Thornity Returns: On Steam Sales and Page Traffic | Scope Creepers a Game Dev Podcast

Setting the Stage: Why Corey is Nervous About This Data Hey, welcome back to another Scope Creepers podcast. My name is Aramis and I hope you're having a lovely day today. I'm working, working that I'm not working. I guess this is kind of my job, which is really cool and I appreciate that. Today I'm talking to Corey, who I've been partnering with. You make a game about a black hole. We'll talk a little bit about this and we'll also talk about his other game that he helped on with Sock House here called Click and conquer. They'll be links down the description below for you to go check out those games. And finally, there's a link to go and if you enjoy listening to Corey chat about business game dev stuff, you can get a free consultation with him to kind of walk through your game and ideas and maybe he can help you out find a way to navigate forward to a path to profitability yourself. This is a data heavy podcast and in a good way. I, I tried to make it accessible as far as asking questions and kind of poking holes in the, in the data or the graphs and we didn't always line up on kind of the data that was presented, which I think ultimately makes an interesting conversation. I'm coming from someone who's really data-driven like Corey to myself, who I guess throughout my career, I've become a little bit more feelings and vibey as opposed to maybe the data side, which is why I think so far has been nice to work with him on a game about a black hole. And this is a cool conversation. This is the second time Corey's been on the podcast. The first one was with Sock House where they did talk about click and conquer in much more detail. So if you want to listen to that conversation first, you can go back, I think it was like a couple months ago in the feed over on YouTube or Spotify, listen to the episode, and then continue on with this one. But without further ado, let's dive into it and learn more about how we can make our games slightly like 1% better in all these categories to maybe hopefully make that game that can be a success financially for for us or just even reach many more players than we ever thought we could. Let's get into it. So where I wanted to start is you said you were nervous for this podcast. You've been on scope creepers before. This time you're coming to me with some data and we've been working together on a game about a black hole. What makes you so nervous to chat today? Speaker 2 I am the only other guest aside from Thomas that have been on more than once. So I feel like there's pressure on the nervousness is I haven't shared this anywhere. It's just a theory. I I have some data I think to nudge people towards that theory being correct and I feel like it goes against some of the other key industry. Like you just need 7000 wish list. You just need to make a good game. And while those are both important, I think there's this third dimension that's not really talked about. And we'll see. We'll see. You can hear the nervousness. Speaker 1 I can't you feel distinctly different than when we talk about a game of Black Hole or anything else. And so it's very, it's a very interesting vibe to feel, which means I need to try to break the ice a little bit down so we can, you know, feel a bit more comfortable here, which maybe I'll try to do myself. So well, do you want to dive in? Do you want to start? Is there something else you want to like that we need to prep before we kind of dive in? Is there other other information or understanding that you want to set up before we kind of sure look at the graphs and the data and stuff like that? The Accidental Discovery of the Game Sales Conversion Gap So I guess I can give some back story to how this started. It was a total accident. I, I had somebody reach out with a game, asked to do a 30 minute call with me about why their game didn't really succeed. And to be quite honest, I had no real good indication. And you know, I looked through everything and it was like an hour before the call and just something hit me. I was like, you know what? I wonder what their first 72 hours of their game looks like compared to Click and Conquer, which was a game that I was involved with that had done very well. And 72 hours was the sweet spot because Click and Conquer didn't actually have any YouTube coverage, no external coverage. We had subjectively modest wish list. Like we had less than 3000 wish lists when we launched. Sure. So I kind of was in this isolated bubble and I'm like, well, clearly this other game I was comparing that had like 10,000 wish lists, a really polished page. Like I thought the trailer was all right. The pricing was like 5 USD, so that wasn't concern. They even had a really good publisher behind them. So I can find anything and then once I looked at the 1st 72 hours, I was like, oh whoa, this is this is way different than I expected. And that's kind of how that we got on to me digging through a bunch of different games now and have spotted similar things. So. Speaker 1 So even with a bunch of different things behind it as far as a market forces and kind of the quote UN quote doing steam correctly, their first what 72 hours are like 3 days, first three days. Speaker 2 Were. Speaker 1 Were very lacklustre, especially in comparison with the games you're more familiar with as far as like seeing the data and having experienced obviously the first 72 hours of click and conquer. Speaker 2 The, the, the big hook I would say for yourself and you know, those who are listening is it wasn't just a minor difference we're talking about. They did like 100 less sales in those 72 hours even though they came in with like three times the amount of wish list and all the other data I could find puts them like pretty even. So that was big shocker seeing like this 3000 units sold versus like, you know, whatever it was 35. I have it somewhere on the excel sheet and it's like whoa, like this is this is not what I expected, especially when you consider the game we are comparing to click and conquer. It didn't have external forces that propped it up. Again, there was no YouTube. There was no major content creator wave that there was we didn't have a big brand. We had, you know, again, 1/4 the wish list compared to this other game. Even the capsule we didn't feel like was like stunning that that there was no single thing you could point to that was like, oh, the work, the artwork carried the game or the pricing. The pricing was similar on both these games. Yeah. So regardless, I, I, I dug into this and got a bunch of stuff and I, I guess that's a good spot to start sharing and looking at this. Speaker 1 So with click and conquer there's no YouTube coverage in the 1st 72 hours. Speaker 2 There was 2 videos, but they were like sub 500 subscribers and like a hundred 200 views on those videos. So nothing that would actually really move it. Yeah. Everything else came after something around 90 hours or give or take. Wow. Speaker 1 So that's a bit surprising because I in in not paying attention to when it came out like I first saw it from so I'm playing it on YouTube. I think either like retro mission or Wanderbots or somebody or maybe Orville potato plate. And I was like, oh, interesting, What's that? And like then happened to be talking to you about and stuff like that. So OK, that's a very interesting place to begin as a good setup and good like understanding of how you found this. It's interesting. That's like it's anecdotal data that you then went and like confirmed by looking at larger swaths of data out there. Unpacking the Data: Sales, Visits, and Wishlist Surprises Yeah, I mean, having the opportunity to work with other devs have definitely given me a lot of insight because it's different genres, different price points, games that come in with a ton of wish list, games that don't come in with a ton of wish list games that hit the popular up and coming. So I expected this to look very different than actually what this does. And it actually looked, I don't know if worse is the correct word, but it was like, oh, a lot more of these games are on equal footing than I could ever have guessed, to be honest. And, you know, I, I think if you can nail this middle spot, this what I'm calling this conversion gap. Yeah, 'cause marketing is driving people in, right? You know, we always talk about get more wish lists, market your game, get on Reddit, make the post, get your demo, get more wish lists. And then there's the actual make good game. When someone buys your game and essentially they don't refund. Yeah, but this in between of converting someone on senior game to buying or wish listing and then being willing to buy the game at that price point. I haven't seen a enormous amount of people chat about this yet. I think this is like the key thing that can fundamentally change whether