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[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

that is true, but, i wasn't exactly talking about postmortems, but about sales data revelations only. e.g. there used to be (maybe still is?) a blog dedicated to indies revealing their sales numbers, and that type of thing feels somewhat outdated now.

but re postmortems, one caveat is, often, developers try to guess about their own marketing, why it succeeded or failed, and often their guesses are wrong -- most postmortems i read often blame or credit this that or the other, but who knows if they are right or not if it's mostly their own speculation? whereas if you look at just the raw data yourself, you can make your own conclusions. which would also be just speculations, but at least they'd be your own speculations, based on your own experience, which might be more reliable than the speculations of other indies (especially if those other indies are newer, never studied marketing, etc.)

for instance, i remember someone from the minecraft team (i forget who) saying that they did zero marketing, and that minecraft's success was all viral and word of mouth without any marketing. to me that seems like a weird claim, because they did a variety of things that could be considered marketing -- having temporary sales, making a trailer, making screenshots, having a website itself, those are all kinds of marketing.

[io3 creations]

I agree regarding the speculation aspect of the results.  For that reason, I'm more interested in learning about new ideas that people used and then use/try those if I think that those might be relevant.

[VampireSquid]

Thanks for posting Kyzrati.  It is very generous of you to provide these details.

On the steamspy conversation, there absolutely is still value in developers releasing their numbers.  Steamspy is only so accurate and it doesn't take into account sales.  Given that most games will have been 75% off at one point  there is a large margin of error when you try to estimate revenue.  Were 90% of products sold at 75% off, or was it more like 25%, you get a very different number depending on your assumptions.  In some cases it is the difference between a game looking like a hobby project vs a living.

[Kyzrati]

You're welcome! One of the useful aspects of Cogmind's sales history is that for two years now the daily rate has been fairly constant when nothing's going on, and any time something happens I either caused it myself or at least know where it came from (and it's generally only one thing at a time), making it easy to assess how much impact each event has. Like being able to see that simply posting to Greenlight was worth about $750 (and didn't itself incur many additional costs since doing so was easy), although unfortunately that info won't be so useful to anyone else these days--glad I did that before it disappeared

[io3 creations]

You're welcome! One of the useful aspects of Cogmind's sales history is that for two years now the daily rate has been fairly constant when nothing's going on, and any time something happens I either caused it myself or at least know where it came from (and it's generally only one thing at a time), making it easy to assess how much impact each event has. Like being able to see that simply posting to Greenlight was worth about $750 (and didn't itself incur many additional costs since doing so was easy), although unfortunately that info won't be so useful to anyone else these days--glad I did that before it disappeared

Yeah, Greenlight was a decent source of exposure.  But on the other hand, your game was already at a stage where you could sell it but I don't think that would be the case for most games.  Perhaps  for those games, the start of Early Access could be a comparable event in terms of an easily recognizable income spike.

[Kyzrati]

Only $750? I would imagine (hope...) the start of EA would be more valuable to them* than that! (But yes, recognizable, in any case.)

Certainly in my case it was a more specific set of circumstances, in that it's a game already for sale. More games do happen to fall into that category today, though, with the advent of itch.io and a lot of devs putting early builds of their game over there even before going to Steam, for example.

^{(*"Them" referring to others who've spent years on their game, as opposed to something smaller...)}