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MARDEK - Steam Stats After 1 Week

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago2,205 words

MARDEK has been ∞ available on Steam ∞ for a week now. Here's a look at how it's performed.



In its first week, the base game has sold 773 copies for a gross total of $6194.

However, there were 22 returns (2.8% of purchases), and Steam takes a cut, so the earnings are actually $5514.

It also says that the 'lifetime unique users' is 553, though I don't know what that means. Does it mean ~200 people bought multiple copies or something?

It's also on 1,565 wishlists, though I don't know if this is in addition to or including paid customers.


However, there's also the OST & Extras package, which has its own sales stats.

This has sold 414 units, for a total (after charges, returns, etc) of $1594.


This gives a total of $7108 earnings for the first week. That's £5568 in my local currency.


However, look at the graph there. This "L-shaped" curve seems to be the norm for game releases, where an initial launch-day spike is followed by a very rapid drop-off to essentially nothing.

Additionally, it has something like 55 reviews (or 57? Steam's confusing), which were 100% positive for a while, but someone mentioned that there's a negative one from someone who didn't like the immature humour, though this review didn't even show up when I just skimmed the reviews section.

Putting this into Perspective

The only other thing I've released on Steam, Sindrel Song, took the better part of a year to develop and sold 128 units for a net total of $1246 (£976). Around 110 of those came from the first week. (And obviously essentially nobody who played MARDEK checked it out, as I'd hoped some people might.)

MARDEK is also a more-than-a-decade-old Flash game which has been available for free for that duration, and still is! It was played by millions back in the Flash days, and received near unanimous praise at the time. In the years since, I've been thanked for creating it - and/or pestered to make more - by a steady trickle of strangers, suggesting that it had some serious staying power in at least a few people's minds.

I also didn't exactly advertise this port anywhere; I haven't posted on Reddit yet or anything (I still might, to talk about it to other devs if nothing else, but we'll see). Maybe I should also mention it on Kongregate, though it feels weird to essentially ask a largely non-paying audience to invest in a game series I've no intention of finishing in a way some of them might like.


I don't remember if I linked to this video or not, but it's one that I found while doing some research recently:



Seems his novel game made about as much as this did. He also mentions towards the end that he spent four years on it (I wouldn't have guessed from the brief clips). Very different backgrounds for each of the games, though, obviously.

By contrast, I mentioned this video in another post:



This person earned $75k in his release week because he'd been consistently generating buzz around his game for the year leading up to its release.


I've been getting emails from people asking for free access keys so then they can stream/review the game; this seems to be par for the course. Some ask for a couple of keys, some ask for way more. Many link to curator pages with content not even in English (Russian is a common one), or youtube channels with a bunch of unappealing-looking videos where they play popular games (not even indie ones) and which get ~1k views at best. I've been ignoring these (I sent out some keys for Sindrel Song to some who asked; look how much that helped), though I've also been checking their profiles to see what kind of reviews they do.

(It seems that few of them actually resell the keys since there's no profit in selling two keys for some obscure game, but a lot of them seem to gain pleasure from appearing high in the Total Games Owned list, as if it's a leaderboard, and this helps them achieve that without actually spending money. Some might just genuinely be people trying to help a streaming 'career' which isn't earning them enough to even pay for games.)

One of those reviews (which seems to consist of a single word, "CurseLit"?) led me to this game called ∞ Crystal Story: The Hero and the Evil Witch ∞. The description says:



It looks... amateurish, honestly, and generic, but obviously a lot of work has gone into it, and the store presentation is at least thorough. I don't remember this game in its original Flash incarnation - or maybe I kind of do, but it's so generic I could be remembering something else - and perhaps I'm not alone in this; I notice it only has 3 user reviews, despite being released over a month ago (one of which got it for free, and the other two are lukewarm). I wouldn't be surprised if the sales were as poor as Sindrel Song's.

It's so sad to see, and I wonder about the psychological effects of that on the developer.

Notably, however, there's a ∞ Crystal Story II ∞, released on Steam in 2015, which has a much more impressive 230 reviews (Very Positive overall). Hopefully that earned him a decent bit of money.

How do I feel about this?

Do you feel that I should be proud that MARDEK generated around $7000 in a week?

This is about the same amount that I was originally paid for MARDEK 3, back in the day, from what little I recall. Or something like that anyway; it could have been more, or less, but I remember it was four figures. MARDEK 2 also earned four figures, though significantly lower, probably like $2000 or $3000, I can't remember, while I suspect MARDEK 1 earned considerably less, maybe just a few hundred. There's also shared revenue from Kongregate, but that's a trickle, and I think contests awarded maybe an extra $1000 or so? I should have been keeping clear notes at the time. One of the reasons I'm writing this now.

