how well has GC done

[shadow]

Just wondering how well Gear City has done.
for such an amazing game i hope it has been well received by the public.

[Eric.B]

For an Early Access title we're doing fairly well. We've had much longer legs than many other EA titles. While we're not a top tier AAA game, from public top sales lists on steam you'll find that we're almost always in the upper 50% range of sales, and typically in the top 35% in player count.

Since I work on the game for free, capital expenditures were fairly low. We broken even in October.
By the end of December we were roughly 33% of the way to funding my 5 years of labor at minimum US wage. There is enough revenues per month to keep me working on the game double time and to keep my artist going at whatever pace he does until the end of the year.


So with that in mind, we haven't made millions, heck we haven't broken 6 figures yet. But it's still enough to keep me and an artist working full time. And that's a lot more than most other games can say.


(Pro-tip, I monitor statistics of things frequently. For example, between 1.8-2.6% of people who visit my steam page buy the game. From what I have observed reviews on steam are fairly linear to player count and sales... If you Multiply by 60 to 100 and you'll have a fairly good guesstimate at how many copies they have sold...)

[shadow]

That's amazing!
i must congratulate you on your success.
also I'm so glad GC has done so well.
It's a truly great game with a level of playability that i haven't seen for years.
It's one of the most in depth games around and i am completely addicted to it.
thank you for coming up with such a great idea and all credit ti you for seeing it turn to reality.
i hope it continues to be successful for you and i will certainly be buying any future game titles designed by yourself.

[Eric.B]

Thank you for the kind words, the game should only get better!

As for doing well, we're not quite there yet. Yes we are profitable, and if you look at it from a yearly bases 2014 I made full time work income. But if you strung it out over the 5 years, I'm currently making about $2/hr. So we still have quite a ways to go before I get to burger flipping money for my efforts. And a lot longer ways to go till I get to programmer money. I also pretty much gave up my entire 20s to this game and all possibilities of a social life thus leaving me socially isolated. So In that respects the real costs to me are staggering. With good legs, In 2 or 3 years, economically the game should be worth the labor to me, but I doubt I will ever get back the other costs.

But that's what I get for making a super-niche game!

That being said, it's not all about me. Just giving you perspective at the real costs of work like this. I think this is true for almost every large indie project. I know much better programmer than my self who put $80k (3 times more than I put into GC) Spent 4 years full time, 60 hours a week, on his project and never got anything to a playable state...

[Tridon]

You deserve every sale you get. I'm one of those twits that buys way too many EA titles and see way too many of them just stagnate and/or die completely, depending on how long my wife will let me spend our money like this.

Trying to be fairly objective here, but a lot of preference is probably in play. I must say that from the part of the process that the users and players can observe from the development of GearCity, this is without doubt one of the healthiest EA titles on Steam so far. Not only frequent updates, but useful updates, suggestions from users are taken to heart, and a lot more transparency than is usual with most developers/publishers. It doesn't take long to find out that this seems like and feels like a robust, skillful and honest process.

In discussions about development in general and not only games, GearCity is one of the examples I pull out the most often to demonstrate a perceived healthy development method that cares about the consumers (not taking into account if you're overworked or not. Don't know much about that, but I do hope you pace this so you don't burn out.)

In any case I hope you get all the sales you need to be able to make this game into the best it can be. I'm also somewhat egocentric, so I really want GearCity to be excellent. Plus; I want to be able to play your next games.