My first week on Steam - my experience

How important is it to develop a following outside of Greenlight (before submission) in order to get greenlit?

 

Well it would certainly help! Or you might find you have to wait a year like I did!
Although its a catch 22 since if you had a big following you wouldn't really need to go on Steam in the first place. You could just sell it off your website.

 

What are the acceptable options for getting the big Youtubers to cover it?

 

Did you do any kind of marketing like building up a following before greenlight or did you go in blind full guns blazing? Would be interesting given your rather long wait time
This your first release or a subsequent one?

 

I don't think you need any following at all to get through greenlight. I had zero exposure, and got through it in like 2 weeks. If you can put together a convincing trailer, I think you can fly through.

Getting the kind of youtube exposure that this game got though, very very impressive.

 

Congrats! Thanks for sharing your experience and it will be interesting to see how it goes in the following weeks/months.

 

I'm not sure the YouTube exposure actually translated into sales. The reason being that many of the viewers and comments of the videos are more interested in the YouTuber and how handsome they are than what game they're playing! Plus they seem mainly younger people with less disposable income. Teenagers today!
Lesson: people who watch YouTube gaming videos are not necessarily the same people who play games.

 

It's impossible to say for sure. But I would bet that a great number of your sales are because of the very large amounts of youtube exposure. Even if some of it is negative. Remember: there is no such thing as bad press. Especially when you're a small scale one man indie! You got some tremendous exposure dude!

I'm super jealous, and I'm sure a lot of other people are too ;D

 

Surely this type of Youtube review is getting you some sales: "The Best Cart Racer Ever Made", with 25,000 views in two days:

 

Review's negative, yet bad press is definitely far far better than no publicity
Didn't Rockstar purposely create controversy to advertise GTA?
Didn't Ony here on the forums have an experience with useful bad press?

 

I think it's much harder for youtube views to become sales, than direct store views.

So Im going to make up some statistics only because this is the Internet. I'd say 1 in 1000 yt views become a sale, and 1 in 50 store views become a sale.
YT helped sales but I think yoonitee owes mo st sales to a niche market right inside steam store.

 

The people in the video said the game was "endearing" and they seemed to have fun with it. There were snarky comments, but I didn't interpret it as negative overall.

 

Sorry, didn't mean it like that. I meant the negative comments in specific. What I meant to say is as long as they say something interesting or funny about your game, be it good or bad, would raise public awareness and interest
Again my apologies for miscommunication

 

Sounds about right. 25,000 views may correspond to about 25 sales. They might not buy it straight away but put it on their wish list in case there's a sale. The videos also seem to be much more like TV shows, in that you watch it one week and then that's forgotten about and then the next week people watch the next one.

Not complaining though because its fun to see YouTube reviews of your game and it probably helps with awareness. I just think IMO that your placement in Steam is really the most important factor.

As for Steamspy. It's not very accurate about my game. It says 426 but its really 267.

Look at the one for "there's poop in my soup". 24,343 owners! Looks like it pays to sell your game for $1. If that's true.

 

I mean I may have exaggerated with the viewurchase ratio. Just a very wild ball park. Maybe it's more like 1 in 400 YT views become sales, and 1:100 for Steam.
My logic is that most people watching yt are probably not even thinking about buying a game, and they're "far away" from the store. And people browsing the STORE in Steam are already looking forward to buy something, and if they clicked on your thumbnail, they're already kind of interested in that specific type of game.

Still if you want to pump up those sales numbers you gotta have more exposure, from youtube and gaming articles.

 

More likely it pays to make juvenile type of games. Kind of stands out "Buy Now Poop On People!". Definitely offers an experience most people have not had before.

But yeah... the whole poop thing may in itself be the road to profits in this somewhat disturbed world. lol Perhaps in time we will see a horde of new moderate Indie successes with "hits" such as Poop Slinger, Poop Puddle Jumper and so forth. I'm guessing there are a lot of kids out there who get a giggle out of such things.

 

I suppose the key to that marketing strategy is to come up with a name that gets people's attention, and a price that they'll pay just to see what the name is about.

 

Something weird. I keep getting a spike in sales for a certain hour where Mac sales go crazy in the UK. I wonder if its just one person buying it multiple times. Well fine by me.

Makes me think I should do a Linux version too...

 

Count me in to the group of people that will follow your quest to doing that. I've only planned for PC/Mac releases myself, and don't really feel that supporting Linux is worth my time, unless the demand is high enough.

 

The owner of Steamspy says, that a low number of owners will probably lead to inaccurate numbers. You need around 20000 owners or more, for more accurate data.
So those figures should be always taken with a grain of salt.

267sales isn't bad IMO, considering you don't sell your game for just 99cent.

I really appreciate that you share your experience with us.

