BYTEPATH, a retro arcade shooter with a skill-tree inspired by Path of Exile has now been out for a whole year, so the developer has shared some details on how it went.

BYTEPATH is a replayable arcade shooter with a focus on varied play styles with RPG elements. The game has a huge passive skill tree, classes and different ships through which you'll be able to try out lots of different builds to achieve ever increasing high scores and eventually beat the game. Expect BYTEPATH to be a mix of Bit Blaster XL and Path of Exile, created with the intention of expanding Bit Blaster XL's relaxing and addictive gameplay with Path of Exile's build depth, build diversity and RPG elements.

If you've never seen it before, take a look at the trailer:

The developer has been regularly posting on GitHub, using it much like a blog to detail how everything went. I especially liked their developer tutorial series, giving a look at how it was all developed.

In one such post on that GitHub, the developer shared some sales shots like this:

Going by what that shows, it didn't exactly sell a huge amount across an entire year. It's a pretty niche game though, so this was to be expected. In a longer post on GitHub made earlier, the developer mentioned their original goal was simply to get the $100 fee back from Steam. To do this, they needed to sell at least 500 copies at $2 each to make $1000 to actually be eligible to get the $100 entry fee back. Obviously they exceeded that, hitting over 5,000 copies sold.

What the image tells us about Linux, is a similar story to Rise to Ruins, that Linux doesn't sell well in the Chinese market. Again here, Linux sold at a rate of around 6.84% which is well above the current Linux market share on Steam (0.82%). One thing I do find interesting, is that across that year Linux by itself nearly hit that 500 mark they wanted.

If you want to pick up a copy, you can do so on Steam.