Hello dear readers!
Two years ago today, we launched Race the Sun via our website using the Humble Bundle widget, after about a year of development, and a harrowing Kickstarter.
The game got off to a really rough start, which I wrote about here. In our first month, the game made less revenue than we needed as a company to keep making games. It was disappointing, but we didn’t give up on the game – and neither did our families, our friends, or our fans. The act of talking about our struggles attracted more attention from the media and Youtubers, which helped catapult us unto Steam. We were incredibly fortunate to land on Steam before the Greenlight floodgates opened up and increased the competition.
Then we added Workshop support, which gave the game a second wind. We thought we were getting into the “long tail” of revenue at this point – but then we were invited to a Humble Bundle, and later a Steam Daily Deal, and the game was revitalized again. We launched on Playstation in October ’14, and while the launch window wasn’t ideal, the game did fairly well, and the additional players raised awareness of the game even more.
Then we were invited to be a Playstation Plus game in May, participated in more bundles, and seasonal sales. At every turn, we’re amazed that somehow, this little game keeps supporting us. At some point, we started realizing that we could mention the name of the game to random people in conversation, and it was more likely than not that they would have heard of it – which is still surreal to us.
A few weeks ago, we launched on iOS, and also made the game completely free for a day on Steam. This combined event raised awareness of the game even further, and daily revenue on Steam is something like 200% higher than it was before (though the effect might die off after a few weeks.) In a few weeks, we’ll launch the game on WiiU, and later on it will come to XBox One, and possibly Android. The future isn’t completely certain, but right now it looks like the game could continue supporting us well into 2016. Today there are something like 1.5 million people who own the game, and revenue has exceeded $500k. The game’s success is frankly humbling. We know that our persistence and execution helped make it into the success it is – but we also recognize that we’ve been incredibly lucky along the way, and that we wouldn’t be where we are without the continuous support of our friends.
Soon, we’ll be talking more about what we’ve been up to, and what the future holds.
Spoiler: it involves you.
