You can really get enough data in 6-7 hours from launch if the game is successful or not? West Coast USA folks are just getting home from work and haven't even had a chance to purchase it yet. It was evening to middle of the night for much of the globe when it released. Shouldn't it take at least a couple days of gathering sales to come to this sort of conclusion?
You would think that, from a common-sense perspective, yes. In practice the overall magnitude of a weeklong sale can be predicted within a certain range based on the first 6 hours or so. At least for our stuff, on steam, on a sale that starts in the vicinity of 1pm EST.
Doesn't mean something won't break the curve, but outside a certain variance we've never seen it happen.
Bionic's numbers really aren't _that_ bad. It's certainly not another Tidalis or Shattered Haven (which barely moved the needle, relative to other launches) or even another Valley2 (which moved some money but really came in pretty low). But bionic's numbers are a lot lower than we were hoping given the nearly unanimous "this is a really good game" feedback we've been getting since even before the last polish phase.
That said, AIW wasn't a runaway success out of the gate either. It was just a really good game that took time to really mature in terms of sales. That _might_ be what we're seeing here, again. Though that was a different era of the market, so I dunno.
Tough if your main distributor doesn't announce it, yeah.
FWIW they did put Bionic in the RSS feed and in the New Releases list, so it's not zero promotion. It's just the bare minimum. I understand that they aren't in a position to be transparent about their decision making process on the promotional spots, but the lack of even knowing "what can we do to warrant that promotional spot?" is hurting us.
