None of this would have been possible without your support, so from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU. Now that we have some perspective on selling a video game over the course of five years, we wanted to share some data, because our sales graph didn’t take the shape we expected, and we thought it might be of interest to other developers. TL DR: Lovers had an okay-but-not-great launch, and we expected the game would fizzle out fairly quickly, but in fact sales ended up increasing for a few years, and it ended up being quite successful, thanks in part to updates, ports, discounts, word-of-mouth, and of course luck (don’t want to pretend that there isn’t a TON of random chance affecting how games fare). We launched the original 2-player version of Lovers on Steam and Xbox One on September 9, 2015. It’s a niche game in that it features local co-op, not online. We knew that would limit its sales, but we didn’t know by how much. Here’s the shape of our first year of revenue: There were a few other local multiplayer indie games getting buzz back then, like TowerFall, so we figured there could be a market for it. We hired a PR company to help us get blog and review coverage, which more or less worked, but our second week of sales declined by half and it continued to drop from there. We ran some 33% discounts after only a couple months to take advantage of Steam’s Autumn and Winter sales (plus we were extremely fortunate to get some front page rotation in Winter) and we got some brief boosts, but then quickly returned to baseline.
It was disappointing, but not really surprising.
#NUCLEAR THRONE INDIEBOX PS4#
In February 2016 we launched on PS4 around Valentine’s day, coinciding with discounts on the other platforms and a marketing effort (meaning we re-hired that PR company to push out a press release, and also did an old-fashioned twitter GIF storm). But again, sales fell back to baseline afterwards - although having an extra platform in the mix kept our total baseline sales from declining further. Year 2: Party games, word-of-mouth, and a bundleĪfter year 1, we expected our best days were behind us and our future sales would follow the same gradual decline.
But surprisingly, our sales stopped declining, and even increased somewhat. This graph is an example of the stegosaurus tail sales curve, where a game’s long tail, instead of just sloping downwards, is covered in spikes. So what made the difference? Let’s dive in. One unquantifiable factor is that in May 2016, eight months after launch, we finally added support for 4-player co-op (still local only). There was no huge spike at the time, but from then on, we noticed the game got covered more often as a party game, and if you do a random Twitter search for the game it’s probably still the most frequent discussion context (usually it’s “OMG I love Overcooked, what other co-op games are there?”). When we noticed this, it gave us the idea to make a Steam bundle featuring us and some other local co-op party games. We approached Steam and the other developers, and everyone was on board, so for Valentine’s Day 2017 we launched the Cozy Couch Co-Op Bundle alongside Overcooked, BattleBlock Theater, Moon Hunters, and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Steam gave us great placement, and the resulting spike was almost as good as our launch. It also had the added bonus of boosting our baseline sales afterwards, as players looking for co-op games could see all our games on each other’s Steam pages. Throughout our second year we also slowly increased our discount percentage during sales.
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