ok so it's been a month since my game has been on steam, i'm doing an update as promised. I remember that I did 0 marketing, which means that I made the game and put it there, as an unknown developer without saying anything to anyone.
so here is the total data after one month which is released after 2 weeks "coming soon":
(the price is 0.99)
161 sales
22 refunds
12304 total shop visits
281 wish lists
3 reviews (all negative lol)
after the first few days of visibility as i thought it's back to around 150-200 visits per day organic but i think it will decrease even more as time goes on. the truth is that i don't have a clue if this data is good or not lol
to be 0 marketing 150 visits a day are good for me, it's not about random people but they are people who are interested in what you offer, therefore targeted visits that come from those who are looking for a game to buy.
the reviews are all negative, but they are only 3 out of 160 and they are from very dissatisfied people, this makes me think that all the others beyond the reviews were either satisfied or indifferent .. or that they simply didn't want to write.
the refounds are mostly performance issues, someone who wanted to try with lower than recommended hardware, but someone said it's not fun or that they bought it by accident, the game lasts less than an hour so it can also be any reason..
however from the stats, I see that over 50% of the players played it through, some even more than double the time it took to finish it, which makes me think they liked it enough to play it through to the end. so the things i think i should have done differently..
don't release the game just before the steam discounts:
before the discounts i was getting about 10 sales a day, from the day the discounts started it went down to 0, then it went back to 1-2 as soon as the discounts ended. it seems that when the discounts are on people just don't even look at the non-discounted ones, and having just released the game not even a month earlier i couldn't participate,
price too low:
so also keep in mind the discount strategy, i had put the price at 1, but maybe i should have put it at maybe 4 or 5, then do some discounts periodically to stimulate people who have the game in their wish list, maybe once a month. so I'm thinking of raising the price to at least 4, however I don't know how to evaluate the price issue properly..
I chose 1 because I wanted it to be accessible to anyone and at least to recover the money spent .. and maybe earn something, it took me about 150 hours to do it, which then became 200 with the additional work to be done for steam (localization and full controller support, shop page etc) halfway through the game I practically redid it to better structure the code so in reality perhaps half the time would have been enough, for this reason the price of 1 seemed ok to me, but if I also have to discount it to have visibility. lol
more time "coming soon" before releasing it: as I said, at least 3 months to have a greater impact on release.
and nothing I think is everything, if you have any questions, ask them.
meanwhile I'm tinkering to do something with VR, I tried to do some mechanics and some maps, but I don't know.. with teleportation the motion sickness is at 0, but it spoils the experience. I don't suffer much from motion sickness even without teleportation, but it's not pleasant. so maybe i'll do something where it's stopped in place.. but i don't know yet.
I think VR will boom when they come up with something for leg movement too, but it's a lot better than normal games so I think I'll shoot some skeletons until I can think of something to do. lol
if you have any questions ask them, and I hope my experience is helpful :)
Edd