Beating SoaSE (in a sense) is a significant achievement in anyone's book; I hope you get sales like that one did
Here's hoping! We seem to be on the cusp of finally reaching a wider audience, which would be nice. I'm not greedy -- 50k or 100k units sold would be enough to sustain Arcen for a number of years, though of course more would provide even more security. Right now sales have been steady for five months, which in itself is fairly notable, but we're still in the four-digit territory, and that's just not enough to cover operating costs if Pablo and I were fulltime.
I have backup plans within backup plans, though -- there's AI War 2.0 coming out on these new platforms, there's the first expansion which should not only drive some new sales to existing players, but also should raise more interest on our existing platforms and through other reviews, and then there's our other two titles -- Feedback and an unnamed Tower Defense game -- that I aim to complete by the middle of next year.
Hopefully Steam and our other new partners will create a situation where we are financially secure enough to actually be able to make this a fulltime thing for me (out of all the staff who currently take royalties from the game, or who get paid hourly or otherwise, I'm actually the only one who has yet to take any cash for my own income, aside to pay back a few thousand in expenses I had incurred in launching the game). But if that doesn't happen, then surely with four titles that are hopefully all as solid as AI War, we'll be in the right position.
Most of the bigger indie game studios start with seed money, or otherwise go about this whole business in a completely different way. In some respects I envy that, because it certainly would make things easier. On the other hand, if my way works for Arcen, we'll have a degree of creative and business freedom that is not exceeded anywhere else.
This sure turned into a tangent! Anyway, I'm excited about the future, but a lot of stuff sure hangs in the balance right now. It's going to be an interesting couple of months!