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Not on Steam Sale postmortem says Greenlight may be a good indie ad
The Not on Steam Sale launched in October and lasted one week, offering up to 50 percent off a lineup of games that weren't on Steam (at launch, at least – that day, three games were Greenlit). By the sale's close, it hosted 63 games, and just 10 of them weren't even attempting to land on Steam. Since the sale, 23 of the games attempting to hit Steam were Greenlit, and 10 of those have launched on Steam. The stats come from indie consultant Mike Kanarek in his Not on Steam Sale postmortem. Kanarek estimates the sale sold 13,500 copies and added 42,000 Greenlight votes to participating games. He calls the sale an "amplifier," not a permanent fix. "Not on Steam did not make anyone fabulously wealthy," he says. "Our top sellers (or top Greenlight vote-getters) sold fewer than 2,000 games apiece (with an average of about 200) and may have added as many as 3,000 votes on Greenlight (with an average of about 700) through Not on Steam. In general most games fell well below these averages with a few big sellers and vote-getters pulling the average way up. Most games got a modest but respectable sales and vote increase, and a handful did enormously well." Three of the five lowest-selling games in the sale weren't on Greenlight and had no intention of entering Steam, while the top 20 best-sellers were all on Greenlight. "This suggests that a presence on Greenlight in some way encourages sales, even off of Steam," Kanarek says. "It's impossible to say whether it's because Greenlight acts to increase discovery and awareness of these games, or if there are people who simply take a game more seriously if it's on Greenlight." Check out Kanarek's full postmortem (complete with graphs!) here.
Not on Steam Sale: 35 indie games that aren't on Steam, are on sale
The Not on Steam Sale is both the opposite of a Steam sale and strikingly similar to one: It features more than 35 games, each up to 50 percent off for one week only, but none of these games are available on Steam – yet. Most of the games are on Greenlight, waiting for their chance to enter the Steam market, and some are simply sold independently and want a signal boost. Games on sale include Race the Sun, Blood of the Werewolf, Richard & Alice, Leviathan: The Last Day of the Decade, The Yawhg, 6180 the moon, Tower of Guns, Girls Like Robots, Full Bore, Sokobond, Cute Things Dying Violently, Rose & Time, and The Sea Will Claim Everything. The great thing is that the most expensive games are just $20 normally, with most of them priced much lower, plus they're now up to half off. To be clear: The Not on Steam Sale isn't a bundle. It's a group of indie games discounted on one convenient page, each sold separately. The sale is hosted by Aaron San Filippo, the developer of Race the Sun. Filippo recently wrote a blog post about the difficulties of selling an indie game that isn't on Steam – when he wrote it, Race the Sun was outside of the top 100 on Steam Greenlight and it had sold only 771 copies in its first month. Now, Race the Sun is No. 10 on Greenlight. "The internet is a crazy place," Filippo tells me. "When we published our sales post, we expected the usual indie developer interest, as we developers love to read about sales numbers and such. But everyone picked it up, and we ended up getting more attention than the project had ever had. Our fans became energized, and then a big YouTuber, Daniel Hardcastle, covered the game after lots of people were asking him to play the game, and he loved it."
