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tarithenurse · 5 years ago

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Stolen - 23

Pairing: Loki Laufeyson &/x fem!gifted!reader Content: A roller coaster of emotions and feels. A/N: So my psychiatrist recommended/ordered for me to take 2 weeks of sick leave because I’m a stressed out mess...that’s not going to stop me from writing, of course. Au contraire, without work I’ll have more time for that! Ask or reblog for tag ;)

23. Misery Machine

... Reader ...

What the ever-living FUCK? The bubble of happiness bursts, the pop loud in your mind but blown away by the cold storm raging before you in the shape of a raven-haired god with the colour of blood in his eyes. Memories of faces smiling during the feast come and go in a blur and leave you none the wiser as to what Loki’s problem is.

“Uh...yeah? It was okay,” you try carefully, “think I’m getting closer to Sif and the trio to accept me.”

“You don’t say?” Sarcasm is probably the default state for the god, you decide there and then. “Practically crawling onto their laps.”

Staring dumbfounded at him, each snarled accusation is a whiplash driving you closer to desperation as up and down cease to make any sense. Unsure whether to laugh, cry, or scream back at him, you just stand stock still. Loki, on the other hand, has taken to stalking around the room as he denounces the Asgardian ways – feasts, pretend friendships, nothing goes free – before ultimately turning to you again on an unseen wave of icy coldness radiating from the bluing skin.

“I’m surprised you didn’t have my dear brother rescue you,” he hisses, “or went with Fandral for comfort...he’d be more than willing to oblige.”

“Wait...what?”

Oh yeah, the fallen prince’s eyes are swallowed by red, leaving only a pinprick of black from the pupil. “You heard me.”

Sure did, smurf. “This’s ‘bout them? Are you...? D’you think I’m desperate enough to dick it down with Fandral or have Thor sweep me away like I’m some maiden in distress?”

Now you’re the one getting into his personal space. Though you’re far from as imposing compared to a god with ruby eyes and frosty skin, his raven hair cascading to his shoulders in ways fit for an anime character, you still manage to push him back a few steps before he digs his heels in.

“Tell me honestly, the idea doesn’t tempt you, mortal?”

“Hell yeah, it tempts me! But, y’know what? I can’t! If I go back home to hide and some day Thanos shows up...how’d you think that’d make me feel? Or if you take your dumb-ass on some quest to find the fucker only to get killed? No, that ain’t happening ‘cause I’ma stick through with this. That’s what this mortal’ll do: do things right.”

You can barely see him because tears (which you refuse to let fall) are blurring your vision. By some miracle, you manage to find the door and march down the dim hallway without bashing face first into something but by the time you turn the first corner, your cheeks are wet.

GAAARGH! He’s such an...an...UGH! Haven’t you already proven yourself? Sure, he might just see you as a mortal, as he keeps pointing out, but how many mortals does he know that would’ve been able to handle the mess he’s thrown at you? Admittedly, it might be your self-diagnosed Stockholm Syndrome speaking when you feel you deserve more respect from Loki. Not that he has to “like me” like me...just...

Wiping salt water and probably snot from your face, you look around for somewhere to be alone with your thoughts and spot a double door which could lead to a balcony or terrace only to find it blocked by a blond figure.

“Lady [Y/N]?” You’ve only spoken with Thor once, but no one else has a voice like that, a voice you don’t want to hear right now. “Please, tell me what troubles you.”

Why bother? It’s so easy to follow along as he cups your elbow with one of the huge hands and escorts you onto what does indeed turn out to be a balcony.

Any other person would gasp at the view of the golden-roofed city below, stretching towards the ocean and the infinity of space just beyond. You, a sarcastic thought jeers in your mind, you’re busy sniffling and holding back tears because of some silly spat – and there’s no way you can tell that truth to the man beside you.

“I know...I’m a stranger to you and you have no reason to trust me with your worries,” Thor begins softly, “yet I do feel responsible for your fate. Your chance of happiness. What my brother di-”

“Enough!” The exclamation startles him, blue eyes reconsidering the woman before him. Oops. “I’m...I’m sorry, your highness,” you try to recover while your heart beats in your ears. “Forgive me. You have no obligations on my behalf, your brother’s actions are not yours to atone for.”

The dazzling smile is pretty even if it’s barely hiding a pain beneath. “Kind words, but clearly it torments you.”

“No.” Oh, that’s actually true. “No, what pains me is what I’ve learned since. Thor...you’ve been to Earth. You’ve seen us humans...and you know we’re hopelessly unprepared for what’s to come!”

“Even if Loki would be foolish enough to attack once more, Midgard is not defenceless. You know this.”

