Vault Dweller: Age of Decadence needs to sell 45,000 copies to be successful

[Excidium II]

Yeah it's at the top of the list.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I got them all except settinv the world on fire.

Anyway, onw thing i am sure i wont be getting anytime soon is that kill 200 people in 1 run.

Sadly i am not good enough (yet)

 

[Kz3r0]

Balance is always important

 

[Old One]

...you see a new game, and think, 'hey, that looks interesting, maybe I'll get it after I finish my 150 hours in Fallout 4'

Get out of my head!

 

[vonAchdorf]

I'm not saying no discounts and I'm glad you've decreased the price and sold so many copies. I'm only saying that

Balance is always important

and to not go into extremes either way.

I don't believe we did. We had a 10% launch discount, then 15% off during the next 3 sale events: autumn (Nov 25), Christmas (Dec 22), lunar (Feb 5), then 40% off on March 26. I don't think that offering 20-25% would have had the same effect. We went from selling about 30-40 copies a day to 7,500 in 2 days, which is huge and well worth the trade off. Looking back, I think we should have gone with a bigger discount on Christmas.

I guess the main question is when to do discounts and how far you should go. That's one area where indie developers suffer because these things are kept secret and each developer learns on his own mistakes, which is costly and not very effective. It's easy to get focused on the discount figure alone because 5% difference between, say, 25 and 30% sounds like a lot when in reality it may only be a dollar or two. Is it better to run a strong discount when there is a strong interest and everyone's talking about your game or when everyone moved on and don't really care anymore. How long does the period of 'strong interest' last? What's the actual effect on post-sale revenues? Etc.

Steamspy discusses steam related data on this in his Medium articles (https://medium.com/steam-spy/about-steam-winter-sale-76a75abe152a#.jg0joxzgr), but that's of course a greater perspective than the individual developer.

The most popular discounts are 75% and 50% off. The most lucrative are 75%, 66% and 50% off.

Larian reluctantly discounts their (current) game, for example.

 

[Old One]

I wonder what would happen if you tried BOGO? Presumably it would cause a flurry of gifting.

 

[Old One]

I just finished a Loremaster playthrough with the newest version. Really, really great. I finally sided with the Aurelians all the way, which I had never done before.

I can't remember another game with as much text as AoD being as consistently replayable as AoD.