Post Mortem

I’ve also made a video with essentially the same content here:

 


Only Way is Down on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2804680/Only_Way_is_Down/

 

I made 41 thousand US dollars net revenue after steams 30% cut on my first commercial indie game only way is down which is a rage platformer priced at 9.99 dollars, i released my game on steam on 1st april 2025 so around 10 months ago at this point, i had 17,821 wishlists on launch day and i’ve sold 8,656 copies excluding returns and got 113 reviews with a total score of 61%. I’ve had 1,712 copies returned to date so 16.5% of total purchases.

The game took around a year to make over the course of a year and a half as i was also working on other projects during that time. I localized my game in 29 languages, the top 5 countries for copies sold have been USA, Russia, Japan, Germany and uk in that order although the top 5 countries for net revenue where USA, Japan, Russia, Germany and UK in that order due to regional pricing on the game and I used steams default regional pricing. I also made the game playable on both xbox and playstation controllers and made it steam deck compatible.

 

I currently have 33,044 wishlists and am selling roughly 10 copies a day although this is very variable due to steam sales or the game being played by content creators and this will certainly decrease on average as time goes on.

 

I started posting about my game on social media at the start of may 2024 and had a steam page set up at that point so i could start getting wishlists

I released a demo of my game on June 2024 over steam next fest which managed to get my game around 4100 wishlists, i left my demo up on steam until a few weeks before release, which allowed my game to be covered by quite a few big youtubers including Kindly Keyin, YuB and Sam Tabor

 

 

I posted a fair bit to social media after launching my steam page right up until the time i launched the game including to tik tok, reddit, facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter, tumblr, threads and bluesky and saw by far the most success with reddit, tik tok and youtube in that order.I did create another post on reddit covering my marketing up until 6 months prior to launch which goes into a bit more detail for that period.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1ftkdb2/wishlist_breakdown_78k_nearing_launch/

 

I’ve spent around 5,000 dollars on advertising in total with the vast majority being prior to launch having only spent around 200 dollars post launch. Prior to launch I spent roughly 4000 dollars on a keymailer campaign, around 700 dollars on reddit ads and around 100 dollars on tik tok ads. I got around 12,000 clicks from my reddit ads so an average cpc of 5 cents but that only converted to 237 wishlists so an average cpw of 2.95 dollars which isn’t great and that’s mostly because i pretty much just set it up and then just left it and didn’t optimise it as i was too busy with all the other aspects of releasing a game. 

 

For tik tok i spent around 100 dollars on 100k views for one of my videos. This yielded extremely low engagement compared to a similar post i had on tik tok which had an organic 100k views. I read later that people suggested turning off pangle on tik tok as otherwise ads are run across third-party apps and games and that often has huge amount of bot traffic. As the promotion did so bad on tik tok i didnt’t use it again

 

 

For the 4,000 i spent at keymailer i got a video mast head ad package and paid more for it to be featured which meant the video always appeared first on the discover games page as typically the ad would be in random rotation with four other ads. This package also had a top ad slot on the browse page and allowed for influencer outreach to 1500 contacts and press blast to 1500 contacts, a press newsletter, an animated social ad and campaign assistance from partnier. The masthead ad went live 2 weeks prior to launch and was live for 1 week, if i remember correctly i did get around 3,000 to 4,000 requests although the vast majority were from very small creators with less than a 1,000 subscribers and on average low video or stream views. Initially prior to release i was only providing keys to large creators with greater than 50,000 subscribers or greater than 10,000 views on average per video but as time went on i slowly started providing keys to people with lesser subscribers or average view counts. 

 

 

I did also use the press blast but only small press websites picked up the game, the reviews were a bit of mixed bag some good, some very bad, Some reviewers barely played the game, if not at all, i’m guessing using AI to write the reviews as they’d leave reviews with things which weren’t true such as that the game had micro transactions which it didn’t. I think the genre of the game probably didn’t help either as i think alot of reviewers do not like rage games as they’re often seen as low effort games. I also did influencer outreach, a few larger streamers/youtubers picked it up but the vast majority of people who accepted the offers were smaller content creators.

 

I did get around 500 – 600 thousand views total from youtube from all the videos created and i think around 50 – 100 thousand views from streamers on twitch which is really good although most those creators were non english speaking creators.Here’s some of the youtube videos that were created as part of the keymailer campaign:

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnD-zffCMME 50k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbXxobZm0Sg 20k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYXHxgzlPWk 100k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bgQkDUYGRE 70k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfQdCU45vgc 10k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxn4-UqOZig 30k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMNExUr1ZHU 10k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_W_k-0VoH0 10k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ2xGP-GUug 2k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5orvcZlKnqI 100k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Vn0hLiIrc 50k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7kOBx3nBIo 6k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW92kWhnrY 80k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE7tfUnK5II 15k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa4EySXnBCk 20k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rG6Pj4lnYA 13k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPC8j_9umdk 2k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4gtV-k34yA 5k

 

Unfortunately it’s still difficult to get really large content creators to play your game through keymailer as although they may be exposed to your game through it, they will also be exposed to 1000s of other games and i’m sure the larger creators get a huge amount of offers so your game will get lost among the 1000s of offers they get. Of course though the game itself and the marketing of that is also a massive factor. All in all i do think it was worth the value, as paying for the amount of views i got via the campaign would of cost a lot more and also it wouldn’t of been as well spread across different languages. It’s very difficult to assess exactly how many wishlists and sales the keymailer campaign brought in, my wishlists certainly increased significantly during this period but this is also due to the increased visibility on steam and my other social media marketing. 

