Winter Sale recap and biz plans
Entry posted by Josh ·
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With the Winter Sale wrapping up, I now have enough information to decide how to go forward with the business of Leadwerks.
Sales on a day-to-day basis were remarkably consistent, and comparable to last year's data, within 5-10% either way. This is good because it indicates that Leadwerks will continue to sell well at a predictable level, which makes planning a lot easier.
We did not get featured this year on the front page of Steam. Very few products did. The whole sale basically just showed the same games over and over, Mortal Kombat X, The Phantom Pain, and Talos Principle, ad nauseam. This sucks, but at least I know not to count on this in the future, and just consider it a nice bonus when it does happen. My income for the year was still more than I would make with a regular job, so I'm happy.
I've recovered about half of the cost I spent to license the models in the nature model pack DLC, within a time period of two weeks. So it looks like it will break even in the near future and start turning a small profit after that. (The point of this pack was mostly just to get you guys the models you need for the new vegetation system.)
The Game Launcher is still in Early Access mode, with about 3700 users. Less than 1% of polled users are using it with Linux, so it doesn't seem like the ability to deploy to Steam Machines is a big selling point at this time.
For 2016, I expect sales to stay at the same level they've been for the last two years. This is good because it means the business of Leadwerks has stabilized and is predictable. We survived new competitors, a price war, and lots of new technologies, and Leadwerks is going strong while other products have failed to gain traction.
I think Game Launcher is nearly ready to come out of Early Access mode, with just a few improvements to be made to the Windows build. The SteamOS version needs some pretty significant UI work, so I think this will be deferred to a later time. I plan to release Leadwerks Game Launcher at the conclusion of the next game tournament.
I believe that perpetual growth is always the goal, so I have the following developments in mind for 2016:
- Release Game Launcher on Steam proper: This will give you a wider audience of players and bring more people to Leadwerks.
- Develop paid Workshop items: I believe this has huge potential for the community, both by giving us access to a wider range of content and by providing a way for you to sell items through Steam.
- More Features: I consider this a maintenance task, because it's just something you do to keep the software evolving. Added features don't translate into an increase in sales, it just maintains the same level and keep things fun and interesting. As long as you understand that a new feature won't have a fundamental transformative effect on your business, then this is a great thing to do. If you are thinking there is one magic feature that will suddenly make you successful, you will be very disappointed. I think this is a good general lesson that applies to all technology products.
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