Andy's going to be quote UN quote successful financially at least, or not. And it it's funny from my perspective in the sense of you're told that make good game and just mark it, but actually this is more like even if you mark it bad, it doesn't actually mean it's good to convert. Well, and even if you make a good game, it's not going to matter if nobody buys said game. Yeah. So I don't know, I feel like this is this like overpowered middle tier that no one's talking about that can really pull up the sales numbers of these games. So. Speaker 1 Yeah, for my own experience, I know that this is the place that I need to play in. And like I had pretty bad conversions for Hexagon. I think I got pretty lucky with Chess survivors and far as like getting getting an idea that's clickable and like convertible and having an artist who's far better than I deserve for the price I paid him to make my Steam capsule artwork for chess survivors. But it's like, this is where I need to grow as a developer is that business minded side of like, yeah, people then come and I can get P. I've like used YouTube to learn how to get people to see my stuff, to wish list it to to get at least enough to like get that ball rolling. And then now it's like that next step of how do I get that from converge? How do I get that from seeing it to converting into sales is something that is going to be they'll probably the next 5000 hours of my work. And so I would just preface this conversation by saying like, also still go learn how to make a good game and make game. Like learn how to make games. And like, if you're going to listen to this conversation and leave it feeling really overwhelmed and stuff like that, know that it's OK to also just kind of back up and say, right now I need to figure out how to get a game on Steam. Like this stuff's probably, I'm assuming is going to feel like a lot. And it's probably feel like a lot for me to try to be like, well, how do I do some of these things? Because that's not an easy question to answer and it's not easy to make a game. And so if this feels like a lot pin this, know that you can come back to this later in this conversation understanding and that it's OK to kind of sit back and just say, I'm going to focus on trying to get a game on Steam and get it released. Because that is not an easy feat to do in itself. And if you get overwhelmed and thinking about all of this up for too long, then all of a sudden it doesn't even matter because you don't even get a game released, right? That being said, I'm really interested in this because I think this is something, right? You know, that's why I'm working with you too. And I gave him about a black hole is like, you have experience, you have thoughts, you have business development mindset. And that's something that I'm learning a ton from already as we've only I think it's been about a month or so right now. So anything else before we dive into the presentation and and all the data? Speaker 2 Nope, just repeat exactly. So it's like a radar graph and like, you can be 100% on one skill and really carry your game far, but ideally you'd be 100% on all that. Doesn't mean you have to be. Yeah, that would be the most ideal. I've seen games that are tremendously great on the artwork, but the core game loop is actually, in my opinion, not that fun. But that has carried those developers to a very successful game. Yeah. You know, I'm just giving one more thing to help try and round out that or pull up or pull out, depending on which way you want to look at it on each of your radar charts. So it's like, OK, you built a good game, you've got decent marketing. OK, there's also this other area that maybe you can then Max a little bit. Yeah. But yeah, you don't have to do everything. I I mean the ideals. Speaker 1 Game development is all about like if you have like 50 skills, if you can increase some of those little skills by one to two points all of a sudden. And this kind of came forward with your the the podcast with you and sock talking about kind of those percentages. But like those one and two points feel like as you add it up across all of it might be enough to like overcome some of these hurdles. And like going from a 90 to 100 is an exponential increase I. Speaker 2 Exactly. Speaker 1 Skills very much like a Path of Exile Exp chart, you're halfway to 100 when you get to like 98 1/2 or something is like halfway to actually getting your XP to 100. So it's probably something more like that where at the last, the later portion of it you're you're chasing, you're chasing this experience that needs more and more and more. But each little tick up in those categories will have oversized impact on on the results. Speaker 2 That sounds good. Yeah, I will share it and let's see let's. Speaker 1 Dive in, I'm excited. Speaker 2 All right, so we're going to. Speaker 1 Have a bunch of graphs showing here. Future me is going to try to edit this so we can see it well. So if you want to like be flipping back and forth just to see the graphs and stuff like that, that could help you understand it. Otherwise I'll be asking questions and we'll be we'll be kind of working right through the data. So if you're also just listening to a long walk, that's it's perfectly fine. Speaker 2 Oh, you're so nice. I'm like, no, you have to watch the VOD. You need to subscribe Scope creepers YouTube. Hey. Speaker 1 There you go. You heard, you heard Corey. Yeah. So you gotta subscribe. Speaker 2 OK, so I'll just dive into it. So this is just the context like and that's a click and conquer is the game. I'm just saying it's the game that I had a baseline to work with and just happened to be in this unique spot where for 1st 32 hours had no content coverage, no post marketing plan. We weren't on the popular upcoming. We did even have bundles set up for those on launch and it was like 2800 wish list. So what I did was I plotted out sales and visits with sales being on Y and visits being on X. And I just got this from the Steam portal. You know why visits because the impression just simply means you saw a capsule, you saw the artwork doesn't mean you actually went to the store page. A visit means you actually went to the store page. So now we're getting to conversion. Did you click add to wish list or did you buy? So and then I just plot like where based off of click and conquer the sales and visits would show up with a trend conversion line. And if I want something like this game, any game you see that the game name is listed, the creator has given permission to show the data. If you see game AB or C, that means the creator is given permission for the data but would prefer the game to not be displayed. Again, trying to respect what people want and and getting all the data. So Sockhouse, who did click and conquer as well play the game with Barricade and you say, OK, it had 2000 reviews. It had less than 10, sorry, 2800 wishlist, less than 10 reviews and it actually had 6000 visits. So, you know, for me, I'm looking I'm like, I don't know, 6000 somewhere like in here. You know, I'd plot it in here, but actually it shows like way below the trend line for comparison to Click and Conquer. Yeah. Anyway, think, OK, it's a game that didn't have the reviews. It's a different genre than Click and Conquer, which was a clicker incremental and barricades like this boomer shooter game. So OK, disregard that, right? Sure. OK, so then I come back and I'm like, hey, what about this farm blight game? It's an automation farming game. It had way more wish list. It actually was on the popular up and coming. It had 9000 visits to it's store. So again, like we're we're expecting way up here in the top right when we're looking at where 9000 would show up on the graphs and we end up way below. We actually end up below what Click and Conquer did with almost half of the visits to the store. So these are the two outliers, the very left outlier and the very right outlier on the graph. OK, so where's everything else kind of fall? So it ends up this, I know the graph is a little messy. We'll zoom in on one of those slides, but you can actually see in the graph that once you remove your left and right outliers, you end up with this bucket of games. They're almost pool all very close to each other. Yeah, which is, again, very surprising. Like I have to quadruple check this because I'm like, really? You'll actually see Aramis's games kind of in there. There's a another slide that will better show that. So the titles aren't on top of each other. But like, you know, chess Survivor somewhere in here, Hexagon somewhere in here. We have games of very different stuff. We have an action RPG game in here. Surf Up is a free to play game. We have roguelike game as one of the I think it's game C Game B is like a cute cozy game. Like I tried to get as diverse as possible. But even then we end up with this bucketing. Our pricing is