The Avengers. Thor had stopped Loki and his Chitauri (as you later found out the aliens were called) invasion. It hadn’t exactly been pretty which is something a lot of politicians are still pointing out – or were before you suddenly found yourself at the mercy of the guy who’d plotted the attack. It feels like years ago.

“Not...” How can I say this right? “Not Loki. Thor, please believe me, he’s not the real problem.”

“Any threat at all...your realm is under my protection.” At least his brows have the decency to furrow, almost hiding the pristine blue.

“He came for the Tesseract...but he already had a Scepter with magical abilities. Where did he get that? Who helped him – or who did he help?”

Obviously, the older brother isn’t as dimwitted as Loki claims because you can see tiny lights go on and off as he connects some of the dots – eyes gazing through your skull and into a different infinity than the one beyond the borders of Asgard and finding the murky areas where there isn’t enough information to illuminate the unknown.

When the crown prince does focus on you, a new worry tightens the muscles of his jaw. “If the Tesseract was all he wanted, why not leave?”

“Who wanted the Tesseract, really? And was that all?”

“Then why the invasion? A smoke screen?”

You shrug (even if it’s hard with Thor’s heavy hands resting on your shoulders) because what else can you do? And silence falls again as each option and its implications are weighed carefully.

“What makes you certain of this?”

Loki might be the God of Lies, Mischief, and whatnot...but looking up into his brother’s face there’s no way he wouldn’t sniff out the smallest inkling of deceit.

“I don’t know anything for sure,” you sigh, “I was...shown some bits and pieces. Been trying to make sense of it.”

“A vision.”

Weeeeell... “If that’s what you’d call it. I’m just scared of what might happen.”

Later, you’d think back of it as a pretty decent hug, but in the moment you are more concerned with continuously breathing as Thor pulls you into a crushing embrace.

“Get some rest, little one,” he smiles tiredly after pulling back, “you have my word I’ll look into this matter.”

... Loki ...

He hears her return to the suite, mainly due to the subdued curses as she struggles to undress. Then the few candles he had left alight are snuffed before [Y/N] settles into bed with a sigh. The single candle in the servant’s tiny room creates sharp borders between shadows and illuminated areas unless Loki exhales particularly hard. I’m not sighing.

Since the woman had stormed out of the quarters, the Jotun has tried to calm himself down and ignore the screaming in his marrow as guilt eats through the bones. Eventually, he succumbed and went to bed only to lie and stare up into the ceiling. A thin blade slips between his fingers in repeated somersaults until he grabs the knife by the handle only to redo the whole thing.

Counting his breaths, he reaches well into the hundreds before daring to step into the suite. The slanted moonbeams illuminate patches on the floor and bed, glistening on the silken covers shaped like a woman. He does his best to ignore it, he really does. Moving silently, Loki picks up the scattered layers of the dress to straighten them out and hang them on the other side of the screen. In the cold light, it is difficult to ascertain the colour of the fabric but he remembers it clearly from when he saw her across the room during the feast where he had been expected to assist – a task perfectly suited to get him closer to the servant and listen to their gossip, of course. He has to shake himself from the tainted memories before continuing the silent duties.

Once, not too long ago, these were details he didn’t bother with. The work of lowly servants, there was no need for a prince to worry about picking up after himself unless he chose to, and while Loki was (and is) meticulous he had certainly never expected to be the one doing this for others. Beneath me! Grumbling within, he still lingers to let the delicate ribbon from [Y/N]’s hair slither between his fingers.

It’s a welcome diversion to imagine how it would be to untie the bow and set her locks free. Or to be the one slipping the straps of the dress off her shoulders and watch it hang on for dear life by her bosom. To gently tug at it, bearing the nipples for me to admire. He can see it in his mind. What Loki doesn’t notice are the eyes watching him.

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lets-get-sirius-about-stars · 8 years ago

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The Cake Graveyard

Oc(s): Sirius Vance (Sirius)

Makayla Fray (Red Comet)

Other’s OC: Alice Mae Qin (Wonderlander) @the-singing-canary

Maia Bailey (Willow) @speedypan or @royslittleharper

Kira (Super girl) @cuddles-for-cassie

Schninner: It’s my boy Sirius’ birthday today! (May 8th) And this is a little piece to celebrate my giant smurf’s (physically) 20th birthday! Oh! And this also takes place when him and @the-singing-canary ‘s OC Alice were dating

Tagging: @preppygothica @hamsterforlive and @maruthor just cause I think you guys will like it! 😁

Warnings: none? Nope, Makayla has a potty mouth

Word Count: 1690

Sunlight streamed through the window onto the slumbering blue star. Sirius stirred, stretching his long limbs over the side of the couch. He scrunched up his sky-blue nose as a yawn left his mouth. He squinted at the brightness as he ran his fingers through his hair while his other scratched his bare chest.

