Well... we're doing okay, really. Player reaction, in general, has been really positive as well. In our space, we've consistently been a top seller, so it's not just the critics that love us. The really blockbuster games that you hear numbers for really skew people's expectations for how well normal games will sell. If you look at various indie-focused projections of market size, etc, we're doing great for the PC.
Now, granted, I'd love to see a playerbase 10x or 100x the size that we currently have, but there's a good chance we can get there with time. It's not like AI War is going to seem "dated" next year, unlike a lot of the larger AAA titles. Games like TA, Rise of Nations, and even the venerable Starcraft started strong, but also had consistent high sales for a long time, years after their initial release. On a smaller scale, I think that AI War has the potential to derive a similar effect through its focus on gameplay over whiz-bang graphics and such. Look at Dwarf Fortress or Counter-Strike for that matter... games that are continuously updated and that have engaging, deep-for-their-genre-at-the-time-of-their-release gameplay, tend to do well over a longer period of time. When we start hitting retail in various territories, and localized versions start coming out, and people see press for the various expansions over the years, we should be able to pick up new players on a consistent, if not a blisteringly-paced, basis.
Everyone wants to win the lottery, or be the next JK Rowling, but even if you look at JK Rowling -- her first three books did not do all that well at first, from what I recall. Then all three were released at once in the US, and became a huge hit. And of course as she expanded that world in meaningful ways through the continuation of the series in her later books, that's when she hit truly astronomical layers.
AI War, or any strategy game for that matter, will never have the mass appeal of a book like Harry Potter. But, there's clearly a seven-figure market for certain strategy games over time; plenty of top strategy games hit the 1-2 million mark, and last I heard Starcraft is north of 8 million. At some point, we'll have enough critical mass that we'll really "pop" into another level of sales. It happened with our initial release on Impulse, with our first sale on Impulse, with our review on Crispy Gamer, with our review in PC Gamer, and with our 2.0/Steam release.
When 2.0 came out, our playerbase literally doubled in 24 hours. Within 48 hours it had tripled the pre-2.0 number of players. With every sale we do with Impulse (we have done three now), we've seen something like a 20% rise in units sold. We've hit #2 on the sales charts (AAA and indie) at Impulse, #4 at GamersGate, and #9 at Steam (for a day). We were top selling in our category (indie/strategy both) at Steam for a good while after our first sale there, and are still doing healthy.
I'd love to see the game do better than it is -- but I also don't want to downplay the success that we have had. It's all been extremely hard-earned success, as we claw our way out into the wider market. Nothing's been easy or handed to us in any way. When and if things ever do hit a higher level, it won't be because we won a "lottery" of sorts. So I'm pretty proud of that.
So yeah, the numbers might not be as stellar as we all might hope -- I had been wanting around 4x more units sold from the 2.0 release compared to what we actually saw, for instance -- but it's a workable situation as long as our numbers don't drop and our future titles sell reasonably well, and we're still doing astronomically well compared to what most indie titles are able to accomplish. I'd much prefer to have more comfort in our budget, more room for slips or misses with future products, but I'm not feeling sorry for myself or anything. To succeed, Arcen is going to have to keep clawing its way up, but that seems to be what we're good at.
I'm sure enough to be quitting my day job to do this fulltime in December, anyway, and that's betting a lot on this little company. The future isn't certain, victory isn't assured, but we've got a darn good shot at victory. To me, victory is getting to make the games I want as my job, for as long as I want to. I think there's an excellent chance of that.
