Thread by @accidentlyAnton

Roto Force - 1 month post-release report

It's been (a bit over) a month, so how has Roto Force been doing?

Let's talk sales, revenue, profit (!?), cost, hours, wishlists and all those juicy numbers.

#indiedev #gamedev #steamdev

Let's get straight to the thing you are here for.

Roto Force sales numbers for 1st month:

1260 Android sales
523 iOS sales
742 Steam sales
22 itch sales
= 2547 total sales

Game is 8€ on PC and 5€ on Mobile (Free to Download with a Single IAP to unlock full game)

Since Roto Force is Free To Try on mobile, downloads are separate from sales:

168k downloads on Android (about 0.7% of that bought the game)
44k downloads on iOS (about 1.2% of that bought the game)

So with what numbers did I go into launch? Let's look at mobile pre-registers and Steam wishlists.
Things to keep in mind: I have a publisher that massively helped with mobile release. Thanks @PID_Games <3

Roto Force was featured in various places in the mobile stores before and after release, so that was nice.

100k pre-registers on Android
4500 pre-registers on iOS

(yes that's 100000 pre-registers on Android, don't ask me how)

4500 wishlists on Steam at launch

8368 wishlists one month after release

About 500 sales from people that had the game previously wishlisted (about 11% of launch wishlists)
(Conversion Rate 7 days after launch was 5.2%)

Refund rate stays steady at exactly 10%

I sent out about 40 keys to various outlets, streamers and youtubers. Which feels too low, but limited time and stress.

Coverage of the game at launch was ... decent? I don't really know how to quantify this in an useful manner.

Critic reviews have been positive.
Edge gave it an 8/10
Eurogamer gave it a 4/5

User ratings on the stores are exceptionally high so that really helps the algorithm I think, and if nothing else is at least a boost to morale.
eurogamer.net/roto-force-a-f…

So what went into Roto Force? What are the hours and costs to get to this point?

I've tracked about 4050 hours working on Roto Force over the last 7 years (actual probably higher).

First in free-time then took a break and then full-time, as can be seen in this graph of weekly hours tracked.

All the costs for commissions that went into Roto Force (art, animation, sfx, writing, translations...) amount to about 11k
(this does not include costs for traveling and exhibiting at events)

If my math is right, Roto Force made about 7k in revenue (after store and publisher cuts) in the first month of release.

Thanks to a distribution deal my publisher made, I got about 10k upfront, which is nice and not something I would have known how to get by myself. I don't know how many details I can share about this, so the important part is that I got some money at no additional effort for me.

So 17k total revenue minus 11k costs is about 6k profit.

My friend and music composer @CptRudy is involved with a 10% rev cut (so about 1.7k).

Which leaves me with about 4k profit (before taxes) for the first month of Roto Force sales.

Looking at the various numbers, one will realize that this is not really sustainable at the moment. First month is expected to be the best month (unless something crazy happens ofc).

If I want to make this my job I'll have to step up my game and change how I go about things.

Current plan is smaller games with shorter dev cycles and reckless iteration.
All while improving skills and fleshing out larger concepts that I can pitch to publishers and get funding for.

Future plans for Roto Force are mostly doing QOL updates and tiny content updates like a Boss Rush Mode.
Also trying to port it to consoles and give the game a second chance.
As well as looking out for events and opportunities to get the game in front of more eyes.

There is a lot to dig into, so if anyone got questions about anything specific I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.
I hope information like this provides helpful data points for the public, but it's important that they are in the right context.

As always, this is just my personal experience. Don't extrapolate just from my data to your situation.
I have assumptions and feelings about how certain numbers came to be, but those are mostly speculation. I don't know what I'm doing.

But that's it for now. Twitter lost my first draft of this thread so I had to redo all of it. I'm tired.

Here's the game. Go buy it. That's #marketing #rotoforce
store.steampowered.com/app/1181610/Ro…