First a little context: Dawnmaker is a turn-based, solo strategy game mixing city building and deckbuilding. Basically, it's like a board game but digital and solo. We've been working on this title for 2.5 years, as a team of two people: myself, doing game design and programming, and Alexis, doing everything art-related. We've had some occasional help from feelancers, agencies and short-term hires, but it's mostly been just us 2. Dawnmaker is our second game, the first one being Phytomancer, a small game we made in 6 months and released on itch.io only.

We did not find a publisher for Dawnmaker — not for lack of trying — and thus had a very limited budget. The main consequence of this is that we skipped the production phase. We had a very long preproduction (about 2 years) and then went straight to postproduction in order to release what we had in a good state. Effects of this decision can be felt in some reviews of the game, complaining about the lack of content. We had big plans for new mechanics, but cut most of these in order to ship.

Marketing on Hard Mode

The second consequence of not having a publisher is that we did all the marketing ourselves. It was hard, not very good and not very efficient, but we did our best. We did not have a well-defined go-to-market strategy, and did things a bit organically. I'm comfortable with Twitter so I started using it, joining some communities like #TurnBasedThursday. I also did a bunch of reddit publications that worked quite well, though none of them went viral. Alexis is more of an instagram person so he handled that, as well as tiktok. Reddit is really the only social network that brought us actual wishlists and sales, the others had no impact that I could see.

Scratch that: YouTube is the platform that actually brought us wishlists and sales. We had a few videos, some by medium-sized youtubers, that brought big spikes in wishlists — see the graph below. And surprisingly, our launch trailer is currently being shown by YouTube on their front page, which is bringing us a nice boost in visibility! But that's pure luck: as far as I know, we have absolutely no control over the YouTube algorithm, and are all subject to its whims.

OK, let's start showing some numbers. Here's our lifetime wishlist actions graph:

The spike at launch is free visibility offered by Steam: we did nothing other than making the page public on Steam. I assume it happened because we had tags that work well on Steam: city builder and deckbuilder mainly. At that time, the page only had screenshots and a basic description. No trailer, no demo.

I feel like we got lucky with our marketing. As I told earlier, we had no real go-to-market strategy, we just tried things. I spent a lot of time in the last 3 years reading about marketing, from howtomarketagame.com, GameDiscoverCo and other such sources. Basically I've been applying lessons learned from these sources, trying to make as little mistakes as possible — though we still made a lot of them, like: not having a go-to-market strategy… The reason why I feel we got lucky is that most of the spikes shown above came from unsolicited sources. Nookrium and Orbital Potato just happened to pick up our demo because they saw it during the Deckbuilders Fest. automaton-media.com, a popular Japanese website, made an article about Dawnmaker totally out of the blue — we did not even have a Japanese translation at the time. And when we did send keys of the game to youtubers and streamers, almost none of them responded. I feel like we just made our best to exist, being in festivals and social networks, and then waited for the Universe to notice.

Considering the lack of marketability of Dawnmaker, I'm still pretty proud that we reached Popular Upcoming on the front page of Steam a day before the release. We had a tad less than 6k wishlists when we reached that Holy Grail, and 7029 wishlists when we hit the release button.

Launching into… the neighbor's garden

Pricing the game was difficult. Our initial intention was to sell it for $20. But we never did our production phase, so our content was way too lacking to justify that price point. We decided to lower the price to $15, but then talked about it with a few French publishers. All of them agreed that it should be a $10 game, not because of the game's quality, but because in today's market, that's what players are ready to pay for the content we have. Pricing the game less also meant that players would feel less resistance in buying the game, hopefully leading to more sales, compensating for the money gap. And it would lower their expectations, leading to better reviews. We actually saw that: quite a few comments talk about the lack of content, but still give a positive review thanks to the low price.

Considering all this, here's how Dawnmaker sold:

These are our numbers after 18 days of being on Steam. We're currently sitting on 8.8k wishlists, with a conversion rate of 5.8%. We are getting close to 900 units really sold (total sold minus refunds). These numbers are very much in the range of estimations based on surveys from GameDiscoverCo. We'll be selling about 1k units in the first month, just like anticipated. It's good that we did not do less than that, but it's still far from what we would need to recoup. No surprises here, neither bad nor good.

The game shipped with English, French and Japanese localizations. The Japanese translation came really late in the process, the Steam page coming just 3 days before the release. Bit of a missed opportunity here that we didn't have it before we "went big in Japan" (the automaton-media.com article), I guess? We'll never know! Anyway, here are our sales per country:

Quick side-note: we also put the game on itch.io, where we sold… 2 units of the game!

On a positive note

These numbers are not high, and are not nearly enough to make a studio of 2 financially stable. I intend to write a postmortem of Dawnmaker where I'll go deeper into all our failures. But for now, let's finish this section with more positive things. First, the reception of the game has been quite great! We have 94% positive reviews, with 53 reviews at the time of writing, giving us a "Very positive" rating on Steam, which I am very proud of. It is incredibly heartwarming to see that the game we spent 2.5 years of our lives on is loved by players. We have 50 players who played the game for more than 20 hours, and that's, seriously, so so cool:

And if we did not have a big spike at launch, our players are still playing today:

That's it for the current state of Dawnmaker! We intend to ship a content update by the end of September, adding a bit more replayability, and then we'll likely move on to other projects. Hopefully more lucrative ones!

I'm happy to answer any questions you have, so shoot them in the comments.