even different. We have games that go up to 2020 U.S. dollars in here and games as low as like 350 USD in here. But again, we end up with this like big bucket in here. And just to reiterate, this is the first launch plus 72 hours approximately because I can't do exact hours. But you can also see they're really on equal footing. Like once I remove Farm Boy, which is skewed because of Poplar up and coming and Barricade because it didn't even get 10 reviews in this first 72 hours, you actually see this pooling between let's say 4000 visits and 6040 thousand and 60,000 visits. So that's the start of the data. I mean, I thought already just looking at this, like, really? Because listeners and yourself don't even realize that we have huge ranges of even wish list here. We have games in here in that pool that are like 800 wish list, and we have games in here with 11,000 wish list. Yeah. They're so very close to each other that it's kind of shocking, like very shocking to me. Speaker 1 That the wish that the wish list when you're looking at sales to visits doesn't seem to have all that big of an impact given this sampling. Speaker 2 Yeah, when I look through it and I have a table at the end of the slides that shows it in a table format. Yeah, a lot of this is actually just discovery Q like usually. Usually the game is more than 50% Discovery Q in the 1st 72 hours. There are a couple outliers like farm boy on the very right, which is popular up and coming with skew the traffic they get and one of the games in this pool had some somewhat substantial YouTube coverage. So discovery Q is obviously the last percentage of the overall traffic. But yeah. And even the wish list conversions are different in here. You have games that have like 10% wish list conversion verse 72. You have games upwards of 30% in here. Yeah. But yeah, they they pull very, very kind of close in the grand scheme of things. I really expected all this dots to be closer on towards the trending line here or more scattered even. Yeah. Speaker 1 It would be interesting to see this graph with other games that are in line with like click and conquer type sales. Speaker 2 Yeah, it could just be that I don't think there's there's no other incremental game in here. But even then, it's hard to do direct comparison always. Yeah. Because then we get into like, did you have bundles? Did you not have bundles? But it was just, to me, just surprising that there's a pool of the other genres which are not all the same. So I would have expect more spread because it's like, oh, maybe the incremental genres just really broken in sales. OK. But then I would expect something like an FPS to be, I don't know, more to the left and like, cozy casual getting more to the right. It's a small sample size, so maybe I just happen to pick the ones that don't convey that very well. Speaker 1 I'd be curious to see this graph also, just like wish list versus visits and wish list versus sales to see those other 3 views just to see what they all kind of pop out to be. Because there's another way where you can present this data and you show the average and then you see how far above click and conquer is compared to those things. Speaker 2 Yeah, so I have a table at the end that will actually list out all the data, including wish list. Yeah. So then it would technically be possible to do like a visit to wish list weighted thing. But like right off the bat I can say like game B, Yeah, game B or C, it really doesn't matter on the graph. But one of these has literally 11,000 wish lists compared to click and conquer. So 4 XA wish list. Yet now you can say maybe it's a combination of wish list, genre and other factors. Yes, I I get that. I just thought it's very interesting doing this and seeing this pooling and I have some theories. So so I did plot to set it on like actual versus expected. If you use click and conquer as a baseline for the visits and what their sales end up being, I should probably just close discord. But and you end up with a graph that just shows like just how far away they are. And I plot in this black line that's like a 40% error margin. And aside from farm boy that had the Poplar up and coming, like they're just so far from what you would expect. And you make a good point. Like maybe it's just incremental clicker games just do very, very well in sales right now. But I thought one of these cute and cozy games was going to be like, Oh my goodness, like Skyrocket. And I was so shocked when they came in with, yeah, game B35 sales. I'm like, what? You have a, you have a decent trailer, you have a great capsule. The description's fantastic. And I think, you know, as we go through this, you know, I think I have a story for each one of them to explain why they didn't get where they should have been. Speaker 1 Yeah, so like chess survivors came out the same year Vampire Survivors blew up. In fact it was what, 88 to nine months after kind of the big wave of Vampire survivors blowing up and and 20 minutes so Dawn. And so it's like, I would say it was well within still. I mean, you also have data for that genre potentially to see it. But like, I would say it, it felt like it was still within the wave and looking back within the wave of those survivor, like still kind of crusting in a way. And it was a novel take in that genre. And so it'll be interesting to see in the long run where that goes because it is disappointing to see how big of a difference both chess drivers and Hexagon could have been given the data and like kind of expected ranges relative to what Click and Conquer did. Speaker 2 Because the big thing I think to remind and listing here, because it's easy to miss, is this is before the player has played the game. Yeah, right. This is simply what you've presented and communicated to the purchaser, the buyer, the potential buyer, the user about whether or not they should click the buy button or not. And I think that's a big thing because, you know, it's easy to get stuck and say like, oh, X game doesn't have a great mechanic or X game wasn't as polished as it could have been. But then it's like, did you present it in that way that showed and highlighted it wasn't unpolished because that probably would have hurt your sales. You know, talking about like chess survivor. I think the game might have actually did better without showing some of the UI because I think some of the UI is the least Polish in the game. And I think that might have hurt some of the sales in the sense of like, it doesn't feel as a high caliber game as other games. Now, I'm not saying defraud the users, guys. I'm not saying go hide your UI when it's terrible and try and convince them that your game's going to be this glorious cinematic thing. I I'm just saying like if you have a strong game mechanic, but then you're conveying this state of the game that maybe doesn't represent that or is more unpolished than another like that radar, like you have weak UI and what's happening. I think for some of these games that people see that and they infer low quality, not going to be great, polished, fun game. And then they just bounce. Sure. And and that hurts on the sales because we I didn't go this far, but you know, you can go step further and say what was purchased and then what were the refund rates to get a better idea, But was game not fun? Was there a core game mechanic difference? This is even before that. This is just simply can you convert on your store page or not? Identifying Key Reasons Games Fail to Convert on Steam So so you know, we're we're way off. You look at the median difference and the median average is like we're 84% off of where kind of we would expect to be. Not that it is that shocking, I guess when you see the graph, but to me it still was, it still was like, Are you sure? Like triple check the table? Like really there's like there's this big of a gap, like, you know, I expected something like 20, maybe 50%. But once we start getting to like this extreme almost 90% difference, it's like, OK, that screams to me that some of these games on their store are clearly not doing things that maybe a buyer would expect or want, or there's a disconnect from the quality to the purchase price. And again, this is before they've actually played their game. So this is just a presentation of what you're presenting. Obviously, your mechanic is being presented to them. Yes. Yeah. But you control that present presentation. Like, the pacing on the trailer can be a little bit different than the game. Sure. So. Speaker 1 I feel like this isn't where where my brain goes is I wanna see this with the average of all the games. I know you're using click and conquer as a baseline to present what a game does, but I'm also like, this could be showing, showing comparing all these games versus one game that was maybe overly successful given given its preconditions. And so it's something that I'm like, I, I