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steam week 1 numbers for A YEAR OF SPRINGS compared to itch & how i did promotion (Patreon)

Published:
2021-10-06 00:52:07
Imported:
2023-10

Content

hello! since i shared week 1 numbers for A YEAR OF SPRINGS when i released it first on itch.io (check out the post HERE), i wanted to share steam week 1 numbers as a comparison.

first off, some caveats:

  • the steam version came out some four odd months after the itch.io version
  • i did a lot more promotion for the steam version than the itch.io version 

this post isn't to say definitively whichever platform is better or that whatever promotion worked the best. it's only meant to be some data points because i find there aren't many small devs sharing their sales data like this - i would love it if more people shared theirs as well, so that we can all have a better idea of how small games are selling.

this post also won't be able to give you any marketing info like 'do THIS & your game will sell!!!' - i'm just providing info about what i did for promotion so that it can hopefully be used as reference.

some quick background info:

rehashing what i posted in the itch.io devlog, A YEAR OF SPRINGS is a remastered visual novel trilogy of three free visual novels that were originally made for various game jams. i (npckc) did the story, code, and art, while sdhizumi did the music (with a couple of tunes from me too). the remastered version upgrades the games from 720p to 1080p, have reworked art and music along with other additional features, plus an all-new epilogue.

i wasn't originally intending to release a steam version, but A YEAR OF SPRINGS was accepted into the tokyo game show selected indie exhibit & to participate in the online demo section, i needed a demo from steam.

at launch the game supported english, japanese, french, korean, spanish & brazilian portuguese. i did most of my marketing in english but also some in japanese as those are the languages i personally handled for this game.

the numbers!

here are the A YEAR OF SPRINGS steam numbers as of one week past launch:

lifetime steam units: 854
- lifetime units returned: -25 (2.9% of steam units)
- total units from mac: 31 / linux: 18

wishlists at 1 week: 4910
- wishlists at launch: 1121
- wishlist lifetime conversion rate: 7.2%

total visits: 45827
- visits by non-owners: 45162

demo lifetime total units: 1653

stuff i did for promotion

from here on i'm pretty much going to detail every single thing i did so it'll be a bit wordy - if you want to skip to the summary ctrl+f "tldr"!

i announced that i was going to release my game on steam on september 1, which is also when i released the steam coming soon page. afterwards, i found out that i should have had the page up for much longer before releasing the game to get more wishlists (or that was what i was told by other visual novel devs) - as some info for other people planning to release on steam in the future.

(since i don't think patreon allows me to embed tweets, i'm going to post links to each tweet with the rt/like numbers at the time of posting in text.)

at the point of the announcement i didn't really do any other promotion. a german website called gamer's palace posted about the steam announcement but i don't think any other sites did.

as a note: judging from the steam traffic stats, i don't think being in tokyo game show has been particularly beneficial for A YEAR OF SPRINGS promotion.

leading up to the release

for the first two weeks after releasing the steam page, for promotion i pretty much only did tweets. i'm told this is not a good idea because mostly it's mobile users & people on mobile won't be logged into steam to then wishlist - but i mostly rely on twitter for other stuff, so i kept with it here. i think it probably would have been better if i also posted elsewhere too though.

i was given the advice to tweet every day with new content, but to be very honest, i didn't have that kind of energy so i couldn't. i did periodically retweet old tweets though, in case people missed them the first time. 

the launch tweet performed the best but #screenshotsaturday & #indiedevhour both seemed to help me reach quite a few people i wouldn't have normally reached. 

i also made a press kit on carrd to make it easier to share game info & images. i made a template as well so that other people could use it if they wanted.

meanwhile, i joined a visual novel discord and was told i should try to aim for 2k wishlists before launch. since at the point i was told this i only had 161 wishlists i didn't think it'd be possible, so i posted about it frankly on twitter as well with a smaller personal goal of 500 wishlists. when i hit that i made my goal 1000 wishlists, which i reached just before the release.

i updated the thread as wishlists went up. (i also found out through this that steam only updates wishlists once per day - i'm not sure about the exact time, but after hearing from some people saying they added the game to their wishlists but not seeing the wishlists update in steamworks, i checked the documentation & found out the number updated daily - i'm not sure of the exact time though.)

meanwhile, i had also prepared a demo. i released the demo on september 15 to go with tgs timing. (in hindsight tgs wasn't very helpful anyway & i should have released the demo when the coming soon page came out instead.)

