The IARC age rating system is lovely and easy to use, but it's also *super* dangerous, and can have your game pulled from the various online stores (eShop, PS4 etc) if they disagree with the rating you give your game
Be aware of this!!
Numerous devs have had their games pulled from stores recently, because IARC disagreed with their rating post-launch
Basically, if IARC decides that your rating is incorrect, they can update your rating automatically, causing your game to be pulled from the stores. It's obviously not ideal, and incredibly scary
It can mean you need to submit entire new builds to Nintendo + Sony!
The solution is:
Be overly dramatic / realistic when filling the IARC form in. Does your game have a single swear in it? Tick "swearing." A tiny graphic that has an ecig on it? Tick "smoking."
It's better to have a higher age rating for your game, than get pulled post-launch
I know this is a *very* boring thread, but I'm seeing more and more devs being caught out, and we had a near-miss ourselves, so it's very easy to fuck up. Watch out!!
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It's time for another classic Mike Rose stats tweet thread!!
This time it's ☕**Spirittea launch week stats!**☕
We launched Spirittea last Monday, and it's been one of our biggest launches to date:
It's been a *fascinating* launch, due to where the game has been most successful
Usually we do very well on Steam, then the console versions catch up in the months afterwards
For Spirittea, Steam was our weakest platform, with Xbox and Switch accounting for 80% of the revenue!
I think the reason for this, is at least in part due to the way that the Steam store has evolved in the last couple of years, compared to the console stores
Way more AAA publishers have started popping their stuff on Steam, having failed to make non-Steam PC platforms happen
Let me tell you the story about how a little country called "Argentina" helped us to our biggest Nintendo Switch launch to date
I write "Argentina" in quotation marks because well... it wasn't really Argentina, was it?
Time for another classic Nintendo eShop thread:
So we put Let's Build a Zoo up for pre-order on Nintendo Switch on September 22, and I was feeling good about this one. Nice buzz around it, perfect for Switch... I went to bed with decent pre-orders trickling in
When I woke up and checked sales... holy crap. So many pre-orders!
So I did a little victory dance (I'm really good at those). Then I checked where these pre-orders were coming from and... ah. Hmm. Oh. Shit.
85% of our pre-orders were coming from "Argentina".
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!
No More Robots is 🎂4 years old🎂, so it's time for a thread of *LOVELY NUMBERS*:
- $12m in revenue during last 12 months
- More than 800,000 units sold
- More than 4 million people played our games
- Split pretty dang evenly across PC + all console platforms
Look at this graph
Here's the batshit thing: We didn't release a single new game in the last 12 months
Those numbers have come from bringing our existing games to new platforms, getting lovely deals for our games, and being Very Good at slowly but surely discounting our games incrementally deeper
Year 5 is going to be pretty release heavy, with all of the following games on the way:
- Let's Build a Zoo
- Not Tonight 2
- Heist Simulator
- Fashion Police Squad
- TombStar
- Several others we haven't announced yet 👀