200k is actually fairly good, for something not AAA. I'd be extremely happy with that.

Most people get surprised when they see just how few sales it takes for a regular item to be considered a best seller.

In books, the New York Times Bestseller list can be achieved 5000 sales in a week, easily (Edit: with a big enough marketing push, potentially) achievable by picking a week that isn't shared with big name releases.

On Steam you can be a Top Seller with under 1000 sales in a week, as long as you don't launch on a week where a bunch of other hugely popular games all release major content.

Granted, it isn't easy to get a thousand sales in a week without spending millions in marketing. It is also fairly hard to cross the six figure (100,000) sales threshold unless you've got some serious backing and enormous funding.

Granted, it isn't easy to get a thousand sales in a week without spending millions in marketing. It is also fairly hard to cross the six figure (100,000) sales threshold unless you've got some serious backing and enormous funding.

And reputation...

I guess the OP is merely stating that he'd expect a big name like Tim Schafer to sell more out of sheer reputation, but the truth is, a very select niche of people really know about his genuis and most of them are probably 25-40 by now... Plus, most of his good stuff came out over a decade ago.

Don't forget that for the most part, Broken Age got pretty ... blah reviews. I'm not making a judgement on it, I didn't play it, but the reason *I* didn't play it was I didn't hear anyone saying "WHOA- GO BUY THIS." Mostly I got "Well, it isn't bad..." not exactly glowing... so I think it got a great number of initial sales and kickstarter sales and has a significantly weaker long tail than the studio would like.