Monday 9 May 2016

Phantasmal Dev Log (Part 8)

It's been a couple of weeks now since the game has been fully launched in Steam.  It's such a weird experience.  It felt like all the activity and mad rush happened in the first 3 days and then just died away.

It felt like it was all over so quickly in comparison to the Early Access Launch.

A few really awesome fans have come out of the woodwork and have been really amazing.  Sales weren't spectacular, but they were really good considering the fact that we were total newbies when we began this journey.

I think at one point I set a fairly low bar mentally - I said that I would be happy if we made more money than we had spent.  We have at this point, even though it's not a spectacular amount.

The key fact is that the team is able to continue on working together - so the only direction is up!

I'm pretty confident that we can top our previous achievement this time around.  I think we have learned enough from Phantasmal.

The nice thing is that we have a base to start from now as well!

Above all else, we weren't financially dependent upon the game doing really well.  Even if we were to have earned zero, we would still be able to continue on.

One thing that has bugged me a lot during this journey is how little emphasis is put on slow growth of an indie studio business.  So much focus is placed on the success stories, so that all of us indies have this subconscious expectation that our first game has to be a mega-success.  I wish I had more stories around like mine that did ok, and were more grounded in reality.

I plan to write up a post mortem, so I hope that it will give others like myself a chance to see a more realistic starting point.