Interesting write-up! There are a few lessons there I never suspected but now seem obvious ^^'
There's one point however you don't speak about: the game's genre. If I had to take a guess, I'd say the school simulator could be a very important factor for its success, it seems to me that's the type of game with a graphical style that people fancy a lot currently (well, since Prison Architect at least), probably more than a political simulation. Not saying that you can just ignore marketing when you do such a game, but I have the feeling that even with equivalent marketing, Academia would have done better than Political Animals anyway. Thoughts about that?
(And as always, thanks for the article, it's not the first I read from you, and they are always honest and interesting
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Hey yeah, all things being equal, its probably possible that Academia would have done better than Political Animals anyway. There are so many factors that we could adjust though that it's almost moot.
Like, if Political Animals had launched in February as the US election campaign was heating up, I suspect it would have done much better. The Political Machine 2016 essentially had that market all to itself for those months, and they've done pretty well for themselves.
For Academia, I would also argue that one of our worries is that this strategy simulation genre market is already being satisfied by games like SimAirport, Another Brick in the Mall, etc. so it's not as if it was a slam dunk idea to launch a School Sim 2 years after Prison Architect launched. In fact one of our worries was that there might be "genre fatigue".
Regardless, if one were to take "Steam front page" and pit it against "Genre that is currently popular" I suspect most devs would choose "Steam front page". I would go so far as to say it's rather spectacular how poorly we did despite getting front page status. I would love to compare notes with any dev that also got on the front page of Steam and did just as poorly or worse. Perhaps we deserve an award of some sort!