“I’m, supposed, to do something today…” his voice scratchy and filled with tired, the gears in his mind slowly turning.

“It’s a Monday…” he trailed off once more rubbing his eyes.

“It’s May…” his brain began putting the pieces together.

He shot straight up from the couch, now in an upright sitting position without a single ounce of drowsiness in his eyes, a wide excited smile spread over his face revealing the single dimple on his right cheek.

It’s my birthday!

He giddily thought to himself, tapping his hand rapidly against the top of the couch. The creaking of the apartment floor boards revealed to him that Makayla had awoken and was moving about. Not two seconds later, she came shambling out of her room and into the open living room/dining room/kitchen.

Sirius’s eyes roamed up and down her, observing her messy morning bun and pajamas that were three sizes too large for her, and his heart fluttered. Oh, how he loved the way she looked in the morning!

“Hey Fray!” he chirped, catapulting over the sofa and bounding over to a half-asleep Makayla.

“Mmhmm? “she hummed he back turned toward him, while she was rummaging through the opened fridge.

“Guess what day it is today?” He happily asked, stepping closer to her.

“What are you getting about at?” she groggily asked, pushing things to the side in the fridge.

“It’s my birthday!” he gleefully squeaked, not able to keep the secret contained.

Makayla banged her head on the refrigerator before quickly turning around with a carton of milk in hand.

“That’s right!” she said rather quickly, she stammered, and looking rather nervous she responded, “I knew that. But you know, it’s Monday, and I early in the morning so…”

Makayla then realized how close Sirius was to her, and shirtless no less. A faint blush formed on her cheeks with a slight frown, her eyebrows furrowing in frustration, she placed her fingertips on his toned muscled chest, and lightly pushed him away from her. She then turned her back to him once more, walking over to the counter and began to fill up two bowls of fruity pebbles.

“So, got any plans on your special day?” she asked him.

Sirius placed his hand absentmindedly over where Makayla had touched him. He shook his head to clear his mind.

“Yes actually! I’m going out with Alice today, she said she had something huge planned.” he replied with a chuckle. Makayla laughed along too, happy, but with undetected tenseness in it.

“That’s Alice for you.” Makayla turned around with two bowls in hand, she brushed past Sirius, placing the bowls on either side of their tiny table. She sat down and began eating her cereal with an intense look on her face. Sirius stepped toward her and placed a blue hand on her shoulder.

“Makayla, is everything okay?”

She looked up to him and smiled, shrugging his hand off her shoulder, she shook her head, “I’m okay, just tired. Now hurry up, you better eat your cereal before Alice comes, you wouldn't want to keep her waiting.”

Shit!

Makayla cursed herself, watching Alice pull out of the drive way with Sirius in the passenger seat.

She dashed quickly from the window, running into her room scrolling through her contacts until she found the name she was looking for and the dial button, turning the phone on speaker, she quickly began dressing into her normal clothes.

A lay groan came from the phone before Maia Bailey began talking.

“It’s way too early to be functioning right now Fray, and on a Monday no less.”

“Fuck Maia, I messed up!” Makala called out to her friend as she pulled her teal shirt over her head.

There was a sigh on the other end, “Okay cupcake, tell mama Maia all your troubles.”

“I forgot his birthday!” She grunted, pulling her skinny jeans over her thighs. “What kind of friend am I if I can’t even remember one simple date?”

“Woah there drama queen, calm down! the day is still extremely young, there is still time for you to figure this out! Just take it one step at a time, go to the store and buy him a cake and presents. Oh, and take a few deep breaths. I can hear the steam rising off you. Wouldn’t want to burn the apartment down on his special day”

Makayla obeyed, breathing in slowly, and exhaling through her nose. She looked down another clenched fist, realizing that her friend was right, glowing red embers wafted away from the newly burnt blanket.

“You're right, I just need to keep a calm and cool head and just take this step by step.”

“That’s the spirit!” Maia responded while yawning, “Now, is that all you needed? I don’t want to be rude, but it is really early and I had a late shift last night.”

“Yeah, that’s it, thanks Maia.”

“Nooo problem.” She yawned once more before ending the call.

Makayla took a few more breaths before cramming her hands into her finger-less gloves and slipping on her brown leather jacket. She grabbed the keys to the house off the counter and grabbed a fistful of assorted fives, tens, and twenty dollar bills, and headed out the door.

“Kira? I need to know what ingredients to get for a cake, oh! And I need to know how to make a cake.”

There was a brief silence of Kira’s end.

“Makayla, you do know there’s this magical thing called the internet where you can easily look up recipes like this.”

