We live in a world driven by algorithms and data-driven popularity contests, and you need a helping hand sometimes to get your product noticed in an extremely saturated market.
Planet Centauri – a 2D sandbox from indie developer Permadeath – had 150,000 Steam wishlists before 1.0 was released in September. But tragedy struck Permadeath when a rare Steam bug prevented wishlists from being sent via email for Planet Cenaturi's full release.
Without the expected boost in sales from wishlists, a game has little to no chance of landing on the front page of Steam, which is where a lot of traffic comes from.
While you can never accurately predict the conversion rate between wishlists and sales, you can be pretty sure that Planet Centauri would have sold more copies on release day if wishlists had been notified of its release. The game only managed a peak concurrent player of around 150 on release day, which is far less than Permadeath expected.
Thankfully, Valve understood and offered Permadeath compensation for the system failure – a daily sale that would put Planet Centauri front and center on the various tabs on the front page. Valve offered several potential days for the sale, with the indie developers landing on November 12.
Twice cursed
Fast forward to that fateful day and Valve announces the Steam Frame, Steam Controller and Steam Machine. As you can imagine, the front page was dominated by these announcements, crowding out sales that would normally be extremely visible.
Laurent Lechat of Permadeath acknowledged the “bad luck” Planet Centauri has faced. He doesn't blame Valve for not telling the studio about the upcoming announcements. However, he suggests that they could have blocked the Twelfth for business without giving a reason to prevent situations like this from happening (nice spot, Rock Paper Shotgun).
The studio has “the feeling that Planet Centauri is cursed,” so they've switched to another project, a 2D roguelike that won't be released into early access.
Thankfully, the sale still generated around 5000 sales for Permadeath, giving the team more runway over the next year to develop their upcoming game. Let's hope this one does better than Planet Centauri.
Planet Centauri
- Released
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June 3, 2016
- ESRB
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t
- Engine
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OniDev engine
