Steam AI War Daily Deal: Everything 85% Off!

[zebramatt]

Although I did nothing, you're welcome.

[Spikey00]

Holy smokes, that's quite a lot of copies sold in a single day; however, I wish there was some effective way of pumping more life into the coop scene with all those new players. 

[Echo35]

This was an incredibly banner event for us.  It earned into the six figures in 24 hours alone, and the total was more than the first 5 months of this year (which were good months) combined, as well as more than the entirety of 2009 for us.  As of today, our 2011 revenue now outstrips out entire 2010 revenue by something like 4%, and it's only early July.

This is really something of a relief, because it buys us a bit of working room in terms of AVWW if it should turn out we need it.  Basically, we earned six months of operating capital in a single day -- and given how bleak the July-September period often is in this industry, that's really nice because this windfall should more than cover that shortfall this year.

Sweet jesus. That's the power of a Steam Sale for you. Also, the things people will do for those tickets...

[Otagan]

Congratulations, gentlemen.  You definitely deserve it for being so bold with your pricing.  I must confess that I was more than a little surprised at the huge dip, but there was a certain logic to it that shows in the results.

[Cyborg]

Question for the developers:

I'm assuming you had a successful sale given previous comments. Does that encourage you to go forth with more content for AI war in the form of an expansion this year? I'm hoping for an infusion of small features that are popular. You have a lot of activity right now with people wanting additions, willing to pay for additions, wondering if you are going to do that this year.

I recognize it was a tumultuous time with all the balance changes and changes in general during the spire campaign development, but I'm not talking about anything that major. More along the lines of children of neinzul size.

I know that traditionally expansions come with some mega feature, but right now I see a lot of smaller stuff that have plenty of votes on the tracker.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Congrats guys, glad to hear about the success!! 

King

[x4000]

Thanks all. The keyword here is "daily deal" more than just general "steam sale," though. Steam sales are always awesome, but this is the fourth steam sale from Arcen this year. And this one daily deal out-did all three of the other steam sales combined by like 50%.

Cyborg, in terms of expansions for AI War this year, it's hard to say. There will certainly be more free DLC and more official patches, but I think a lot of what you are referring to we tend to do for free, not for paid expansions. It's possible we might do another micro expansion in the November-December timeframe, but right now it's really too early to say for sure.

Despite how well AI War did this week, I still very much believe that for the long-term health of the company we can't have all our eggs in one basket. Also: AI War still doesn't yet even support us having Keith on full-time with us, so right now he is half-time at another programming gig. I really want that to change, and that won't happen with AI War alone it is clear. After the financial near-catastrophe of last year, I'm even more conservative with expenses.

All that said, I think that for a big influx of new players, he last thing they need is a smattering of new little features. That sort of thing is more for the really experienced players (which many of these new players will obviously be, with time). All else being equal, I'd rather do another largest-to-date expansion early next year, rather than a micro expansion late this year and a big expansion later next year.

If things work out like we hope with AVWW, then next year is going to be the year of the expansions (and the free DLC). For both titles. I'd love to be able to build something radically new on top of both base games, while also giving yet more love to the littler features, etc. AVWW could bring even more focus on the company and thus on AI War, and I think there's a lot about AVWW that many AI War fans will also like. But we'll see! Right now we just have to get AVWW to beta and then 1.0 on time and in superb shape, and then a lot of the other decisions become markedly more clear.

[Quixotic143]

Great to hear the good news!

I'm new here so I don't know if this has already been covered, but I think it would bring a boost to the game's popularity if there are more people in the AI War: Fleet Command community group on Steam.  As of right now, there are just under 2000 people in that group, and I'm guessing, especially with yesterday's sales, that's only a small fraction of Steam accounts that own the game.  This might just be me, but when I was evaluating multi-player games to get -- not knowing how many people actually play AI War -- I used things like community group size and number of Steam user recommendations to gauge whether I'd have trouble getting multi-player games together.  It was only Chris' 3/4 player co-op tour on Youtube that convinced me to get the game regardless (excellent narration, haha).

This is also important because the more people in the group, the more people there will likely be in the group chat.  Since the game is not like your typical RTS with 20-40 minute matches, I'm not sure if there's a better way to do matchmaking than 1) this forum, and 2) the AI War Steam community group chat.  Unfortunately, there's only a handful of people in the group chat at any one time, and most are either AFK or in some other game.  If Steam users are alerted to the group as a way to perform matchmaking, I don't see why there couldn't be at least 100 people in the group chat at any one time, if not more.

EDIT: Haha, I look pretty stupid with that new sticky posted up earlier today.  But um, if possible, perhaps in-game there could be a big neon sign telling Steam users to join the Steam community group and group chat *in addition* to checking the forum here and the irc channel.  If they use Steam all the time, it's more convenient for them to see there's a lot of potential players in the group chat, than for them to install and keep an irc client running in addition to Steam, or even load up a browser and have to keep refreshing to see responses if they want to play immediately.

[Bleek]

Thanks so much for the support!  To everyone.

This was an incredibly banner event for us.  It earned into the six figures in 24 hours alone, and the total was more than the first 5 months of this year (which were good months) combined, as well as more than the entirety of 2009 for us.  As of today, our 2011 revenue now outstrips out entire 2010 revenue by something like 4%, and it's only early July.

This is really something of a relief, because it buys us a bit of working room in terms of AVWW if it should turn out we need it.  Basically, we earned six months of operating capital in a single day -- and given how bleak the July-September period often is in this industry, that's really nice because this windfall should more than cover that shortfall this year.

It's not like we won the lottery, but it puts us on ever-more-secure footing which is exactly what we like to see. Thanks to everyone who helped to make that possible!

Excellent news, well deserved. 

[Echo35]

I am actually curious, if you're allowed to say, as to how many copies you sold yesterday. If you sold more of the game in one day than 6 months, and it was 85% off... That's a LOT of copies.

[x4000]

I don't think I'm supposed to say exactly sales numbers, there's an NDA about that sort of thing.  But it was more new players than all of the AI War players combined up through maybe May of last year.  And we can now boast a playerbase of somewhere in the 60k-80k player range (factoring for people who buy multiple copies, and ignoring the sales of expansions since that's to repeat customers, and ignoring regional retail).

All told for AI War products, we've now moved something very near to 200k units across all vendors since the game originally came out. So that's a happy number.

[Zair]

I'm glad to be three of them. (My own copy plus two gifts for friends)

[x4000]

Thanks very much! 

[BobTheJanitor]

I see Tidalis is a daily achievement ticket item today. I'm curious to see how many sales that will drive when it's not actually an advertised daily deal. (although it is pretty well discounted to impulse buy territory already)

[x4000]

I see Tidalis is a daily achievement ticket item today. I'm curious to see how many sales that will drive when it's not actually an advertised daily deal. (although it is pretty well discounted to impulse buy territory already)

Yeah... will get back to you on that.