“I know, but can Google tell me how to make Kira’s famous triple chocolate cake?” Makayla questioned the child, holding the phone against her shoulder while holding up a bag of powdered sugar and granulated sugar.

A sigh on Kira’s end, “Fair enough. Okay, so listen up, because I’m going to only get through this once before my teacher catches me…”

Baking the cake was...and experience to put it lightly. As soon as it was done baking Makayla popped the over open and picked the pan out with her bare hands. This not only burnt the cake past being consumable, but it also managed to catch it on fire. Makayla swore as she dropped the flaming cake into the sink and turned on the faucet. She grabbed one of the many fire extinguishers they had laying around their tiny apartment and dowsed the monstrosity of a cake with the foam.

Her second attempt was less than perfect as well. The cake turned out great! But in her haste to close out the pastry down, she had dropped the pan sending its contents to the floor. In the end of it all, she only had enough batter to make one cupcake. Which she carefully poured into wrapper and baked it slowly with her powers. Once it had cooled off, she quickly frosted the tiny cake.

Just in the nick of time to, no sooner had she just finished, she heard the blue boy laughing outside the door with Alice. Makayla whipped around to the door right as he opened it, obscuring their view of her tiny master piece. Sirius and Alice stood in the door way in shock observing the cake graveyard. With one layer on the dining room floor, two charred and un recognizable ones lying on the counter, and then the one in the sink (That somehow managed to once again, catch fire.

“I… I can explain this!” Makayla blurted, as her cheeks began to grow hot with embarrassment.

Alice could tell how absolutely mortified her friend at that moment, and could tell how much Makayla really didn’t want to explain. She let out an overly dramatic fake yawn as she stretched,

“Well, I’m beat. I’m going to head home.” She stood up and her tippy toes lightly pecking a still surprised Sirius and the cheek, “See you later blue boy, happy birthday!” She called back before quickly skittering out.

Sirius cautiously walked through the door frame, closing it behind him. He gave a cautious glance at the charred cakes as he walked closer to where Makayla was standing.

“So… What have you been up to?” He asked, attempting to peer over her shoulder.

Makayla side stepped out of the way to reveal the tiny cupcake she created. Sirius looked at the miniature pastry in bewilderment, then looked to Makayla who was blushing a deep crimson in embarrassment.

“I really did try to make a decent cake, but as you can see, baking is not exactly one of my skills,” she muttered, motioning to her several failed attempts. “This was the only survivor.”

Then, without any warning, he began laughing, downright hollering. Clutching his sides as he doubled over from the sheer number of giggles, which only made Makayla’s face darken to a deeper shade of red. She crossed her arms and turned her head away from him, oh, she was absolutely mortified.

Once Sirius stopped laughing, he surprised Makayla for the third time today by pulling her into a hug.

“Thank you,” He said, lightly squeezing her before releasing, “No one’s ever gone through this much trouble to bake me a cake before. Makayla gave her friend a small smile, feeling the butterflies doing summersaults in her stomach.

Sirius clapped his hands together in excitement, “well, let’s cut this bad boy up!”

They split the cupcake, and did a mock toast before popping their halves into their moths.

Makayla chewed hers and grimaced, slightly gagging “Oh my gosh, these are garbage!”

‘Agreed,” Sirius nodded, his eyes watering form the foul taste, “But it’s the best garbage I have ever eaten!” He smiled at her, looking into her crimson eyes.

“Thank you Makayla.”

Makayla smiled back at him, “Your welcome, and Happy Birthday Sirius.”

#makayla fray #red comet #sirius vance #alice mae qin #wonderlander #not my oc #kira #maia bailey #sirius's birthday

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Yesterday I tweeted a thread with some scary stats (click through to see the whole thing):

I'm going to tread carefully about this thread:https://t.co/HqlJ5XyO0d

— Lars Doucet (@larsiusprime) May 8, 2017

A quick updated summary of some of the things I noted:

At least 249 indie games have launched on Steam in the past 13 weeks

not including VR or F2P games

that's more than 30 games every week, on average

In their first month...

75% made at least $0

10% made at least $1K-9K

7.5% made at least $10K-49K

2% made at least $50K-99K

5% made at least $100K-999K

Exactly one made > $1M

Here's a graph:

What you're looking at is minimum estimated earnings for each game, in their first month on Steam. If a game is pegged at "$0" that doesn't mean it made $0, it just means I don't have enough data to confidently state it made any more than that. (Doing some spot checks with willing developers, it seems that games in the $0 tier make a few thousand in their first month at best).

How did I get this data, you ask?

For the past thirteen weeks I've been playing a little game with a small group of friends I like to call "SteamProphet," and it's basically fantasy football for indie games on Steam.

(UPDATE: we have a website now.)

