Hey everyone, thanks to all who have purchased, downloaded, or rated Fish'n Feathers so far. I hope you are enjoying the game! I wanted to write this post as a reminder that the first-month 40% launch discount is ending in less than a week, so if you haven't purchased yet, now is the time!

I also thought sharing some stats on the game's performance post-release would help other devs out there in pricing or marketing their game. Many of these patterns may not be surprising, but the transparency can help anyway. In short:  I have sold 127 copies so far and the game has been downloaded 369 times. 

Note that the $401 in gross revenue is before the Itch.io share and payment processing fees. On every $3 sale, Stripe takes $0.39 and Paypal takes $0.59. Itch also has a default cut of 10% (so another -$0.30), but this level is configurable to whatever you are comfortable with. If you are selling your game for less than $3, these fees really add up and is one reason I encourage devs to price accordingly. And as a purchaser, it really helps to try and use Stripe when possible!

There were a couple interesting things about this game's release that contribute to the downloads being twice as high as the payments:

1. I gave about two dozen copies of the game away for free to people who had previously donated to Bird and Beans
2. This game was part of two itch.io reproductive rights bundles: here and here. Although there was only one other Playdate game in these bundles (the excellent Down the Oubliette), it seems like a fair number of people who bought one of the bundles were Playdate owners and downloaded Fish'n Feathers, so I was happy to see them supporting the cause. 

As you can see from the below graphs, purchases tapered off quickly after launch (with a weird uptick at the very end of June, maybe more group 2 deliveries?), but I had a steady stream of new downloads thanks to the co-op bundles. In my mind, joining the bundles was a win-win-win for everyone and I would highly recommend it to other Playdate devs should the opportunity arise. I'm not very concerned with profits for this game, so I was happy to see people downloading and enjoying it while contributing the money to a great cause.

 Game performance over time

Another interesting note is that the vast majority of referrers were coming from itch.io itself. At launch, people were coming in from Reddit/Discord/Twitter, but as the game rose on the popularity charts and got added to the bundles, itch.io started to be the source of most traffic. Notably, the /bundle/download link stands out and is another indication people who bought the bundle were actually downloading (and hopefully playing) the game!

I am interested to see how the end of the launch discount affects sales as well. Currently, I'm only selling around 1-2 copies for day if I'm lucky, and I am hopeful this pace will continue as more people get their Playdates.  There's a chance the increase in price to $5 will impact sales, and I will write another follow-up post discussing that too when I have the data.

Thanks for reading and don't forget to submit your high scores here!