We tried to find where the 100+ subscribers came from, but since there was no findable marketing campaign, we cannot say anything for certain. We apologize to those waiting.

As short update, the campaign we referenced is suddenly funded. It makes no sense to us because there has been no further visible marketing. There are a few more things we find unexpected, so we will investigate and come back with our learnings.
#gamedev #update #marketing #crowdfunding

If you haven't played Usurper yet and want to try a Metroidvania game, we recommend to check it out.
Do any of you have other recommendations for hidden gems or other sub 100k games?

Let us know until our next post. Stay colourful!

#games #gamedev #steam #analysis #metroidvania #platformer

One game we want to highlight is "Skautfold: Usurper". While the UI seems copy pasted from somewhere, it's actually quite good as a Metroidvania. We also learned that it's part of a series of games with very differing genres. It is surprising that it is relatively unknown.

- Another part of sub 100k games were adult games with cheap 3d graphics
- That leaves the sub 100k games that look like a good game, quack like a good game, but haven't quiet hit the revenue jackpot. Those are the ones we can learn the most from.

- Almost all sub 100k games were unknown to us.
- Most of the sub 100k are visually appalling. A few had CD-i graphics. Their steam pages also were barebones which makes sense for such niche graphics

We will continue to look at failed an successful games as well as share our journey building a games company in Germany.

Until then, what would you say defines a game as successful?

Stay colourful.

And 90% of all games on Steam didn't even manage to make that.

It's hard to pinpoint exact reasons why some games didn't get bigger. Maybe the target audience was missing, the art style sucked, the mechanics didn't fit or there was no marketing.

Since we want to develop a second game sometime, we want to take out about 20k so we have enough funds for assets and specials. This leaves us with about 40k. So that's about 20k profit per year since typical game development takes 1.5-2 years. In our case, that's 10k per team member. A year.

Then, we have to pay taxes on profits in Germany. We can lessen the taxes by deducting expenses, so let's reduce the usual 19% tax to 15%. That leaves us with 59.5k profit.