Every Sunday, I put together a list of upcoming games releasing on Steam in the next week, with a few filters (must be tagged "indie", no VR, no F2P, must have a concrete release date, etc). Each player selects a "portfolio" of five games from the list they think will do well, and selects one game as their top weekly pick.

Four weeks later we score the results and see who did best. We calculate a pessimistic minimum estimate for how much money each game has earned, and a player's score for that week is the sum of each game's individual score, plus the score for their weekly pick (the weekly pick is the same game as one of the five regular picks).

Scoring

In the first iteration we simply used the lower bound of SteamSpy's "players" metric for each game to count as the score. We prefer the "players" metric over "owners" because it's less susceptible to distortions from giveaways, bundles, free weekends, and metric-inflation scams.

"Owners" counts anyone who has the game in their Steam library, whether that's a paying customer, a journalist who got a free review copy, or a smurf account trading greenlight votes for game keys. The "players" metric represents someone who actually bothered to install and run the game, and although this figure is still gameable, it's harder to do. Most importantly, we're pretty sure that "Players" will correlate closer to actual purchasers than "Owners", especially in a game's first month. To be extra conservative, we take the lower bound, so for a figure like "Players total: 58,263 ± 6,959" we count that as 51,304 players. Since SteamSpy uses a statistical confidence interval of 98%, taking the lower bound means we can be 98% confident the actual number of players is at least that high.

However, just counting players makes it hard to compare differently priced games -- $2.99 easily garners more players than $19.99. To normalize scores, we multiply players by the lowest price in the game's first month, rounded down to the nearest 1,000. This makes it easier to compare the relative success of two different games.

But since we're dealing with estimates rather than hard figures from developers themselves, we insist on being conservative. This scoring method stacks four ruthless forms of pessimism:

Use players instead of owners (players is always < owners)

Use the lower bound

Use the lowest price

Round down

What we're left with is a pretty reliable "hit detector." If a game scores 100,000 points with this estimation method, we can be pretty sure that it's actually earned at least $100,000 on Steam. The only major fly in the ointment is regional pricing -- if everyone who bought the game was from Russia or China, then the actual purchase price could be significantly lower, but as long as western buyers represent a significant chunk (a near certainty), the built-in pessimism should more than account for this.

If we wanted to create a "miss detector" instead, we would probably do the opposite -- go with the most optimistic estimate possible in each case; take the upper bound of the owners metric and multiply by the highest price, and count that as a pretty confident ceiling on a game's earnings (on Steam, at least) -- and a low ceiling could reliably indicate a flop. But that wasn't our chief concern -- we wanted to know which games had almost certainly done well.

Predicting

The predicting part of the game was inspired by the concept of "Superforecasters" -- a group of people who try to actually get better at predicting future events (a much-needed skill in our age of non-stop punditry). The basic gist of their method is:

Make clear, quantifiable, falsifiable predictions.

Bad: The economy will do better.

Good: The S&P 500 will close higher than 3000 points.

Set a maturation date for the prediction.

Bad: The economy will do better "soon"

Good: The S&P 500 will close higher than 3000 points on January 1, 2018

Keep score.

Go back and see if your predictions came true.

If not, try to figure out why you were wrong.

After a game's already launched it's really easy to say, "Oh yeah, obviously Super Sandwich Quest did poorly on Steam -- it's clearly not what Steam's audience wants." But do you have the confidence to say that in advance? How many games have you been super hyped for that actually did well? Are you sure you really know "what Steam's audience wants?"

Here's a quick example -- which game did you think would do better, Night in the Woods, or Northgard?

They both released the same week. Night In The Woods was a super-hyped, long-awaited indie title that, judging by my twitter feed, all the "cool kids" were talking about. Northgard was some sort of Viking RTS / village sim about to launch into Early Access, by an obscure developer most of you probably hadn't heard of. If I hadn't been a personal acquaintance of the developer, I would have missed its launch entirely.

Night in the Woods did great -- it scored 653 thousand SteamProphet points, but Northgard positively blew it out of the water with 1.259 million points.

Nobody in our group called it.

Heck, even I underestimated it, and I'd been following Northgard's development since the start because I'm a big personal fan of the game's creator, Nicolas Cannasse (he created the Haxe programming language I use every day). Sure, it's easy to look back now and say -- "well, clearly, games like Banished have done well, Northgard is actually pretty innovative, and its production quality far exceeds the typical game entering Early Access, so of course it was a massive hit."

But before it launched, all I could think was -- "sure, it looks cool, but, don't we have enough Viking games already? Is it really what Steam's audience wants? Do people play this kind of game?"

Apparently so. Since we started SteamProphet 13 weeks ago, Northgard still holds the title of #1 best performing game.

And it's an early access game!

Shows what I know.

