Sorry for the rather clickbaity title! This will actually be a rather dry and boring dissection of why our game hasn’t done as well as similar games, and ideas for doing better. Academia : School Simulator (henceforth known as Academia) has been out since September 2017 and has done pretty well for Squeaky Wheel. It recently went past the 50000 unit mark and was making a decent profit, at least until the dreaded Steam Algocalypse of October 2018, from which it never truly recovered. We do have some savings built up and we’re more or less breaking even every month. Being on that knife’s edge of profitability does keep me up though, and I’ve recently started wondering, why hasn’t Academia been quite as successful as other, very similar games? I decided to do a deep dive and compare notes with some other trusted indie developers. These are the results.
PS: I want to make it clear that we realize how lucky we are to be one of the few devs that are even surviving relatively comfortably. I’m just thinking of this an experiment, ie all things being equal why would one game do worse?
The games to be compared are:
Another Brick In the Mall ( henceforth know as ABITM)
We are comparing these games because they are the most directly comparable to Academia in these ways:
Graphics: All of them have a graphical lineage from Prison Architect (for which I was the artist), with some variation.
Team Size: Relatively similar team sizes
Marketing : Similar marketing output, which is to say that aside from doing their own marketing, none of these games have really gotten big marketing pushes.
Originality : These games are building off a relatively established framework. Obviously they are unique in their own ways, but they are different mostly in theme, not gameplay.
Launch Timing : These games came out within one year of each other, so for the most part the timing argument can be said to be neutral (ie one game does not have a huge advantage over the other due to being first).
Early Access : All these games are currently in Early Access.
Quality : I am coming in with the assumption that all these games are of relatively equal quality. That is to say one of these games is not clearly superior to the others at first glance.
We are excluding the following games from this comparison :
Prison Architect
Rimworld
Prison Architect can be said to have reintroduced the business sim genre to the world when it came out, and was wildly successful for a variety of reasons. We cannot compare to that. Rimworld, while having similar graphics, is essentially a storytelling game similar to Dwarf Fortress, making it a massively different game. Both games also came out much earlier, which means they have the benefit of not dealing with any “sim fatigue” that may be creeping in. In short, these super successful game are not a good comparison to Academia.
Assumed Units Sold
The goal of this exercise is to figure out why Academia hasn’t quite sold the same amount of units as these other very similar games. We will not be measuring actual units sold, but merely comparing the number of reviews and using that as a proxy for units sold.
As of June 29, 2019, these are the numbers of reviews per game:
Academia : 522
Sim Airport : 1740
Airport CEO : 1772
ABITM : 982
Based on the above numbers we can say that very roughly, ABITM has sold twice as many units as Academia, and Airport CEO and Sim Airport have sold 3 times as many units as Academia.
Pricing
Academia : $20
Sim Airport : $20
Airport CEO : $16
ABITM : $15
In terms of pricing the games are pretty close to each other. ABITM’s lower price point may have helped give it an edge over Academia, but it has sold less than both Sim Airport and Airport CEO, so lower pricing doesn’t seem to necessarily lead to more units sold.
Launch Date
Academia : 8 Sep, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 24
Sim Airport : 7 Mar, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 62
Airport CEO : 29 Sep, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 81