after releasing the demo, i sent a press release about it to games press (found HERE) - what i found out is that apparently my word formatting of shift+enter (for
style line break) is displayed as no line break on games press, so the press release looks not so great & now that weird formatting has been immortalised on a number of sites that posted the press release as is from games press... i fixed this in the release press release 💦

some other sites posted about the game at this point.

i also sent to some steam curators but i don't feel it was very helpful judging from how at this point in time only one of them has actually reviewed the game haha.

as another tgs note, tgs did do a livestream for the indie games on sep 17 but i think at the highest there were maybe 75 live viewers (& there are like 80 indie exhibits...), which is in my opinion kind of weak for a big game show like tgs with over 50k followers on twitter. it was also just three hours of commentators reading exhibitor-submitted game summaries over trailers.

they also posted this kind of spammy-looking tweet using the exact same format for every single indie game in the exhibit (0 rts / 7 likes): https://twitter.com/tokyo_game_show/status/1440969436484177921

countdown tweets

the week up to the release i did countdown tweets with little introductions to the game. for some of these i tried adding videos to see if it would be better than screenshots.

the first two tweets with screenshots only did better than the video tweets except for the epilogue intro, probably because the epilogue has new content. my qrt at the end also did well.

release day!

then came release day! i put the game on a 10% launch discount for one week since launch discounts were recommended by steam. here are my release tweets.

at this point i also sent out a bunch of press releases to various gaming media. for english media i sent english press releases while for japanese media i sent japanese press releases.

sites that customised the info from my press release before posting:

sites that posted the press release i sent as-is:

quite a few jp places i sent the press release individually actually posted my press release, whereas none of the english places i sent individually except games press posted about my game at all at the point of time i posted this. i didn't contact the german websites personally.

both automaton & 4gamer got people posting about the article & saying they would buy the game / were interested in the game on twitter so for me they had the most impact.

i also read that steam boosted the ~algorithm~ for games once they hit 10 reviews, so i made a tweet asking for more people to review.

on oct 2 i noticed that A YEAR OF SPRINGS was new & trending for visual novels on steam so i tweeted about that too.

this also helped me realise that the 'small capsule' image is the one that shows up in search results like this so it's probably a better idea to have character art or something in it besides just the logo... i updated the graphic after i saw it here 💦

(separate from promotion tweets i had some people ask in dms so i made another proper tweet about streaming guidelines for the game - this might be something you want to have set up in advance on the steam community as a pinned post or on your website!)

i also made a tie-in update for the first game in the series (one night, hot springs) that added a toggle-able outfit from A YEAR OF SPRINGS to let players of one night, hot springs know about the A YEAR OF SPRINGS release on steam.

here are other tweets i made the first week after release:

that brings me up to present day. 

some idle thoughts that didn't fit elsewhere

i was hoping to get some english gaming websites to post about my game's release, but from what i see at this point one week in none has. my method was just to send out press releases to various media (in particular ones that have covered my games before) but this doesn't seem to have worked out for me for english media, while it worked well for japanese media. from what i've seen, i feel like english gaming media is less 'business-like' - while with japanese gaming media a random small dev like me sending an email to the website's press email gives me a fair chance of getting coverage (and i've seen the same thing for other small devs here), english gaming media does not seem to operate in the same way unfortunately, and the effort i put into sending individual press releases to english media hasn't really panned out for me. this would probably be very different for somebody with more connections than me though.

thanks to that i pretty much had to rely only on myself for english media promotion. i think being very open in my tweets was helpful - for example, i said specifically that i was aiming for 500 & then 1000 wishlists & kept people updated as it went up & when i was a bit short from 1000 before the release day, i made a tweet asking people to share a lot of people did through qrts &c. & i don't think i would have reached the 1000 wishlists for release day without it. people also replied telling me they'd leave reviews after i tweeted asking for them.

regarding translations, for me since i can write in english & japanese i usually make all of my games in both languages - but i think with steam, supporting english is probably the most important. past that i would suggest supporting chinese since there's a large number of players on steam that speak chinese but not english. (this gets me into localisation talk, but i think the traditional efigs model is not as useful any more & it doesn't make financial sense to immediately choose those languages to translate into.) in my case having japanese support led to more press visibility, but if you can't personally reach out to press in the languages you're translating to it'll be harder to reach press in that language which also means you'll reach fewer players who speak that language.

i was also told multiple times by multiple people that i shouldn't put links in my tweets because twitter suppresses visibility for tweets with links. in general though i included links in all my tweets with call to actions right in them because i feel like it's just easier for viewers to go straight from a link in a tweet to do stuff... also i think past a point trying to ~game the algorithm~ is too stressful (especially when it's just me doing this & not a proper marketing person whose job it would be to deal with stuff like this). i just want people to know where they can find my game without any weird hoops of having to click into replies just becaues twitter is dumb.

