PC platform driving Sanctum 2 sales, developer regrets console launch

PC and consoles indie title Sanctum 2 has earned around 95 per cent of its revenue from Steam, according to developer Coffee Stain Studios.

In a postmortem on Gamasutra, Coffee Stain’s Johannes Aspeby explains that the simultaneous console launch on Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware only caused the developer additional pressures – with the payoff not matching up with the work put in.

In retrospect the console ports were a bad idea — we’ve made about 95 percent of our revenue from PC, so having a day 1 port is not something we want to do again,” Aspeby wrote.

We’re still unsure of why we sold so much more on Steam than on consoles, but if we’d take a guess we’d say that it could be because visibility is much easier to get on Steam with daily deals, free weekends, etc, compared to consoles, where we got pretty much no visibility at all.”

Aspeby added that sinking time into DLC ahead of knowing what sales were going to be also turned out to be a mistake.

One of our arguments for continuing working on the DLC was that we already had done so much work for it. Before we knew sales we had started setting everything up for DLC since we thought we were going to strike gold. Or at least find a silver vein. In retrospect we should just have looked at the figures and seen that the work wasn’t going to pay off and killed our darling with a hatchet.”