Переведи на русский First Steam release, sales / results after 14 months.

**On October 17th I launched my first large-scale game. Here are the results.**

*Before I begin; I made a similar post four months ago covering the results up to that point. However, I feel like I did not go into sufficient depth. Additionally, I would like to discuss  future plans.*

**Introduction**

My first game is titled 'Open The Gates!'. It is a 2D sidescroller castlebuilder RTS game inspired by games such as Stronghold. It targets people who casually like strategy games. An ideal player is someone who wants to jump in, build a castle and fight off enemy attacks without having to learn complex mechanics or struggle to 'get good'. My game is relatively simple and the tutorial is setup in a way such that the player figures out everything on their own. In case something is unclear to the player, a voice-acted character will help the player out.

*If you want to check out the game for yourself, here is a link!* [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1332450/Open\_The\_Gates/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1332450/Open_The_Gates/)

**Game**

My game is a castlebuilder with a relatively cheerful art-style. I worked together with an artist I found online and she turned out to be literally amazing and I am still working with her today on my next project. We worked out an arrangement where I would pay a reduced rate per asset in exchange for a 20% revenue share. This arrangement has a few pros and cons. A giant positive is that the artist is genuinely interested in the game and treats it more like their own project in a way. This turns the freelancing artist into more of a teammember, which I way prefer. One obvious negative is that you lose out on a significant chunk of revenue and you set a precedent in case you want to continue working with the same person. For example, on my next project I am still giving 20% of the revenue to the artist.

**Initial Design**

My **initial budget** for the game was a modest **$350,- USD.** When I was 16 years old (I am now 22) I first came up with the idea for the game. I threw together a [design document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wVjX7DlcCBu0tmAzdFN4G5qIFGIRo6NYjzcpUvfMXKE/edit?usp=sharing), which is terribly written but a fun read all these years later. As I turned 18 I revisited the idea and decided to resume work on it.

**Development**

I started by worked with another artist who volunteered to create a few assets for the game. However, we later parted ways. I still credit this person as 'Concept Artist' though. A year went by and nothing happened until I decided to start actually getting serious about the game. I started full development on the game in February of 2020 (shortly before pandemic). The game was released after two and a half years on October 17th 2022. Surprisingly, the development was relatively smooth. The art and the music were done after a year but due to my inexperience the coding parts took longer than expected. The unit movement code was rewritten a grand total of seven times, for example.

In total I invested 2000 euros into the development of this game. The money mostly went to paying for art assets and paying for a musician to do music. For music, I was contacted by a musician who had little experience making game soundtracks and who wanted to do the music for the game for a reduced rate. I ended up paying $40USD per minute of music which I thought was very reasonable. He turned out to be quite talented and went on to make a lot more quality soundtracks.

There are many voice acted characters in the game. The voices were all done by volunteer actors and actresses who reached out to me. I find adding voice acted characters to a game makes the game feel a lot more alive.

**Marketing up to release**

I had absolutely no idea how to market a game. I posted on X (formerly Twitter) occasionally, but no posts really got any traction. I gained about 1-3 wishlists a day simply from Steam traffic. The page launched early 2020 so it had a massive amount of time to simply accumulate wishlists. However, the most important pre-launch marketing moment was the Steam Next Fest of June 2022. I released a demo without reaching out to any streamers or youtubers. This probably was not smart but I did not realize the importance of Steam Next Fest at that time.

Thankfully I got extremely lucky since my demo got picked up by some massive youtubers such as [SplatterCatGaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioQ8BKe76K0) and [BaronVonGames](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9KFJcNq0Oo). This resulted in a [massive spike](https://imgur.com/31TXkLK) in wishlists. In total I [gained 2882 wishlists](https://imgur.com/wfbBjCU) in three months time. This was fun!

The daily wishlist count dropped back down after July and only started ramping up as videos started coming out before release.

**Before release**

Having seen how succesful the youtube videos / streamers were for the demo, I decided to send a whole bunch of emails (with pre-release keys) to a variety of streamers / youtubers. A lot of them had already covered the demo so it was easier to convince them to also cover the full game. In total I sent around 200 emails by hand, personalizing each email. This took a few days of grinding but I feel like it was worth it. Here is the [presskit](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19kwsmi34_oLUo6-p_n-CHAoJm5CCMbmB?usp=sharing) I sent along with the mail.

There were a lot of videos covering the game such as [SplatterCatGaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHRBcRgmmvA), [BaronVonGames](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU75CxfGy5w) and [Real Civil Engineer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bn4cJxCQfE). These videos got a lot of views.

In total, I launched my game with [4702 wishlists](https://imgur.com/ewXJ6RB). This was **not** sufficient for the popular upcoming. The fact I didn't make this list likely harmed my sales significantly. In the future I will not launch a game with less than 7000 wishlists.

**Sales**

[Click here for the full financial overview up to today.](https://imgur.com/mwPauXH)

In short;

Gross Revenue: $27.601 USD.

Net Revenue: $21.960 USD

However, as discussed earlier, the artist got 20%. Additionally, there was a 9 euro transfer fee with the bank and I had to pay some taxes. The total amount I earned all things considered is: **€11.222 EUR.**

My [wishlist conversion rate](https://imgur.com/mXilqBD) is 11% which is below average according to Steam.

Interestingly, the game is still selling to this day. Each month has been 100+ EUR net for me and there is no real sign this is slowing down. I am unsure how long this will last, anyone have any ideas?

**Reviews**

I quickly reached 10 reviews on Steam, kickstarting the discovery queue traffic. The reviews were generally positive, although there is this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRgcpkFieds) which completely destroyed my game. It is a fun watch and I respect his opinion, he makes valid points and I hold no grudges.

The game currently sits at 49 reviews and is classified as 'Mostly Positive'. The frustrating thing is that this would change to 'Very Positive' if I got just one more positive review... Oh well! That's the way of the world!

**Conclusion**

The game was mildly succesful for a first project. It could have done better had I somehow pulled   
about 2000 wishlists out of thin air before launch so it could have gotten into the popular upcoming tab but I honestly have no idea how I could have done that. I was also quite done with this project at release since the code was getting incredibly messy due to earlier inexperience. The game is stable and has surprisingly few bugs at this time though.

**Future Plans**

I am currently working on a spiritual successor to my first game titled 'Realms of Madness'. It takes all that worked in my first game and expands on it while fixing many things that didn't work. Here is a link to the new [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2501920/Realms_of_Madness) in case you would want to take a look. I am investing most of the money earned from the first game into making the next game the best it can possibly be.

Additionally, I am working together with a team to create a small puzzle game scheduled for release at the end of this year. It is called 'Observe' and is a singleplayer puzzle game about collaboration. Here's the [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2738190/Observe).

**I am looking forward to hearing all your thoughts. If you have any questions, please ask!**