want to see it with the averages against all of these. So then I want to see both, right? I want to see this and then OK versus each other, how do these games line up given that if you could average out all of these, OK, how did they perform amongst the whole group? But you can kind of see it in tease out from the data but like. Speaker 2 Yeah, within the bubble they're doing fine, but The thing is like and why I guess fortunate enough with click and conquer. Was it it? It doesn't have a very special thing. The only thing you could point to is maybe it was a trend and the genre and that was it. It is not like it had this external force of Oh my goodness real civil engineer covered in the 1st 72 hours and everyone followed it. Or it had 25,000 wish list, or it hit popular up and coming or the popular recently released. So I I think there's something there to consider on the games that yeah, in their own isolated bubble there, as we saw in the graph where they pulled together, they're doing fine against each other, but I wanna know why are they not going up? And if the answer is just it's incremental clicker, then I'm like, man, we should be building more incremental clickers. Oh gosh, what? Speaker 1 Are we doing for a next? Speaker 2 Game, but I I've also seen, you know, other incremental clickers not do as well either like they they may maybe do better than that pooling of other games, but they're not necessarily hitting this Clinton conquer feat, if you want to call it that. And, and the big thing is, you know, it's not like, oh, you picked a trending genre and therefore you got more visits. And that's why it's actually like, no, no, no, no, no. Like Steve puts you on a pretty good equal footing for the visits that you get across the board almost regardless. I can't talk about further than like, let's say 15,000 wish list and all the games in here are like sub 15,000 wish list. Or maybe there's some signal once you hit 20,000 that drives even more visits, yada, yada. Yeah, black box, who knows. But here I think I'm talking to a large audience of Indies listening that are probably in that is somewhere sub 15,000 wish list. And it's, I don't know, relieving to me on some extent that like, wow, I'm got the same chance as kind of everyone else. And it's just a question of, you know, can I convert those visits over to purchases or wish list? And of course, you can look further, like I didn't include how much those gains made. And maybe the graphs look slightly different because yes, they sold less, but they were charging, you know, four or five times the amount. So maybe they actually netted out more money. But that's hard because then you have to factor in the refunds too. You have to factor out what time period. And like again, it was I just picked 72 hours because Click and Conquer didn't have any coverage in that time. Speaker 1 Period. So my gut says that click and Conquer is presented in a way where you can understand exactly what the game is within 5 seconds of seeing the page. Like watching streamers after Nextfest or before Nextfest and stuff like that go through on their stream and say what games do you want me to play? Like I was watching Soda Poppin once and he walked through and he had his mods or his community said here's 50 games you wanted to play. He's kept clicking on the links and it was this instantaneous. Oh, it's like this, but that oh, it's this, yes, no. And like these things, these these guttural kind of gut feelings were so immediate that he was just filtering stuff out so quickly so so you could see it on his face. It was instant reaction. And like, I think click and conquer has a really good name. It says, it says exactly what the game is going to be, right? You click something and then something happens and then you see the page and it's the trailers. You click something and a bomb drops and blows up and like that is less than 3 seconds and you could say, oh it looks, you know, kind of fun. I want to click a thing and drop a bomb, you know? Speaker 2 The nice thing though is I think all or nearly all other types of games should and can do similar. Like you should be able to communicate out your core loop and what the game is about to your user in these like sub 6 seconds kind of shenanigans. And if you're not, and maybe it's just more obvious with a clicker game because there's less mechanics and therefore you can only just show that and just makes it easier for people to produce those sorts of trailers. But I don't disagree exactly with what you're saying. Yeah, I think there is truth to that. It's like that game had a very good refined. This is really what you're getting. And I think that converts well with users. Now, one of the stories we could talk about out of these charts is game B that does 35 sales is a game. It's, let's call it a buildy, cozy, casual game. The price point is, I think, fair for what it was. It was like five U.S. dollars. The capsule looked actually quite intriguing and you know, they had nice GIFs on their page. I think the description made sense. You know, I'm biased to what I think in this, sure. But one of the things I did notice in that game was yes, the game was tagged quote UN quote correctly to what was in the game. But if you Scroll down and you looked at games similar to this, they were super hardcore strategy builder games like let's say like Factorial and Rim World. And this is a cute casual game. And those are not. There's probably some player overlap, yes, but I think those are divided players mostly. And my theory there is. OK well where does Steam get the initial audience for discovery queue? I don't know. It's again a black box. I would use my experience in the ad space to say, well they probably seed off of games that they think are similar to this game. Yes, and Steve Dawg is not. Speaker 1 Going in and playing all those Steam games, like playing the game and saying, well, this one feels a lot like this game. It's like it's the data we tell it. Speaker 2 With that said, it's like, well, yeah, of course you did less sales if you have the same amount of visits, that's the other game. But you drove the audience that Orstein gave you, the audience that's like hardcore factorial players. And you're like, oh, look, it's like this little cute, cozy, like casual game you laid back. They probably don't convert. So I I think that's actually what honestly killed Game B, because everything else was spot on. I couldn't find anything else. At least conversion's important. I guess that's the point. Is like that page is more valuable than you ever would imagine. Speaker 1 Yeah, one of the things I have done and I think it did with both my games is like go and find my target like 3 comps. Basically thinking of like selling a house too. Like go find the comparables and look at what they're doing and use that as like your market force to say, OK, you can literally pull and grab all of their their tags and put in a spreadsheet and say which ones are common and which ones are ranked higher. And then go into that and say, my game is like these three games. I want my tags to be like those three games. And then I want to make sure that in the little widget that they pop up and they're like closer to the top just so you can try to lean into like you just said there. I think that's a little trick to try to like there's thousands of tags, there's so many tags out there that you can put on your game. And so trying to like figure out which 20 to use is not easy. And even if you figure out they're 20, which order to put them in is also not easy. I would highly recommend not using the suggestion thing by from Steam. Speaker 2 I would say to not put the tags actually you believe your game should be and to spend the time trying to engineer what the tags that produce games similar to what you agree with. Yeah. So if you put in tag ABC and you get similar games as the games you agree with, then great. If even though you might say like, oh, but I think it's more city builder, that tag should be higher. And then all of a sudden factorial shows up and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, none of my players are probably really good. Play that game. That's not I wouldn't recommend playing this game and then tell them go play factorial yeah. So yeah, games B in that case, that story behind it and why I think there was such a gap was I think the tagging was just incorrect and their discovery Q, even though they got the same amount of visits, the audience just did not resonate with the game. Sure. And obviously did not buy and and like I said, that game particularly is 3-4 times the e-mail wish list and actually did have some 4 to 5000 view coverage in those first 72 hours. So what else did I put here? Let's see. Oh, I just zoomed in so it's easier to see the the grouping and I was saying each has their own reason and kind of explaining it