Author Topic: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?  (Read 9605 times)

Offline zespri

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What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« on: March 25, 2017, 04:25:46 am »
I think Chris published these data before, does any one know how Arcen games rank from most number of copies sold to the least number of copies sold?

If I had to guess, this is what I would come up with:

AI War
The Last Federation
Starward Rogue
Bionic Dues
Skyward Collapse
A Valley Without Wind
Shattered Haven
Tidalis

Given that Starward Rogue is the "newest" title, it may be further down than I placed it. Anybody know?

Offline Misery

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #1 on: March 25, 2017, 07:29:04 am »
Chris or Keith are probably the only ones that could really confirm this, but something tells me Starward is a good bit lower down.

There was enough trouble getting anyone to even notice the blasted thing.

I could be wrong of course

Offline Logorouge

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #2 on: March 25, 2017, 08:41:38 am »
Given that Starward Rogue is the "newest" title, it may be further down than I placed it. Anybody know?
Makes me sad since it's my favorite arcen game, but I'm pretty sure Starward Rogue is at the bottom of that list (Second to last if you count Release Raptor).
Can't say for sure which one would be the second best selling, but I think Skyward Collapse was definitely the fastest selling. Didn't take long for the expansion to get announced after that either.

Offline Draco18s

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #3 on: March 25, 2017, 04:21:04 pm »
Makes me sad since it's my favorite arcen game, but I'm pretty sure Starward Rogue is at the bottom of that list (Second to last if you count Release Raptor).

AVWW/AVWW2 are less selling than SR, I think.
The Last Federation I believe is the #2 title.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #4 on: March 25, 2017, 08:01:04 pm »
I believe the order is something like this:

AI War
The Last Federation
A Valley Without Wind 1 &  2
Skyward Collapse
Bionic Dues
Starward Rogue
Tidalis
Shattered Haven

Valley may seem high, but I think the original actually had a pretty good launch for a few weeks, not so much Valley 2. Things get a bit weird with the Valley games since both are now packaged together, though. AI War and The Last Federation are the clear top sellers, quite a way ahead of the rest. That's my guess, anyway!


Offline WolfWhiteFire

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #5 on: March 25, 2017, 09:07:39 pm »
The second best selling Arcen title is definitely The Last Federation.

Offline x4000

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #6 on: March 27, 2017, 11:26:09 am »
I meant to respond to this over the weekend, but I saw it while I was on my phone and all my passwords are different now. ;)

Roughly speaking, the order is like this:

AI War (about a million-ish)
The Last Federation (three quarter million-ish, and generated far faster)
A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 (half a million ish -- sold faster than anything than TLF for 3 months, then tapered off)
Skyward Collapse (quarter million, maybe)
Bionic Dues (that's hard to calculate because of bundles, etc -- but let's say about $100k)
Tidalis (I guess this is approaching $80k
Starward Rogue (again hard to calculate, but something like $40k natural sales maybe -- but then another $80k of "unnatural sales" from unusual deals it got to be a part of.  Without those it's far below Bionic or Tidalis, so I still put it lower than that)
Shattered Haven (I think maybe $20k, it's harder to be sure with this one.  It's maybe half of the organic sales of Starward)

Various notes:

1. We've had right over $3m of net revenue from Steam.  This is for sure.

2. We've had right about $500k of net revenue from other stuff -- GOG and Humble, mostly.  This is very ballparky and I could be off by a fair bit.

3. Overall I have a wide variety of ways of tracking income for various purposes (taxes, royalties, expenses, making sure invoices are paid, etc), and a lot of the "special windfalls" wind up throwing off the simplicity of the calculations of "how much did game X make."  I have all that data, but mainly that was for purposes of royalty payments to staff/contractors, and my method for inputting and calculating that data has evolved over time.  I never have bothered to update all the older data into one format that I can run rollups on to know exact aggregate amounts to the penny, just because it isn't relevant to operating the business.  At some point I will do so out of curiosity, I'm sure.

4. Our fastest-selling title has been TLF, by far.  But our one with the staying power is AI War, by far.

5. Tidalis and Bionic both benefit over Starward by having had a lot longer to generate income.  So it's a bit of apples and oranges there. 

6. Long term, Starward will likely pass Skyward Collapse even.  Particularly if we count the "non usual" income it has had, such as from the Humble Monthly, then it's already ahead of everything but Skyward.  I consider that to be something not to consider too carefully for planning and performance purposes, though, because that's not the sort of thing that I could base any future decisions on.  Those sorts of one-off deals aren't available to games in general, or to Starward again, so I look at them as unexpected windfalls and not part of the normal earnings patterns of the product in question.

7. Skyward Collapse actually sold really well at first, and did really well in terms of critics and whatnot.  It broke even faster than any of our titles except perhaps TLF (AI War doesn't count since I built it in off hours before we were really a company).  TLF and SC were pretty close in terms of break-even speed, though.  TLF had staying power unlike SC, though, and SC wound up tapering off and lost favor with players and critics as other god games came out after that initial run.

8. Skyward Collapse actually "un-broke-even" when I made the first expansion to it, and that expansion sold wretchedly, too.  It then "re-broke-even" within a couple of months after that, and it pretty much killed any future updates for the game aside from maintenance stuff.

9. AI War is the main game of ours that has heavily broken even, because it has an insane cost to income ratio (for us).  TLF had much higher expenses, but still has a very high income in the end.

10. AVWW 1 & 2 had higher expenses than TLF and AI War combined, and so they still haven't broken even.  HOWEVER, we did so much R&D during that period that the amount of intellectual property (code and knowledge) that we generated during making them was huge for the company going forward.  So it was still a win in the end, since we survived; it lowered the cost of future titles, in many ways.  Raptor is kind of a similar thing -- a huge loss obviously, but it paved the way for AI War 2, which couldn't exist like it does without the work that was done on Raptor.

11. In the end, despite giving refunds to everyone and making it free, Raptor still made a slightly positive net income from people who didn't want refunds and/or who gave us money for it separately.  Very very low four figures.  I thought that was really cool.  Still a huge loss of course, but I didn't get eaten by refund costs like I'd predicted.
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Offline Cyborg

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #7 on: April 05, 2017, 06:55:20 pm »
It's insane to me that Tidalis hasn't sold more than any of the match three games on the market, ever. I still install this sometimes.
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Offline x4000

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Re: What is the second best selling Arcen title after AI War?
« Reply #8 on: April 05, 2017, 06:56:18 pm »
"Suck it, Bejeweled" as OutOfEight put it, apparently applied in reverse.
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