This isn't nothing. And I am glad that it earned anything at all.

However. The national minimum monthly income in the UK is apparently £1360. That means that MARDEK on Steam earned what someone would get working a minimum wage job for about four months.

This would be great if I'd spent a month making it! But I spent a month just porting it; actually creating it took around four years.

If we generously estimated that MARDEK earned around $10k (~£8k) originally and $7k (£5500) this time, for ~£13500 total, and took four years, that means that if I'd had any kind of traditional job for that duration, I would have earned at least around 5 times as much money. Obviously having a higher-paid job would have netted me far more.

I don't know how much the unemployed get on benefits/welfare, and googling it just gives figures for how much the UK spends on that as a nation each year (annoying). It's probably more than I got from this.


This is... frightening, honestly. I'm worried about being able to keep doing this. Sure, there's the potential to earn a ton from this if all goes well, but it's hard to be confident when the actual stats are what they are and a level of comfortable success is so hypothetical.

Obviously releasing a port of an old game is very different to releasing something new. Essentially everyone who's bought MARDEK is an old fan who loved it, but I feel weird pushing it anywhere else because I feel that's the only audience, which is limited and dwindling. Especially since it's just a port, not even a remaster or anything.

I'll make much greater efforts to promote Divine Dreams since it's currently in production.

Still, one of the reasons I wanted to port MARDEK was to gauge the interest in it after all this time. The way some people speak of it, it seems like it should have earned more attention and money than it did, but perhaps these stats make clear that the audience is more limited and why a direct continuation of the series - catering essentially just to that audience - wouldn't be viable (though the notes also seem to have made this clear in the minds of people who've mentioned their thoughts about them to me).

Perhaps also it'll receive a steady trickle of sales as new people remember the series and search for it or me directly. That's not something I can really rely on though.

Apparently sales also get a bit of a bump when you run a discount, but as the discount chops off a significant amount of the cost, I wonder how much this would count for actual earnings.



Aside from all the money stuff, I've received some really wonderful comments from complete strangers over the years about their love of MARDEK, their stories of playing it for countless hours during their youth, how it helped them during dark times or even inspired their future careers. There was of course a surge of these kinds of comments alongside this port, and the reviews on the game are full of them. Some brought me to tears.

It's always so surreal reading them, even now. Thinking that some silly thing I made largely as a hobby to entertain myself as a lonely, awkward teenager could have brought people such joy. It's so strange to think that other people have discussions about this thing, with real spoken words and everything. People devote some of their thoughts to its details, become invested in its characters.

This is the bit that means the most to me, and which makes me want to keep doing this. I just want to bring joy into people's lives like MARDEK clearly did. It seems like such a waste to have the skills which could potentially bring such things into being, and to go and stack shelves or do data entry or something just to earn enough money to cover basic survival costs.



Obviously I'll need to try harder with the actual making-money-from-this side of things if I want to keep doing it.

I already revived ∞ my Patreon account ∞, and I'm immensely grateful for the 35 people who are currently supporting me on there! I need to start posting there, though; maybe I'll post some of the concept art I've been doing for the other Divine Dreams characters I've not revealed elsewhere yet. I'm still thinking about it, and I have so little time (it's all spent actually developing) that I end up putting it off for days.

I've also talked about doing a Kickstarter a few times. I need to get a bit further along with Divine Dreams first.

And recently I spoke of how I might release Divine Dreams in chunks, sort of:

- It'd consist of a trilogy of games, each of which would have its own Full Release and Steam store page.

- Each of these would be made up of six episodes.

- The first of these episodes would be a freely available demo, released alongside the Kickstarter, while the others might be released as they're ready to patrons of a certain tier.

- When all six episodes were complete, I'd compile them into the Chapter and do the full release.

- Repeat three times.


So I have plans. Whether they'll work out, I don't know.

I'm seriously concerned about the future, though. I have no financial stability at the moment at all. I'm lucky, I suppose, that my parents are quite happy to support me for now, though they're in their sixties now so they won't be able to work for much longer. They won't live forever either. And I feel awful leeching off them. I suppose we're all hoping one day this might pay off in a big way, and I'll earn enough from it to be able to pay them back and support myself for long enough to keep doing it. But I really don't know. It's tough.

I am at least getting somewhere, though. This is more money than I've earned in a long time. I suppose it's all about taking it one step at a time.

Thanks if you were one of the ones who bought MARDEK though. I don't want to seem like I'm not grateful, since I really am. I just wish the cost of living wasn't so damn high!


Oh, and I set up a (private) Discord a few days ago, but I've been neglecting it for a while because I've had other stuff to see to. I should hopefully get around to finishing some setup with that soon, and maybe in time a new community will build up, which might help.