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Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2016 6:30 pm
by UkiTheMaid
My itch.io stats so far:

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Let it be know that I have only one game on my itch.io page, and it's a fangame not many people would be interested XD
Also, had this account for an year now, and I'm FINALLY working towards adding something to it!

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2016 12:43 am
by 8oni
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I don't use itch, I use mediafire.
And for my first VN I only share it to my blog and 1 forum so I am not surprised to see the low download count. And I always plan to remake it anyway so that's why I don't want to publish it too much.

For my second one I share it on my blog, facebook group, 3 forum and on DA so yup, I can understand the huge difference there lol

So far I never got any money from my VN. Maybe when I got better I will try set up itch page.

Edit : My second VN have 2 language. I first make the Indonesian one then after I got a proofreader I updated with the English version so that's why there is 2 stat on my 2nd one.

Second and hopefully last edit : LOL, I read the year wrong, no wonder I feels something is wrong all day. So yeah, it's 1 years and 9 months not 9 months.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2017 10:44 am
by Steamgirl
It's now been 2 and a bit years since The Trouble with Earl Grey was released. Since then I added a bonus game, called Earl Grey Forever After, which people could get access to if they gave $2.50+. If anyone's wondering whether it was worth it... financially no. Was it fun to make a spin-off? Yes! Do I feel a little sad that less than 20 people have actually played it? Yes. So was it worth it overall? Probably no. I may give it away for free one day, but that definitely won't happen for a while.

Then again, in all honesty, I wrote it at a time where I was learning a new way of putting together plot as a writer, so a part of me is relieved because the writing is not as good as what I can do today. :)

Anyway, here are my 2 years and 3 months stats!

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And here are my 3 month stats for comparison:

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Hope this is useful! :)

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2017 1:07 pm
by Helyees
Dear dev friends, why dont anyone of you publish via Steam? I guess it is better than to distribute paid games via itch.io.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2017 2:31 pm
by papillon
Most people posting in this thread are not listing 'paid' games, they are listing games that take donations. Putting them on Steam would be counterproductive, as they would have to pay a fee to be listed and there is no easy mechanism for people to make donations if they want to.

As for those of us who sell commercial games, most of us already are on Steam.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2017 4:32 pm
by Imperf3kt
Since I don't have any properly released yet, I'll just post this amusing Google Play data for an alpha release of something I only told two people about.

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I was hoping to update (a somewhat big update) but some issues are preventing me from pushing an update yet.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2017 8:07 pm
by KillerQueen
Helyees wrote: Sun Oct 29, 2017 1:07 pm Dear dev friends, why dont anyone of you publish via Steam? I guess it is better than to distribute paid games via itch.io.
It's pretty much against policy to share steam sale stats, even if a few devs do it.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2017 1:23 am
by Helyees
Intersting policy, I wonder why is that?

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2017 4:47 am
by Steamgirl
I am not sure why Steam don't want developers to share their stats. I think you can contact them and request permission to share the stats. It might be a hang over from the olden publisher days, or maybe from the days when they weren't the primary digital games store and they didn't want sales comparisons between stores? I'm only theorising here, no clue really. Valve move in mysterious ways. :D

But, for those not aware of it already, you can use Steam Spy to get very loose ideas of sales for games.

https://steamspy.com/

Mind you, it's "owners" not sales, so we can never know how many of those were given away for free, as part of a bundle, as part of a Kickstarter, or sold during a 90% discount. It also doesn't tell you why some games have more owners than others, which is where developers sharing stats can often help fill in the blanks.

For example, if you compare Dream Daddy against Coming Out On Top, their owners are approximately 226,700 and 3,701 (the margin of error is listed on the page as well with the ± symbol). On paper, they are not too dissimilar, both gay dating sims, both include sexual content, both feature "Western"-style art (as opposed to manga/anime style). So why the difference?

One has been out longer than the other, so perhaps sales have not caught up yet, but I can tell you that when Dream Daddy was launched their 1st month of sales was phenomenal (I think they even ended up in the top 10 most sold games the first week?? Correct me if I'm wrong). You won't get that info from Steam Spy, you would've had to have followed the game back then, as I did.

