We live in a world run 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 its 1.0 release in September. However, tragedy struck for Permadeath when a rare Steam bug prevented wishlisters from being emailed about Planet Cenaturi’s full release.
Without the expected surge in sales from wishlisters, a game has little to no chance of populating on Steam’s front page, which is where a lot of traffic comes from.
Although you can never accurately predict the conversion rate between wishlists and sales, you can be reasonably certain that Planet Centauri would have sold more copies on release day if wishlisters were notified about its release. The game only managed a peak concurrent player count of around 150 on release day, which is far less than Permadeath expected.
Thankfully, Valve understood and offered Permadeath compensation for the system bug — a daily sale that would put Planet Centauri front and centre on the various tabs of 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 the sales that would usually be extremely visible.
Laurent Lechat of Permadeath acknowledged the “bad luck” that Planet Centauri has faced. He doesn’t blame Valve for not telling the studio about the upcoming announcements. However, he does suggest they could have blocked the twelfth for deals without specifying 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 in early access.
Thankfully, the sale still generated around 5000 sales for Permadeath, which gives the team more runway over the next year to develop their upcoming game. Let’s hope this one fares 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
