I started working on Space Gladiators 20 months ago.
It launched into Early Access 8 months ago.
During the first 6 months, I sold 117 copies.
In the last 2 months, I sold 900 copies. (thanks to influencers and Steam summer sales)
That means we just passed 1,000 sales.
This is a pretty important milestone for me.
It’s the goal I had set for the game when launching on Steam.
(when you sell 12 copies on the first day, 1,000 seems like a stretch goal)
Now, this still doesn’t make the game profitable.
It still doesn’t make working on it a financially wise decision.
But it at least proves that it’s possible.
To start from scratch with no audience and no skills (well, except programming)…
…and to earn money from making games.
In the meantime, I’ve continued working on my second smaller game.
We’re now 17 days in and I’m pretty happy with its progress.
Here’s what I’ve done since last email:
- Finished implementing various features like saving and Steam achievements.
- Localized the game in 23 languages. Quick note: Japanese, Korean and Chinese were a bit of a hassle to get working. Your base font probably doesn’t support those languages so you’ll have to use multiple ones. I found this free one made by Google which works out well.
- Setup the Steam page, made all of the key art, descriptions and screenshots needed. (I haven’t made it public yet though)
- Ran a small beta on my Discord server. Having a community is very helpful for this.
Feedback has been good and I’m currently working on implementing the suggestions I got.
After that, I’ll still need to make a trailer, the presskit and some other marketing stuff. Then we should be good to go!
At the beginning of this project, I said that the plan was to sell it for $4.99.
I’m now thinking it might be a bit short on content to justify that price.
But knowing that the vast majority of copies get sold during sales…
…we also have to consider that the base price isn’t really the actual price.
Still not sure how I’m going to go about it.
Anyway, I’ll keep you updated!
Until next week,
Thomas Gervraud,
Developer of Space Gladiators: Escaping Tartarus