absolute drop-off in sales - bug?

[VayneVerso]

This feels like a bug to me. I had a game on the market that was doing gangbusters. Sales were pretty regular, though obviously, after many months it was sort of in maintenance mode. All of a sudden, though, units moved went from like 20k a month to (effectively) 0. Can anybody speculate upon why that might be?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2448779280

[Personal Responsibility]

It's possible that a rival has released a similar product that was better than yours. You should check out the releases and sort them by date.

[VayneVerso]

Originally posted by angk500:

It's possible that a rival has released a similar product that was better than yours. You should check out the releases and sort them by date.

You're right! A competitor released an RPG that same month that my sales dropped to 0. Seems a little extreme, still. Does discounting your game benefit you at all if you see a rival about to drop something in the same category?

[Personal Responsibility]

Originally posted by TheWatcherUatu:

Originally posted by angk500:

It's possible that a rival has released a similar product that was better than yours. You should check out the releases and sort them by date.

You're right! A competitor released an RPG that same month that my sales dropped to 0. Seems a little extreme, still. Does discounting your game benefit you at all if you see a rival about to drop something in the same category?

How do you mean discontinuing? Support-wise or as in sequel?
Support wise it only makes sense when you reach a very low customer count. Otherwise it will hurt your business rep.
Sequel wise I have no idea. That would be an interesting question to the dev. But I think sequels do have a good impact on feature work-speed (using same features = faster production) and possibly you might attract followers faster. Though the latter one I would have to ask the dev if there are any other benefits than development related.

[VayneVerso]

Originally posted by angk500:

Originally posted by TheWatcherUatu:

You're right! A competitor released an RPG that same month that my sales dropped to 0. Seems a little extreme, still. Does discounting your game benefit you at all if you see a rival about to drop something in the same category?

How do you mean discontinuing? Support-wise or as in sequel?
Support wise it only makes sense when you reach a very low customer count. Otherwise it will hurt your business rep.
Sequel wise I have no idea. That would be an interesting question to the dev. But I think sequels do have a good impact on feature work-speed (using same features = faster production) and possibly you might attract followers faster. Though the latter one I would have to ask the dev if there are any other benefits than development related.

No, sorry. Discounting. I meant lowering the price. Which is something I tried since asking this question, but I didn't see it having any effect on units sold at all.

I tried it out on a title that had been out for more than a year and was down to selling around 5000 units per month. I cut the price in half and all it did was lower my profit, because I continued selling about 5000 units per month.

[Personal Responsibility]

I think that has no impact at all. The game likely just checks if your price has a valid price in comparison to how feature rich your product is and if it's not outdated.

[Personal Responsibility]

lol, stupid me just realized that in my first answer I totally missread the word :-)

[VayneVerso]

ha! No worries. These things happen to the best of us.

Anyway, that's the only time I saw sales drop straight to zero like that except for one time when the OS to which I was selling ran out of users. That was also kind of weird.

Here's another funny one. Sales on this one were dragging along for months, and then got a sudden pop for no reason.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2450029201

[Personal Responsibility]

I had the same happen to me, since my publisher decided to start a big marketing campaign again^^

[VayneVerso]

Yeah, my publisher must be killing it on the marketing or something, because I'm back up to right around peak sales again on that title after a few more months. I guess it became some sort of perennial hit. If intentional, that's kind of neat.

[VayneVerso]

This happened again in my new game; from around 10k units to 4 units over the course of a single month, and within still six months of release. I think it's not intended to be this extreme, so I'm going to report it in-game as a bug.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2456000562

[BigSilverHotdog]

The bottom line is that the player needs more information available. When you don't know how something works you can't discern a bug from a feature, and I've never met a single person who actually knows the inner mechanics. Even that one latin guy who has made like 20 guides for this game doesn't actually know almost anything about the inner workings. Just a lot of "I do this because it works" and "I don't do this because it doesn't work" -- a bizarre situation for this type of game to be in.

I feel like I shouldn't be able to dominate the entire market on Impossible without understanding how the game works.

[VayneVerso]

Originally posted by Rainbow Droid:

The bottom line is that the player needs more information available. When you don't know how something works you can't discern a bug from a feature, and I've never met a single person who actually knows the inner mechanics.

Yeah, I mean, the only thing I'll say about it is that both times, the fall-off coincided exactly with the release of a product in the same category from another company. So I think it probably *is* intended, only not meant to be this over-the-top. I'm pretty sure that the other company's release wasn't even on the calendar when I started my design document for the game, so it's a little unfair that a player can get punished for that.

I guess not entirely unrealistic, but it's not like you can push up your release date by putting your employees in crunch mode (and buying you another month or two of sales), because even if you finish early, your publisher still won't accept it before the announced date.

[BigSilverHotdog]

I've never outsourced the publishing of anything I've ever developed so I can't say anything about that, except that I never have problems moving my release dates to avoid the very market conflicts you describe. I've done it at least... 10 times in the current game I'm in now (almost always pushing a release further back, both to avoid release sales conflicts and to let me squash more bugs during a beta period I did not allot enough months to fully complete), but still in that game I'm passing 1bn cash in 1999 with 28 products, around 700 employees, and #1 overall in both Cash and Worth despite only just starting to pick up the pace of yearly growth in the previous two years. This was all on Impossible, on my first alpha11 attempt, and it was much, much too easy. I didn't even check to see what my competitors sub-market target was in 90% of my product development (which are even now almost all manual since auto development still seems to cause way too many problems -- if I have to micromanage every stage of the automation then its not terribly useful automation).

Hard to believe we're on Alpha 11 and there still isn't any reasonable way to automate team size conforming to development requirements... or that my maint staff still have problems reaching the odd random toilet, forcing me to replace it manually every few months. I got sick of doing that like two full versions ago...

[VayneVerso]

I'm playing on Impossible, as well, though I will say that I haven't found it as ridiculously easy. Especially for the first ten years or so, I was watching my bottom line very closely and ensuring I was maximizing my profit from deals. It's 1994 now, and my net worth is about 36 million with 7 products and 37 employees.

I have a critical mass now, but I'm loath to expand, because I feel like I'm at the point where the level of management would get really annoying if I had to do more of it--especially handling employees.

I do have a marketing team (all of my teams are four worker bees and a team lead), but I only actually use it for doing marketing for other companies. I'll probably change soon.

I've always worked with a publisher to do my marketing and printing (I freaking hate monitoring how many disks I've got printed). At the Impossible difficulty level, publishers basically give you *just enough* time to publish a great game if you have an extremely skilled team on it. My B-teams haven't cut it--with my mid-level teams, it's about 50/50 that you'll get your product shipped in a state with which you'll be happy. I shoot for "Good".

You can't deliver a product to a publisher either early or late without them being annoyed with you. I haven't done it except for one time in my first game, so I don't remember what the consequences are. It's a problem from a gameplay perspective, but not a deal-breaker.

I've yet to use product management at all. What are you still having to micromanage with it?

[BigSilverHotdog]

Apparently you can resolve this instant dropoff to zero (in almost all cases) by going to Software Details and looking on the left there is a new text (new for me, I never saw it before A11 maybe I just missed it) under the software box "This product has run out of potential customers" i.e. everyone who can buy it has now bought it and the potential market has dried up.

600 hours and billions and billions of dollars and I only just now noticed it...