Game Dev

Real Sales Numbers from Successful Steam Game!

It's always great when devs share sales numbers, the more data there is the better informed people can be when trying to make indie games.

In this case the stats are from Minami Lane, a very successful cozy game where you manage a street with many charming residents.

The stats for the last month show 28k copies sold and $108k gross revenue and an estimated €23k net revenue which was surprising to people. There's a great post going over the rough math of costs/taxes.

They also shared sales numbers for May (15k copies, $66k) and in the first 3 months sold 75k copies.

Also funny to see how 6 months before release the dev expected to sell just 100 copies.

Game Dev

Results from Not-E3

June came and went along with Not-E3, the various game showcases where hundreds of games were announced.

What was the impact of all of that? Which events were successful? Which games did players remember?

Here's a really interesting deep dive answering all those questions with lots of data based on views, impressions, interactions, comments, on everything from YouTube to Twitch, Press, TikTok, X and more.

The Xbox Games Showcase is at the top with the highest total and per game scores, Summer Game Fest on second, and Ubisoft Forward at the bottom.

Star Wars: Outlaws was the most recalled title, followed by Street Fighter 6 and Batman: Arkham Shadow.

And despite the numbers naturally being weighted towards AAA games, many indies still found lots of success getting hundreds of thousands of Wishlists on Steam.

Game Dev

2 months from nothing to 4k Wishlists!

Here's a really great thread on Reddit of a game that found a lot of success in a very short period of time.

The game is called Kimera, it is a creature collector game that exists in the bottom of your screen. With just 2 months of development and 2 weeks of a public Steam page it already has over 4000 wishlists.

This is also an excellent example of a strategy known as Fast Follow. It's where a game with an interesting concept finds a lot of success, and how you can replicate and build upon it very quickly.

This game is an example of a fast follow of Rusty's Retirement. Another famous example would be Vampire Survivors and the hundreds of VS-likes that have come out since then.

Now importantly this strategy does NOT mean you make an exact clone of the original game. You take the core concept that players like and then add one interesting twist to it. Like you take Vampire Survivors, then make it in 3D inside a cave, add your own IP and you end up with the massively successful Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

Tech

Controllers for Apple Vision Pro!

Are you one of the few special people with an Apple Vision Pro? Would you like a controller instead of using your hands? Here comes the Surreal Touch controllers.

Pretty standard controllers, just like the Meta Quest controllers, left-right with ABXY. It has compatibility with SteamVR games, so you can use your AVP to play Alyx, Beat Saber, VR Chat, etc.

There's no mention of price or release date yet. They've got an SDK for download, I wonder if they're sending controllers to developers for testing. If you're a VR developer maybe try asking for a devkit.

Gaming

Steam Summer Sale continues!

The Steam Summer Sale is still ongoing, have you picked up anything interesting?

This sale has an interesting new section on Deep Discounts, really great games that are 90%+ discounted. It's amazing the high quality games you can get for so cheap. I wish these Steam sales existed when I was a kid and had a €5 monthly allowance.

Since I've been so busy working on the DOTS course I haven't had time to play anything in a long time, I picked up No Plan B a while ago and I can't wait to play it soon.