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TotalBiscuit Recommends Retro/Grade in Steam sale

Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2014 9:42 pm
by ranger_lennier
TotalBiscuit, a popular PC Youtube personality, has been doing a series on the Steam Summer Sale. Since the sales on the front page today are repeats, he went over some of the "hidden" (unpromoted) sales. At 2:39, he highly recommends the Retro/Grade for $0.99 deal.



Hopefully that helps the sales a bit as the summer sale winds down. The video's also worth watching for some of the other bargains flying under the radar. I got Defy Gravity for $0.29. I'd never heard of it before, but it sounds like the sort of game I'd like.

Re: TotalBiscuit Recommends Retro/Grade in Steam sale

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 4:45 pm
by RightClickSaveAs
That's really cool! There was a lot of weird stuff on Steam for less than $1 this year, so I feel Retro/Grade got buried a bit more than it would have normally. I definitely turned at least two people on to the game this sale, so there's at least $1.98 in additional gross sales :)

How were the sales from this round of Steam discounts, if you don't mind my asking?

Re: TotalBiscuit Recommends Retro/Grade in Steam sale

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 6:40 pm
by matt
In the last 2 weeks, we sold $8,424 gross. After VAT, taxes, and Valve's cut, we probably made around $5,500. Not too shabby, but no the huge spike that many games on sale got - especially those that were featured. The sad part is or cumulative lifetime revenue (before Valve's cut and all that) is an even $39,000, which is not so great for 4 years of crunch... I think our PS3 US sales is similar...

Still, I can't complain too much because we wouldn't have made that money otherwise. We were selling 1 copy a week before the sale, so I don't think we hurt our "long tail" (as some game developers worry sales do) because we basically don't have one. hahah

Anyway, thanks to everyone who bought the game and helped spread the word! :)

Re: TotalBiscuit Recommends Retro/Grade in Steam sale

Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 4:45 pm
by RightClickSaveAs
Thanks for the openness! I'm always interested in hearing about the financial side of game development. That is a shame to hear about the long term sales, but it is good the game did get some sales this round at least. Also I gifted one to a friend with the stipulation that he had to check out Neverending Nightmares, and he said he was going to preorder based on what he saw, so there's that.

This is the first Steam sale I can remember where there were so many <$2 games competing too, unless I just don't remember. I've forced myself to ignore sales in the past because of my shamefully large backlog.

Re: TotalBiscuit Recommends Retro/Grade in Steam sale

Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 6:56 pm
by matt
I think people hear so much about the successes that they think indie game development is lucrative. I believed the hype to some extent and got a rude awakening when we actually got our sales numbers. I expect that next year, it'll be hard to get anyone to purchase the game, but I suppose you never know. Honestly, we are doing better this year with the $0.99 sales than I expected. I don't know how much we can repeat that or how much we'd want to, but I guess I'll keep experimenting.

Obviously, I hope that Neverending Nightmares will do much better in terms of sales, and once you tally up the kickstarter money plus the Free the Games fund, it has brought in more money than Retro/Grade did (and probably ever will do) before we even release... So that's a good sign! :)