![steam 2017 sales steam 2017 sales](https://digicodes.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/steam-summer-sale-2017-home-banner.jpg)
A number of people were waiting to hear that, and the price had already been lowered the previous month, factors that combined to generate a decent amount of revenue for May.Īnother factor that I find valuable in examining daily revenue graphs, but that you might not immediately notice above, are “zero days.” Any day during which there are no sales at all is a zero day, and too many of these, especially in a row, can honestly start to get demotivating. The most recent mini-surge surrounded the Beta release, a pretty big milestone considering it allowed me to declare Cogmind essentially complete by multiple metrics. (I’ll share more data below to shed light on conversion rates.)
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It seems to have been beneficial, though one week is too short a period and there are too many other factors at play to really draw any conclusions. (Other reasons: It was also a good excuse/opportunity to do a little advertising that didn’t overlap with the upcoming Beta release, and I also wanted a longer buffer between the price change and Cogmind’s upcoming Steam debut.) I actually silently lowered the price a week before even announcing the change, just to see what kind of impact it would have on random visitors. In that sense the price change came a little earlier than expected, since the Beta release wasn’t to happen until early the following month, but sales had been flagging over the previous six weeks and I couldn’t let revenue fall too much since I’m relying on it to get by before bringing a mostly complete Cogmind to Steam. In April I again lowered the price, to its current and final base price and the level at which I’ve always planned to sell Cogmind once the main game reached completion.
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#Steam 2017 sales free
It was greenlit not long afterward, but that wasn’t really the point-notice that nice little spike in the graph… it’s nice to have some free exposure from Steam when people who’d rather not wait can already buy from my site! Putting Cogmind on Greenlight clearly contributed an instant $750 or so to revenue :D There was literally only two days between the time of this decision and hitting Publish :P. Valve pre-announced the end of Greenlight in February, and since I 1) wasn’t sure whether I’d like what would replace it, 2) know that having a little Greenlight campaign is itself at least worth some exposure, and 3) already had all the required media on my own website anyway, I decided to put Cogmind up for voting. That’s not why I made it-it was just a fun side project to see if it was possible with the engine, but it’s nice that it had that side effect :) That’s all money I could’ve kept for development if Cogmind was available before 2015 when the EU introduced VAT for online purchases!įor New Year’s day I made an ASCII fireworks gif (actually the first iteration of the one shown at the top of this post) and that garnered some attention, which pretty much always translates to more sales. Since I made that change, between November 15 and June 6th $5,085 of actual revenue received originated from EU countries, meaning $1,271 went to extra taxes (a low estimate). Considering I was still losing money throughout development it took me a year and a half to reach a point where I was willing to eat a 20% cut in revenue from those regions. Starting mid-November, buyers in the EU could finally get Cogmind “ VAT-free,” which basically boils down to a loss for me though it’s technically the industry norm to include VAT in the list price. RPS has been following Cogmind since pre-alpha and I hadn’t expected to see anything more until after alpha, but it was a nice surprise to have a sudden article about my work arrive the following month. The effects of that alone lasted for a good couple weeks. The next noticeable bump coincides with the Roguelike Celebration, an awesome event at which I gave a talk and news about Cogmind subsequently made the rounds. At this point the price change didn’t seem to have any long-term impact, but we’ll get to data on that later. This naturally sparked a good number of sales in the short term, which eventually died off as player growth returned to normal once those who’d been waiting for that to happen got their hands on it. Year 2 started with a minimum price drop, from $30 to $24.99 (albeit by adding a new lower tier without any perks, and keeping the old price as an option).
#Steam 2017 sales full
(Click on any image in this article to see at full size.) Cogmind Year 2 daily gross revenue, annotated (Year 1 graph here).