Hello! My big parser puzzle game Never Gives Up Her Dead is coming to Steam!
It’s Windows only for now, as I have trouble testing on other platforms.
This game was released a few years ago, and is a 360K-word text adventure game centered around approaching your own inevitable death while rescuing a damaged starship filled with portals to 10 other dimensions.
Pricing/Business discussion
A free version of the game (including all text content in the commercial version) has been available on ifarchive for a while and will remain available. A ‘Deluxe’ version with 10 pencil portraits and a cover image displayable in-game, as well as hyperlinks for conversation and movement, and with executable files for windows and linux, has been available on itch for 3 years. That version is $7.50, while the bare gblorb (with the images and hyperlinks) has been available for $5.
I’m pricing the Steam version at $11.99. That’s a lot, but I have a few reasons. Mainly, I wanted to match Hadean Land’s pricepoint as a higher tier for very substantial games (mine takes about 15-25 hours to complete one playthrough, while Hadean Lands reviewers on Steam have about 25-50 hours logged). There are several parser games available on Steam and a lot of them are very short, like 1-2 hours long. If I priced my game lower, at, say, $4.99 or $7.50, it would squeeze out the market for smaller games. It also keeps the ceiling high for other big games coming out (like Wade Clarke’s upcoming magnus opus Andromeda Acolytes). I’ve heard Steam doesn’t allow lower-priced competition, so I’ll be raising the itch prices, but I’ll see if they’ll let me keep a low price on the bare gblorb of the Deluxe version.
The other reason is that the price is mainly for convenience; if someone doesn’t want to download the bare gblorb and get an interpreter, or doesn’t want to deal with unsigned files on itch, Steam is a safe and reliable way to get the game. I would expect anyone that frequents this forum regularly to be more comfortable just playing the free version on Spatterlight or Gargoyle.
In any case, I was originally going to post to ask for wishlists, but I saw that wishlists don’t actually affect game visibility anymore, so don’t feel a need to wishlist out of support.
I don’t expect big sales. I’ve been advised numerous times by several people not to do this. But I’ve run the numbers and even if this only sells 7-12 copies a year to parser game completionists searching for tags on Steam, it will be worth it to me. Currently itch sells about $100 worth of games a year, and that’s been nice, so I’m just seeing if Steam can recreate that.
There’s been a lot of discussion over the years about monetizing IF and how profitable Steam and Itch are. I’m doing this with very little advertising (I plan on making a post or two on reddit in small communities), and so my expectation coming in is that selling 50-77 copies in the first week would be great, selling 12 in the first year would be just fine, anything less than that was probably not worth the effort.
Thanks for the help and encouragement! And please, do not feel the need to buy the game solely out of financial support. While I’m not rich, I’m out of debt now (thanks to past helpful supporters) and feel like donation-style purchases could better go to other authors.
) However, I know Zarf said he thought he underpriced Hadean Lands. That’s one of the reasons I expect to set Andromeda Acolytes higher, when I get there.