Hello!
This is post is more of a news roundup of the past few weeks since release. I've got some release stats and also some nice news regarding bundles. I would have liked to make this post either exactly 1 or 2 weeks since the release, but I've been a little busy moving flats, but that's just given me a little more time to organise thoughts and data.
If you haven't played Deep Space Exploitation yet, there's an excellent (and quite long) demo available on the store page! And please do come join the Discord Server, the more the merrier. :)
Release Stats
General
- Development Time: 14 Months
- Steam Page Live Date: 2025-04-09
- Release Date: 2025-11-06
- Release Wishlists: 4,298
End of Week 1
- Units Sold: 960
- Steam Revenue (Gross): $7,049
- Wishlists: 5,805
End of Week 2
- Units Sold: 1,156
- Steam Revenue (Gross): $8,785
- Wishlists: 6,461
So all things considered I'm quite content with this. The sales are good for the number of release wishlists, and that's an actual amount of money which someone can (frugally) sustain themselves on. Typical Year 1 sales projections are around 3 times the Week 1 sales, so we're looking at roughly $21k Gross.
Marketing
(These wishlist numbers are rough estimates as Steam's wishlist reporting is currently down so I can't get accurate date range numbers.)
Throughout the 7 months running up to release that the game had a Steam page (it had an Itch page for a few months before that) I had been marketing it with social media (Reddit and Bluesky) posts and dev logs (Itch, IndieDB, and Steam). I would say that the social media posts netted about 1,500 wishlists, and can't really say that the dev logs did much.
I participated in Next Fest June, which was maybe a little early considering the ultimate November release, but I did honestly think I was going to release soon after Next Fest. Either way Next Fest was great for discoverability and wishlists, bringing in about 1,200 and also a lot of great feedback and new members for the discord channel. This was probably the biggest single event for the game's visibility, which made it even worse that I missed a couple of other fests that would have been great (Debut and Tiny Teams) because I wasn't keeping track of the right channels or knowing that I should really have been searching for them.
Two weeks before release I started my real marketing push, emailing content creators and journalists, posting my trailers, re-posting my best social media posts, and also paying for Reddit ads. This brought in the remaining 1,600 wishlists, which mostly came from Reddit ads, averaging about $0.60 per wishlist (difficult to know exactly since there was a lot of noise from other marketing).
The final wishlist count fell short of the magic number required to get on Steam's Popular and Upcoming tab, and I'm still not sure whether it would have been worth it to delay and push more money into Reddit Ads (because every other marketing avenue seemed to have run dry). I was feeling pretty confident about the release, and really wanted to get the game out there, but also felt like I'd done everything I could in terms of marketing. I had no coverage from journalists or the like, which I found surprising at the time (since there were two small articles written about the game after Next Fest) but now understand that that's just the state of things. I've had a fair few small Youtubers/Streamers cover the game, which has been amazing and lead great feedback and conversations more than visibility.
Overall, this feels like a decent result without striking lucky with any viral posts or content creators. I think my two week marketing push before release was too short, a month would have been better to give me time to react to things and push in different directions. Based on the feedback I've had about the game (next section) I don't think there's still potential to get more coverage and visibility for it; either I wasn't trying hard enough with the marketing or I was wasting effort in the wrong places.
Feedback
Currently on Steam the game is at 100% Positive after 55 reviews (61 reviews in total, if you count those who got the game for free). In terms of feedback, this couldn't be better. The general feeling I get is that people really like the core loop of the game, some people love the story, and some people wish it had more of an open-world and endless element to it. One of my big worries while making the game was that people wouldn't get that it's supposed to be a short and sweet game, and because a lot of other games about mining in space are open-world and endless they would expect this one to be too. Thankfully, my intentions have come across clearly and people are enjoying the game for what it is. It's nice that people want the game to have more of an open-world, because to be honest, if I could go back in time (and have the experience I have now) I would probably have designed it more like that.
So yeah, feedback is great, couldn't be happier about it. :)
Itch Sale and Money Raised
I released on Steam and Itch at the same time, and because I really like Itch and it's had a rough year I decided that 100% of the revenue from the Itch release sale should go to Itch. This hasn't been a substantial amount of money, just short of $200 at the time of writing, but it's support nonetheless.
Steam Bundles
I suppose I didn't realise how big of a thing Steam Bundles are, but I had a few devs of other games approach me about making a bundle with them. I wanted to wait for a little while after release and also approach some devs myself before I properly entered DSE into any bundles, since I didn't really have much of an understanding of this side of things. DSE is now bundles with two other games, which I can announce below (one of them I already announced in the Discord), and hopefully I'll have news of another bundle in a few months, but no promises.
ΔV: Rings of Saturn!
DSE is bundled with Delta V for a 25% discount in the "Sim vs. Arcade" bundle. This has been very exciting because DSE has been likened to Delta V by players throughout development. If you like Deep Space Exploitation but crave a more hard sci-fi simulation in an open-world, then Delta V is the game for you.
Astronomics!
DSE is bundled with Astronomics for a 15% discount in the "Astronomical Exploitation" bundle. Astronomics is big on asteroid mining and exploitation by way of automation and strategy, so give it a try if puzzling out optimal systems for resource extraction is your thing.
What's Next?
Now that I've finished moving flat I have a brief period of time where I can get on with things before the holidays season starts and I get stressed and distracted. I'm planning a few updates to Deep Space Exploitation, but not really anything in the way of large content updates. Next I want to spend a little bit of time bringing one of my old games to Steam, since I think it deserves a little more love and attention, and then I'll be starting on my next project in earnest. I have a couple of ideas of what I want to make, but I still need to properly think things through.
As always, thanks so much for all your support :)