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The Sales of Incline.

MrMarbles

Cipher
Joined
Jan 13, 2014
Messages
438
Is a sale for AoD permanently ruled out? Would like to buy it for 3-4 friends but I'm poor.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
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Messages
28,024
Dead State sold more than 100k? Jesus. VD, you must invite Brian Mitsoda to write a quest in your next game. It will generate publicity.
The magic of Humble. So far AoD did better than DS (copies sold in the first 6 months). It would be interesting to see how well we'll do in the first year.

Is a sale for AoD permanently ruled out? Would like to buy it for 3-4 friends but I'm poor.
What do you mean? We've never ruled out a sale, I simply didn't want to discount the game when it was in early access and only because it's dickery, not because I don't like money. We ran a 15% off discount several times and did a 40% off discount in March.
 

MrMarbles

Cipher
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Jan 13, 2014
Messages
438
Is a sale for AoD permanently ruled out? Would like to buy it for 3-4 friends but I'm poor.
What do you mean? We've never ruled out a sale, I simply didn't want to discount the game when it was in early access and only because it's dickery, not because I don't like money. We ran a 15% off discount several times and did a 40% off discount in March.

K, it didn't show up in the steam price history, my research skills must be off.
 

Kz3r0

Arcane
Joined
May 28, 2008
Messages
27,013
Monthly update:
Minuscule changes here and there.
In case anyone is interested Banner Saga 2 sold a third of Banner Saga 1
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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In case anyone is interested Banner Saga 2 sold a third of Banner Saga 1
Sadly, this idea of selling more hardcore gameplay styles to casual is a one-shot deal.

People bought Legend of Grimrock because of the awesome graphics - then they found out what blobber means and never came back...
Now people bought Banner Saga for art style and BioWarian pedigree - then remembered why they never finished Final Fantasy Tactics and never came back...

Worst, those devs probably went "They loved our game! We established an IP! We can make the sequel many times bugger & more expensive and sell even more!"
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
In case anyone is interested Banner Saga 2 sold a third of Banner Saga 1
Sadly, this idea of selling more hardcore gameplay styles to casual is a one-shot deal.

People bought Legend of Grimrock because of the awesome graphics - then they found out what blobber means and never came back...
Now people bought Banner Saga for art style and BioWarian pedigree - then remembered why they never finished Final Fantasy Tactics and never came back...

Worst, those devs probably went "They loved our game! We established an IP! We can make the sequel many times bugger & more expensive and sell even more!"
Yep, and the same could happen with the bigger titles. Worse, alot of people that donated on the kickstarter crazy were casuals and they might not be around if those rpg companies decide for a second round.
 

Zdzisiu

Arcane
Joined
Dec 3, 2009
Messages
3,489


No more Pillars and Tyranny stats!

They can do that?! Aren't these statistics easily accessible public data?

I believe that might be more of a gentlemen agreement rather than something that would be legally actionable. Paradox asked, the guy said "Sure, whatever". What would happen if he said no? I have no idea, probably some threats of legal actions with some copyrights claims. And I am sure the dude wasnt that keen on having to prove he was in the right in court.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
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Messages
28,024
In case anyone is interested Banner Saga 2 sold a third of Banner Saga 1
Sadly, this idea of selling more hardcore gameplay styles to casual is a one-shot deal.

People bought Legend of Grimrock because of the awesome graphics - then they found out what blobber means and never came back...
Now people bought Banner Saga for art style and BioWarian pedigree - then remembered why they never finished Final Fantasy Tactics and never came back...

Worst, those devs probably went "They loved our game! We established an IP! We can make the sequel many times bugger & more expensive and sell even more!"
It's an interesting topic for discussions but I'm not sure the answer is that simple. Yes, undoubtedly, the first KS games benefited from a massive press coverage as back then everything on KS was new and exciting. Now they get as much coverage as any other non-AAA games which does affect sales. However, I think the bigger issue here is the risk of doing more of the same (no offense meant, I thought that LoG2 was absolutely fantastic, way better than LoG). Would AoD 2, for instance, sell as much as AoD (our numbers can't be compared to LoG or BG but still...)? I doubt it.

Another factor is the bundles that artificially inflate the number of copies sold. On the surface the difference between 946,400 ± 23,934 and 250,995 ± 12,340, is staggering but at least 400,000 copies of LoG were sold in a single bundle. Its lowest price on Steam is $2.99, which also skewers things a bit. Also, LoG2 is a much more expensive game, so it's possible that even though LoG2 looks like an abysmal failure compared to LoG, it actually earned more.

Yet another factor to consider is that LoG was kinda shallow. The character system was horribly broken, the weakest aspect of the game. Combat was kinda meh. The highlights were the puzzles and the atmosphere, which isn't enough to make people crave more. As for Banner Saga, I couldn't finish it and I wouldn't describe it as a game with 'hardcore gameplay'.
 

SausageInYourFace

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Wasn't Banner Saga 1 one of the first games of the Renaissance? The market for these kind of games seems to be pretty narrow and there are lots of other RPGs to play by now. Ain't nobody got time to play them all or money to buy them all.
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
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No more Pillars and Tyranny stats!


I wonder if they actually threatened SteamSpy with any legal consequences (their Twitter says it's a friendly agreement but who knows). I also wonder if other big publishers are going to follow suit - and if someone less scrupulous is going to create a SteamSpy clone free of publisher influence, hosted somewhere third-world.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
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It does set up a bad precedent that invites others to follow. I'd expect it from Bethesda but not from Paradox.
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
People bought Legend of Grimrock because of the awesome graphics - then they found out what blobber means and never came back...

