cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37741347
Post content:
More than 10 years ago we started creating Planet Centauri, a 2D sandbox with terraria as main inspiration.
We released the EA many years ago and this is our start just before the 1.0 release :
103 400 units solds
138 675 Wishlist
the sells seem incredible but it’s not with so many years behind, when you work for 10 years and have to paid many people helping you with the ten of thousands of monsters frames animations and thousands of pixel art items, you don’t have much left on your wallet at the end.
So we were eager for the release of 1.0 because with so many wishlists, the game’s visibility would be good, we would appear in the new and trending categories due to sales, etc…
The 1.0 happen in december 2024… we sold… 581 units in 5 days.
The game didn’t even appear on page 2; we were invisible; the release was a total flop. And we never understood why until today.
We just received this mail from Steam
Steam Launch Wishlist Email Issue
Hi there, We found a bug that impacted a very small number of game releases (less than 100 since 2015) where wishlist email notifications for the launch of a game were not sent. Unfortunately your game Planet Centauri was among those included. We intend for this feature to work for every game and we’re inviting you to a Daily Deal as a way to help make up for lost visibility from your launch day.
It’s incredible to win the lottery like this: 100 games impacted in 10 years out of the 86,000 games on Steam. And to reward you, we’re giving you 24-hour visibility (which is nothing special; there are 6 slots available for this visibility every day of the year for various Steam invitations).
I don’t even have the strength to be angry. We’ve been so frustrated, disgusted, and in total confusion . Now we know, we understand better, it’s unfair, and we can’t change anything. We’ve started a second project because it’s financially impossible to continue patching our game, and we’re moving forward, because it’s the only thing to do.
This article was my way of expressing my anger, I guess, but also to see all the problems that a platform holding 99% of the PC gaming market can cause when the cogs don’t work as they should.
Have a nice day everyone, may luck be better to you
Comments
I feel like I would have asked a friend or family member to check for the email day of, if not test it on my own account. Seems 9 months is a while to not notice
https://store.steampowered.com/app/385380/Planet_Centauri/
They did kinda abuse early access to crowdfund development for a very long time. 100k+ copies sold is not a bad result overall. The bug is pretty unfortunate, but they didn’t exactly set themselves up for future financial success. Seems more like an unfortunate factor in the “flop” rather than the ultimate cause of it.
The game does look interesting though and if they can regain enough momentum off a daily deal and/or future discounts to fix some of the issues mentioned in the post-1.0 reviews, I’ll definitely consider getting it on sale.
I’m checking the steam reviews, apparently it wasn’t the only factor; players are complaining even the so-called 1.0 version still feels like a beta.
I’ll bet you that if it was an EA (as in the publisher) game, Valve would’ve figured out how to send those wishlist emails.
I don’t know, Valve is financially motivated to make every game they sell a hit. This isn’t like YouTube, where they want people to keep churning out content without remuneration; Valve only gets paid when video game companies sell their game.
And as a software engineer myself, I can totally see how this bug could’ve happened. There are so many ways, in fact; they released on 2024-12-12, maybe the bug was that they also released at 12:12, and some ancient code in the emailer got set up to treat any repeating string of four 12’s as a signal that this is only a test and shouldn’t actually be sent (probably in an attempt to diagnose and fix another bug), but that if statement was never removed from the codebase before it shipped.
Or maybe there’s a weird overflow error that happens when an email is supposed to go to exactly a certain number of customers. It’s kind of close to a number divisible by 64 (138,688); maybe it’s just sloppy binary unit choce?
Or maybe it was at the end of the email fanout for the day and the server crashed without warning, and lost some games without notifying anyone. That would only have to happen once a year over that decade and it would add up to all 100 games.
The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity. Or at least a SWE going too quickly and not checking their work.
The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity.
Oh, I definitely agree. I just think that Valve would’ve come up with a much better solution than a daily deal if this was a game from a big publisher.
