Hello wonderful developers,
My name is Cristi and I am part of the 16 BIT NIGHTS dev team.
Ready for another post-mortem from the industry of indie games?
I’ll start by saying that among other mistakes my most critical mistake for this title was: “I wanted to make a good game” – I will explain later what I mean by this.
The game I will be talking about in my post-mortem today is TAURONOS, as a pitch line “the game is sort of pac-man mixed with horror elements” and it was released back on 4 August 2017, I think it got through on final days of Steam Greenlit and I am writing this 7 years after its release.
Game Link on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/676240/TAURONOS/
Development
I made 20 flash games, 5 games released on Steam with a Publisher, 1 game released on consoles, and 4 games self-published on Steam and I will say that on TAURONOS I had the BEST development experience ever, and this was because of my partner at that time: Cavalie.ro, I am now referring to both the work pipeline and the social environment.
Development took us 6 months. I had a day job back then so I worked on the game part-time as soon as I got home up to obsession, and Cavalie.ro was full-time.
We decided together the game concept, My partner was focused on programming + the story(he placed a lot of focus on having the story as accurate as possible to the Greek myth) and I was focused on game design, art, and marketing.
At that point in my career, I was still learning marketing but as far as game development was concerned I wanted to make A good game, A very polished game with a solid gameplay loop because at that point I already had a couple of games released but I always kept skipping the polish step.
Considering that this was my first time working with Cavalie.ro I aimed for a simpler game design scope in order not to risk unrealistic objectives but as far as polish goes I did not want to make any compromises.
The only downside to the development part was that at some times we had different visions on game design considering that Cavalie.ro vision was more story-based and my vision was more gameplay-based.
Good-times.
Ah, also we made and released the game with basically 0 funding except for the voice acting and music. BTW I try to be as biased as possible but the Voice Actor we had is Godlike. Alexey Ryan did an amazing job.
Release & Results
On Itch.io the game had 0 sales. :( https://16bitnights.itch.io/tauronos
At the time of release, we had around 800 WIshlists.
Not many content creators played our game and the ones that played it were very small, this may be because my email marketing back then was just with cold emails, and no networking whatsoever, not to mention my email template and email lists were very beginner level, instead of making my own custom lists and research I was just downloading random YouTuber lists and sending emails.
We released with 20% discount and the first month of release we sold around 200 units.
After the first year since release, we sold a total of 1500 units.
I had no regret but I was disappointed, this “failure” was also the cherry on top of losing the relationship I had back then with one of my exes.
And overall it was ok, I quit the day job I had and went back to my country(Romania) and the money was enough to make some renovations and find a new day job.
Now, in 2020, I met an indie publisher that managed to port TAURONOS on Xbox and Nintendo Switch. The sales were decent, a good source of passive income, double as much as I made on Steam the first year.
A couple more years passed, I think it was 2021 and our console indie publisher “Restless Corp” had some personal problems so we decided that all sales the game generated on the console market would be from this point donated to him so we renounced console royalties, he is a cool guy he deserves it.
Now, one more year has passed, 2022 and I just released a new game with my Default programmer SadOff, the new game was called “Chromosome Evil” and had such good results that I was finally able to go full-time dev.
In 2022 I also made an agreement with Cavalie.ro and I paid an upfront sum for TAURONOS and he renounced his royalties so now 100% of TAURONOS goes to 16 BIT NIGHTS.
Present day
The game still sells a constant of 10-20 units per month + some small spike in sales each time I release a new game.
Having the game in the company bundle on Steam also helped a lot.
Currently, in 2024, TAURONOS sold a total of around 6000 units on Steam.
2017 First month of Steam release – 200 units
2018 First year of Steam release – 1500 units
2020 Released on Xbox and Nintendo Switch – around 2000 units from consoles until 2021 when I donated all future royalties to “Restless Corp”
2022 16 BIT NIGHTS bought the full royalties rights for TAURONOS from Cavalie.ro
2024 present day(7 years after Steam release) – 6000 units
Graph with sale(image)
Graph with wishlist(image)
Wishlist conversion (image)
Conclusion
The Game Design was not the type of game that I liked playing as a player but I wanted to make a Good game and I thought I knew what the audience wanted, I was naive, or maybe I was just bad at marketing at that time.
Since then I really focused on learning marketing and I now only decide to make games that have the “Yes” answer to the question “Would I actually pay money for this?” after checking my own Steam library because surely I cannot be so narcissist to think I am unique, so surely there are more people like me and best way to designate the target audience is on my own person.
In the end, TAURONOS was not amazing but proved to be a nice source of passive income in the long term and an awesome journey to create it.
Thank you for the read!
Cristi P. – 16 BIT NIGHTS