Posted July 16, 2022 by Vogelscript
#stats #sale
Hey everyone, thanks to all who have purchased, downloaded, or rated Fish'n Feathers so far. I hope you are enjoying the game! I wanted to write this post as a reminder that the first-month 40% launch discount is ending in less than a week, so if you haven't purchased yet, now is the time!
I also thought sharing some stats on the game's performance post-release would help other devs out there in pricing or marketing their game. Many of these patterns may not be surprising, but the transparency can help anyway. In short: I have sold 127 copies so far and the game has been downloaded 369 times.
Note that the $401 in gross revenue is before the Itch.io share and payment processing fees. On every $3 sale, Stripe takes $0.39 and Paypal takes $0.59. Itch also has a default cut of 10% (so another -$0.30), but this level is configurable to whatever you are comfortable with. If you are selling your game for less than $3, these fees really add up and is one reason I encourage devs to price accordingly. And as a purchaser, it really helps to try and use Stripe when possible!
There were a couple interesting things about this game's release that contribute to the downloads being twice as high as the payments:
As you can see from the below graphs, purchases tapered off quickly after launch (with a weird uptick at the very end of June, maybe more group 2 deliveries?), but I had a steady stream of new downloads thanks to the co-op bundles. In my mind, joining the bundles was a win-win-win for everyone and I would highly recommend it to other Playdate devs should the opportunity arise. I'm not very concerned with profits for this game, so I was happy to see people downloading and enjoying it while contributing the money to a great cause.
Another interesting note is that the vast majority of referrers were coming from itch.io itself. At launch, people were coming in from Reddit/Discord/Twitter, but as the game rose on the popularity charts and got added to the bundles, itch.io started to be the source of most traffic. Notably, the /bundle/download link stands out and is another indication people who bought the bundle were actually downloading (and hopefully playing) the game!
I am interested to see how the end of the launch discount affects sales as well. Currently, I'm only selling around 1-2 copies for day if I'm lucky, and I am hopeful this pace will continue as more people get their Playdates. There's a chance the increase in price to $5 will impact sales, and I will write another follow-up post discussing that too when I have the data.
Thanks for reading and don't forget to submit your high scores here!