Steam Spy doesn't tell us anything about demographics either. Was Dream Daddy bought by all genders and sexualities, while Coming Out On Top only bought by gay men? Did Dream Daddy appeal to gamers 25+, while Coming Out On Top to the 16-25 bracket? What were their marketing campaigns like? Does one game lend itself better to YouTubers than the other? Granted, you can find some of this out for yourself, but developers are able to share things that they found surprising or unexpected.

Anyway, this turned into a rather much larger post than I originally intended. But yeah, if you're interested in Steam stats, steamspy gives you a very VERY rough idea. :)

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2017 3:09 am
by Helyees
Thank you Steamgirl! Much appreciated!

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2017 5:57 am
by Necivo
My free VN on Gamejolt :

Capture.PNG
Capture.PNG (9.38 KiB) Viewed 1951 times

Lot of People come to see my game but finnaly they don't download it :( ! Why !? I have good rating at least.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2017 7:41 am
by Mammon
The downloads from this year's NaNoRenO project Stalker&Yandere I made with a few other free VN developers. (Credits here.)
It's been 215 days since its release so, 200-day stats? Because any kind of donating money was disabled, it's $0.
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@Necivo: I too only have a 1/3 views to download ratio, and that's pretty good considering. I think the views thing is partially by bots, but that it's mostly because there's a whole ton of people who browse through the games looking for quality images of company levels rather than anything independent developers like us can provide. Your sprites aren't the amazing ones equal to mainstream games or anime quality they want, few indie games are. Also, marketing and making a story appealing in just a few lines is always hard to do.

Also, not asking for money can apparently deter a lot of people from trying your game because they think it'll suck if it's so bad you're not charging money for it. I don't know how true the statement is, but maybe free = nope to a lot of people.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2017 12:18 am
by sasquatchii
I love this thread!! It's so interesting to see behind the scenes stats, figures, and sales from other VN creators.

Here's my itch.io stats:
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The bulk of my earnings is from A Day in the Life of a Slice of Bread. It became more popular when a handful of let's players started playing it! I was tickled to have the chance to watch random strangers play my game.

It should be noted that I've been on itch.io for over 2 years, so it's not like I'm diving into pools of gold or anything. Still, every month (despite A Day in the Life of a Slice of bread being over 2 years old) I tend to make about $1 or $2 from it.

Also, I'm really grateful for these tips and happy that so many people even spent time playing my games. I do this for fun & as a hobby - it is an amazing way to be able to create & experiment without any deadlines, clients, or limitations on what I can and can't do :D

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 11:48 am
by JBShields
I think the biggest challenge is MARKETING for this genre. This is an all-around struggle. Not too many people know about VNs and their understanding is usually limited to hearing about Japanese eroge dating sims types of VNs.

As a community, how to spread word out about how wonderful VNs are is something I think we should brainstorm on and discuss.

With VN Maker releasing this month, the flood of VNs coming in the next two years will make the markets more saturated. I really think it'd be good to grow the fan player base for these. However, if no one knows what VNs are, then we're stagnate in the water.

Side note: Blind Griffin only made that much?! What? That is a damn good VN.

Re: Share your sales/downloads stats!

Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 1:21 pm
by mikolajspy
JBShields wrote: Sat Nov 04, 2017 11:48 am I think the biggest challenge is MARKETING for this genre. This is an all-around struggle. Not too many people know about VNs ...
I agreee with this, I recently had my game reviewed by few small game sites/blogs, and it clearly looked like they didn't even knew what kind of game is Visual Novel. For example, their complaints were... minimalistic mechanics like forward/backward and choice (which they said were too few, while I made them around 30 during one gameplay, in most VNs I played there were mostly 0 or 3-6). Well, after all they gave me 3/5 stars, so it's not bad either.

Anyway, back on topic, since I sell only on Steam currently (link in my signature) I can't tell specifics, but as for month after release of first, more like a test, not really advertised game, I'm satisfied (two-digit number and slowly getting to three!).