Icarus Week 140 Update | Project Clinic #2

Welcome to our 140th weekly update.

This week we are introducing a battery-powered ice box backpack, which offers a new way to keep your food from spoiling while on the go.

We also have a heap of updates including new workshop items, new battery-powered equipment, numerous small tweaks and fixes, and even a new main menu screen.

These are the result of a “project clinic” our team conducted while playing the upcoming free expansion to the Prometheus map. We do these deep dives every now and then, and you can read what a project clinic involves in this post from earlier this year.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1149460/view/4201372129447834069

CEO's Forward

We left some of the Prometheus map empty so we could develop it further, which we were planning to release as a free expansion for that map this week. However, as we played through it we ended up doing an intensive "Project Clinic" and are taking an extra week to add even more content - both to the base game and this map. A key aspect of our studio development is for our senior leadership to do full playthrough runs with no cheats, experiencing our games just as our customers do. This is incredibly time intensive, but is extremely important for our aim of making better games, and it has been instrumental in driving ICARUS forward. We've talked in the past about doing “Project Clinics”, where we use these intensive playthroughs to highlight issues, missing content, or Quality of Life changes. We then rapidly iterate to solve as many as we can. So we used our Prometheus playthrough week for this purpose and want to get these additions out before we release our expansion to Prometheus. Once these two updates are out, our focus will move onto the next installments in ICARUS as well as our next free major updates. If you have enjoyed what we do, please consider leaving a review and picking up some of our DLC. Our studio spends all the money we make on developing the game and does no dividends, so all our income goes into making our games. Dean “Rocket” Hall, CEO

This Week: Ice Box Backpack

This week’s featured new item is the Ice Box backpack, crafted at the Fabricator. This backpack adds six new inventory slots - like most backpacks - but it also chills everything carried in your inventory, drastically extending their spoil time. Our design intent with this backpack is to provide a specialized solution for long expeditions across the map when adequate freezer storage isn’t available.

This backpack does require stored electricity to operate, meaning you must charge it between uses. This can be done at the Charging Station introduced in week 127.

This Week: Project Clinic Highlights

Our Project Clinic has resulted in a massive array of adjustments, enhancements, additions, and refinements - all designed towards the kind of gameplay that we want to emphasize more. This includes survival and general infrastructure setup for more longer-term missions, that are part of the expansion to the Prometheus area.

New Main Menu Flow

When opening Icarus this week you will no longer see your character on the main screen. Instead, you will see our redesigned main menu. We felt the old design did not clearly convey the different game modes available to you and added an unnecessary extra step in the process to getting into a session. This new update aims to simplify this process and get you into game faster.

Hydrazine - A New Workshop-Only Resource

Hydrazine is a new gaseous resource collected from space and compressed into canisters for you to purchase from the orbital workshop. These are a one-time use item that cannot be refilled.

Two new items have been added to the workshop that are powered by Hydrazine:

• The MXC Cooker - provides all the same recipes as a pot belly stove but does not require shelter
• The MXC Heater - provides substantial heat for a small device, making it perfect for night or arctic crossings

Expect more items to be added in the future that use this new fuel.

Portable Biofuel Generators

To help with power needs on the go, we have added portable biofuel generators. These provide 2000W of power and are very light to carry. They are also considerably cheaper than the other larger biofuel generators and are ideal for powering electric deep mining drills.

Battery Powered Equipment

This week, we've introduced some new equipment that can be charged at the charging station, enriching the tech tree and offering alternatives powered by batteries instead of biofuel or electricity. All of these items are craftable on the fabricator at T4 and sit next to the Charging Station on the Tech Tree.

• Battery Powered Lantern that provides an alternative to the flashlight with a different illumination
• Battery Powered Spot Lights that can light up large areas
• Battery Powered Cave Lights that are ideal for what their name suggests

Item Mesh Updates

• Some of our meshes for existing items were substandard and in need of a refresh:
• The Ghillie Suit has had a complete overall with a new up-to-date look
• The Hunter Armor helmet has been refreshed
• The Biofuel Generator has received a new mesh that better fits its size
• The Charging Station has been updated to reflect the new equipment that can be charged

Workshop Balance / Price Adjustments

• Some minor price adjustments were made to ensure consistency among items of similar quality. Additionally, we’ve introduced minor balance adjustments to more accurately reflect the current status of items in the game and, in certain instances, their readability.
• Reduced the Workshop Repair Kit price to be the same price as repairing in orbit
• Adjusted the Larkwell Bolt Price and reduced replication cost from 50 -> 10, bringing it in line with workshop arrows of the same tier
• Adjusted the Larkwell Sickle Price as it was far costlier than the actual value to a player
• Reduced the Workshop Biofuel Canister replication cost as it no longer felt appropriate with the introduction of Hydrazine
• Updated the Workshop pickaxes so they have only a single stat for mining yield, which helps avoid confusion when comparing them
• Made slight tweaks to Workshop Hammers stats
• Reorganized the workshop bow tab to have a clear progression of arrow types, and reduced the Inaris arrow unlock cost
• Buffed the Larkwell Knife attack speed to make its high cost appropriate for the benefit it provides

