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Bingo! Some thoughts on video game dev costs…Ī continued talking point this week? Finji ’s Bekah Saltsman was even more transparent in a follow-up after some quizzical looks (from lower cost-of-living countries, maybe?) about her IGN interview, where she mentioned a $4 million cost to make a competitive indie game: And they launched into an under-served market.

#Best escape simulator community rooms full#

Ultimately, the ‘surprising thing’ that Pine Studio did was decide to ship an escape room simulator not in VR/AR (or even VR-optional!), with up to 10 player online co-op and full moddability on Day 1. It has a really good & appropriate art style, well-studied game design, and it’s from a veteran team which has previously shipped high quality games on Steam. The devs didn’t just shove some escape room ideas in a box and ship it. Like, a lot.Īnd I wouldn’t underestimate how well-constructed Escape Simulator is. But lots of streamers did.” So yep, ‘doing virtual escape rooms with other streamers’ is very streamer friendly, and that can drive a lot of interest for your title, it turns out. budget, it somewhat doesn’t matter, right? And as he says, you can never A/B test reality to see what would have really happened…Īnother thing you might want to bear in mind on the discovery side of things: “No major game news portal covered our game. But since the game was overall such a success vs. We would have recommended launching this game at $19.99, given its features, yes. Did it work? Who knows, but we were in the trending games for two weeks.”

The general advice is to price higher, but we felt we're not recognizable as a brand to risk it. Tom says: “We slightly underpriced the game at $14.99, hoping for more sales and getting more people talking about it at launch. There’s a lot of other interesting commentary in the full post - including on pricing. I think this is the reason why all publishers (we talked with all the major ones) said NO to the game.” There are escape games, but none of them have the budget and the scope of. Sometimes ‘going where the market isn’t’ can work out: Another very important facet of the game’s success: “If you looked at Steam, there is not really a game like ours. Minimum viable Escape Simulator would NOT have: room editor, character models, support for more than two players in multiplayer, etc.” Online co-op and modding can make such a big difference - the team was right to focus on both for launch. Online co-op and Steam Workshop? Also vital : As Tom says: “You often hear about Minimum Viable Product, and Escape Simulator goes against the grain there. Making this counter-intuitive move paid off. Not making Escape Simulator AR/VR was key: Tom noted: “Escape Simulator started development as AR mobile game… we decided that we have a better chance on Steam, and it is a more accessible platform to develop for.” Bingo! Although AR/VR seems like the perfect platform, the target market for a game like this is so much larger on Steam. It looks like it’s attracting casual gamers who want to play, but don’t care about reviewing? This means the game sold something like 300k+ copies, but it only had 2,238 Steam reviews at the time. The game’s doing even better than we thought: it’s still difficult to estimate sales via reviews or CCUs, and we were surprised when Tom said “the game just passed $4M in gross sales”. How did this happen? Well, with the help of a Reddit ‘postmortem’ post from Pine Studio’s Tom, we can make a bunch of extra commentary on its road to success, as follows: And with 3,100 CCUs right this second, it’s clearly becoming a bit of a sleeper hit - we’ve been paying attention to it.

#Best escape simulator community rooms plus#

That was #41 out of all games released that month on our Plus charts - not bad, and a 0.30 ‘Hype to Reality’ score, double the median.īut fast forward two and a half months, and the game is now averaging 260 Steam reviews per week, which is #17 out of all titles released on Steam in October 2021 (!) That’s a major jump-up in rank. It had 332 Steam reviews in its first week on sale. So, when Pine Studio’s first-person co-op escape room game Escape Simulator launched in October, it looked, well, medium popular to us. Escape Simulator - why is it a (semi)-surprise hit? Imagine if we all still marketed via infomercials? ( Devolver’s E3 press conferences are probably the closest concept nowadays.

#Best escape simulator community rooms tv#

Semi-offtopic: musing on the weird viral ways that content gets discovered nowadays, I just discovered this bonkers 30-minute Philips CD-i TV infomercial from the early ‘90s. It’s a borderline giant newsletter this time out, so bear with us - we’ll take you through a cornucopia of relevant content. As you ease back into work, welcome to Wednesday’s newsletter, my friends in video game discovery.