So last month Cogmind "launched" ... for the second time :P

It's now on Steam EA and doing fairly well. Not like indie smash hit amazingly well, but that's a given considering it's way too niche for that kind of attention. Still, the relatively unexciting screenshots and two-year-old alpha trailer are apparently sufficient to attract the type of player who will enjoy Cogmind, and that's all that really matters.

To be honest, going into Steam I had zero expectations, which from a sanity point of view is probably the safest way to do this sort of thing. Cogmind's "first launch" was Alpha 1 back in 2015 (see the comprehensive month-1 postmortem), and at the time I was pretty nervous/excited, but also had more savings remaining to fund work on it (regardless of sales), plus the project was flexible enough that if necessary it could be completed in a short while. (In gamedev time, a "short while" means a year or less ;D) Since then I've already found there are just enough players out there to keep development humming along, even without help from Steam, so while putting Cogmind on another platform was a big move that could affect the feasibility of long-term development work, whatever the result it wasn't nearly a make-or-break thing for the current project like it is for a lot of other new devs.

I must say it feels really good to have this milestone behind me. It's nice to no longer have that pressure building in the background--I was starting to worry about Steam's rapidly changing landscape:

Annual Steam Releases

Nearly as many games were released this year so far as the entire 2006-2015 period. Now that anyone with $100 (and a game with some semblance of playability) can release on Steam, the flood gates are open and tons of people are doing just that. A good game with decent outreach can still do fine, but Steam is notoriously bad at "discovery" in the first place, and the sheer number of games means the exposure value of being on Steam is greatly reduced, and getting worse each day.

This trend was inevitable, but I didn't quite have enough time to get in ahead of it.

Still, in hindsight I continue to stand by all my previous decisions, such as with regard to pricing, releasing only via my own site for the duration of alpha, and extending development to include more features and content.

Earlier I shared what goes into preparing for a Steam release, and now it's finally time to talk about Cogmind's first month on a new platform! We'll be looking at reception, rankings, traffic, sales, and more.

Traffic

First of all, let's look at the traffic data to help give the rest of this article some context. (*Note that some of the data in this post is not equivalent to a month beginning on launch day, because it was compiled a bit before the month ended.)

Cogmind Steam Launch Month Visitor Sessions

It's easy to see that although over this period my own website saw a respectable number of sessions (16,103 in all), this value was dwarfed by total visits to the Steam store page: 236,665!

So while long-term exposure on Steam isn't what it used to be, quite a lot of fresh eyes will be seeing a new game for the first time on launch day. Not to mention technically the above are people who actually visited the store page, whereas so-called "impressions" (those who had a chance to see the name and logo w/link) were much much higher. Although I have that data, I can't release the specifics because it's under NDA (unlike the above graph, created from my own Google Analytics tracking data).

There were not a lot of noticeable events worth annotating on the graph, at least not compared to my previous postmortems, but that's partially because much of it is overlapping within this short period and therefore doesn't stand out. A bigger reason would be that a mere 10% of Steam sessions originate from external websites, e.g. Reddit (about half of such visitors), Google, Twitter, and others.

So 90% of traffic is actually coming from within Steam, which itself has a huge range of different sources. Steam breaks them all down into narrow categories, but I'm not allowed to share all those details here. However, I will say that the largest chunk of Steam traffic comes from tag pages, and specifically within those lists the New and Trending tab which I'll talk about more later.

The only two post-releases blips so far on the sessions (and therefore sales :P) graphs are:

Notice the significant drop-off following the first week. There's no way to know for sure, but based on anecdotes and past experience I'm guessing it would've dropped off even sooner had I not chosen to go with the 10% launch discount. Valve recommends launching with a discount, and it's yet another factor that Steam might use to promote a game more heavily throughout their site. Not to mention it attracts more visitors who see a game available below full price (Steam also intentionally makes this information very prominent... everywhere).

About 73.8% of visits happened while the sale was active, and we'll see that reflected again in some of the following sections, though I'm very interested to see whether/how that ratio changes in the future when not mixed in with so many launch factors.

Another fun little statistic to look at is the store page's real-time visitor count. This is about where it peaked on launch day:

Cogmind Steam Launch Day Store Page Analytics

I launched shortly before 6 PM US Pacific Time, so it was late in much of the US and Europe was already asleep. The number of concurrent visitors would probably have been higher if earlier in the day, but I chose the most suitable time for my own time zone (9 AM!) because I'm working on this alone and have to field all questions and issues myself, after all.

Charts and Algorithms

Being far too busy with other work, following the launch I wasn't glued to charts (or revenue, for that matter), but I did have a browser set up for occasionally checking in on various Steam lists to see how Cogmind was faring for the first week or so. This was mostly just to get a better idea of the state of the market. I watched these via a US VPN so as not to taint the data with my own profile.