here on one of them was like OK, game game B is that you know, barricades obvious because it didn't have the ten reviews. So This is why it's so much lower. Yeah, serves up is. Speaker 1 Getting the ten reviews for those who don't know, that gets you into this, gets you into the discovery queue to basically like that's the one of the initial algorithms that kicks in, right? And like Steam has said, but I think they've said before, like, no, it's not ten reviews, but like everyone's like it's, we're almost positive as a community. It's ten reviews. It's like kind of where that kicks in. Is that correct? Speaker 2 It is, but it will actually get some minor traffic even without the 10. Sure. It's just like, I guess that's where the weight is kind of the question point. Yeah, that OK. Instead of you getting 5% of X, all of a sudden you're getting like 80% of said X. And again, where are they getting the traffic from? Black box? But I have this suspicion. Speaker 1 My cat just knocked something off of a shelf. Speaker 2 I I had the suspicion that it is trying to use the seed audience of games similar to yours. And if those don't match, you're not going to convert. And then what that does is it incentivizes that discovery Q to send less and less because it's not converting. And then you just have this giant drop and lose the traffic, which long tail would hurt you even more, But not in 72 hours. Absolutely. We chatted about Test Survivor early, like 2 cents. There was just I think like some of the UI stuff maybe isn't most appealing to people seeing yet. Sure. I think Indie Clinic covered Hexagon on your side. So I don't know if you want to chime in on their two cents of what they thought about the game. Speaker 1 I think the biggest problem with Hexagon is that it just it's unclear what the gameplay is. Speaker 2 Yeah, I was gonna say, like, conflicting systems, like, I think they nailed it when they had mentioned you present like a cute, cozy casual game. And then you get in and you're like, wow, this is a real, like, strategy game with tons of UI and it's like, OK, not what I expected. Yeah. And I think like you can get that even in the trailer and the screenshots. Speaker 1 I think the mechanics that were outside of any of that converse, this sort of conversation is because that is like what is presented to the players, not necessarily what are they like actually playing the game. And like there's there's problems in the gameplay absolutely that indie clinic talked about, But it's like from a marketing standpoint, I think it's just you come to the page in five seconds and you don't know what you're going to like what what am I doing in the game? Like, you know, like there's some hexagons cool and it's bright colored and stuff like that. And that all informs a lot of these decisions. But I think it's something that I'm like, yeah, I I really, really failed that making a game that's clear what you're going to be doing. I. Speaker 2 Suppose Surfs up is a free to play game so it has like 80,000 units so it actually beats click and conquer units, but it does free to play so that there's no friction. So I looked at their DLC supporter pack and that's how we got the the sales. And I think the story there is like less of a their store page bad. It's actually more a story about like converting free players to paid users is a whole other beast. Yeah, especially because once you've gone to the page and you've downloaded, you've, you've left the page, you've actually converted, yes, but you convert it as a free user. So now the difference is like, how do I convert you to a paid user? How do I get you back to the page? And, and I think that's even harder. Speaker 1 Yeah, because this was a cosmetic pack, right? It's not like Track Mania where you can buy a sub and then because you have the sub, you get access to also cosmetics in that game, right? But then there's like the big cup of the day thing, which is a, you know, a daily, a daily tournament you can access because you are a paid subscriber. And that's like, that's a way to get yourself into that. Speaker 2 It's cosmetic, but I think there is functionality but you don't need it to play the game. I think it's like private lobbies is unlocked but you can play the game solo and then it's like how many players actually want to play together, yada yada. It's an. Speaker 1 Interesting game. Speaker 2 Game C is looked to be like a pricing issue. The game doesn't describe what it is at all. I'll say it's a rogue light platformer is game and you would never get it from the title. It's like calling a game like I don't know, the land of quarry and you're like, what is that game? I have no idea. Like it doesn't describe anything about it. You would never even guess. Even the capsule art itself, there's zero way to even guess that it's going to be this rogue flight platformer in any shape or form. Sure. And game A was in early access and then full. And the big story there is they just had a pricing issue. Yeah, I could see it in the refund data. It was just complete after complaint after complete after complaint of game too expensive. Game too expensive. Would never pay this for this type of game. It's an action RPG game and and let's say it's like 20 U.S. dollars and yes, there are 20 U.S. dollar action RPG games, but it's like if you even ask the creator, is your quality and time playable like even half of these other And it's like no, and it's like well, but you're charging like same price almost as the. Speaker 1 Last Epoch is a $30 game to buy and it is very very full and fun RPG game. Speaker 2 So all different stories and like, you know, some is pricing, some is, I think screenshots, some I think is tags. I, I, I mean the trailers are subjective and like how much, like how much you think they could have better conveyed the game. But you know, I, I basically just, this is from the last time I was on the podcast. I, I took this slide which talks about like, hey, if you want, I'll go success on steam. It's like the shortest amount of time and the largest amount of impact. And like the things you can do are yes, market your game, yes, build a good game. But this middle gap is like, look at your pricing, look at your store, look at like what you can piggyback on the trends. Can you convey it in your trailer? Can you have a good value to pricing? Practical Application: Optimizing Our Black Hole Game's Page I mean, let me ask you this, a game of a black hole, like, you know, you're hearing this. What are you thinking about the game of a black hole that we could do differently on the store? Speaker 1 That we can do differently on the store. Speaker 2 Like, given this information, is there anything that you're now considering? Speaker 1 I haven't put too much thought and time into the store page that was going to be tomorrow's task or maybe this afternoon's task to start kind of fiddling through all that stuff for the demo launch. I mean the the premise of a game about a black hole back when I came up with the idea in March or April was like make a game that has that 5 seconds of understanding what the gameplay is like. I failed with that in Hexagon. Let's make a game or at that point it's just me, but I want to make a game that was just like this game knows what it like. People can know what it is very quickly and decide yes, I'm interested, No, I'm not interested. And so a lot of everything has been around that, even from like the art style, I guess is something that's like, I want this game to be very quickly understood and that lends itself to hopefully having something that pops a little bit harder to see what it is. So I don't know, does anything come to mind when you're thinking through these things and looking at a game about a black hole saying it's a very interesting question. Speaker 2 I think, well we talked about even changing the name to I think it was beat the black hole or feeding the black hole, something around feeding it. Speaker 1 I was thinking of a game about feeding a black hole. Speaker 2 Exactly. I, I think that is already a win on building these. It describes exactly kind of what you're doing in the game. Yeah. OK. My goal is to put things in the black hole, OK. You know, we, we talked to the pricing. I I think pricing is going to be within the range of what the market's willing to play for pay for these sort of like incremental game. I think it will be comparable to the art style of other games in that price range too. I think the tags we will just do exactly what we're saying is like not what we think naturally the tags should be. It's like what gets the tags to the games that we know are going to be similar and the player base would be of, you know, where we have inspiration from keep on mining. Well, if we can get it to show up, that's probably actually good. Yeah, Nodebuster, another kind of this Hover Destroy game. Any other games