ok so i'll update my post about the finished game and now..
I'll start by saying that I also released the second game The Voyager , but I'll talk about it later before I update on Find The Key.
(always without promotion)
about the visibility on steam after the first month it goes back to the same as when the page is coming, which means 50-100 views per day, but the only sales will happen only when there are discounts, people seem to ignore completely games that don't have a discount and even something like 10% makes a difference, I don't think it's for small money savings especially on low priced games, but rather that they filter games by higher price/discount ignoring those that don't have discount.
for Find the Key, I made an update including many branches of the path, it doesn't change the general experience at all but each chosen path changes the whole game a bit so the replayability is higher, also to unlock the steam achievements it is possible to do it just replaying the game and choosing different paths etc.
for The Voyager, things went more or less the same way as for Find The Key, considering the difference in price and type of game, we can say that the statistics are perfectly identical, in terms of sales or 0 feedback and reviews, visibility, game completion by players etc. pretty much everything the same. i also left the incoming page for 3 months, it made no difference.
for The Voyager I also used keymailer sending keys to a hundred influencers, it was completely useless and had no effect on the game. even those who asked for the key themselves didn't make any content or even leave a review. which means that it was a waste of time and money because at least your game already doesn't attract clicks, influencers big or small will ignore it.
however, The Voyager and Find the Key are two very different games, and the starting stats are nearly identical, so I can assume that things will be exactly the same, too, and that it doesn't depend on the game. this is both a good thing and a bad thing, as it means that, precisely, it doesn't depend on the game but on other things. in the sense the majority of people finish my games, if people finish the game I can assume that they liked it, personally if I don't like a game I leave it after not even 20 minutes.
but only those who didn't like it or abandoned it before the end will bother to leave a review, and we know that reviews are very important to steam. I read somewhere that it needs 10 reviews from people who bought the game (didn't receive the key and not necessarily positive) before steam decides to recommend it to people more.
so to conclude, in the long run the quality of the game is definitely the crucial factor, but in the initial period of the launch it doesn't really matter the type of game as it just depends on how many people know about it. Sure I'm still talking about minimal quality anyway, but if few people know about it other people like influencers or potential players will either ignore it, think no one has played it or talk about it because it sucks rather than because no one has played it . lol
in the case of indies like us, games are successful because they have their community or patreon ready to buy/review the game positively at launch, so in the long run you will see the difference but without a solid foundation the game won't take off anyway. so I think this is the main thing to think about while developing the game :)
Thanks for reading,
Edd