On Reddit, a developer blames Valve for the failure of his promising game. He’s not wrong, and Valve has apologized.
On Reddit, a developer from the small indie studio Permadeath recently complained about his plight, targeting Valve, whom he blames for contributing to the failure of his long-standing game project called Planet Centauri (to the game on Steam).
More specifically, he complains about the dependence of many studios on such a relevant platform as Steam and how a single, extremely unfortunate mistake makes this dependence a problem.
Especially for him, because a bug was actually the reason why the studio’s game completely flopped, wasting ten years of development time.
This is how Steam can ruin more than 10 years of your work
by
u/PlanetCentauri in
gamedev
“The release was a total flop”
In the post, the developer explains what exactly happened, presumably on behalf of the studio. According to the post, the game, which is a Terraria-inspired sandbox game set on a fantasy planet with sci-fi elements, was developed over ten years ago.
In 2016, early access launched on Steam and was very successful. According to the developers, over 100,000 units were sold during this phase, and the game was on the wish list of over 130,000 people. A huge success! However, it then remained in early access for a long time.
For the 1.0 release in December 2024, the team had hoped that, due to its initial success, it would appear very prominently on Steam and once again generate numerous sales – but this did not happen:
So we were excited about the release of 1.0, because with so many wish lists, the game would be highly visible, we would appear in the “New Releases” and “Trends” categories based on sales figures, etc.
The release of 1.0 took place in December 2024… we sold… 581 units in 5 days.
The game didn’t even appear on page 2; we were invisible; the release was a total flop. And to this day, we’ve never understood why.
The fact that the team now knows what the problem was is thanks to an email from Valve.
No energy to be angry
Over nine months after the release of Planet Centauri, Permadeath suddenly had an email from Valve in its inbox. In it, the company reported a Steam bug that affected a very small number of games. Steam says fewer than 100 games since 2015.
Planet Centauri was apparently among them, and this had disastrous consequences. The bug meant that email notifications for the 130,000 wish list entries were never sent. So 130,000 potential buyers didn’t even notice that the game had been released at all.
To make up for this, Valve is promising to participate in a Daily Deal, but for the developers, this is only a small consolation:
I don’t even have the energy to be angry. We were so frustrated, disgusted, and completely confused. Now we know what’s going on, we understand better that it’s unfair and there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve started a second project because it’s financially impossible to continue patching our game, and we’re moving on because it’s the only thing we can do.
This article was probably my way of expressing my anger, but also to show the problems that a platform that dominates 99% of the PC gaming market can cause when the gears don’t work as they should.
However, Valve alone cannot be blamed for the failure of Planet Centauri. After all, there are a number of factors at play here. These include the fact that the development time was so long and that the team was apparently extremely dependent on Steam.
What is your assessment of the situation? Write your comments below!