3 More Years! 3 MORE YEARS!
3 More Years! 3 MORE YEARS!
Unless we have a Terraria-like success I doubt we'll know in advance that we can support this for such an expanded period of time -- a staff of 5 is expensive to maintain over that stretch of time, and having all the money in advance requires quite a bit of success indeed.
That said, things are certainly looking positive. Trimmed for relevance and brevity:
I dunno. One thing is certain, though: this thing is selling like hotcakes at the moment, and the main complaints from people who actually like the game have been that they want to see more enemies, more missions, etc. The worry about too much repetition.
Right now there's a ton of momentum for the game, it's outselling what AI War did 3:1 and we were up to #5 on the Steam top sellers list last night and are currently sitting at #9. The press are largely really enthused, and word of mouth seems to be spreading as well as lots of of fan mail coming in folks who are talking about how they love how the game harkens back to their childhood in the 90s. Etc.
Two days ago my fear was not being able to capture new customers due to the art or whatever other factors. Now my fear is losing the momentum of new customers by not just completely delighting the sort of people who clearly have a taste for this sort of thing. So new enemies, new missions, ever-polished mechanics, and other fun stuff to explore is at the top of my list.
During the next couple of weeks what most needs to happen is for all these new fans to see Arcen beta release schedules in their full glory, if you know what I mean. 
Nothing is ever certain in life, but we're certainly out of the woods for a little while at least. We, uh, really ran ourselves down to the wire with this one. As in, literally layoffs were going to have to happen next week in order to stay in business if this thing didn't come out. We weren't at risk of disappearing completely, but it could have collapsed down to barely more than just me again. Blah, that was not a scenario any of us were looking forward to if this turned out to be Tidalis-like and flopped.
Fortunately, it looks like if this keeps up, AVWW will have actually outsold Tidalis's life-to-date income within the next 24-36 hours. That's including multiple daily deals and the puzzle pack and so on for Tidalis. That's less impressive in terms of how well AVWW is doing but really just speaks to how enormously dismally Tidalis did. A goodly number of single midweek madnesses for AI War, and a number of the daily deals for AI War, also far outstripped Tidalis's life to date revenue.
The big question is how all this shakes out over the longer haul. Right now we're very much in the spotlight and that's great; we're on the front page of steam for multiple reasons, we're maintaining a pretty good position on the top sellers list on steam, and the game is also doing well with other vendors and our own site. So that certainly gives us a bit of breathing room, but the question is what happens when all that fades -- when we're no longer showing up at the top of the new releases, when the press isn't talking about us just having come out, and when we've potentially fallen off the top sellers list as well.
At that point we'll hit some sort of baseline sales volume that we'll have to rely on as our long-term source of revenue. For AI War, that baseline was only about 33% of what we needed in order to stay in business; and so hence the frequent sales with that game, because that's what kept us in business (earn 33% of what we need normally month to month, then earn 1000% or even 5000% all in one go, etc). So we were constantly bleeding cash while hopping from windfall to windfall, and have been doing that for the last three years. That works, clearly, as a way to keep building out a game like AI War. However it's not exactly restful or stress-free.
With AVWW I really hope that we hit a baseline level of sales where we can remain stable without being quite so reliant on discount promotions. Not that we wouldn't ever want to do discounts anyhow, but we wouldn't want to be dependent on them just to keep the lights on if you see what I mean.
In general I'm feeling really positive, and it's just a matter of making sure that we deliver on the post-release expectations that everybody has. And hey: that's what we're known for! So I'm very cautiously optimistic that the 3 more years thing will get to happen, but nothing is certain unless you're sitting on a massive stack of cash.
