Devlog #3 (Patreon)

Wow, here we are again. This week went by so fast. It's mindboggling really. Hope all of you are doing great.

Today I'm going to give you an insight into the hard numbers, view counts, how much money the game makes, downloads. I also would like to talk about promoting the game and how much of an uphill battle it is. Next week's devlog will be dedicated solely to the development process again. But I'm sure some of you will find this interesting too.

Let's begin with the platform I've published it on first (not talking about a certain website we don't want to mention here if you catch my drift). I've published it first on May 1st on itch.io. The game has not been particularily successful nor a total failure. A nice middle ground I would say as you can see by the numbers and compare it to similar new games in the same genre. You can see the total numbers after having been released for almost exactly one month:

Here's a bit more detailed screenshot of the overall engagement with the game over the course of a month.

The little uptick in views and downloads around May 19 was due to the first update I've released on May 18th. As you can see, the engagement fell off rather quickly after the initial release. One thing I've noticed is that posting promotional posts on either Reddit or Twitter didn't really have any effect at all towards the numbers, same goes for Patreon as well as SubscribeStar which was somewhat surprising to me and rather disappointing to see.

Patreon has been the most successful so far when it comes to monetization (that's all thanks to you obviously), which isn't exactly a surprise at all. I was hoping the first update would increase at least the average view count since I added links to the main menu in the game, but as you can see in the image below, that hasn't been the case unfortunately. It remains on the same level as it was before the update got released. Also no increases due to social media exposure.

I only have four subscribers on SubscribeStar, so I will leave the statistics out. Not much to see anyway. I will post an image of the earnings below.

With all of these platforms, the full amount of earnings in the first month is $296,96. Not too shabby I'd say, but I also don't really have any numbers to compare it with. It's still a nice amount I can save each month in order to invest in a new GPU which will increase my render output tenfold, which in turn will make working on the game and future projects much more convenient and also increases the quality.

I wish I would have taken a course in marketing at some point of my life, because I feel like I'm doing it wrong. Such a niche genre as AVNs doesn't have a lot of spaces where you can advertise your project to your target audience. I'm basically utilizing every space I can think of but there's hardly any engagement with my game at all, apart from the website we don't mention, and even there it's getting quieter with each day which, and I want to be totally transparent with you about everything, has had some negative effects on my motivation. I'm very far from giving up though. If anything, I became even more determined.

I want to make clear that I am going to finish this project no matter what. I started it with the intention of learning how to make AVNs and get an insight into the development process in general, which is still the main reason I'm doing this, besides making you smile.

I'm still very excited to see what's to come in the future and I've already met some cool people I would have never met if it wasn't for Summer's journey.

Thanks for your kindness!

Flip