I never finished Grimrock because the combat (particularly the first person grid based projectile dodging) got annoying after a while. It also didn't seem to have much outside of puzzles and combat (you run into more interesting people/things in the first few levels of Paper Sorcerer than in Legend of Grimrock).

Darkest Dungeon is a blobber, but that seems to have sold well.

After the lukewarm response SRR got, Dragonfall didn't sell that great when it first came out, but word of mouth seems to have given it a decent amount of sales (and bundles/sales as well, but it's sales were going up before).
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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Terra da Garoa
It's an interesting topic for discussions but I'm not sure the answer is that simple. Yes, undoubtedly, the first KS games benefited from a massive press coverage as back then everything on KS was new and exciting. Now they get as much coverage as any other non-AAA games which does affect sales. However, I think the bigger issue here is the risk of doing more of the same (no offense meant, I thought that LoG2 was absolutely fantastic, way better than LoG). Would AoD 2, for instance, sell as much as AoD (our numbers can't be compared to LoG or BG but still...)? I doubt it.
I'm not talking about KS games (LoG wasn't one), but these old genre revivals - LoG brought back Real-time blobbers, Banner Saga a more old-school and slow fashion of Tactical RPG (more FFT, less Nu-XCOM).

My point is that these sold not only for their excellent presentation and media hype, but because a lot of people didn't knew what those games played like. Anvil of Dawn (the last "big" blobber) is from 1996, Final Fantasy Tactics from 1997. A lot of gamers weren't even born back then. After months of hype they bought the game, sat down to play... and gave up after 1-2 hours.

The audience for real-time blobbers were never the million+ buyers of Legend of Grimrock, but rather the more modest group of ~250k old-school gamers who got LoG2. No other blobber will sell 1M+ copies, because now 750k people know they hate blobbers.

On the other hand, AoD was frowned upon because of the graphics and never reached the mainstream, casual gamer. With fans and part of the media enjoying AoD, I think a hypothetical AoD2 that breaks through that rejection barrier with fancy graphics could indeed sell more than AoD... not that you should pander to those filthy casuals, of course.
 
Last edited:

Athelas

Arcane
Joined
Jun 24, 2013
Messages
4,502
I'm not talking about KS games (LoG wasn't one), but these old genre revivals - LoG brought back Real-time blobbers, Banner Saga a more old-school and slow fashion of Tactical RPG (more FFT, less Nu-XCOM).

My point is that these sold not only for their excellent presentation and media hype, but because a lot of people didn't knew what those games played like. Anvil of Dawn (the last "big" blobber) is from 1996, Final Fantasy Tactics from 1997. A lot of gamers weren't even born back then. After months of hype they bought the game, sat down to play... and gave up and 1-2 hours.
Nu-XCOM is more challenging than FFT and has bigger and more complex maps, so I'm not sure your analogy holds up. Also, Fire Emblem is still a popular franchise.

I very much doubt anyone gave up on The Banner Saga because they were overwhelmed with the amount of choices to make during a turn or anything like that. If anything, the mainstream criticism of the Banner Saga's combat seemed to be that it was too simplistic.

Maybe without AAA marketing budgets, diminishing returns on sequels is just a normal occurence?
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
I think that unless you have a massive AAA franchise like Elder Scrolls, nu-Fallout, Witcher, Mass Effect that every casual dreams of, trying to establish your own tiny franchise is a big mistake. It works for single-developer studios like Spiderwebs, but not for 4-5 people and higher. Even if we consider the XCOM franchise, the numbers for the second game are way down: 780k vs 3.2 mil. Why? More of the same. You know what to expect, you know what the gameplay is like, you know that the new game will have new enemies and features, but the core will remain the same. So unless you're a die-hard fan who can't wait for that 'more of the same' content, you won't buy it. I'd say the diehards represent no more than a third of the first game's sales.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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I think that unless you have a massive AAA franchise like Elder Scrolls, nu-Fallout, Witcher, Mass Effect that every casual dreams of, trying to establish your own tiny franchise is a big mistake. It works for single-developer studios like Spiderwebs, but not for 4-5 people and higher. Even if we consider the XCOM franchise, the numbers for the second game are way down: 780k vs 3.2 mil. Why? More of the same. You know what to expect, you know what the gameplay is like, you know that the new game will have new enemies and features, but the core will remain the same. So unless you're a die-hard fan who can't wait for that 'more of the same' content, you won't buy it. I'd say the diehards represent no more than a third of the first game's sales.

I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it's an insightful point worth discussing. I don't think I've seen anybody else bring it up.
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
The audience for real-time blobbers were never the million+ buyers of Legend of Grimrock, but rather the more modest group of ~250k old-school gamers who got LoG2. No other blobber will sell 1M+ copies, because now 750k people know they hate blobbers.

Interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it's true. LoG and LoG2 seem to have similar completion
statistics on Steam (about 10% finished the game on normal), so the demographics probably aren't that different.

I bought (and
completed) LoG because a) it was the first ("mainstream") blobber after a really long time b) it looked good and c) the guys behind it were good at reaching me with their marketing. I didn't buy LoG2 because after completing LoG, the "novelty" of western blobbers has worn off again and I suspected that with the new game being bigger and more open, I'd probably not finish it anytime soon, so it's still on my wishlist and I even skipped a few 75% sales. There are lots of other games which I want to play first.
 

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