I would really appreciate if you could read this as I believe the last three and a half years of my life have just been rendered all-but wasted through no fault of my own, by a series of Steam issues which are yet to be resolved.
When I tried to instigate ZGA's full launch yesterday, there was a catastrophic issue with Steam which resulted in the game vanishing from Steam rather than launching. See my last announcement for details on this.
I woke up this morning to a response from Valve claiming that they'd fixed the issues. Thankfully, the issue with ZGA being erased from existence on Steam has been rectified, so existing owners can at least play it again.
This alone would have had a terrible impact on the launch (something I'm yet to get an acknowledgement from Valve on). Unfortunately there have been more issues with Steam which are currently set to render ZGA a complete commercial failure unless fixed. Even if they are fixed at this point the launch will have been severely compromised.
Here's what I know:
Valve have also supposedly launched ZGA for me overnight, which would have been inconvenient even if it had worked properly, as it would have been way off peak times and I wouldn't have been available for tech support.
It's now marked as released and the 40% launch discount has been applied. The launch visibility clearly hasn't been applied however and ZGA is not showing up correctly under new releases. I contacted Valve about this again and their response was that the launch visibility had been applied and that I couldn't see ZGA in new releases due to it being hidden to owners of the game. They suggested using private browsing to see it in new releases.
Multiple people have confirmed to me that ZGA is not showing correctly in new releases and I've tested it using private browsing and even a VPN. We have since discovered that ZGA's launch date is showing incorrectly in some places as the 3rd of November 2016 and it's place in the new releases list is next to games that launched around this time (on page nine hundred and something). I am still waiting for a response from Valve having provided this new information. I encourage you all to look on the Store page and observe the incorrect launch date. It shows as the 9th of August on other parts of Steam so this is clearly a problem. If in doubt, I do know that an Early Access game's launch date should be set to the day it leaves Early Access.
Given these problems, I do not think it should be surprising that the launch visibility is not working, although since this is not as clear to demonstrate I am concerned that even if Valve fix the other problems they won't do anything about this.
With regards to the launch visibility, I have access to data and so far as I can tell the number of impressions and store visits is orders of magnitude less than at the early access launch (which was supposed to be less than the full launch!). It is also less than any typical sale event, so I think any increase in traffic is attributable to the launch discount, which has at least worked.
I'm not sure if many people will appreciative the significance of ZGA not getting it's launch visibility. Every game that launches on Steam is supposed to be given a chance to show that it can sell when shown to users on the Steam store. This is the entire reason that Valve can take such a hefty chunk of a game's profits (I am not allowed to divulge the exact number), in exchange for visibility on their platform. ZGA has had a negligible increase in page views and a negligible increase in sales. As I say, any increase is more likely attributable to the launch discount and perhaps people who were waiting for the full launch (excluding those who tried to find it when it was vanished yesterday!).
If there is any doubt, I do know for a fact that a game releasing from Early Access should get launch visibility. In fact the documentation clearly states that a game doesn't even receive it's full launch visibility until it's full release, so right now ZGA should be getting more visibility in the Steam store than it did for the Early Access launch. I read the documentation over and over to be sure of this before making the decision to continue developing ZGA to this extent. I've also reinvested most of the money ZGA made in Early Access back into the game.
The consequences of all this are that ZGA has sold a negligible number of copies since the “launch” and as such the servers are all but empty and, unless something changes, I am, without a shadow of a doubt, not going to be able to go on making games for a living.
Thank you for reading this,
Jon Wood, developer of Zero G Arena
