Overwhelmed (Patreon)

On Friday, just before 9AM US Eastern time, To Be A King: Volume 1 became available for purchase on Steam. I had modest expectations, and those were pretty quickly destroyed (in a good way). When I logged in that morning before publishing the game on Steam, I checked the wishlist numbers from the day before. Staring at me was what I thought must be a glitch in Steam's reporting. I went from an average of 100 new people adding the game each day to their wishlist to over 750 new additions in a single day. We almost hit 9000 people wishlisting the game before launch. If you don't count those who later deleted it from their wishlist, we would have been well over 9000. Pretty amazing, and To Be A King had what I consider to be an incredible launch day. Over 100 simultaneous players at times this weekend, and a ton of units sold.

I am the type of person who always looks ahead, and that means that once I reach a milestone, I want to improve on it in some way. This has been a bit detrimental to my Steam sales tracking. Not only is your first day your biggest (short of To Be A King featured on Kotaku or something later on), but it starts a pretty rapid descent in sales from that peak. The two days after launch day have been much less than the first. That's when I have to bust out my old projections for how To Be A King might do on Steam and laugh (in a good way) at how pessimistic they turned out to be. It has been an amazing first 72 hours of sales, with a lot of positive comments. From here on, I'm going to periodically check the sales numbers to see what my first week and then first month end up being. After that, it is going to be seeing what the second and third months end up as, since those should be more "normal" in terms of regular sales.

Thank you to all who promoted this big release! We got a lot of eyes (nearly 9,000 wishlisted BEFORE launch) on it. Thank you to all who have supported me here on Patreon. The Steam release never would have happened if I didn't have some growing income coming in during development. And thank you to anyone new (and I know there are at least a handful of you) who discovered my Patreon after buying on Steam and then pledging here because you wanted more of the story. I hope you've enjoyed Chapters 8 & 9.

The dirty little secret of game development is that you need a LOT of eyeballs on your product. The Internet helps there, but, of course, it also allows anyone else the same reach. Especially for niche products like an adult visual novel, you need good volume to support the development. For now, nothing comes close to Steam's reach and sales. I'm grateful it is that way, and I hope it stays that way for awhile so other developers that are not as far along in development as I am can take advantage.

I'll have more to say on all this after the dust settles and I get through a full month or so on Steam. For now, I am blown away that the game did this well. I'm not resting on my laurels, but I may take a day or so to take it in and also relax. At least in between coding work for Chapter 10. That launch proved a bit stressful as I kept checking to see if there were any bugs I had missed. Since I did not have time to do any special renders (apart from the ones you saw on launch day), enjoy these special renders of Kaylan.