More than half of the Humble Bundle "sales" are actually - 0 on the dollar - literally giving away copies. The info is known ahead of time so its not a surprise, everything is on the up and up in terms of communication from Humble. It did seem like it boosted part 2's sales - which was my main hope with a ok-ish paycheck for a "old" game. It also flooded the "key reseller" sites - before it was pretty rare for Void Destroyer to be on them as I almost never had big discounts.
As far as VD1 and VD2 performance - comparing early access launches - it is a factor of 1/5th the sales. Pretty brutal! Void Destroyer early access was featured on Steam's front page for a week-ish (on and off - in various places with various prominence) while VD2's early access made it to Steam's "Early Access" section for a day or two then got bumped off.
Thanks for the Info! I'm surprised you got nothing per copy on some the humble bundle sales. I'm wondering if the market is getting so flooded that this is the new norm? But as you said, and as I mentioned in my commentary, moving ~55,000 VD1 copies that Quarter generated significant movement for VD2. (25% gain according to steamspy, but of course you have the real numbers.) Which is a smart move. (Also one has to remember trading cards, will generate some revenues as well.)
As for VD2. I believe I previously mentioned that you should bundle both it and VD1 together using Steam's bundling feature. Might be able to generate a little extra reviews off VD1 by doing so.
Another interesting metric for you. GearCity was recently on the weekly sale. There were more games on weekly sale last week, than were on Steam when I launched GearCity to Early Access 2014... I think the coming months will only get worse as Youtube Curators are not the solution to an open Steam market. I might actually write some big gamasuta thing on it or something after it fails.
I don't think this is privileged info or what not - but the way Humble Bundles work is - you only get paid if your game is listed on the bundle (makes sense no?). So the issue is that often in bundles there's "more games coming soon" type mechanic/section - games are added in the mid point of the bundle. If you are in that section - after your game is officially "added" you start getting paid - however ALL the buyers at a certain level still get a key for your game (even in week 1) - without you actually getting funds from the pool.
It makes sense from a lot of view points - but it does result in many copies being given away for free by the second week folk.
EG:
Bundle runs for 2 weeks - your project is in the second round of games.
First week - bundle sells 100k copies - you get paid 0.
Second week - bundle sells 20k copies - you get paid for the 20k copies.
Actually I did not know this. My publisher handles this sort of stuff.
The only bundle I've been involved in, I believe we got a flat per unit rate. But it also didn't have the same sort of mechanisms you're talking about. So thanks for the extra info. I'm sure it'll help others on these forums.
I have a few more charts based on concurrent player count coming up soon. Hopefully an update to the main charts for Q3, and I found a way to get some of the data before I started working on this little pet project.
But of course, my work is top priority. Thus the delays.
Q3 numbers have been updated. In this chart, I changed how I calculated the numbers based off Steam Spy's data. Instead of just eye balling it, I have taken the average of the lowest and highest day of the quarter. The numbers came out pretty much the same as my eyeballing method, although it seems to be more accurate, as Bomb is finally showing nearly proper amount of sales now... This way of doing it is much quicker than my previous method, so I will probably stick with it.
So what happened this Q?
Running with Rifles has jumped up to 6th place, with 300,000 units on Steam. Venetica jumped over Ceville for 33rd. Ember, which is a new game on our list, but has been out for a year jumps into 34th with 35,000 units. This is up from 30,000 units last Q when it would have been 38th on our list.
Battlezone 98 Redux reached 40th, moving up 3 spots with 30,000 units now. Kromaia moves ahead of Ankh 2 for 44th. GearCity and Emergency 2017 both jump ahead of Ankh 3 for 47th and 48th respectively.
There are two new game released this last Q, one new game to our list that has been out for a year, and finally one major game that was release at the end of the month but is not calculated in our chart yet.
Starting with the game that has been out a while, Ember, is a RPG sitting at 77% positive reviews and moved 35,000 units. It is not the first game for the developer (N-Fusion Interactive) so I probably need to go through and see if they have anymore Ogre based games.
Two new releases this Quarter are Art of Guile and X-Morph. Art of Guile is an RTS currently in Early Access. You can find a thread for it in the showcase of this forum. There hasn't been enough reviews to score it, and since it is under a few thousand sales, its unit sales are inaccurate. Hopefully as it progresses through early access, the unit count will increase.
The next new release is X-Morph: Defense by EXOR Studios. You may know EXOR as the makers of Zombie Driver (The 8th most owned Ogre game on Steam.) X-Morph is a cross genre tower defense shoot em up. So far the game is getting rave reviews and looks very well made. With a 93% rating it moved 7,000 units in 2 weeks. Which is pretty good numbers considering the flood of flops that have been released on Steam lately. But even with the great reviews and great artwork, comparing it to the success of Zombie Driver, I am not so sure sales haven't been a disappointment for EXOR. Although it remains to be seen how much legs it will have, I don't expect it to break 100,000 without major discounting. None the less it will move up the lower parts of our charts fairly rapidly. By Christmas, I wouldn't be surprised if it breaks 30,000.
