was Xbox and steam day one and uh it did not sell like you would hope with those numbers I think now two years later uh a little over two years I'm only I'm maybe just about to be 40,000 units sold uh which is like a ton of that's a ton right that's huge yeah um it was just you know in that moment the day of launch I had expectations of the Moon if you will and uh I I took a twoot jump off a wooden ramp you know instead and are you are you willing to disclose you don't have to but what does that convert to an actual USD like net profit or net revenue it's a couple hundred thousand I yeah I'd have to double check maybe 300K total um profit from the game

something well a lot of people are probably thinking oh you made 200 Grand why are you complaining why are you oh yeah absolutely and uh and uh yeah and that's again it is a success to a to a point right and I had every intention to keep like all right I made enough I can make part two now I can keep going yep and that was the plan the money driv up fast because you're paying for stuff and it it sure does and also you paid probably a 30% tax rate on that yeah then you pay the yeah you're you're paying 30% or whatever to the to the stores and then you pay another 30% to Y to the government and yep and then you and then you use it to actually live on and so it's uh and then it gets inflated I mean you know because of inflation so you're just it's just slowly like everyone's like oh I just want to make 500k and then I'll just put the cash in my bank account and I'll just live if it was years and it's like it's going to it's just money just integrate so quickly

what happened why did it not really quickly I wanted to give give people listening some context here imagine you get 100,000 wish lists what's the first thing you do well I'll just say what I would do I would pull out a calculator and I would multiply it times the average conversion rate and I would go holy crap I'm going to be a millionaire in two weeks yep that's effectively what we were trying to figure out yeah those numbers I mean it's been a couple years but I mean effectively the average is like you know 10 10% of your wish list you can sell in the first day or week or something and then as you get as you get higher and higher the chances of it snowballing get greater and greater theoretically so if if you can convert 10% of of that in a week the chances of that number actually like doubling or tripling for non- wish list purchases goes up really fast to my understanding at the time and so the expectation is you know you're selling 30,000 units in your first week as an indie Dev and then that just snowballs for the you know and

then you can double that for the year I might be I might be really butchering this now cuz it's been a while but you you know you double that for the year and then your sales so your wish lists get emailed every time you put it on sale over a certain amount were you learning this from Chris Chris zakowski yeah maybe and I there was a bunch of different things and they probably all just used the same information um you know they're always they're all referencing the same content and then they're always talking about wish lists like wish lists are everything and I'm I just have this gut feeling I don't know where it's coming from probably completely wrong I have this feeling that it's all going to change I think it's already changed yeah you can start to see Games showing up on the up and cominging list right and mine was taking a long time to come up some games that were coming out the same day and I just knew cuz there's some wish list sites I knew they had like a third of my wish list nothing bad to them rock on to them so I started messaging steam I was like hey where am I like I know I have more wish list than the people that are showing up like basically the short as they told me you know momentum matters

also I had gathered 100,000 wish lists over like 2 years the this these other these other teams very likely gathered their much less lower number of wish lists in the last couple weeks potentially so they had all this like momentum like my wish value was really low even though I had a high number because it's like they put like a life span on a wish list kind of thing or something and so I probably really the system probably considered me to have 20,000 or something and that's that dude that's like so difficult how did you take that oh man I did not take it very well I mean it was you know you're already putting your baby out into the wild and and all that stuff and then I had a really hard time launch day should be a celebration I was curled up in a ball you know in a dark room for most of it it was the worst thing launching this thing it was the worst it it just like you know you're you're so so excited you

push the green button and you just sit there and you just wait and the first review is bad and it doesn't do it doesn't suddenly sell 10,000 units you know in 10 minutes and you kind of and in man you instantly question like what what am I doing I had so much confidence 10 minutes ago and now I just I feel like I just made a huge mistake and I feel like I let my my wife down you know you feel these things and you're like you're being a little irrational maybe because your all the stress and lack of sleep but oh man the worst here's the question okay how do you avoid that with song of iron 2 yeah oh it's I mean that's the greatest thing I took from it is is the learnings to try to avoid it again I mean I think song of iron 2 I have to not care about how well it does first as best as possible you know song struggled from a few things and I think led to this the majority of the negative reviews My controls were not great pretty simply understood I definitely

didn't like test that enough with my friends even and I had I've I've talked about it before but I kind of laughed like without even realizing it I had I had like started using my fingers in the most insane way on my keyboard and I just got so used to it in development that I didn't think twice of it I was like my middle finger was like literally crossing over my index finger to do stuff like night it's just like insane it's like okay fix the controls which I've done a huge multiple passes on now so way better steam doesn't let you review until about the 20 minute Mark and so make the first 20 minutes the best 20 minutes of your game if not like entice people to continue playing without like stopping because there there was it not for song of iron one I would I would argue that you could get to a point of frustration uh before the 20 minute Mark um wow S one so some of my best stuff of song is in the beginning um it's sort of it's the cleanest you kind of have the

more most anticipate like this the best little bit of the story and it's fresh and stuff but it's still like Well it can't be that true because I did have you know I ran into that people coming right at 20 minutes and having know bad feelings and then um 20 minutes is the return or 2 hours is the return window so short game not super good for that um so people make it I mean not many people finish games I think that's pretty well known right like very few people make it to the end of a game so say people make it 2/3 of the way through your average game that's pretty much the end of song of iron you know and so people can return and I had a pretty high return value too which is y less fun um return value what do you mean uh yeah what is that number I it's probably made up ter but like I a large percentage of people return the game they want to play a second time no they no they they refunded it sorry they refunded the oh refund oh I see I see

the numbers gone down but it was like for a while it was like 20% is it the price so the price is a little high potentially uh maybe it's the price I think it's probably all the reasons that people kind of didn't love the game probably led to it and some people felt like they got a they got a good chunk of it done in that 2hour window and they thought well I'll just return