After their game on Steam failed, a developer now shares his experiences with Valve. He explains that he was particularly unlucky, as a bug that affected his sales is said to have only impacted 100 games in the last few years.
What was the situation? The developers of the 2D sandbox Planet Centauri report in a Game Dev forum on Reddit about the unfortunate release of their game. They started development over 10 years ago, with an Early Access beginning in 2016.
In the following 8 years, they sold over 100,000 units and almost 140,000 added the game to their wishlist. The developers had high hopes for their full release: With so many placements, they believed the game would certainly have good visibility and would appear in the “New and Trending” category.
This list of popular new releases is particularly important for smaller studios that do not have a large marketing budget.
The release in December 2024, however, was disheartening: In the first 5 days, they only sold 581 units, and Planet Centauri likely didn’t even make it to page 2 of the popular new releases. A painful flop after so many years of development, during which the devs created their own engine and had to pay employees.
For almost a year, they didn’t understand how the release could go so wrong – until they now received an email from Valve.
Steam is usually known for particularly good customer support.
What was the problem? As Valve apparently communicated to the developers in an email, Planet Centauri belonged to the less than 100 games that have been affected by an extremely rare bug in the last 10 years.
Accordingly, no email notification was sent to players who had the game on their wishlist at the launch. Many potential buyers might not have even realized that the title had been released.
To put this into perspective: Between 2015 and 2024, a total of about 85,000 games were released on Steam (Source: Statista). To be among the 100 affected games is particularly unfortunate. The developers even refer to it as a “lottery win”.
As compensation, Valve is said to have offered the developers a “Daily Deal.” Daily Deals are a curated promotional event where eligible games are displayed on the Steam homepage with a discount.
In this way, they hope to compensate for the lost visibility at launch. However, the developers cannot really be pleased about that. For them, the damage is likely already done. The post states that they are now working on another project, as they could no longer afford to continue patching the game.
It seems that the developers accepted Valve’s offer, as Planet Centauri is now available for purchase at a 25% discount on Steam.
“A nightmare at every level”
How is this being discussed? In the comments, there is sympathy for the developers, but also criticism. Other devs point to the rather mediocre ratings of Planet Centauri and ask what the studio had actually been working on for 10 years.
The Early Access was also not designed to last for so many years. One user writes on Reddit: He discovered the game in 2016 in a gaming forum and added it to his wishlist, but by the time of the full release, he had lost interest in the entire genre.
What happened to the developers is unfortunate, but they cannot solely blame Steam for the failure, according to the consensus.
In the comments, developers admit: It was a mistake not to simply create a small, neat game and then add new features. Instead, developing their own engine brought so many bugs to the game that 80% of the time went into that instead of giving the game the needed polish.
“If we could go back in time, the solution would be simple: We would never have created Planet Centauri. The 2D sandbox is one of the most complex 2D games in terms of code. It’s a nightmare at every level, and we could have finished 4 games in the time it took us to release this one,” was the developers’ harsh judgment on Reddit.
Other developers have also had unique experiences communicating with Valve. Due to a Steam policy, one dev has received an absurd email for years: Valve has been sending one developer a reminder for 7 years that he is not earning money on Steam
