• Wishlists are king. 
• The longer you have your Steam page up the better. 
• Don’t launch without 10,000 wishlists. 
• etc., etc.

 

So surely no indie developer in their right mind announce a game and then release it *three weeks* later?

🙋‍♂️ Erm. Hi. That’s basically what I’m doing, and there are reasons.

But I’m also prepared for complete failure as a result.

Very brief context

I spent five years, on and off, making my first game; a 2D point and click adventure game that released in July last year. 

It’s done reasonably well. Across Steam and iOS it’s grossed $45,000 in 11 months. It launched with 3,500 wishlists on Steam.

All well and good. But, obviously, I wanted my next game to *not* take five years to make, because that's the world's worst hourly rate.

Portrait of a maniac

With my first game still shifting units on iOS, I wanted to see if I could turn an idea I had for a premium, portrait-oriented mobile puzzle game around in 6 months or less. 

So in January I started building Mini Murder Mysteries (think the Golden Idol deduction games, but Agatha Christie-esque, and with cases you can solve on your commute), and by April I had it basically finished.

BUT. At that point I also had a nagging thought: I’d be silly not to also release this game on Steam – it's already built, after all. And then I thought: why not also stick it in Next Fest? And then, what the hell, just release it on both platforms right when Next Fest ends?

So then began a mad dash: translate this portrait-oriented mobile game into landscape for PC, and create a demo, and get it all registered for Next Fest.

That process took another month or so, but I did it. I was registered and ready and announced the game on June 1st, with a June 23rd release date.

23 days of promotion.

But… why?

Kind of two reasons:

1. This is a mobile game first and foremost, and on iOS wishlists don’t exist; you just punt something out there and hope it does ok. I believe there is an underreported market on that platform for nice, polished, premium games that don’t have ads or timers or IAPs, and my first game has shown me as much.
2. As my second game, I want to see if there’s life in a model where I make games (and release them) faster. Spending years making each one (even if it results in longer Wishlist-gathering times), feels less viable to me than kinda pumping things out and seeing what works. That’s not to say “stop making big cool things and start making trash”. But just… operating faster and tighter.

So where are things at?

I announced the game on June 1st, and it's currently at just over 1,500 wishlists on Steam. It’ll probably be at about 2,000 by the end of Next Fest, and launch with around that many on Tuesday next week. 

The bulk of my eggs are in the mobile basket, as mentioned, but either way this will be an interesting case study for me in terms of how DOA a game truly is without a boatload of wishlists. 

Maybe it'll go well on mobile and die on Steam. Maybe it'll die on both. Or maybe it'll trickle along nicely enough for me to repeat the experiment.

Either way.... We’ll see, I guess? Please wish this idiot some luck!

🕵️ There’s an exclusive demo case waiting for your attention right now:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4639520/Mini_Murder_Mysteries/