As it turns out, the most valuable lesson I learned from playing SteamProphet wasn't the predicting part. I mean, I did learn that I totally suck at predictions (despite having invented the game, I routinely score in the bottom half of my group), and that's a valuable lesson in itself.

But the much more important reward is the fine-tuned sense of presentation you start to develop by looking at every single indie game that releases on Steam and scrutinizing their pitches, screenshots, titles, and -- most importantly -- trailers. It's a brutally humbling experience.

One key lesson is how important it is to make a good trailer. So many indies frankly have awful trailers, and it's the number one thing that somebody's going to judge your game on. What makes a good trailer? Here's the secret -- I don't even need to tell you.

ATTENTION: This is important!!!!

Just go to this list of upcoming indie games on Steam. Click on each one. Watch the trailer. Do that for the next 15 minutes. When you're done, I guarantee you will come away with a better sense of what makes a good and bad trailer than when you started. And I bet you'll be a lot more careful when it comes time to make the trailer for your next game.

Making and shipping a game is hard. It takes a long time. Hundreds of hours. Often thousands. Whether you're a grizzled veteran or a first-timer, This One Weird TrickTM will save you loads of grief:

Once a week, spend 15 minutes watching trailers for upcoming indie games.

Not only will you get a better sense for how to present (and not present) your game, but you'll also get a very sobering reminder of exactly how crowded this space is, and how important it is to make sure you stand out.

That's seriously the most important thing I learned from this whole thing. The rest is fine-tuning. That said, here's some other interesting things I learned from SteamProphet:

Case Studies

Thimbleweed Park released the same week as Rain World and Beat Cop. Despite being a huge Ron Gilbert fan and mega-hyped for the game, my heart sank when I saw the main trailer posted on its Steam page:

[embedded content]

Now, Ransome is a funny character, and the production quality of this trailer is good, but -- were they really leading with this? People who had no idea what this game was about were about to come away with the impression, "Pixelated point and click adventure game featuring a weird obnoxious clown who curses a lot," rather than, "Highly anticipated classic-style adventure game by Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert, featuring a large cast of colorful characters, with a distinct 90's Twin Peaks / X-Files sorta vibe."

So, I picked Rain World over Thimbleweed for my top pick.

Luckily, they updated the trailer right before launch, putting their best foot forward:

[embedded content]

Thimbleweed went on to score 674,000 SteamProphet points, beating Rain World and Beat Cop handily.

As for Rain World, it looked gorgeous, was all over my twitter feed, and had an awesome trailer when it came time to make my prediction. It did pretty good -- 147,000 points -- but not as well as I had predicted. This might be post-hoc rationalization, but I think Rain World struggled because many players came in expecting an awe-inspiring exploration game in a dangerous world, but instead found something more like a precision platformer mixed with a punishing survival sim.

Again, this just means that we are fairly sure Rain World made at least $147,000. It probably earned more, but we can't say how much. It also launched on Playstation 4, and we have no idea what it earned there.

Another surprise I had was Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment. It scored only 5,000 SteamProphet points, and pretty much everyone had it pegged for their top pick of the week. This one's a little harder to explain -- maybe it did better on consoles? Maybe new customers opted to buy Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove instead, which includes Specter of Torment? In any case, my intuition failed me once again.

A case where I was dead right, however, was Little Nightmares. Several other players were skeptical of how it would do on Steam, but I stuck to my guns. Its final score isn't even due until next week and it's already up to 8,873,000* 777,000 SteamProphet points. Yes, that's over 8 million*, 700 thousand and it's a lower bound. Seems kind of weird to classify a game published by Bandai-Namco as "indie" but that's a discussion for another day :P

*Don't fat-finger the calculator, kids.

But my biggest embarassment of all is not calling Yooka-Laylee. Not only did I pass it over for the top pick, I didn't even pick it as one of my five basics! Why would I do something like this? Well, the pre-release buzz about the game was pretty negative and I was sure we had another Mighty Number 9 on our hands. Turns out I was living in a bubble and a lot of people really enjoyed the game. Its score hasn't matured as of this writing, but it's already up to 2,051,000 points. Granted, it was kickstarted so some of those are probably kickstarter keys, but -- they're actually playing the game, so that's a sign of real engagement. We're still iterating the rules of SteamProphet and there's some ongoing debate for how to settle edge cases like these.

Now, there's one final thing I want to talk about before we circle back to the beginning.

Jeff Vogel once famously explained How You're Going To Price Your Computer Game:

Flip a coin. If it's heads, $15. If tails, $20. Done!

