Monaco dev blames poor sales on launch delay

Andy Schatz says he’s disappointed with sales of his studio’s latest game, and places the blame in part on a last minute launch delay.

Pocketwatch Games’s Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine launched on PC on April 24th, and Xbox 360 on May 10th.

Schatz talked about the successes and failures of the launch in a Reddit discussion.

“The 360 delay unquestionably hurt our sales,” he said.

“I was never depending on the Xbox being our primary revenue generator, but I was very disappointed in Xbox sales nonetheless. We put a ton of effort porting the game, and to have that effort be largely wasted was really disappointing.”

Though there were other factors, the developer believes the game would have done a lot better if the launch had been simultaneous.

“I don’t think the demo was particularly strong… so it could be that the game wouldn’t have done better on Xbox even if it had a simultaneous launch (though IMO it would have performed at least twice as well),” said Schatz.

The game also suffered from a few bugs that only occurred on retail Xboxes, which meant that not only was the team unaware of the bug until certification, it was unable to reproduce it when producing a patch.

Schatz refused to directly criticize Microsoft’s handling of the launch as the game’s publisher, Majesco, acted as a go-between.

“I don’t really feel like it’s a good idea to piss in the pool, so whatever complaints I have I think it’s best that I keep them between me, Majesco, and Microsoft,” he said.

In fact, his comments suggest Pocketwatch benefitted from Microsoft’s earlier decision to ease up on patch fees.

“We had to submit two patches, and luckily they had already relaxed the charges for that process about a month prior,” said Schatz.