Steam has a massive user base, of course, and where a game is placed or highlighted on their site will have an equally massive impact on sales. Funny enough, in general a game must be able to drive sales for it to get on, or stay at, a prominent place on most of these charts in the first place, so it's kind of a chicken and egg question. Being a good game in the first place definitely helps here, as does pre-release hype to attract a surge of early buys and interest. Equally important is having a preexisting community to start it off and help sustain the momentum, which is further supported by organic word of mouth and random coverage (which I'll talk about later). That said, almost any game has an audience out there and will manage to get some initial sales--there are simply so many people watching.

As mentioned in my steam prep summary, regarding exposure it's both possible and important to have a game's store page published before release, as early as possible. In addition to simply building interest, it also allows prospective players to wishlist it in order to be notified on release. Yet another benefit is that prior to release the game can apparently even get some placement on other Steam pages. While the "Upcoming Releases" list is not so valuable to anyone now (players and devs alike) due to the flood of games, Cogmind in particular was immediately paired with another popular roguelike, Caves of Qud:

Steam

Each of our games occupied the top slot of the "More Like This" suggestions on the other's store page. In fact, I haven't checked lately but this was the case from the first day Cogmind's store page went live through to more than a month after release. Steam may be bad at discovery, but this is a no-brainer :P. Although Qud and Cogmind are technically rather different games, there's a lot of overlap between the player bases and the two are often brought up together across the web in numerous discussions, even in many of the same articles (for example here on PC Gamer). This is interesting because it seems to imply that Steam algorithms uses some outside criteria (considering Cogmind had no prior presence on Steam), unless perhaps they simply noticed on day one that a lot of people who own Qud had also suddenly wishlisted Cogmind (?).

Now on to the placement following launch...

Steam users can browse games by category, e.g. Action, Adventure, Strategy, and within each category are four tabs: New and Trending, Top Sellers, Specials, and New Releases. The latter list is simply chronological and not all that interesting, given that new games disappear pretty quickly as a couple dozen more are released every day. "Specials" is for anything on discount, which technically would include Cogmind and its launch discount but I didn't follow that so don't have anything to say there.

Putting Cogmind out there is actually the first time I've ever really used Steam, and launch day was my first time looking at these charts so this was all new to me. At first I didn't even know what kind of charts I should be watching, but come launch day others on Twitter were pointing out Cogmind performance on various charts so I figured those were good to keep an eye on :P

I mostly followed the Early Access category (duh), Indie, and Strategy, about which I'll provide details in the following sections.

Main Carousels

A "carousel" would be the collection of large images prominently displayed at the top of a page, a select few games that users can cycle through and which Steam wants to promote for whatever reason. They actually list the reason below each game, be it because it's currently selling well, it's new and trending, or the user has showed an interest in such games before, etc. Games included in these carousels are swapped in and out fairly frequently.

Of course the most prominent carousel of all would be that on the front page of Steam. With The Flood upon us, front page exposure for new games is no longer guaranteed, but games that are popular or selling well can end up there organically. When Cogmind launched, surprisingly the initial surge of purchases was enough to get it on the front page, though only for a brief time. It was there for perhaps an hour or less, and didn't bring in much traffic at all compared to other sources.

Still, it was definitely cool to have my first commercial game featured on the front page of the largest video game platform in the world. So of course I had to screenshot it :)

Cogmind on Steam Front Page Main Carousel

There's no way a niche game like Cogmind could maintain a presence on that page for long (even less probable as an EA title), not to mention about a third of the slots were taken up by various Witcher products... Apparently I released on the same day as a 10-year Witcher series-wide sale, but the market is so active these days that if it's not one thing it's another, so no sense in putting too much effort into finding the best release window! (Technically I can identify some undoubtedly better windows, but they push the release back into next year and I didn't want to wait that long considering Cogmind was ready. Interestingly, not long before launch I read an article about another indie studio that postponed releasing their already-completed game to next year.)

Much greater numbers of visitors were brought in via carousels on relevant category pages, where Cogmind enjoyed prominence for multiple longer periods.

Cogmind sat on the Early Access carousel for almost the entire first three days, displaying the reason as "Top Seller." Then it disappeared for a few days before returning once again for the same reason, not coincidentally on the final day of the launch week discount. I wonder how Steam figures that, though, because sales were mostly declining in the lead up to that day. My guess is they're probably also factoring aggregate sales over the previous week (or something like that) and also giving an extra boost to new games nearing the end of their sale period since a looming deadline can spur people to buy if they're on the fence. On that note I did see some meaningful anecdotal evidence, several people saying they wanted to catch it before the discount ended.

Cogmind on Steam Early Access Main Carousel

In the Strategy category, for the first two days Cogmind also sat in the main carousel, often as the leading game (!). This definitely surprised me since this category includes all Strategy games on Steam, not just Early Access. I had thought releasing Cogmind as EA would relegate it to a smaller subset of the site, mainly the EA-specific area, but that's apparently not the case. Strategy is one of the somewhat smaller categories on Steam, and I guess there weren't as many big strategy titles released around this time, so there was space for a niche game to edge its way in there :)

I don't think Cogmind ever appeared in the carousel of the other category I was keeping an eye on: Indie. That wouldn't be a surprise since it's without a doubt the broadest and most competitive category these days.