that we use as, I don't know, I used as inspiration, at least if they show up, they're great. I don't look as competition like, oh, but if they've already played that, they won't play this game. Speaker 1 It's also not how incremental games work, right? It's like we get this nice thing where like at least I as a player, I play 1 and I'll play another. Like I'll play another one with a similar mechanic because the novelty will be different. Speaker 2 I think I see that with like these crafty building games too, and I think that's one of the reasons why they do so well in Steam. Yeah, is like, I've played factorial. I've played like, in my opinion, the like building game. Yeah, I still go play banish. I still play Beaverton or Beaverton, whatever. The one Timberborn, yes. Speaker 1 Beaverton Q Is that what you named your town in? Speaker 2 Timberborn, you know, and I initially was hesitant buying that game because I thought, like, how much more can you improve? I have Rimworld, too. Like, how much more can you really improve? And then I sunk 50 hours in the game. Yeah. So I don't look as disadvantaged. It's just watching Christie's How to market a Game Bod. He had a part of one of his courses or was on his YouTube where he records people buying games on the store page. And one of the first things I noticed when watching this is how quick people make the statement. Oh, it's like X but Y different. We were like hardwired for pattern recognition. We are very good at this and I think doing that as part of those page is actually important. Like, yes, I want games to show up that are actually like, oh, it's like this but a little bit different, or that's the different mechanic or the art style is different. Speaker 1 Yeah, think in nature there's like mimicry with animals that they're not poisonous themselves to eat, but through natural selection they will mimic other animals that are poisonous to eat. Smart and or or the opposite if they want, say it's like a fruit that wants to be eaten. It'll mimic other things that want to be eaten. You know, XY and ZI think that's something that I've noticed myself getting in my way with. And like other people I've talked to during game dev coaching sessions is like we keep getting in our way of trying to do something unique and different. So you look at making a trailer and you're like, how do I make a trailer? Look at the games that you're targeting. What what communication styles? Literally you could take the format. OK, I'm doing a survivor style game. Your first few screenshots need to be 3 or 4 different one to two second clips of people doing crazy builds. Hook me and show me the crazy stuff I can do and then like pop up on the screen with some text and then the next one is where do I start then? And then show me quickly progressing to another crazy build at the end, right? Like that's a formula. There's hundreds of those games out there. Copy that formula and then like be able to showcase, you know, plug in your, your, your clips into that. Speaker 2 I don't think I ever told you initially how we went around Click and Conquer's trailer, but we, we just look to YouTube like every advice you have for YouTube for like the first 30 seconds matter for YouTube. What's your hook? All that? What's like the framing? What are you trying to be? We just took all the lessons from that. It was like, we're not making a trailer. We're just making a really short YouTube video. Yeah. Like we're trying to close the audience to get them engaged in first, whatever, 5 seconds and then longer 30 seconds, let's see, let's say. And that was it because, you know, if you try and go Google away, Google around for like how to make Steam trailer, like I feel like you get less in depth advice than how to make a YouTube video and what is all the possible things to do there. Yeah. And I feel like the quality is very, very polished on those because you have content creators that have a very refined playbook and have done it way longer. And it's like, OK, take all those lessons apply. It's like, OK, even if you watch click and conquers trailer, it's like the reason why we change out the clips every like 5 seconds is because the really successful YouTube videos we've seen, they never see on the same screen for more than 5 seconds. Yeah, that's literally what we did. It's like, OK, we need a transition like some sort of like J cut over somewhere every 5 seconds, which is good because it keeps the video down and condensed and short and to the point too. Yeah. Speaker 1 I think it's one of the biggest benefits of having made YouTube videos for three years, that it's just like I have a better intuition for like that sort of kind of editing, I suppose. I think I did good with chess drivers, absolutely horrible with Hexagon. But I'm excited about a game about a black hole and like the Polish for the electric effect that we added in and the radiation one, like even just electrical alone is something I'm like, cool. That is really, really easily marketable. I think like to show as an opening shot you breaking one and then the chain lightning kind of going out and breaking a bunch of stuff is a very like pleasing thing to be able to see. And so it's exciting to get to some things that I'm like, this will look really nice in a trailer. Speaker 2 Even on the trailer, like I guess one of the things I could say about this is maybe even before building a game, think about the page before it. Like what would the page look like before you built the game? It's like, well, I need to highlight a a GIF around this this mechanic. OK, but how is that mechanic would look a way that actually captures people attention? How's your trailer going to look to make sure that the audience is engaged in it? It's almost kind of like the advice I heard on the YouTube side is like design your title and thumbnail before you even make your video and and similar. I don't know how great the device is, but I'm not a YouTube, but I've heard this enough that it sounds good on the how to a game of a black hole. It's like you can have a scenario where it's like you show the end state just how powerful you get and the game beats it becomes a big black hole and then transitions right to the small shrink down. Here's where you begin. Because then they get a sense of like, Oh my goodness, the game's broken. Like that's what I got. That's the power I will have. And then you show them this is where you begin. And like, I would cut right over to the here's the skill tree. Oh my goodness. Like it's like on keep on mining. When you see how big the skill tree is, you're like, whoa, there's so much to do. Same thing for ours. Anyways. I don't, I don't think I had anything else. These were just, this is a good spot of anyone else who want to play around with the numbers. If they want to say sales to visits or impressions to sales or the percentage of the discovery queue or how many wish lists or weight them differently. It's all here. And you know, like I said, I just saw this pooling and thought it was interested and just kind of wanted to highlight that, you know what can do great marketing and have nobody convert? You can build a great game and no one will actually buy it. And if you don't nail the conversion and the best ways you can with the tools you can because like, obviously like you're at the mercy of like the audience that gets driven to you. Yes. But we do have little, little levers like, oh, if I take right, maybe I'll get that type of audience. If I get the similar games that I really want, maybe that will drive a better audience then. Yeah. Like I just think people put it in and they spent enormous amount of time maybe on the trailer, but not necessarily everything else too so. Speaker 1 It, it is something that it is everything. It's, it's kind of like to make a game feel good. It's not one thing like I think we often, at least I, I'll speak for myself, I often think that oh, one thing makes the game good. And it's it's something that over the past 5000 hours of making games, I figured out that's like, Oh no, it's hundreds, not thousands of small little decisions that add up together to this effect. Hovering button noises, the button animation slightly, the timing of a transition, the the amount of screen shake or lack there a screen shake, the the shaders you put here and there that the colors you palette you like it. The list goes on and on of all these small little decisions you're making to add up to be the game. And the same seems to be true. At least that's what disappointing is like. Just cuz you have a ton of wish list doesn't necessarily mean you have success. It is easy to boil it down to that and saying that yes, wish lists are important, they are helpful, and there's all these other things that we also need to be trying to do correct or optimally to try to get all the levers there. And as we saw with some of these games and stories you pointed out, sometimes missing one lever can completely tank a game that otherwise look like it could have been better. Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, any number of times there is still 0, Yeah. Like if, if you truly tank out one of these really bad, yes, it can fundamentally hurt the game as a whole. But equally, you know, if you just meet them in on the others, they're not zero. You can have one area that actually will really pull your game. I just think it's as you had mentioned at the start, it's a lot harder. I think it's an exponential graph at some point where it's like the first 80% of the skill is linear and then from 80 to 100 is just whatever, some form of exponential. And you know, I'm like, well, let's get the 80s around. And yes, you might have one thing that you really have excelled in, whether it's art or programming or it's the core game juice or yada, yada. And great, that's good help. But leaving any of these other regions as like near zeros is probably really hurting your game unless you're like really incredibly strong in another area. And again, like, how much time does it take to pull up the one? I'm not saying to 100% like to be world class in that field. I'm saying like a moderate level of like, OK, I did the one hour watch YouTube VOD to get an idea of the minimum stuff I should do. Yeah, like I need 10 reviews. I, I, I should plan around that. Like you didn't need to go through Excel sheets and all this data to get there. It's like, OK, I need to make a play test. Sorry, I launched a test or launch day event and I need 10 people. I want more than 10 because some people are gonna flake some people can't and like great. That's enough of like I checked off I'm going to get traffic from steam yeah we didn't even talk about any crazy min maxing here or can we time up the content creators to all release their videos on the first day? None of this like just just get the 10 reviews. Speaker 1 This is the stuff that's in your wheelhouse, although reviews might not be in the wheelhouse, but it's like setting up all the different things. You have to go and take your game. You know, you have to have a trailer, you have to have screenshots, you have to have a description and all those different things. And those are things that are within your control. And even if it is your first game and your goal is to get a game on Steam, like going through the practice of creating a bunch of these things and trying to do them with intention can help you build up the muscle that when you come back to more and more games, like I'm doing with the game, but a black hole, trying to do them now in a more optimal fashion, yeah. Speaker 2 Yep. Maximizing ROI: Pricing, Bundles, and Translation Strategies This is cool. I like seeing the data. I'm disappointed that my games at the top game, but that we'll get there, we'll get there. Speaker 2 That's what the next game's for, right? Speaker 1 If that one doesn't work, then there's another game after that, so. Speaker 2 Well then I just have one more data point. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Air Miss column will have three games, which is crazy. That's so cool. What else? What are the things have you kind of thought about or looked about, you know, kind of in the last six months of of Steam work and and different things like this? Is there anything that stands out to you as another interesting finding? Speaker 2 You talked about the YouTube video. I mean like bundles are really the protection of the long tail for games. Constantly looking for not only old games, but new up and coming games. The bundle, you know, I started playing around with one game on just changing the base price of your game after the fact really increase sales when you're not on discount. Sure, so far it looks like not really, you know, but it's like only one game and start tinkering around with this AB testing because I'm always curious. It's like, should a game that was $20 just drop down the base to 10 and just decrease the discount? And does it get more sales during non discounted time or is it just better leave the $2020.00 game discount like way more and just make it up for it only during the sales and festivals and. And so far it looks like the answer is don't play around with the base price unless you're doing it right at the start when you still have like the 30 days of visibility from Steam. If you think that the game won't sell well during that initial wave is probably the only time to touch it. After that, you should just min Max off your discounting, even if it means that the game has to be pulled down like 75% on the discounting. But I have a gut instinct that there is a point of diminishing returns on the discount. You hit a spot where people feel like the game is quote UN quote dead and it's not of good enough quality anymore to buy because it's 90% discount. Yeah. And maybe that is the spot in which you flip the script and you do pulled in your base price and restart at like a 50% discount, even though the user's paying like the same or less. It's just now they're not seeing this 90% off on a $20 game and going, oh, that's a dead game. That's why it's 90% off. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's something I'm playing with with chess survivors is running 50% discounts where I was like working my way down to like 70%. And like as you showed me, there wasn't necessarily any sort of significant difference in conversion rates. And so it's like, well, that's just leaving money on the table. And we'll see in the long run if that does hold out to be true with 50%, cuz I think I'm going to try to run that for like the the remainder of the year is everything at 50%. And then we'll have six months of data with 50% to see what that conversion rate looks like and stuff like that. So that should be interesting to learn from. The long run is like, I just defaulted assumed based off of being a Steam user myself, that over time you just slowly will step your way down that thing and be attracting new players. But the data doesn't necessarily tease that out. And you can look at that data to understand if you're heading the right direction or if I was just like blindly following what I thought the right part process was. And I'm a data-driven person. I've had a career full of doing data analytics and stuff. And like, I'm just, sometimes I'm just too focused on making a game to be able to like take that step back and like, oh, is this really, is there any data that backs us up? And I could have pulled that data down and made that graph within an hour and I would have been able to spend an hour and maybe easily make $50.00 with that decision. That's an interesting lesson I've learned from. Working with you is like trying to find those high value, low effort moments to add value to the business. Speaker 2 Translation was one of the ones you covered some of this in your video on your main channel on the game audit. It's like translations that well, I haven't looked at it exactly, but let's just say it likely had some improvement. I don't think it had a negative impact. Let's say that, you know, the bundling is a great ROI. It's like, even if it takes you 10 hours, yet you know, it ends up being like whatever, 30, forty, $50.00 an hour of your your time when you figure it out, it's like, of course those are worth it. The same thing for the translation to go back was like I recommended it just because the time effort too. Like, I, I had another game that the way that they've created the game translation would take them like, I don't know, 30-40 hours to implement just because they have images with text in the images themselves. They have some audio stuff that says stuff, OK, this would be way harder. And for that, I was like, you know what? It's probably not worth it for the amount of copies you're going to sell. You know, arguably, though, on the flip side of that is like you could still list the game, the Steam pages in the language and just mark as the game is only in English. Yeah, and why is if you filter by English only or whatever your your your mother tongue is, you know, you're not even seeing it on Steam. You're not even going to see the store page. Yeah. Let alone that the game is only in that other language. So it's like click and conquer. If it only said it was a the store page is only in English and you filter on, I don't know, Spanish. You'll never see it. Literally never versus if we have the Spanish page there and you go there, then at least the user is able to make the informed decision of ah, game says English only. OK, how much text is there? Like how much do I actually? Speaker 1 Need to be able to get the text, yeah? Speaker 2 Or if they just see the trailer, like, you know what looks fun enough, I'll just pull up Google Translate. Yeah, or they have just enough working knowledge