[This piece was originally posted at weatherfactory.biz]

Lottie and I are both open production enthusiasts - I did a talk on it at GDC a couple of years ago, and as a reminder, here's our roadmap.

So this is a post about the strategy we've taken at Weather Factory with making Cultist Simulator available for full release, and how it's worked out. It does include sales figures! We talk to a lot of other indies and I know people are always hungry for data.  SteamSpy has gone a long way to alleviating this, but it's never the whole story - especially when a game's been Kickstarted and there are an uncertain number of keys in the wild.

Cultist Simulator was Kickstarted, and we have also done a couple of slightly unusual things.

The first unusual thing is this. From a post I made back in July 2017:

As it happened, we're not releasing CS as Early Access or Games in Development. We'll go straight to full release on May 31st.

Why?

Here are the main reasons devs consider Early Access - at least, the ones I'm aware of.

[(3a) is a special case of (3). You tend to get people mailing you after a Kickstarter to say 'shit I missed out! can I back?' You can reply to them all and say, sorry, no, wait for full release, which may upset your nascent community, or you can reply to them and say, yes, PayPal me ten quid, which is insanely manual; or you can just provide some sort of slacker backer option. It just removes some pain to add the slacker backer option.]

The thing is these objectives can clash. If you need cash, you'll want to be sure the game is as polished as possible. If you want feedback, you'll want to get it out as early as possible.

If you're running a business, you don't turn down money. But we were okay for cash - we'd just had a well-funded Kickstarter. And I really wanted feedback. Cultist Simulator is a deliberately experimental game, and I wanted player responses ASAP.  Plus, we have limited QA resources, and allowing backers to help us squash bugs earlier was a big win.

So I wanted to get the development builds in front of people quickly... and I didn't need that many participants. We already had nearly 5,000 Kickstarter backers. I knew most backers would be happy to leave the game in the oven for the next eight months,  but at a conservative estimate we'd probably get 400-500 beta testers. That would be plenty, right? For a single-player game, you don't get 10x better feedback at thousands rather than hundreds of players. You do get a lot more comments and bug reports to process.

But people burn out, and also people become veterans. If 500 people beta-test your game when the first dev build hits, a good many of them will stop playing after the second or third (especially if early builds are buggy - which they will be if you're going in early). And a lot of others will be very familiar with the game, and will stop seeing it as new people will. You'll still get useful feedback, but you can't use them to tune your early game experience, which is the most important five minutes of the game. (This is one of the things I learnt the hard way on Sunless Sea.)

So we wanted a steady trickle of new players. But we only wanted a trickle, not a gush. We wouldn't get much more useful feedback from Early Access on Steam, and we might screw up our chance of a good launch later.

And of the digital store-fronts, Itch is unmistakably the one where people expect to find experiments. I'd already put the pre-Kickstarter alpha on it. Itch has, anecdotally, something like 2% of the market share of Steam (I've heard numbers as high as 5% and low as 1%). So we could soft-launch over in Itch and not many people would notice, but we'd get our trickle of new players.

(Also, did I mention I really like the Itch upload tool? I really like the Itch upload tool.)

What?

So we settled on early purchase / early builds on itch.io.

I had originally planned to leave Perpetual Edition on sale until the day before we hit full launch, but Lottie, when she joined me in December, talked me out of it. A month before launch, we wouldn't be able to do much with the feedback - it would be hard to change direction - and we'd be busy tidying everything away and strapping in. Sure, we'd lose a month's revenue, but we'd already agreed the point of the Itch Early Access was not primarily cash. I tentatively agreed.

After that, we got advice from another source [*this is foreshadowing for a followup post*] that if we encouraged people to wishlist the game on Steam rather than buying it now, our chances of charting on Steam in launch week would be that much higher. This made sense. So we agreed we'd make Perpetual Edition unavailable in February, but make it available again in launch week, as an early incentive. In related news, here is the wishlist link for the game. It would be charming for you to use it.

--

A few other things that have happened that might be useful info if you're also a dev.

First of all, we've had some lovely streams of the game: SystemChalk, FuzzyFreaks, Mike Laidlaw (stream deleted; cryface), Jessy Quil, to name but a few. This is nice for buzz and great for feedback. Someone playing your beta product through, talking about their experiences, trying out loud to understand it, while the audience discusses it in text chat? Holy shit, I wish I'd had that when I was building Fallen London. (And to my surprise, it streams pretty well: it's slow-paced and abstract, but there's always something just about to happen.)

Secondly, lots of people wanted to be able to play the game on Steam ahead of full release. This surprised us a little - we hadn't realised how much of a lock Valve has on people's playing habits, even though nearly all my gaming is in Steam - but it encouraged us to sort the kinks out of Steam deployment ahead of time, so I'm glad we did it. But!

(i) it makes messaging surprisingly tricky. We've gone from

'you can buy Perpetual Edition on itch now, or wishlist it on Steam and get the full game at launch'

to

'you can buy Perpetual Edition on Itch now for free lifetime DLC, or wishlist it on Steam and get the full game at launch, but actually if you buy Perpetual Edition now you can also play it on Steam, and yes if you buy it now you will still get free lifetime DLC, but also you can get free lifetime DLC in launch week. On Steam.'

...I mean we generally just say 'buy on Itch if you want preview builds, wait until May if you want the full game'. But it's led to a few confused conversations. This is what happens when you adapt your strategy on the fly.

(ii) fun fact! You can upload Steam keys to Itch, but  by default they're only available to people who've purchased the  game for money on Itch. If someone redeems an Itch key you give them because they Kickstarted the game, you'll need to send them the Steam key manually. We had to do some extra work to sort this out. Be warned.

How Much?

Data is valuable. Honing your ability to use that data is super valuable. Always do projections, now matter how ugly or informal. Comparing what you guessed against what you achieved will make you that much better at guesstimating the future next time.

I did top-down and bottom-up, aka 'hand-wavy' and 'based on wrong numbers', informal estimates for itch sales:

We have played fast and loose with maths this far, so we now casually average the two estimates together to get 105 a month.

October, November, December, January, February, 5 months, maybe 300 sales lowball, 750 highball, 525 most likely.