Postmortem Analysis

This post analyses the past performance of two indie games. One that was considered a hit and the other a miss based primarily on sales revenue. At this point I would like to stress that I have no affiliation nor connection to the games and/or developers. This post is not intended to malign the work of the developers and is presented here simply as an analysis of the data I have gleaned from the interweb.

Blade and Sorcery

Blade and Sorcery is a first person VR role playing game. The player can choose from a number of different character types to play as, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This leads to a different gameplay experience on each play through.

At the time of writing, the game has been on sale for 4 years and, according to the developer’s Steam page is still in early access. Despite this it’s nearly 33,500 reviews are ‘overwhelmingly positive’ and data from SteamSpy suggests over 1,000,000 people have installed the game from Steam alone. Note this game is also available through the Oculus store and the number of installs is therefore likely to be much more.

Sales revenue for the game is not readily available but with a retail price point of about $15, even if only 10% of players purchased the game that would amount to a worst case gross revenue estimate of $1.5m. This is a very conservative figure, and probably inaccurate especially when compared to the Game Stats website which reports a much higher figure at around $13m. I suspect the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes.

Throughout its life, the game has received regular updates which has no doubt contributed to its success. The VR games market is also very small and with far fewer titles to choose from than the mobile, console and PC markets, being the big fish in a small pond will have definite advantages.

Mind Labyrinth VR Dreams

Mind Labyrinth VR Dreams was released in 2018 and the second title by developer Frost Earth Studio. Although released around the same time as Blade and Sorcery, according to SteamSpy it has accrued less than 20,000 installs and Game Stats estimates its gross revenue at $4,200.

In the 4 years since launch, Mind Labyrinth has only received 11 player reviews on Steam and its most recent update was way back in March 2019.

Analysis

With so little data available it is almost impossible to conclusively determine why one of these titles significant outperformed the other. All we can realistically do is compare the data points we do have on the understanding that even this information is at best sketchy and probably inaccurate.

The most interesting differences for each game are…

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash