The Longshot
There was a game released on Steam this week called She Remembered Caterpillars.It has a bit of a resume:
IGF 2017 Finalist
IGF 2017 Nominee for Excellence in Visual Art
IGF 2017 Honorable Mention for Excellence in Design
Best Puzzle Game (Intel Level Up Dev Contest 2016)
Three nice posts over at RPS.
I bought it.
It's a charming game, not great, but very satisfying, and very relaxing to play. It's quite lovely, too. Overall, a very happy time waster.
Here's the thing, though. The game was released on January 17. How many other games were released on Steam that same day?
Thirty-five.
The highest number of concurrent players for She Remembered Caterpillas since launch was seventeen.
Seventeen players.
So the devs spent a couple of years on this game, sunk who knows how much money into the project, did a very solid job, and their reward is sales that will probably be in the 500 range.
It's just brutal.
I don't know how you sidestep the basic issue, which is so many games being released that no one can sort the good ones out from the messes. Plus, these guys did get some attention. They did very well at IGF, and RPS covered them. For a small game, that's fairly solid.
I would really, really like to have game development as a second career, and I know I can make games, but man, it seems almost impossible to actually sell them these days.
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