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after 16 released projects for free or pay what you want, we're working our way through asking money for our work for the first time; and it's 
a mess
it's hard to find resources for teams of our scale, so here's an analytics thread (be the change you wanna see in the world)
a messit's hard to find resources for teams of our scale, so here's an analytics thread (be the change you wanna see in the world)
let's start with a basic overview: we've been on itch for 3 years and a half. we got a few games playable on browsers and the overview doesn't quite allow us to differentiate between plays and views for them.
But by removing download-only projects, we have a max of 16,867 views.
But by removing download-only projects, we have a max of 16,867 views.
So by this stats we know that we are anywhere between 5,000 and 20,000 plays for our games, over the course of 3 years. as you might have noticed, we don't agressively market shit and communicate poorly. what's gonna be interesting there tho is "how much the store does for you"
because of course, our biggest question with wanting to sell our game is : fucking Steam. always fucking Steam. https://twitter.com/browniecove/status/1317373061675601923
here are our 365 weekly analytics. apart from release weeks, we're between 30 and 50 downloads + browser plays weekly. i'm not sure how to read this but it seems most our players come from our own itch, so I assume it's being pushed to players somewhere by @itchio
it's a bit of a pain to do it game by game but the dashboard gives you indication on how many 7 days impressions there was for each game. that is, how many times a player saw your game by navigating the store. Incidentally, we only got impressions for our +1,000 views games
So we see from that that itch pushed our game to 3560 players last week, which is great considering they are free games and that we play the marketing game poorly (i'm not even sure we have tags on all our games
)
The %CTR is 100% on us bc tags and thumbnails and names?
)The %CTR is 100% on us bc tags and thumbnails and names?
these our the detailed stats for everything; how not talk about Brownie Cove Cancelled! it's probably not that much for most but these were our first almost 100 bucks on Donations. let's be honest here, it's absolutely definitely because of that "One Kotaku Article".
(that's why it's always funny to us when we attend a conference where some professionnal fuckers say written games journalism doesn't change anything and that you need STREAMERS. these advices apply to publishers and big companies who know that already???? worst advice)
so say we try and sell our game for 5$, doing shitty press releases and spamming our 1000 combined followers for a month or so, if we are optimistic and extrapolate a bit on Brownie Cove Cancelled we could probably make somewhere between 100 and 500 bucks
if we only had these analytics we wouldn't mind much staying on itch only because they're close to what we value. but, we also are... on Armor Games.
so yeah, that's it. 88,168 fucking plays. it just absolutely obliterates our itch analytics. but this is for free games on a flash games portal, and when you look at the comments and ratings, you can see a lot of these are hate-plays. there's no trailers for free games.
if we compare the few meaningful stats we have, we see that even with a lot less views/plays whatever, we've almost got the same number of "favorites/collections". it's hard to know for free games, but it seems we're as efficient on itch than on Armor Games.
and that's the gist of it, really. we make fucked games, Brownie Cove Cancelled is a terrible frustrating experience that's been very well received on itch. but would that be true on Steam too?
there are great comments but we also have this kind of stuff. and like, it's fine, it's just not a game for them. but knowing our games are mostly games for "itch people", does it make sense to still go on steam??? (and use our hardly won 100 bucks lol)
is it worth going against our values by going on Steam, where players harrass devs in comments, where they take 30% and don't even allow you to link to your http://itch.io (while people whine on itch when they don't get steam keys smh)?
will targeting a broader audience by being in front of a lot of consumers scrolling "upcoming releases" everyday work better? or should we focus our efforts where we know our audience is more likely to be?
the industry is fucked and sometimes the small niche 50 plays a week indie community is very nice and very sweet; but we also need the slightly bigger fishes who made a kickstarter or a steam release or whatever to just post a screenshot of their stats, it'd be so helpful. <3
thank you to @alienmelon for openly talking itch statistics for experimental art games! https://twitter.com/alienmelon/status/1014227194871099392
