How Does Steam Promotion Help Indie Sales?

Steam is not the ideal system because hundreds of games are being released there every week and many companies are facing really tough competition, drowning in the flood of numerous indie titles. However, if Steam loves you and your game gets a nice promotion, you’ll definitely benefit from Steam’s huge user base. Here’s a little report published by Alex Nichiporchik (tinyBuild GAMES) about the most recent promotion of SpeedRunners in Steam.

This weekend was the biggest promotion for SpeedRunners ever. We reached the top #8 best sellers on Steam, had over 300k new players join, and 200k of them made it to Level 5 in-game. It was a Free Weekend + 67% discount.

The discount drove the game into

With the influx of new players, our Steam User Reviews dropped by only 1% (was 95% positive, now 94%) and peaked at over 17k concurrent players. This is not free to play, this is a premium game that people pay money for.

Alex Nichiporchik, tinyBuild GAMES

These are incredible results for such a small team and such a small indie title. It should be mentioned, however, that SpeedRunners enjoyed relative success in terms of sales. On March 2015 we reported that the game sold over 600,000 copies while in Early Access. Alex commented on the achievement back then:

All the money earned from sales of No Time To Explain were invested in SpeedRunners about 2 years ago. The game performed incredibly well. We’ve started to earn money very early, almost a couple of days after Early Access release.
I love how the people dig the simple and competitive design of SpeedRunners. To market the game we did a lot of work with players. We’ve started to spread the word in 2011, during the release of No Time To Explain. So people knew about the title.
Right now we’re trying to build a studio in Holland. This company will help developers to port their games on consoles. Our first console product (No Time to Explain remake) will be released in June 2015. We will continue to port games from other developers. Work on the console version of Speedrunners will start in winter 2015.

Source: facebook.com