Epiphany & Molly Post-Mortem & the Future

Recently, I’ve had a trial of faith when it comes to game development.  Let’s look at the sales statistics of my first two games, shall we?

Epiphany in Spaaace! (released Oct 20th) (Purchases/Trials)
October – 322/2418 = 13.32%
November – 96/284 = 33.8%
December – 90/263 = 34.22%
Total 2009 – 421/2965 = 14.2%

Molly the Were-Zompire (released Dec 10th)
December & Total 2009 – 355/3651 = 9.72%

Now, on the one hand, I know I should probably be pleased with these figures. I’ve made two interactive novels that are almost entirely text based on one of the most powerful gaming systems available at the moment and I’ve sold several hundreds of copies of each, which is far more than some games on the service has sold. On the other hand, you have other games that have made their creator’s over $100k so as someone who was hoping to turn independent game development into a viable part-time job and maybe even a full-time job, making around $500 for your first quarter is disheartening.

Even moreso than the money, Molly the Were-Zompire’s reception has been discouraging. Despite my thinking that it was the superior game, it’s getting worse ratings that Epiphany in Spaaace and is selling slightly less despite getting more trial downloads. Still, there’s no point in getting too depressed about the matter. Rather, I’ve been trying to figure out what I did wrong with Molly so that I can do better with the next game. After much thought, here are some things that I think may have caused its poor performance.

1 – The pictures may have thrown people off. In Molly, I put in around a dozen intentionally bad pictures as a joke. I’m afraid that some people may have found these pictures to be less funny and more bad.

2 – Less focused. In Epiphany, I received some complaints that the humor was too focused – all sci-fi cliches and not much else – so with Molly, I tried to do a wider range of humor. So in Molly, you got some 4th wall jokes, RPG cliches, various gaming references, undead stuff, and just random silliness. People knew what to expect in Epiphany (Star Trek & other sci-fi cliches) whereas with Molly, there was less certainty.

3 – It’s essentially a stand-alone expansion pack. Sure, the plot & characters are all new (like many expansion packs), but nothing else is substantially different than Epiphany. In both games, you read a story, make choices, and see what the result of those choices are and that’s it. Either game can be experienced in a single play session of an hour or two. Had the second game had substantial improvements like beautiful artwork, new gameplay elements, more content, or drastically better writing, I think it would have been received much better.

I think that last reason is the key. It’s evident from these two games that there’s an audience for straight Interactive Fiction on the XBox 360, but it’s not a horribly large one. If I drastically improved my writing skills or art skills, that audience would probably increase, but I imagine not drastically. On the other hand, if I was to expand my games so that they’re not just interactive novels but also traditional RPGs with all the character building & strategic combat that a good game on the genre entails, I think I would hit a much larger demographic. RPGers aren’t necessarily attached to great graphics – just look at the niche popularity of text-based roguelikes – so I think that a quality entirely text-based RPG could go over very well.

So that will be my next project – a text based console-style RPG. My working title is “Mulan vs. the Zombie Apocalypse.” I’ll talk about some of the gameplay specifics in my next post.