1,350 wishlists. 33 days until Easter. 33.75% toward goal.
Last two days were not as big but still relatively big overall. Puppygames newsletter impact does seem like it will have doubled the wishlists we had, and we’ll still be doing two more newsletters before release.
Brazilian Portuguese added thanks to muriLoco!
1,465 wishlists. 31 days until Easter. 36.62% toward goal.
1,546 wishlists. 29 days until Easter. 38.65% toward goal.
At the moment, we’re focusing on polishing what’s already in game. Then we will introduce new content that has not been seen before.
I’m pretty sure the only way to achieve 4k goal for you is to release demo everywhere (steam, itch, … ) redirecting people to steam store page (e.g. on exit). Also, you can try to send demo to streamers\youtubers.
traffic before and after demo release
At the moment, we are thinking about uploading a HTML5 demo to sites like Kongregate.
Some good news… Valve is letting us send an IM to all owners of one of our other games! That’s a lot of people, but I have no idea how much of an impact that will be on sales.
1,726 wishlists. 24 days until Easter. 43.15% toward goal.
Recent stats
Hope the demo and mails will increase it a lot! 
let us know, we’re keeping our fingers crossed 
Can you send notifications directly (e.g. by posting news in Steam) or Valve will just notify players themselves?
What external websites bring you the most traffic?
The IMs are the messages sent directly to Steam users in popups when they open Steam. This is the one we’ll be sending (WIP). This will be sent to FS owners that have popup IMs enabled once the game is live. We provide the assets, Valve does the sending via a rep. AFAIK it is incredibly hard to get an IM sent to everyone on Steam if your game is not AAA. Sending an IM to your owners is also hard and you have to talk to a Steam rep to do it. I’ve never sent an IM before so don’t know how much of an impact it will have compared to other ways to reach owners but hopefully it will be worth a few sales. 
Looks like top traffic sources are reddit (#1 source), steamdb, twitter, youtube, yahoo, facebook, yandex.
We’re changing the release date to the 12th (for a few reasons). We’ll at least get to 2k wishlists probably. I’ve not done any new promotion stuff recently but we’ll have some more soon before release to try and get wishlists as high as we can.
1,870 wishlists. 8 days until release. 46.75 % toward original goal. 93.5% toward what we’re going for now.
After Steam version goes live we’ll focus on getting Android version released next with the extra features it needs.
We have a few things we’ll add over next few weeks but we’ll also be transitioning into next game to finish too.
How much copies sold on Steam do you consider as success for FSH?
Do you plan f2p for mobile or paid?
Probably like 10k copies including copies sold during sales. Optimistically it will sell 1k copies in the first week, pessimistically 500, any less and it would be considered a disappointing failure. Game is $10 with a 10% launch discount.
We expect it will take a year on Steam just to break even on cost. But who knows what could happen. The game is already super polished and fun so it might be a hit but it’s still Steam where casual audience is a severe minority. There are still casual portals we can publish on too but if it does well enough on Steam we’ve already decided we will ignore them and keep everything on Steam because Steam is still the best deal for us and concentrating ownership there is better for us long term.
Mobile version will be F2P with ads/IAP with an option to pay the same price as Steam to unlock a premium version with all of that stuff disabled. We’ll self publish it probably 2-3 weeks after Steam launch. Android first then iOS. If the game hits we’ll invest more into adding more content to it over time if not we will immediately transition into the next game to finish. And we’ll put that one up on Steam as coming soon as soon as FSH goes live.
I wish you the best of luck with your game. Thank you for sharing your Steam launch experience, it’s really useful for me to see.
Probably like 10k copies including copies sold during sales. Optimistically it will sell 1k copies in the first week, pessimistically 500, any less and it would be considered a disappointing failure. Game is $10 with a 10% launch discount.
How did you land on a 10% launch discount? I have no clue what to do for my game in this regard.
We put 10% discount because a lot of gamers do not buy games that are not on sale at all. So it removes some friction for them. 10% launch discount is best to do because until you get to like 50-75% off the conversion rates for different discounts are very almost the same.
If your game is highly anticipated for the primary Steam audience you do not need a launch discount.
Here is updated Steam IM WIP now with less text. Trying to convey value at a glance.
I like previous version more. This one is incomprehensible to me. Eggs? Backgrounds? Obscure icons? Looks not too fun. I would keep version #1 but replace eggs with cards.
I agree with @Ivan_Lytkin This version feels a bit “We got stuff in the game”, it s very hard for the user to actually know/relate to what the stuff is before playing the game.
I was happy with version 1 too but Valve told us to change it for two reasons 1. apparently people ignore IMs that have a lot of text 2. the amount of text version 1 had would have been a problem to translate to all of the languages Steam supports for them.
The IM is only being allowed to be sent to owners of our previous game with similar mechanics so it should be able to be understood by the majority of them. If we were being allowed to send to all of Steam we would probably use full art only with no extra stuff.
Here is further simplified fullart IM at Valve’s request as they didn’t like the extra stuff either.
If you get a chance to do an IM just do full art with “Now Available” text and logo only.
I’ll modify the store page to include some of the other assets I made.
That’s great! Looks really nice!
