Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is my second ‘big’ game (the first being Meteorfall: Journeys) and my first ever Steam release. If you haven’t checked it out — take a look at our Steam page.

Krumit’s Tale launched on Steam Early Access on November 6. How’d it go?

Initial Sales

Going into the Early Access we managed to get ~1400 wishlists. I forget exactly when I put the Steam page up, but I believe it was more than 3 months, but less than 6. I would’ve liked to have had a longer runway to build some wishlists before the Early Access launch, but I drew a line in the sand for a November release to force myself to focus on what was required to get the game into a stable state that I felt good about — else I’d have to wait until January to release it, since the holidays are a busy and competitive time.

First few weeks of sales for Krumit’s Tale on Steam Early Acccess

In two weeks, Krumit’s Tale has earned $5,422.2‬ USD (after Steam’s cut) and sold 1400 units. To my knowledge, we didn’t receive any sort of obvious feature on Steam, land on any ‘Popular Upcoming’ or other chart — though frankly I don’t know how that works for Early Access games. As best as I can tell, Early Access games don’t get as much visibility on Steam (which makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint, given the unfinished nature)

The biggest single day revenue was on the initial Early Access launch day(370 units, $1400 USD) and we’re currently doing about $70-$100 per day in revenue at this point.

247 units came from Day 1 wishlist conversions (roughly 17% conversion) and to date, we have a balance of 3200 total wishlists and 516 total wishlist conversions.

What kind of marketing did you do?

The free kind!

Things I did

Emailed various gaming sites (about a dozen) of sites I visit for gaming news

Posted on Twitter / Reddit / Discord about the game. I have a community of about 2000 Twitter followers, 300 Discord participants, and 800 redditors that I’d developed over a few years with the release of Meteorfall: Journeys

Sent out free keys via Keymailer

Streamed the game myself on launch day, on the Steam page (max — 50–60 viewers)

Ran a good sized beta (~300 testers) to both help test the game and to help evangelize it in different communities

Things I didn’t do

Any sort of paid marketing or ads

Any sort of game shows or meetups (not a bad idea though if you can do it for free)

On the news site front, both PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun wrote articles about the Early Access launch of Krumit’s Tale, which I was really satisfied with.

How do the sales compare to Meteorfall: Journeys?

When I refer to Journeys, I’m referring to the first Meteorfall game, Meteorfall: Journeys. It was released January 2018 on iOS and Android.

It’s not really a perfect comparison to compare Krumit’s Tale on Steam vs Journeys since they’re different platforms, Journeys was a 1.0 release vs. Krumit’s Tale is still in EA, but in any case — it’s still a question I think people may be curious about.

In it’s first two weeks, Journeys grossed $20,474.00 USD on iOS alone, so it’s quite a bit higher than Krumit’s Tale ($5,422.2) thus far.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about the difference between the two, and I think some of the reasons for the big delta include:

A lot of players (myself included, at times) would prefer to wait for a 1.0 release, once Early Access is completed

Meteorfall initially released on Mobile, so many fans of the original may prefer to wait for a Mobile release

Steam players are even more sale conscious than Mobile. It’s common for players to only buy games that are on sale, given how many sales there are. After the launch sale was over, sales went way down.

The initial price ($7.99 with a 20% launch discount) may have been *too* cheap (given the niche audience), leaving some amount of revenue on the table

As I march towards the initial 1.0 release after Early Access, I’m hopeful that I can build additional word of mouth and hype for the game, and manage to hit some of those Steam charts that are so important for visibility. Plus, we still have the iOS / Android 1.0 release as well, which I’m hoping can top the earnings from Journeys.

Did the release of Krumit’s Tale effect sales of Meteorfall: Journeys?

Actually — yes! The effect is definitely noticeable. Note the spike leading up & following to the Nov 6 Early Access release date of Krumit’s Tale.

The release of Krumit’s Tale had a noticeable effect on the daily revenue for Meteorfall: Journeys

I don’t think the effect will be long lasting, but it does show that the release of one game can affect the sales of another as well. Part of why I wanted to develop additional games in the Meteorfall universe was because of the potential to cross-promote between the games in a natural way, and I think this is a good demonstration of how fans of one game may also be interested in another.

Conclusion

Though I’ll admit my perhaps overly ambitious expectations following the success of Journeys were somewhat tempered by the realities of releasing a small indie game on Steam in 2019, the whole experience has been incredible and I’m both really proud of what we released and excited about the roadmap to come.

One of the most exciting parts about debuting on Steam in particular has been seeing streamers play the game and getting to interact with their fans. Mobile gaming doesn’t have as much of a ‘culture’ around streaming, as compared to Steam. Getting to watch streamers and see their reaction to the game has definitely been one of my biggest highlights thus far.

Esty8nine streaming the game on Twitch on launch day

I hope other game devs will find these numbers helpful! I think this level of transparency is helpful for indie devs, and it’s a big reason why I was confident enough to put money / time in order to develop Meteorfall: Journeys in the first place. I’d written about the first week sales in Journeys as well, continuing the tradition of transparency demonstrated by other developers like Arnold Rauer (Tinytouchtales — Card Crawl, Card Thief, Miracle Merchant) .

If you find this type of data useful, I’d also highly recommend checking out some of the articles that Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games has written, such as How many wishlists should you have when launching on Steam?

What’s Next?

I’m still figuring out what I want to tackle next — there are *so* many things I want to work on, that it can be hard to prioritize! Some rough thoughts of things I’m currently thinking about at the top of my list:

Localization (broaden the population of players)

Daily Challenges (keep people coming back)

New Hero (new content is fun!)

All of these are pretty high on my list right now — I may end up completing some of the tasks in parallel. I’m also still working on the Varfa update for Meteorfall (new Ranger hero, and sixth hero in that game)

Hope you enjoyed reading!

Other Links