About 2 months ago we have launched our hack and slash game, Book of Demons, on Steam Early Access. I've written a short post on our blog detailing our marketing efforts and our sales data. You can find it here: https://thingtrunk.com/bod-early-access-launch-postmortem/
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Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/449960/
As you can see, the sales are ok, but not great, so we're looking for any tips and hints :)
Your game looks cool and I wouldn't call 2k sold copied in a few days for an unhyped/unknown indie early access title bad. On the other hand you have an interesting price-tag for an early access game (€20) and very tough competition. I.e. I bought torchlight I/II for €20 each (as finished product).
Eventually the tough competition, Dialblo III, Torchlight, Exil + dozen of indie hack'n'slash roguelikes, all trying to bind players for a long time, will make your life very hard.
Nostalgia and art style alone is not enough, you need a feature which makes your game unique compared to your competition. Torchlight would be never such a success if they would have released the game after the Diablo III release. This + early access + price tag would be a reason to avoid your game for now.
The steam link goes to Paladins??
Anyway, this information is very important to me personally since I'm preparing to launch my software as Early Access. It's not a game, but the information should be very helpful. Thank you for sharing!!
The steam link goes to Paladins??
Sorry for that! Just updated the link. Copy & paste mistake...
Anyway, good to hear that our info might be helpful. Good luck with your EA launch!
took a look at the website and shop page.
didn't look at the report, but i get the idea from Ashaman73's comments.
2K units in a few days is a quite respectable start.
seems your biggest problem is you're in a rather competitive market.
you basically have three choices:
1. provide the best value to the customer - better than any of your competitors.
2. find another market to compete in
3. be satisfied with what sales you can manage to get.
generally speaking, greater value to the customer = more competitive product = more sales.
value is a function of two things: quality, and price. so you can increase you value by increasing quality and / or reducing price. whats the price of your cheapest competitor who is of at least similar quality? do you charge more than that? if so, how can you possibly justify that, if your product is no better? Your product must be competitively priced.
=== but that's not all that is required! ===
lets assume you've decide to try to compete in this product category, and you've adjusted quality and price accordingly, so now there is no doubt that you are providing a very competitive value to the customer. if you can achieve highest quality product in class as well, all the better, but given your competition, its doubtful. so now that you have your competitive product, you must advertise it.
"build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door - but only if you tell them about it!" <g>
at the end of the day it all boils down to a very simple analysis on the part of the potential customer:
"I get X amount of game for Y dollars".
maximize X, minimize Y, tell people about it, and you will do about as well as can be expected, no matter what category of games you choose to compete in.
Thanks for the analysis and suggestions. Normally we'd be disappointed by such numbers, but what makes us optimistic is the very high satisfaction rate among customers (94% positive reviews on Steam) and data from the SteamSpy which suggests, that we are indeed off to a good start and performing above average. Still, getting bigger game visibility seems to take a lot of effort and it’d be great to find a way to make a bigger leap rather than building up slowly over a long period of time.
Thanks for posting this here, it was a very interesting read. The competition is tough, look what happened to Two Tribes. They are shutting down and their newest game RIVE is selling very poorly, even though they put their hearts and souls in it and the game is very good.