New Stove Proxy Meshes

The Potbelly Stove, Biofuel Stove, and Electric Stove, along with the new MXC Cooker, have been updated with proxy meshes and effects. This means that when you are cooking something, pots and pans with ingredients will appear based on what is currently being crafted. This was done to better reflect what is going on with the devices in the game world. We want to do more of this in the future.

Lighting Updates

We have spent time adjusting the lighting on many of our light sources. Deployables with a flame, such as the standing torch, candles, and campfire, have been adjusted so they feel more atmospheric when playing. Due to some of the changes made, these items are also a little more performant.

Next Week: New Area and Missions for New Frontiers Expansion

Sale on New Frontiers now, for a limited time

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1648532/Icarus_New_Frontiers_Expansion/

As we wrap up our internal play sessions of Null Sector, we can now begin finalizing the free update.

This expansion to the Prometheus map - available with the New Frontiers DLC - includes five new Operations, a new exploration mechanic, new mutated creatures, and one new giant creature.

This region is not for the faint of heart. All the adjustments and differences are geared towards this being a hardcore survival challenge, so make sure you enter it prepared.

Revenue and our DLC Strategy

We have tried to setup our DLC in the most permissive way possible. We give away all the key features for free, rather than bundling them in the DLC. We also made it so only the host needs the expansions, and removed DRM so that it is easy to bypass the DLC restrictions when hosting local servers.

We generally take home about 50% of the retail price, after deductions for Steam, cost-of-sale, and Epic. After these, our typical outpost DLC has around USD 50k net revenue, on a budget of roughly 5-10k per outpost. Making them is very profitable, which surprised us a lot. However from what we can tell, most people buying outposts are doing so via the complete the set - mostly as a way to help us fund future development (thank you!). As these do well, we are looking at doing more of these in the future.

Our major expansion (New Frontiers) was a big portion of income, gaining about USD 1.5M net the above deductions. It probably cost us roughly USD 1M to make, although it is complex to budget for as we pulled out many of the things we planned to include to give away with the free update that went with it. Overall, New Frontiers seems to be a major factor in driving general sales of the game and other content and has been pretty much essential to the survival of the game and maybe even the studio in the current market.

The content packs give us about USD 75k - 100k after deductions, on a budget of roughly that. So they tend to break even, but seem to have quite a long tail. In the long run they add just a little bit on top which we can use to continue with further development.

For the game itself, the last year has seen strong sales - much stronger than the preceding year but below the original launch. This is quite unusual for a video game, when you generally have the vast majority of your revenue at launch and then maybe a small amount continuing on. This is probably due to several factors, the most notable being us improving the game. The community feedback iteration has been essential in us bringing the game back from its mixed launch. People often say “why don’t studios do a No Man’s Sky and improve their game?”, but the reality is this is very expensive and many studios that wish so, simply can’t afford to try. And even where they do, they don’t have the exposure for anyone to notice. We have been incredibly fortunate to be able to continue to develop the game, but it is expensive. We have only been able to do such regular updates through very hard work, heavy community engagement, and a top-level commitment for a better game rather than a profitable one.

This information is provided because game studios tend to be very opaque when it comes to financials, and many gamers end up thinking that DLCs end up being “cash grabs”, when in fact most DLCs don’t tend to make a lot of money as attachment rates are quite low. Our target, and we suspect most studios are the same, is that a DLC will break even over the course of a year.

Please consider leaving a review

We have worked hard to bring our product forward, focusing on changing core aspects of the game based on your feedback, new content, and performance improvements. This has been done every single week since the game launched, with not a single week missed even through natural disasters and holidays. While the game isn’t perfect, we have have worked hard with the community to try and make the game better every week.

Early on we also rolled back the online backend, ensuring the game would have a future even if our studio went under. This was an unpopular decision at the time, but one we knew was necessary to secure the games future. We think that with recent sentiment against Games-as-a-service, we feel vindicated that it was the right call.

Given this, please do consider leaving a review for our products. And if you want to support the studio, please do consider buying the DLC. All the money we make is spent on making our games, we don’t provide any dividends and put all the money back into our staff and development.

Your support makes these updates possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/40692/Icarus_Pets_Bundle/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35727/Icarus_Complete_the_Set/

Changelog v2.2.15.125691

New Content

Fixed

Future Content