After the difficult launch of his game on Steam, a developer from Valve learned that a bug may have ruined his release. MeinMMO looked into what he is doing today.
What was that situation? Last week we reported on an indie developer who vented his frustration about the failed launch of his game on Steam. Laurent Lechat, a developer from Permadeath studio, explained that Planet Centauri fell significantly short of expectations at launch.
Months after the release, they learned through an email from Valve that users who had the game on their wishlist did not receive an email notification from Steam at launch. This error affected fewer than 100 games. From Lechat’s perspective, it ruined 10 years of hard work on his game.
With this trailer, Planet Centauri celebrated its release on Steam.
Developers are working on a new game
What are the developers working on? Despite the failure of their first game, Lechat is still working with his development partner Boris on a new game. This is said to be a roguelike that runs on the engine they developed for Planet Centauri.
Under his original Reddit post, Lechat explained that creating their own engine was one reason for the long development time of their game. The developers had good intentions: the own engine was meant to allow students from around the world to play a comprehensive game with many features on a simple laptop.
They aimed to differentiate themselves from the biggest competitors at the time, Terraria and Starbound, which required increasingly better hardware with a growing number of features. However, the own engine also led to numerous problems, causing the developers to spend 80% of their time fixing thousands of bugs.
With a new game on the same engine, this work was at least not entirely in vain, and hopefully, the major issues with the engine have now been resolved. They have also learned from the development time, as the new game is supposed to be released within a year.
As the developers revealed to Polygon, they are financially obligated to complete this project. The proceeds from this game are intended to enable further development of Planet Centauri and help bring future patches to the game.
Boris and Lechat lived together in a shared apartment for several years while working on their game to save money. Lechat even sold his car. They currently cannot afford additional updates for Planet Centauri.
How is Planet Centauri doing? To compensate for the launch error, Steam offered the developers a so-called Daily Deal: a game is featured on the homepage of the store for 24 hours in connection with a discount.
Indeed, Planet Centauri experienced a small increase in player numbers with a recent sale. According to SteamDB, they managed to attract 90 concurrent players, an improvement of 350% compared to previous months. While the originally hoped-for success did not materialize, the game received a number of positive reviews from players who had learned about the developers’ struggles.
It’s not impossible to recover from a bad launch – see No Man’s Sky – but especially for indie developers with a limited advertising budget, the time immediately after release is often crucial. Steam: Indie developer works 10 years on her game, shortly after release pushed out of trends by EA
