Thread by @RaveofRavendale

✨The Let's Build a Zoo launch week sales thread✨

We launched Let's Build a Zoo last Friday on Steam and Epic. It's been a pretty bonkers week, and the game has broken even already which is extremely pleasant!!

So in classic Mike Rose fashion, let's delve into LOADSA NUMBERS:

In the first 7 days we've sold 32k units, which translates to nearly $500k in revenue

This roughly matches what my expectations for the game were, and it means that all dev costs have been recouped, and the future for the game (and loads of further updates!) has been secured YEY

According to current numbers that are floating around the orifices of the Game Dev Internet, it's likely we'll now see roughly $700k in PC revenue in month one, and $1.5m in year 1. With the plans we have for future updates + the high user rating, I feel confident we'll hit that!

A deep dive into those sales shows that as per usual the US was our biggest country for sales -- but you might be surprised at which country was third!

The Thai following for Let's Build a Zoo has been incredible, as has the Japanese following! Been really amazing to see :)

The high Thai player numbers wasn't a huge surprise to us, since of our 65k launch wishlists, 12k of them were from Thailand (nearly 20%!)

TBH I thought Germany would be higher, as German players always seem to be into sims. I guess maybe the pixel art put a lot of them off?

Wishlist-wise, roughly 20% of pre-launch day wishlisters converted to sales, and we've now bumped the total outstanding wishlists to 125k, which should provide us some tasty sales at Xmas, especially if we pair it with a major update and a discount

On a slightly more negative note, the launch day itself was not hugely fun

Right after launch, we started to get dozens of reports that people were trying to buy the game, but Steam payments were failing. We received around 50ish reports, so it was prob affecting 100s of people

We also had no access to sales data at all, as that system fell over in the backend. So for the first *9 hours* we had no idea how many units we'd sold🙃

The dev team were obv panicked by this, and there was very little I could say except "I'm pretty sure we've sold well!!"

It's the 2nd time recently that Steam has fallen over on us on an important day -- back in July on the day we announced Heist Simulator (), Steam stopped working the moment we launched the Steam page, and we missed out on 2 hours of wishlists. Fantastic!

This time around we were assured that it was happening to everyone, not just us, but obviously that wasn't really super useful information while we were clearly losing sales from it

Our peak concurrent numbers levelled out a lot lower than I was hoping at 800 players

BUT!

As player numbers peaked and looked like they'd drop as expected, something weird happened. Steam finally got its act together, sales figures came through, payments were working again... and instead of nosediving, our player numbers continued to rise after regular peak hours

I then stayed up until 4am, genuinely unable to believe that player nos. were rising throughout the night, rather than dropping after the peak as we normally see. China, Japan and Thailand had all woken up and started buying the game, and proceeded to push us to 1500 con. players

By the end of the weekend, we'd reached a peak of 1645 players, which we were pretty dang happy with. We haven't dropped lower than 700 concurrent players since then, and I'm intrigued to see what peak numbers we manage this coming weekend

According to data from @gamediscoverco, we're currently the 5th biggest Steam release of the month so far, so feeling pretty happy about that!

@gamediscoverco One thing I'd say we've done exceptionally well with this launch, on both the No More Robots (pub) side and on the Springloaded (dev) side, is provide crazy levels of support to players

We've been deep in the trenches of the Steam forums / reviews, and it has paid off immensely

@gamediscoverco I cannot tell you how many negative Steam reviews I've flipped from negative to positive simply by responding with apologies and reassuring the person that we're working to remedy their concerns. And then 6 days after launch, Springloaded put out a HUGE update that did just that!

@gamediscoverco As for the future of Let's Build a Zoo:

Since the game has broken even so early, it now means that all the future plans that Springloaded had for the game -- numerous free updates, larger DLC, constantly tweaking systems until we're all happy -- will very much happen

And with console versions on the way early next year it's very likely you're going to become p sick of me talking about this game in the coming months and years. Sorry about that in advance

OK I'm done now, thanks for not muting this thread 12 tweets ago

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