After putting in a pre-order in Canada on the first day (back in July I think), my Steam Deck 64 GB model arrived in the mail. It’s cool to finally hold the thing, and as an indie developer, to see my old games running on it. But getting my games to run wasn’t perfect; I go into detail in this post about my experience and impressions as both a developer and as a gamer.
My Steam Deck is here!
In December 2018, Epic Games announced the “Epic Games Store,” a direct competitor to Steam to sell digital PC games. To help entice developers, they advertise a 88/12 cut in favor to developers, and a full 100% of profits to games that use Epic’s Unreal Engine. To entice gamers, they made several announcements of exclusive indie titles for the platform. Steam tried to counteract this by offering a new profit-split deal, and Discord’s Game Store announced they would beat Epic’s revenue split (90/10) sometime in 2019. For the first time in nearly a decade, there is genuine competition in the space.
That escalated quickly in just a few weeks, didn’t it?
Just a handful of stores to sell your indie game in 2019…
Firstly, thanks in part to both Steam and the PWYW deal on IndieGameStand, “Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” has broken even, recouping it’s development costs, only two months after its release date. Given that those development costs were solely for the soundtrack, perhaps that isn’t a huge feat. After the recent sale (ending in about 10 hours), I can say Steam has also sold over 600 copies of the game so far, which again is small but a good milestone for me (fingers-crossed for 1,000 sold by 2016). I sincerely thank all of you who bought the game, your support and encouragement has been kind. Anyway, I promised an update, and have finally released it. It doesn’t change much, but can still be significant to those who have already played it. The details of what is in the update (and what isn’t) can be seen below.
“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” (v1.04): new GUI, collectables, and more
For several months I’ve promised to write a retrospective about the release of my first game “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth.” But then it was released on Steam, on IndieGala, and available during the Steam summer sale. Then I was working on my second game “Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament,” which took longer than expected, but has now officially been released for one week. This gave me a lot more perspective to write about, and a year after the first game, I think now is the time to write about it from a functional point of view. This summarizes in-depth time and money spent and made for my first two indie games as an indie developer, which were not necessarily successful, but hopefully helpful for others wondering how their experience in game development may go.
“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” is officially available now on Steam (and soon other stores)! Hooray!
Buy it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/388680/
Plus, if you are still unsure, please try the free demo of the game here: http://unfinished.fromdustscratch.com/#system
Plus, see this little launch trailer!
The game is also trying to be on IndieGameStore, MacGameStore and WinGameStore. I should have remembered they need a few weeks to prepare a store page for it, I only submitted the game last week. Hopefully anyone who doesn’t want to use Steam can use other outlets by the end of the month.
I always feel insecure when releasing a new game, or even revealing it for the first time, knowing that this is what it is, and not everyone will like it. A few close friends tried the game for the first time this week, and while they certainly weren’t the intended audience, their appalled reaction when I said I planned to sell it was discouraging. I was tempted to not release the game at all.