putting my game on steam made me wonder why itch didn't have something similar to a wishlist though. you can put a game page up without a game, but to my knowledge there's no way to follow a game specifically (rather than follow a creator), so there's no easy action for a player to take to get notified afterwards of a game's release or when a game is on sale &c. i love how easy it is to put stuff up on itch & it's still my personal favourite platform to use for pc, but i would love to have the option to be like 'hey i'm interested in this game maybe i'll check it out later!' without having to create a collection & add the game to it or check in myself every once in a while to see if the game is out yet.

a summary... (ctrl+f "tldr")

anyway, to sum things up, hopefully this info can be helpful to people in the same position as me!

i had a lot of advice from different people & also learnt a bunch of stuff on the go.

things i focussed on/would recommend:

- have your coming soon page out early for steam

- if you can, join a steam event with your demo beforehand

- aim for wishlists before your release (this should be your 'call to action')

- have a 'call to action' with each post so people know what they can do if they want to check out your game

- post frequently but try to have new content when you do

- have videos/images when you post

- post with hashtags if they're relevant!

- after your release, aim for 10 user reviews on steam (make this a 'call to action')

stuff that's good to have:

- a press kit so that if people want to write about your game they can get all the info they need

- translations if you can to reach users who can't speak your game's source language (but if your source language is english, you can probably reach quite a few users already)

- streaming guidelines so that people know whether you're ok with streamng / what they can stream

what i feel didn't help me much:

- steam curators (at least in my experience not much traffic from them but a LOT of fishy-looking emails supposedly from curators asking for steam keys specifically not through curator connect...)

- online events (i think if it's on steam directly it'd be different, but the off-platform online tgs was pretty not useful for me & i've heard similar from other people who've participated in similar online events)

back to the summary...

for overall sales at least in my case here steam sold much more than itch.io in the first week. (as a note though, i did not have a launch discount on itch.io. i also put up free community copies in advance of any sales.)

steam had 854 units sold for the first week while itch had 324 units & actually has only sold 728 units to date, five months past release. as a note though,  itch also has the option to pay more than the suggested price. i have free community copies donated by users who pay extra & as of this point i've given out 263 copies, which would put total itch units 'sold' at 991 currently.

looking at views for the page, steam had 45827 visits while itch only had about 5.5k views at the time & only 31.4k views now. steam has way more visibility from a much bigger audience.

judging just from these numbers the ratio of units sold to views is quite different for the two platforms - steam at 53 views per 1 unit sold as of this week. itch is at 43 views per 1 unit sold, or 31 views per 1 unit if including community copies up until now, & an incredible 17 views per 1 unit sold just for week 1. what i would assume from this is is that steam gets you many more eyes due to a larger audience, but that will include a lot of people who aren't that interested, while on itch the people viewing your page are more likely to be interested in your game already. 

this also seems to make sense in regards to refunds - A YEAR OF SPRINGS has 25 refunds on steam at this point but i have never had anyone refund any of my games on itch. (as a note, i took a look at the refund data & somebody refunded A YEAR OF SPRINGS on steam for "Family Sharing Issues" because the game is too heavy to share with their family 😅)

that said, the sheer numbers from steam will probably get you more purchases overall. getting A YEAR OF SPRINGS on steam took a lot more work than getting it on itch, but for me the effort was worth it.

(an important thing to note financially though is that itch doesn't let you set regional prices so it's the same price everywhere & tax is after the fact, so the amount you get per sale is about the same. meanwhile, steam has different prices for different regions & tax is included, so you'll be seeing quite a bit less per unit. on top of that, steam's cut is 30% over itch's default 10%.)

well, i think that's pretty much all i have to say! best of luck to other small devs & hope this info here can provide some insight as to whether to launch on steam along with itch.io!

you can check out my game here: (& leave a review if you play! 💜)

itch.io: https://npckc.itch.io/a-year-of-springs
steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1688580/A_YEAR_OF_SPRINGS/

reference links:

How to Market Visual Novels - arimia (arimiadev.com)

Visual Novel Press-Kits – Jaime Scribbles Games

presskit() 

(and for jp marketing)

【無名のインディーゲーム開発者がプレスリリースを送った結果】 

【ゲーム系プレスリリースの基礎】ゲームメディアに掲載されるためのポイントを徹底解説！ 

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Comments

Anonymous

thank you so much for sharing such valuable info. it was SUPER helpful !

Goblin University

Thanks so much for the info! And for the reminder, finally remembered to leave a review. hope it helps.