Hello Everyone! Today we’re going to talk about the sales and statistics of Bone’s Café 1-month post early-access release!
Before we start however, we just want to explain what Bone’s Café was to us. The project was a passion project and a test. It was never meant to make revenue, or rather we never planned on making anything more than a $100. This project was our attempt at developing a fully functional game, and then publishing the game on steam. We didn’t put in the effort towards marketing. But, upon release we saw so many more sales then expected, and have since then poured in far more attention towards marketing.
So, lets start off with an introduction to Bone’s Café:
Bone’s Café is a fast paced, 1-4 Players couch co-op, cooking game. Customize the layout of your kitchen to guarantee your success. Specialize your menu in ingredients and recipes to design your ultimate restaurant. Put your necromancy skills to the test and raise your own undead kitchen staff.
Statistics (April 8th through May 10th):
- 1335 units sold
- 46 reviews on steam (100% positive)
- 4216 total wishlists (513 purchased, 12.2% conversion)
- 147 wishlist deletions (3.5%)
- 822 direct purchases
- 247 highest daily player count
Bone’s Café was started in January 2021, worked on for a month, dropped, and picked up again in July. Since July, Sarah has been working on the game full time. In the mean time, Tim (the artist/helper) worked on the game part-time occasionally, but most of the game was created by Sarah. Our early-access release date was April 8th 2022 (10 months dev time), and prior to that we did next to no marketing. We released our first game on steam, and experienced all of the frustra… joy of releasing our game.
Here’s a graph of our visits since publishing the store page in December 2021.
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visits
As you can see from the graph we had a huge spike of activity a little over a week post release. This was due to us receiving 10 reviews on our game’s store page. Apparently, Steam doesn’t direct a whole lot of traffic to your game until you’ve received 10 reviews as a sort of filter against low-effort games. And, as you can see we received a height of 20,000 page views in a single day! This was a great boon for us in terms of sales as well with our highest day of sales being 99 copies sold.
published
wihslists
In conjunction with 10 reviews, we also had been handing out copies of our game to youtubers in hopes they would stream our game. Note, that we haven’t handed out a key to anyone who has asked for one. The keys we’ve handed out have been to people we researched. Regardless, we’d like to thank StumptGamers for streaming our game! They’ve been streaming our game on twitch, and posting videos on YouTube (1st video has 43k views). We noticed bump in direct searches and sales with every video and stream.
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sales
As you can see we’ve been receiving a fairly steady (but declining) amount of sales since the 10th review. In total, our gross revenue is $13,350 and we’re expecting to actually receive about $5,208 after steams cut + taxes (Shown below).
$13,350 (1335 copies x $10)
-10% for regional price differences and launch week 10% discount
-5% for refunds
-30% for Steams cut
=$7440
-20% taxes
=~$5,000 net revenue
We’ve also been updating our game using our discord as our main method of community feedback. We’ve been blessed to have such a wonderful community providing bugs, feedback, and fanart. I would suggest anyone release in early access to have a community of some sort as it has helped us out a lot.
Future goals:
- Finish the game. We’re releasing monthly updates until we finish our early-access list.
- Language Localizations
- Porting to Nintendo Switch
- Release a 2nd game. We’re currently prototyping “project2” 😉
Closing thoughts: Working on this game has been a very fun and challenging experience. We’ve learned so much, and I think we made a decent game. I don’t know what will happen from here, but I am confident we can continue to improve the game, finish it, and move on to the next project.
Hoot Hoot,
Acute Owl Studio Team
TL;DR
- Worked on game full time for 10 months
- We did no marketing (You should do marketing before you release a game)
- 10 reviews on steam store page are a godsend
- After a month, sold 1,300 copies at $10 a unit
Acute Owl Studio 
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