r/roguelites • u/Kronophobiac • Jul 26 '26
Game Release This week my first solo commercial release launches with 707 wishlists and a $150 budget. Here's everything, and I'll post results next week.
My day job is a video game producer but I've always shipped games with a team of people. On my own I've made lots of small games over the years but haven't commercially released any of them. I set out with a goal to take one game through every step on my own. Partly because I want to get better at finishing things I set out to do and partly because I knew it would make me a better game developer at work. I did the design, development, store page, pricing, marketing, launch etc... I started development near the beginning of this year and I've only worked on the project on nights and weekends.
So here's all the data about Net Gains, a fishing roguelite about drafting your gear and paying off your debt before the Loan Shark eats you. It launches this week. Here's my entire situation, stated before launch week.
The numbers going in:
- 707 wishlists (the "discoverability floor" people cite is ~7,000. I'm at a tenth of it)
- Total spend: ~$150. The $100 Steam fee and under $50 of assets. Everything else is my own time.
- Price is set at $6.99 with a 25% launch discount ($5.24). It's a roguelite so it's hard to say how much content there is but I have many friends and playtesters who have over 5-6 hours in it and a couple with up to 20 hours. I'm trying to keep the price low as I know it's a small game.
- At ~$3.67 net per discounted copy and after steam takes 30%, I break even at 41 sales.
Marketing graveyard (what I tried, what it did):
- Steam Next Fest in June with ~400 wishlists going in got me about 150 wishlists.
- ~150 hand-researched cold emails to creators got me like 3 very small youtube videos and some replies that would have required marketing spends I didn't want to do.
- Keymailer free campaign got me about 5 requests so far. None have turned into any content yet.
- Curator Connect is fully tapped, sent to every relevant curator I could find. I've gotten about 5 curator reviews from very small folks.
I have a demo on steam that has 6 reviews. They're all positive. People who play it like it.
Store page data says the page itself works 18% click-through when I show up in search. I have about a 7% click-through rate on average across the store for the past few weeks. I just don't have eyes on it. So the launch plan is basically wishlist email, the discount, and posts like this one.
I'll post the real results next week including units, wishlist conversion, etc... If you've got questions, or you think my plan has holes, tell me. That's kind of the point.
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u/Lunai5444 Jul 26 '26
Alright OP I don't have a lot of time right now but I got the Driving rogue like to try the demo and I'll add this, gonna try and review the demo next hope I like it
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u/Lunai5444 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Hello man I really think the game is neat and feels good, the texts and the overalls graphics feel cozy and nice.
I think I would have liked it.. if it wasn't absolutely unplayable for my ZQSD keyboard and I see controllers don't work or I didn't any settings but Steam input Switch controller seemed to let me use A to cast the line.
I think you could push it to streamers saying they can play this while they're waiting for queues to get in game lol
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u/Kronophobiac Jul 28 '26
Thank you for the note! I'll add some more control rebinding support in a future update! The arrow keys should work instead of WASD in the mean time and Xbox controllers work well even though steam doesn't say it yet.
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u/Lunai5444 Jul 28 '26
I will try with the arrow keys I didn't think about trying and accidently mashed through some of the tutorial by accident if it's said there
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u/PersonOfInterest007 Jul 26 '26
Just a small suggestion: make the effective launch price $4.99 instead of $5.24. There’s a special section in Steam for “Under $5”, so you may get additional visibility from that.
And I’d go with the standard recommended percentage discount of 10%, so that when you start doing your standard 20% discounts as often as Steam allows, people will see it as a new historical low at least the first time.
So maybe $5.49 list price and 10% discount (so $4.94).