Regarding the Mac/Linux/Windows ratio. It's always interesting to look at IndieGameStand's daily deals which show also the sales figures and break them down by the OS like here (scroll down)
Windows is of course pretty dominant. But most of the time, at least 25% of the sales are Mac and Linux. So it's nothing I'd dismiss.

 

Interesting... Linux seems very high too. Wonder why as I've never seen anyone with a Linux laptop accept for about five years ago when they were selling Linux netbooks.

I think the idea is even though less people have Linux, if yours is one of the few games that support it, it could be a big seller in that market.

But.. would Unity games run with WINE on linux?

 

It's the right order of magnitude. Getting that close with no real data is actually pretty good.

 

I believe the games themselves would, but I believe its very tricky to get steam games into a wine wrapper on a non supported platform - basically too much hassle

 

It's actually pretty well made though! Poop in my Soup is surprisingly polished.

 

What's more insulting is that my game appears in the "More like this" section at the bottom of the page! haha. What are they trying to say? That my game is poopy?

 

LOL!!

The biggest value of your game is its mood.

Imagine if Mario Kart was sober and dull, wouldn't be nearly as popular.

 

No need to as Unity has Linux export since forever.

 

According to SteamSpy, your game has been tagged with "nudity", "story rich", "horror", "gore", and "Illuminati".

 

True, I just meant I wondered if Linux users just download Windows games and use WINE.

I suppose its technically true since the animals have no clothes. And if you saw a giraffe walking around on two legs that could be horrifying. Not sure where the Illuminati comes in though...

 

The Illuminati connection must be that conspiratorial, mysterious smile that the giraffe has on the title screen.

 

Of course that is what you would SAY when asked about the Illuminati...

 

I can assure you there is no link to the Illuminati here.

 

So, you can polish a turd...

 

Well, Mythbusters already proved that long time ago.

 

Hi and congratz, I was wondering when you where making your game did you have any target audience in mind? and is your actual target audience your expected players?

 

Thanks. The audience I envisaged is the audience that likes bright colorful Nintendo-like graphics and movies like Monsters Inc. Obviously not targeting the Halo or Skyrim audiences. All though that's not to say that people can't like both.

The actual audience is maybe the curious minded... ??

 

I think your audience is more likely people who want to laugh and have a bit of fun playing a kind of silly game!

If this wasn't your intention, that's cool. Remember the story of the Five Nights at Freddy's guy. Everyone made fun of the dead eyes in his characters and how terrifying they were, so he embraced that, built a game around characters with dead eyes and ended up with a gazillion dollars and becoming a borderline cultural touchstone.

Even if it wasn't 100% your intent, you clearly did something very right. Your psychedelic cloud levels ... i mean that's not Monsters Inc... but there's a reason it's on every youtube video!

 

It's been almost a month since the release of your game. Anything you could share? How is it going?

 

What are the sales?

 

Hello, still seems to be doing OK. Up to 417 sales now. (don't trust steamspy for small numbers!) I compiled a Linux version but so far only 1 taker.
Happy to see some people actually completing the whole game, getting all the acheivements and unlocking all the content!
With hindsight I think I would have put the game on Early Access for a week for people to test and then released the game at a lower price.
Now I am thinking about updates, and of course... the next game, whatever that may be! (probably involve either a caveman/woman or a monkey).

 

Don't be very happy: there are steam cheaters who unlock all achievements using hacks. Be sure to check date when they unlock, at least they should be authentical, and only then be happy

 

417 sales? Cool for first game. How does it stand in $$$? Perhaps you know that, but in case of steam you can't actually just multiply sales count by current price as prices change and there are steam sales/discount codes. Also, have been refunds a problem?

 

Good job for first game. Do you think you overpriced it?

 

Hello, I am not at liberty to disclose this information. Since this would allow you to calculate the percentage that Steam takes which would be in violation of the contract! But I'm sure you can make an educated guess. Refunds haven't been a problem really.

Maybe overpriced it but who knows? Maybe underpriced!

 

Wait... I thought this was known.

 

It's all right. I already know it's 30%.

 

Don't forget to add (or rather substract) the VAT for European customers on the base price (thus before steam's cut) and overall you'll get something more around 60% than 70% on global sales.

If you live outside of US, you can also lose some extra percentages (from 0 to 30%) depending of the commercial treaties between your country and the US. Maybe Steam changed their way since then but at some point, the W-8 BEN form was required by them.

 

I'd never get taxes anyway so I don't count them as part of the sale.

 

And about free game? Is there a way to monetise it with ads on steam?

 

This. VAT (or GST as its known here) is an invisible tax to the vendor. Its only paid by the end consumer, not any of the chain of vendors that get the goods there. It gets added on to the cost at the point of sale, and essentially goes straight to the government. All calculations and accounting on the business side are done without GST.