of that language that they're able to get. Speaker 1 Well, imagine it happens and you see 5% of your sales are Spanish. I go, maybe I should invest time into that translation at that point when it makes more sense or not at all. You know, there's also that there's a lot lot to do there and that's definitely something I want to try to do with you might a black hole is get translation support in there before we release the demo so that we're just already kind of getting that as many buckets as possible for the demo and. Speaker 2 Then I just did it for. Speaker 1 Survivor So my brain is it's. Speaker 2 All around the the TR function Ditto. I was going to say that the content creators too. It's like, OK, even if the game doesn't have a ton of wish list and doesn't have a ton of like maybe traffic for Korean, it does not mean like in test survivors case, it's like great, you've introduced that. So now you can go hit up that audience of content creators that probably would have skipped running looking at the game because it did not have that translation, which opens up a whole new like visitor potential traffic. No guarantees. I mean, you could do this work and nothing happens. It's just what you think the ROI would be and what can you kind of wager out. I think I could sell for two more copies. Speaker 1 Even the expected value on that is really low, like the, the even if it's a -5 hours of work for me to make Hexagon and would not have translation files or is five hours for chess survivors. And like even if it's $0.00, my time is maybe 15 to $20.00 an hour. Or I could take my my game division coaching rates say it's $50.00 an hour for my time. That's -250 if I do it and nothing positive happens from it. So like that, that expected value calculation is really easy to see the the downswing isn't that low and the upswing is in the long run of a game, you know, maybe somewhere between zero and $1000 could be a, a decent kind of middle band of success for that. Speaker 2 Other things that were interesting is I am intrigued at least by the marketplace and steam and you can take cuts of trade transactions. So like you, I have a skin. You want to trade the skin to me, Sure. I actually get a like as a dev creator. You get a cut of that surfs up Does this being a free to play game with skins and all this, but it has not amounted to like really anything. But I'm always interested in games that could find a way to push this boundary. Speaker 1 That's the banana game especially. That's where that game makes all the money. Speaker 2 Banana game is it worth doing it for the level of effort just for the potential upside? You know, maybe you have a game that's like a modest success, but this is the pushing factor to make it financially really successful. You know, I don't know if every game should do this, but is there really any downside to having like DLC supporter packs even even the games I've looked at that have this it's like well what how much time did it take you? It's like, well, less than three hours. I just slowly add the switch statement that adds a gold skin. They get a like, I don't know, Rusty Rusty's retirement. Let's say they get a gold Cape. They get no functionality difference. And you're like, yeah, but it's not a ton of money. Yeah, but it took you 3 hours at $50.00 an hour, it's 150 cost to do it. And it's like, well, how many coffees does that sell over the lifetime of the game, Right. And so it's like, OK, if it's selling 50 copies and you're making 3 bucks a copy, you're actually breaking even. You know, I think there are games that should revisit a lot of what they're doing. They think like they've, they've set up their discounts, the game's been out more than a year and it's doing its thing. And they just don't do the homework to revisit opportunities, whether it's the pricing, whether it's bundling, whether it's OK, you want to consider doing V2. I mean, there's ethics and morals to this, but as like, you could technically make AV 2 of any game and say you would like to do it, but it depends on the engagement of your community and not work on this game at all. You could make the store page and look at the reception of how many people are interested in getting it. Yeah. And then make the decision. Yeah. But I think people don't even go even that far. They won't even make the discord message. So they're like, hey, I I think I'm going to make X Should I or should I not as a as like those are like not dead game. Forget it. It is what it is like yeah. But you know, if you're going to build another game, would you like to build a game that you already know all the constraints of and all the game play and you're going to revamp or re add or extend. And you might already have an audience of like, hey, there's already like 100 to 200 copies probably going to be sold off of the existing. And I'm not saying that's like going to break even on the project, but it de risks some of how successful the game has to be. So then the question is how much time are you going to be spending on this other thing? Yeah, listing on like Humble Bundle, like we talked about this, it's like you don't need to do the bundle sale. You can just list on the store page. Yeah, and have your own store and you like it takes one to two hours, let's say to set up. It did over. Speaker 1 The course of a couple weeks and we'll see. I have, I've never checked it. I don't know. I think I have to get to like $250 but if I randomly get a $250 check that'll have been worth it like. Speaker 2 Like I can say from click and conquer side, I I know in the first week of being on that we had already sold like between 30 and 50 copies. So like it, it already was like, oh, this is a no brainer. I remember we did support Mac. We added Mac even though the game is on Windows and Linux and you think, oh, there's not that many Mac users, right? And it's already paid back way over the time we spent implementing Mac. Post-Podcast Reflections and Future Game Development Outlook I just think that people should, you know? Speaker 1 Are you still there? Oh, no. He left. It's just me now. It's just now it's just the Aramis podcast. Thornady. Thornady dropped off. Let me see if he's in Discord. The power went out. Shoot. Well, yeah, I, I'm, I am blown away by chess survivors being able to continually sell. And it's been something that for a long time I thought I was just a dead game and I wouldn't keep like adding more to as a product. And now it's something that I am considering like doing more development and doing more work on in the long run. And that's interesting. I, I'll, I'll likely try to do a few more things here and there, even just to take advantage of the visibility around, you know, trying to trying to re engage a little bit with that game because it is showing that it has a high conversion rate and that I can put time into it. Although I will tell you the code base is absolutely garbage, very hard to use because it is my first commercial game and I've grown a lot since then as a dev, even just like changing from snake case to I do snake case now and I used to do camel case all the time. And so just those little changes there. It's just harder to read my old code. It'd be cool to see in the long run what I can do with chess survivors to continually re engage sales and find those like strategic bundles in the long run to to, you know, make make more money. That is ultimately what it's trying to do, is trying to find valuable things for consumers or players to buy that then turns into profitable things for me in the long run. And I think that's one of the cool things I've learned from working with QWERTY. There'll be a link down in the description below if you want to reach out and get a consultation with Thornady. Also know Corey, also known as GD. I don't know, it was in the bottom corner of something. It all be in the description below if you want to work with him. I've had a blast doing it. I'm partnering with him on a game about a black hole and we're in discussions about what game #4 would look like for me and working with him to do it as well. It's likely going to be taking what we did with a game about a black hole and try to do it faster, more efficiently in a little bit better for the February next fest with like a March release timeframe. So all things instead pretty excited about it. It's been great working with him and this was an interesting conversation. The data wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. I would say in the long run, there's maybe a few graphs that I would hope were were added, but I still think it is an interesting point of perspective to see. Hey, wish list aren't everything. You do need to try to do all these different parts. And because of that, I think I'm learning more and more every day. So that's it. I've been here. Miss, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye bye.