Help me understand sales....

[Castille]

I'm playing on Impossible difficulty, and things started off great. My first product was a hit, and my second product did even better. My third product, which is objectively superior, had a score of 10 during iteration, prominent marketing, regular bug fixes, and updates.

However, my second product is still selling 2,000 units per month, while my third product is only selling 200 units per month and dropping.

I compared my product to the best-selling competitor, who released their product 6 months earlier. They have 2 features I do not have (in the 2-star bracket), while I have all the other features, including one feature they do not have in the same 2-star bracket.

Could the missing features be the issue? Should I always aim to include all features, even if it risks wasted interest? Or is there something else I’m missing here?

Any advice or insights would be appreciated!

[NonToxic]

Some information is missing here. You mentioned several products, are they all released for the same OS? How many fans did you have at each release? Did these products release just before a competitor (bad news, competitor eats some sales even with an inferior product), or just afterwards? There's a lot of details that make a difference. I'll list them out here not because I don't think you get it but because the devil is probably some small thing along the way.

The basic break down is:

Your Product
-Product Quality. Is the Creativity score Outstanding? Visionary? Merely Ordinary? This is the launching point, quality determines our trajectory. A rock solid product in massive demand that is only Good, Ordinary, doesn't set off sales fireworks.
-Expected Interest sets a ceiling on our sales. You speak of missing features, but from what I understand (this is a nebulous area, I could be wrong) features serve to determine the Interest level, and then contribute to market overlap. Cramming all the features into one package would almost certainly serve to harm every other aspect of development while winning you only 1.5% more of whatever market (if Interest even does this).

Now take Your Product and put it through the filters of:
-Bugs
-Marketing and Fans
-Competition

The way I see it, Your Product starts off ready to go to the moon, and each step down from absolute perfection impacts the sales arc.

In terms of bugs, the more complicated pieces of software to develop (OS for example) need way more time in the beta oven. Launching with bugs is practically inevitable, but launching with very few bugs is better than many.

Fans make a massive difference as well. In the example you provided your second product is outselling your third product, so I think it is safe you assume you had more fans for the third release than the second. But fans can get upset with changes to an IP. In your example, was there any change between the second and third product? Is the third a sequel to the second? Does your competitor, to whom you compared your products, have more fans than you?

Finally, competition. In the Market portion along the bottom bar of the in-game UI is Event Calendar, which tells your who is releasing what and when. It is possibly the single most important thing to launch when your product has time to breathe. If BigCorp is launching in January and LittleSoft is launching in March, you want your competing product to drop in April. As I said at the outset, a worse product launching the day after yours will still impact your sales, but you can do the same thing to your competition by carefully managing your release schedule.

Your comparison in the beginning is a bit flawed. If those products were released for the same OS, that OS would have been in a different stage of its own popularity when you released the first, second, third product. The market looked differently when your third product arrived than the first. If they were released for different platforms, that alone could explain the sales fluctuations. Heck, you didn't mention the timeframe, so it is within the realm of possibility that your products were competing directly with themselves.

tl;dr There's a lot of moving parts, be sure to check every angle. If your product is A+, check the market. If the market is clear, check your marketing.