How many copies of my game did I sell?

I’m trying a new format this week. Let me know if you like it!

I started working on my game in November 2018, almost 18 months ago.

It’s been in Early Access for 6 months on Steam. This is my first game ever.

Maybe you want to make a game yourself.

And maybe you want to publish it on Steam.

If you do that, how many copies can you expect to sell?

Well, here’s how many I sold so far: 117 copies.

I would tell you the exact amount of money that makes, but I don’t know it yet.

I told Steam to hold it for now to avoid bank fees.

What I can tell you is that the game grossed $1,091.

That’s before chargebacks, returns, VAT, Steam’s share, bank fees and taxes.

No need to tell you it’s not even close to the amount I’ll see in my bank account.

(I actually don’t expect to get more than half of that)

You might think it’s a disappointing number.

But there are a few things to keep in mind:

My game is still in Early Access. It hasn’t “officially” launched yet.
I haven’t done much marketing at all. (detailed below)
It’s my first game so I had no idea what I was doing for a long time.
No one knew who I was.
It kinda sucked at first.
My game is only available on Windows and in English. Only about a third of steam players use English as their primary language.

Now…

I actually believe it’s only the beginning for my game.

During these first 18 months of development…

I spent about 95% of my time making and improving the game.

It had big flaws and I wanted to fix them before getting too many players.

All of the sales I got until now came from 2 things:

Last week I published an update that fixed the biggest issues of my game.

So I’ve started experimenting with marketing.

Before that, my game had sold ~85 copies in 6 months.

It means 30 of my sales came from this last week only.

That’s why I’m pretty optimistic about the future.

I’ve tried a lot of things. Some worked, some didn’t and some are still pending.

Let me know if you like this kind of behind-the-scenes content.

I have a ton more numbers and insights to share.

Until next week,