The data strongly supports this position:

What you're looking at here is a chart of indie games in each earnings tier, color-coded by the lowest price they had during launch. As you can see, games priced below $5 and $10 are strongly clustered at the bottom. Games priced at > $15 did significantly better -- not a single one made less than $10K, and most of them made at least $100K. Games priced between $10 and $15 were spread out across the scale. Only one game had an earnings floor above $1M, and it was priced at $20.

Notably -- exactly one game was priced lower than $10 and still managed an earnings floor of $100K. That game was Hidden Folks, which is an abnormally appealing game for that price point:

It's important to draw the right conclusions from this data. For one, it's not the biggest sample size ever (especially for the $1M+ tier). More importantly, it's a classic mix of correlation/causation -- I'm pretty sure raising the price on some random game isn't going to make it perform better. What's more likely happening is that games naturally fit into certain perceived "production quality" tiers that developers (and players) use to peg their prices.

That said, if you've put in the effort to meet a certain perceived quality bar, don't price your game for pennies. For whatever reason, Steam Players seem pretty strongly anchored around the $10, $15, and $20 tiers, so it might be dangerous to slip outside that range and naively count on an Econ 101 price elasticity slope. I'm pretty sure Hidden Folks could have safely pegged themselves at $9.99 without shedding too many customers, but good for them in any case!

Now, let's circle back to that scary little graph at the beginning:

Each week, dozens of indie games release on Steam, and the vast majority of them will make very little money. And if you don't get that initial boost of traction, Steam's discovery algorithms are unlikely to lift you out.

The /r/gamedev thread I linked earlier features a lot of developers concerned about this. Many of them understandably express frustration with visibility rounds; these were changed recently from giving each developer a free 500,000 impressions on the Steam front page, to only targeting existing customers and those who have wishlisted your game about recent updates. As I detailed in my article Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0, this was a huge boon for established developers like me, but a lot of first-time developers feel cheated.

I think Valve should rename "Visibility Rounds" ASAP -- the name is seriously misleading and the broken expectations are not good for the community.

That said, I don't think it's possible to change visibility rounds back to the way they used to be, and simple math can attest to why:

chart source: game-debate.com

In 2016 alone 4,207 games were released on Steam. If every single one of those games was given 500,000 free impressions, that's 2,103,500,000 (over two billion) impressions. And that's just if each game spends one visibility round. In the old system games got as many as five of these. If each game in 2016 spent all five visibility rounds, now we're talking about ten billion impressions.

But hey! There's a lot of Steam users to spread that out over, right? Steam's concurrent users bobbles around the 7.5-14 million range. Taking the extreme high end, let's say 14,000,000 are online at any given time and also assume super generously that all of them logged into the steam storefront at all times, ready to spread out impressions, rather than just skipping the storefront to play CSGO and DOTA2 (which is what most of them are actually doing). Even then, it's still over 150 impressions per concurrent user, for one visibility round per game, for just the games released in 2016. At this rate, the old style of visibility rounds would completely overtake the Steam storefront with indie game impressions. It was a system that could only work in an uncrowded system.

The hard truth is just that there's more indie games on Steam than ever before. Steam's discovery system doesn't actively bury new games as much as being buried is the natural default state in such a crowded environment. And for first time indies, any measure to hard-cull the store front could just as easily exclude their own games. Sure, there were some obvious cynical shovel-ware titles, but the majority of what I saw were earnest efforts by first-timers, even if many were rough around the edges (just like my games were when I first started out).

The silver lining is that if you pay close attention, you can get a pretty good sense of what the climate on Steam is like, and what you can do to improve your chances. I've been making games professionally for almost a decade now, and I've seen lots of developers come and go in that time. I'm still here (for now).

If you want to stay afloat in a storm, it's really important to know which way the wind is blowing.

Everything is hard, good luck out there.

Update:

Okay, after getting like a billion requests to join my SteamProphet league, and people asking how to set up their own, I put together a little site with all that information:

http://ift.tt/2pA15zu

If you want to join one of my leagues, or just want more information when it's available, put your contact details in this form:

http://ift.tt/2qVVzf2

Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

Yesterday I tweeted a thread with some scary stats (click through to see the whole thing):

I'm going to tread carefully about this thread:https://t.co/HqlJ5XyO0d

— Lars Doucet (@larsiusprime) May 8, 2017

A quick updated summary of some of the things I noted:

At least 249 indie games have launched on Steam in the past 13 weeks

not including VR or F2P games

that's more than 30 games every week, on average

In their first month...

75% made at least $0

10% made at least $1K-9K

7.5% made at least $10K-49K

2% made at least $50K-99K

5% made at least $100K-999K

Exactly one made > $1M

Here's a graph:

How did I get this data, you ask?

For the past thirteen weeks I've been playing a little game with a small group of friends I like to call "SteamProphet," and it's basically fantasy football for indie games on Steam.

