T w e n t y S i d e d

My videogame came out yesterday. And if that’s not shocking enough for you, try out this factoid: It continues to be out. You could even buy it for money if you wanted.

Last week we did a hangout where Josh streamed the game. If you missed the event, here’s the archive:

Sorry I sound so crappy. At the time, I thought I was getting over a cold. But no. It turned out I was just in the early stages, and it was about to get ten times worse.

I really am on the mend now.

As far as I can tell, the Good Robot launch was a success. There are a few very minor bugs or annoyances that will probably be patched soon. There weren’t any serious, widespread, game-killing bugs, which is what I was worried about. The public response so far has been positive.

The only downside is our release timing. We were very careful. We spent many meeting-hoursThe longest sort of hours. trying to figure out when would be the optimal time to release the game. Our goal was to release when not a lot of other titles were coming out. Usually a new game will get a spot in the fancy rotating banner at the top of the store, and we wanted that momentary glory to last as long as possible. February was too soon. GDC happened in mid-March, so there was no point in trying to get any media attention then. A couple of major tent-pole releases were scattered around the calendar, like landmines. So we picked early April as a good opening where we might be able to make an impression among the never-ending avalanche of indie games that hit the Steam store every week.

And then Valve chose that exact week to launch the Vive, and they made the entire storefront a huge VR showroom. Not only did we not get an extended time in the spotlight, we were actually denied any place at the top of the page. No splash screen. No spotlight in the sales box. Nothing below the splash screen. We were shoved way down the page.

We did manage to briefly appear under top new sellers, but in practical terms, that’s recognition for sales we’d already generated under our own power. It’s not a great way to reach out to people who’ve never heard of the game before.

This was probably the worst possible release date this quarter, and there was no way for us to know that ahead of time. There was no way to know Valve was going to give their storefront over to VR. Releasing opposite high-end hardware sounds like a safe bet. But even if we’d broken into the Valve offices and stole their secret storefront plans, it wouldn’t have done us any good. We picked this release date two months ago and we’d made trailers and web pages and marketing and press releases, all trumpeting the April 5 release date.

I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe being on top of the Steam page wouldn’t have done anything for us. But there’s no way to know for sure, and now it’s going to eat at me forever.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Good Robot is released! We even have a launch trailer to prove it!

I’m not nervous about sales. Maybe it will flop. Maybe people will dig it. I hope for the best, but I’m not worried.

No, what has me worried are glitches. We’ve done as much testing as a small outfit like ours can hope to do. The press have been playing the game for a couple of weeks now. While everything is basically okay so far, I’m still terrified that some previously unseen glitch will pop up when the game reaches the masses. Maybe the framerate will be low for people using left-handed mice, or maybe the display colors will be inverted for people using DVORAK keyboards, or whatever. There was no shortage of mystery problems during development, and I can’t shake the feeling that a few of them have been hiding, waiting until launch day to manifest.

If I designed a bad videogame and it gets bad reviews, then that’s how it goes. But if I designed a good game that gets trashed in reviews because of some obscure but game-breaking glitch, it will haunt me forever.

I’m sure we’ll have more posts in this series. Maybe I’ll do a postmortem. Maybe we’ll talk about sales. I don’t know. We’ll see what’s interesting.

Thanks to Pyrodactyl for teaming up to finish the dang thing. Thanks to Arvind, Mikk, Rutskarn, and Ross for the hard work, long meetings, and good ideas. Thanks to everyone who’s followed the project since day one. Thanks for the encouragement. Thanks for taking a chance and buying the game. Thanks for doing all the social-media sharing stuff to help the game reach more people.

Rutskarn’s Amendment:

First, I want to stress that for us to make it through the first few hours of Steam Shenanigans you should absolutely buy Good Robot now and not wait. Want to make that clear.

But a bonus for you–unexpected snag for us–is that for some reason, the launch was hinky in a few ways, among them being the game was discounted at 30% instead of the 10% we’d budgeted for. Steam Customer Support will presumably slouch into action before too long, but for now…I dunno. Know anybody ELSE who needs a copy of Good Robot?

EDIT: As of forty minutes from launch, the problem is fixed. Price is right, Robot is Good, page is here.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.