Which leads us to the elephant in the room. Runic has finally released Hob! For those that do not know, Runic is the former Blizzard North studio, who made Diablo and Diablo II. They went on as Runic to make Torchlight and Torchlight 2, the #1 and #2 most owned Ogre games. Their latest game is a departure from the hack and slash RPG's they're known for. Unfortunately our chart ended on September 15th, and Hob was released on the 26th. So it will have to wait until the Jan 1st charts to make it on our list... But a little sneak peak, it has an 88% review score and 30,000 owners after 3 weeks of sales. We'll see how well the legs hold up into the holiday season. I don't think it's a million seller unless there is some major movement when discounted. But a top 10, maybe even a top 5 game is certainly not out of the question over the next year or two.
Anyhoo, I have a player count spread sheet all set up. With this update, I will make some player count graphs broken up by total units. If I can get some time (will be hard, as i'm headed to full release my self) I will get some of the data before I started making these charts via Archive.org.
The next set of posts will use data taken from http://steamcharts.com/ to show peak player counts for the month in the order of the units owned according to the main chart. (Also we should bump up the maximum number of attachments on the forums...)
Top 5 Games, Peak Player Count:
Top5-Peak-WithT2.jpg
Top 5 Games, Peak Player Count Maximum 8,000 Players:
Top5-Peak-Max8000.jpg
6-15th Games, Peak Player Count:
Peak-6-15.jpg
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
The next set of posts will use data taken from http://steamcharts.com/ to show average player counts for the month in the order of the units owned according to the main chart. Once every hour steamcharts checks to see who is playing what game. The average of these numbers taken every month are then used to show the average concurrent player counts for the games.
This number is good to show how much long term legs/gameplay a game has.
Top 5, Average Player Count
Top5-Average-WithT2.jpg
Top 5, 2500 Maximum, Average Player Count
Top5-Average-Max2500.jpg
6-15th, Average Player Count
Peak-6-15.jpg
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
loath wrote: ↑Sat Nov 04, 2017 1:24 am
dang you were right - runic games closed today.
Yup, I was just about to pop in here and post about it. Was waiting for my night shift. For anyone that wants to read the announcement: http://runicgames.com/
So we don't have an exact headcount, but they started Torchlight with 17 employees, and they're based in Seattle. According to glass door, character artist make around 80-90k there. I figure this is roughly the average pay for the entire company. (Scripters will make like $40k, shader programmers $120k.) Rule of thumb is to double salary per employee to figure out the actual cost of the employees. So we're looking at around $160,000 per head or $2.7m a year in just labor related expenses.
Hob took about 5 years to make, so a rough off the wall figure is around $12m... I would say it's probably less as you normally ramp up then ramp down, plus some of the staff is probably supporting other products, etc. So lets just say half that, $6m.
Hob is sitting at roughly 40,000 in PC sales. Their take home is most likely around $12 per copy. So around $480,000 in revenues... It was released on PS4 though. I don't see the sales number on VGChartz, but they do have 165 reviews on the PS4 store. Using my PC Reviews to Sales metric of x80, that would mean 13,200 PS4 sales. Although I'm not sure how accurate my Reviews to Sales guesstimation is on that platform. But it doesn't matter, even if revenues are 3 or 4 times greater than PC, the end result is the same.
Perfect World Entertainment, the Chinese publisher that owns Runic, still remains. Most likely this is a cost restructuring move. Kill off the expensive western developers, focus on the online portion of the Torchlight products using cheaper Asian labor. What it means for Ogre3d based products? I highly doubt they'll be using the rendering engine in any future products using Runic's two IPs. https://kotaku.com/big-layoffs-at-studi ... 1820120915
In the end Hob was a bad gamble, in a crowded niche. But everyone must take risks I guess.
Last edited by EricB on Sat Nov 04, 2017 4:43 am, edited 4 times in total.
And I need to do some more research in the game dark_sylinc used to work for. As it used Ogre for a time.
Long time not browsing Ogre site and forums
Yes, we have finally released the game ThunderWheels on Steam. We use Ogre 1.9 and an old NxOgre (Betajaen made this binding long time ago) version with some custom code and MyGUI.
I'm glad to see Ogre project is alive !! we will be porting the game to Ogre 1.10 this year.
Awesome! I'll be sure to add it to the list next time I update it. (There are 3? or 4? games I need to add...) My own game has been taking up much of my time sadly. So it might be a couple more weeks before I produce jan 15th numbers. The good news for me though is that I'm almost done.
paul424 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2017 1:26 pm
How about open source games, like OpenDungeons, don't they deserve mentioning as well , maybe not in the Steam Corner but somewhere in general ?
The purpose of this list is for sales/owner data on Steam. You're more than welcome to create an Open Source list if you want. I unfortunately do not have the time to curate my own list let alone one that has no barring on me and is of little interest to me.