Scoring

But since we're dealing with estimates rather than hard figures from developers themselves, we insist on being conservative. This scoring method stacks four ruthless forms of pessimism:

Use players instead of owners (players is always < owners)

Use the lower bound

Use the lowest price

Round down

Predicting

Make clear, quantifiable, falsifiable predictions.

Bad: The economy will do better.

Good: The S&P 500 will close higher than 3000 points.

Set a maturation date for the prediction.

Bad: The economy will do better "soon"

Good: The S&P 500 will close higher than 3000 points on January 1, 2018

Keep score.

Go back and see if your predictions came true.

If not, try to figure out why you were wrong.

Here's a quick example -- which game did you think would do better, Night in the Woods, or Northgard?

Night in the Woods did great -- it scored 653 thousand SteamProphet points, but Northgard positively blew it out of the water with 1.259 million points.

Nobody in our group called it.

Heck, even I underestimated it, and I'd been following Northgard's development since the start because I'm a big personal fan of the game's creator, Nicolas Cannasse (he created the Haxe programming language I use every day). Sure, it's easy to look back now and say -- "well, clearly, games like Banished have done well, Northgard is actually pretty innovative, and it's production quality far exceeds the typical game entering Early Access, so of course it was a massive hit."

But before it launched, all I could think was -- "sure, it looks cool, but, don't we have enough Viking games already? Is it really what Steam's audience wants? Do people play this kind of game?"

Apparently so. Since we started SteamProphet 13 weeks ago, Northgard still holds the title of #1 best performing game.

And it's an early access game!

Shows what I know.

ATTENTION: This is important!!!!

Making and shipping a game is hard. It takes a long time. Hundreds of hours. Often thousands. Whether you're a grizzled veteran or a first-timer, This One Weird TrickTM will save you loads of grief:

Once a week, spend 15 minutes watching trailers for upcoming indie games.

That's seriously the most important thing I learned from this whole thing. The rest is fine-tuning. That said, here's some other interesting things I learned from SteamProphet:

Case Studies

[embedded content]

So, I picked Rain World over Thimbleweed for my top pick.

Luckily, they updated the trailer right before launch, putting their best foot forward:

[embedded content]

Thimbleweed went on to score 674,000 SteamProphet points, beating Rain World and Beat Cop handily.

A case where I was dead right, however, was Little Nightmares. Several other players were skeptical of how it would do on Steam, but I stuck to my guns. It's final score isn't even due until next week and it's already up to 8,873,000 SteamProphet points. Yes, that's over 8 million, and it's a lower bound. Seems kind of weird to classify a game published by Bandai-Namco as "indie" but that's a discussion for another day :P

But my biggest embarassment of all is not calling Yooka-Laylee. Not only did I pass it over for the top pick, I didn't even pick it as one of my five basics! Why would I do something like this? Well, the pre-release buzz about the game was pretty negative and I was sure we had another Mighty Number 9 on our hands. Turns out I was living in a bubble and a lot of people really enjoyed the game. It's score hasn't matured as of this writing, but it's already up to 2,051,000 points. Granted, it was kickstarted so some of those are probably kickstarter keys, but -- they're actually playing the game, so that's a sign of real engagement. We're still iterating the rules of SteamProphet and there's some ongoing debate for how to settle edge cases like these.

Now, there's one final thing I want to talk about before we circle back to the beginning.

Jeff Vogel once famously explained How You're Going To Price Your Computer Game:

Flip a coin. If it's heads, $15. If tails, $20. Done!

The data strongly supports this position:

Notably -- exactly one game was priced lower than $10 and still managed an earnings floor of $100K. That game was Hidden Folks, which is an abnormally appealing game for that price point:

Now, let's circle back to that scary little graph at the beginning:

I think Valve should rename "Visibility Rounds" ASAP -- the name is seriously misleading and the broken expectations are not good for the community.

That said, I don't think it's possible to change visibility rounds back to the way they used to be, and simple math can attest to why:

chart source: game-debate.com

But hey! There's a lot of Steam users to spread that out over, right? Steam's concurrent users bobbles around the 7.5-14 million range. Taking the extreme high end, let's say 14,000,000 are online at any given time and also assume super generously that all of them logged into the steam storefront at all times, ready to spread out impressions, rather than just skipping the storefront to play CSGO and DOTA2 (what is what most of them are actually doing). Even then, it's still over 150 impressions per concurrent user, for one visibility round per game, for just the games released in 2016. At this rate, the old style of visibility rounds would completely overtake the Steam storefront with indie game impressions. It was a system that could only work in an uncrowded system.

If you want to stay afloat in a storm, it's really important to know which way the wind is blowing.

Everything is hard, good luck out there.

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes