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  • Game Dev is NOT a lottery, and Boost your Steam Revenue

Game Dev is NOT a lottery, and Boost your Steam Revenue

Also Concord shut down and Copilot leaks your API keys

Author

Code Monkey
September 08, 2024

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

How are you doing? I hope you're doing great!

I've been working on pre-preparing a ton of interesting videos lately, basically preparing a nice library to then publish them over time. And now that I have a few mostly prepared I plan to spend this week working on the next update to the DOTS course adding Buildings.

This is a strategy that I find works quite well for me. Focus on one specific project for an entire week, and then the next week focus on a different project. I find that this leads to much more productive results as opposed to swapping between projects every day.

Try it out!

  • Game Dev: Game Dev NOT Lottery, Boost Steam Revenue

  • Gaming: Concord Shutdown

  • Fun: Copilot API Key leaks

Game Dev

Game development is NOT a lottery

Here is a really excellent blog post from a very successful indie developer (Frozen Synapse, The Colonists) talking about how game development is NOT a lottery.

He writes about how platforms like Steam are indeed extremely crowded (14,000 games expected this year), and success is difficult, but that does NOT mean that it's completely random and there's nothing you can do to improve your chances of finding success.

Luck is always a factor, but you can make yourself "luckier" by studying the market/audience, managing a realistic budget, picking the right game idea, studying marketing, listening to players, iterating and polishing your game, etc.

If you make a generic platformer, you are likely to be "unlucky".

If you make a crafting building automation game with an interesting hook, you are more likely to be "lucky".

It's an excellent (very long) blog post talking about this topic and importantly giving you tips on how to reduce risk and increase your odds of success, I highly recommend you read the whole thing.

I always have a simple view on the topic of "luck" (made a video on it)

The quote that always comes to mind is "yes I believe in luck and the harder I work the luckier I get"

Obviously luck (randomness) exists, you can super work hard and not guarantee "luck" while someone else can work the bare minimum and hit a home run. But since luck is not in our control I prefer to simply not think about it and instead think about what I CAN control which is how hard and smart I work.

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Game Dev

Boost your Steam earnings by discounting longer

The latest GameDiscoverCo post has some really fascinating stats. By the way I highly recommend you follow their newsletter, they cover a lot on discoverability and the business of games.

In this issue they cover the question of "How long should you discount your game for?" and the answer is quite surprising. They compared 7 day discounts vs 14 day discounts and found it totaled higher revenue (after taking into account the time difference). Read the whole issue (paid) for more stats.

Discounts are super important, they give you more visibility and attract more players so you should discount as much as possible which based on Steam's rules means you can join their big sales and join a Weeklong discount every few weeks.

Also on the topic of discount strategy, make sure you increase the amount that you discount very very slowly over time. Don't jump to making your game 50% off or 75% off within less than one year, take your time and slowly up the rate. There are only two things that matter, 20% to trigger the email to wishlists, and the deepest discount ever, so use those two as much as possible.

In the case of my latest game, Dinky Guardians, which came out last year I still have only discounted it at 20% off.

I always make sure to discount my games as often as I can, every time Steam allows it, that’s how you get the most revenue.

But I had never even once thought about doing anything other than the standard Weeklong deal so these stats really surprised me. I will definitely schedule a 14 day sale and see how it goes.

Gaming

Release to Shutdown in 2 weeks

Concord launched 2 weeks ago, and earlier this week it shut down, this is probably the fastest release to shutdown that ever happened.

In terms of review scores the game wasn't necessarily terrible, it got a bunch of 7's, however it appears it did not appeal to players at all. Estimates put the game at just 25 thousand copies sold ($40 game), many indie games sell more than that and this one reportedly had a budget over $100M.

However on the official message they do state "we have decided to take the game offline and explore options, including those that will better reach our players" which leads me to believe they are going to rework the game to make it free to play and try a second launch later. Will that plan work?

There will also supposedly still be an episode of Secret Level based on Concord, that will be interesting to see considering no one knows the characters.

Publishers keep trying to make live service games to get that infinite Fortnite money, but so far the only Fortnite-killer has been Fortnite which continues at the top of the charts year after year. Similar to what happened in the WoW era with a bunch of supposed WoW-killers that never made it.

Perhaps this monumental failure will be a wake up call to make more singleplayer games and less never-ending games.

Cliff Bleszinski wrote "Concord, I feel your pain". Lawbreakers was also a hero shooter that could not find an audience and shut down one year after release.

I have to say I barely heard about this game before launch. I knew the name but not much beyond that and certainly didn't feel any hype behind it.

Another lesson we can take from this is don't do massive years-long dev cycles, for both indies and AAA. When this game was greenlit 8 years ago the world was completely different, Fortnite was just starting to get exponential growth and live service games seemed like a guaranteed money maker, not so much nowadays.

Fun

Copilot leaks your API keys

Do you need an API key for some service? Copilot (or other AI) might help!

Just write "apiKey =" and wait for it to auto complete.

I think this is pretty funny although I hope no one gets seriously messed up because of this, always make sure you DON'T include your API keys or any secrets when uploading your code to any source control.

If you do make that mistake, revoke the key immediately.

Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!

(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)

Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

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