 

 

I’d say the launch itself was fairly successful, i did a 20% launch discount for the first week and managed to sell 1,248 copies on the first day so a total of $8,232 gross revenue and 3,091 copies in the first week for a total of $19,851 gross revenue and 4,810 copies sold in my first month for a total of $35,862 gross revenue so almost half of the gross revenue i’ve made to date.

 

The game started with a relatively good review score of 75% but dropped to 62% after the first month and has now dropped to 61%.This relatively low score has likely impacted sales, due to the many mixed reviews. 

 

The main issues mentioned in the reviews were the difficulty of the game and the controls. The game is a rage game so it is meant to be very difficult and punishing however even still it’s probably way too hard. I did compromise a fair bit on the difficulty, adding a mode with unlimited lives adding in save points and later increasing the amount of save points but i did want the game to be a real challenge and achievement to complete.I was fairly stubborn regarding the difficulty though as i didn’t want to compromise too much on my vision for the game and make it easy. In retrospect i think for sure making it easier would of helped make the game more successful .

 

 

The other main issue mentioned in negative reviews were the controls, while admittedly the turning is a bit slow, it’s intentionally like this to make turning more precise and make it harder to turn too quickly and make mistakes, the controls in general i do not think are bad although i am of course bias, i think the difficulty in the controls essentially comes down to the difficulty of the game, in that as the challenges are so hard and the precision required is extremely high this in turn makes the control needed to have that level of precision very hard.

 

A big issue which impacted these reviews and in turn the sales was my marketing. Unfortunately prior to launch i had focused on marketing as broadly as possible rather than focusing on players who liked rage games specifically. I had thought that even players who didn’t like rage games but liked cats may enjoy this game but in the end i think this lead to a lot of negative reviews which ended up hurting sales. I think most players who came across the marketing and thought it would be a cute cat game did not enjoy the game as it was far too difficult and frustrating for them. I think regardless of the marketing this would have occurred to some extent as it was a cat game and a lot of people automatically assume it’s going to be some cozy cute game because there’s a cat which it definitely is not. Changing the animal would have made this clearer but it made sense for the premise of the game that the cat fell asleep and got transported to the top of a building and i also i really liked playing as a cat and that was really the core aspect of the game i wanted to make.

 

Another issue was that although it was intended as a rage game, the way the platforming was designed was more similar to a very difficult precision platformer like super meat boy, in that in most rage games there’s a very long challenge with relatively easy platforming but if you make one mistake you lose a lot of progress, whereas in my game it’s a long challenge but most the platforming is extremely difficult and you won’t lose much progress if you die at least on the easiest setting. This likely impacted potential customers views of the game as some streamers would get stuck on a particular section and would just be constantly dying over and over and over in quick succession and while funny at first it would become boring for the viewers and streamers and they’d eventually lose interest in the game whereas with more typical rage games they may lose a lot of progress but when they reach the same challenge again they would likely complete it after a few tries as the individual challenge isn’t so difficult.

 

In terms of the factors which helped with the success i would say the fact that it’s a cat game is a big aspect as that automatically attracts the attention of a lot of people. i think also the graphics, the setting and the premise all helped attract attention, as the cat starts on top of a skyscraper and you’ve got an expansive view over a city, which is quite an interesting and visually appealing game setting. The fact that it’s also a rage game which can be popular with content creators and it’s somewhat unique that you have to get to the bottom and has a semi realistic premise rather than the typical rage game concept of having to climb up random objects floating in the air. I think also the cat customisation was a feature that attracted a fair amount of people as a lot of players like the ability to customise their character and i think the silliness of the game helped a bit; with the ragdolling cats and chonky cats as i think it can make for funny content. 

 

In retrospect if i had to do it again i would make the game even easier and aim my marketing specifically for rage gamers to make it very clear what type of game it was. Also I think if i’d added co-op support that would have really helped with the popularity and sales as that’s always a feature which really helps sell games however i did want to have a short development cycle and didn’t really want to spend too much time on it, perhaps i’ll do it in a sequel further down the line. 

 

While i had hoped the game to do a bit better both financially and critically, i’m still very pleased with how it turned out. Solo game development at this point won’t be able to support me as my full time job but for my first release i think it’s decent start. Overall i’m really proud of what i produced and surprised how well it came out in the end, i was a bit apprehensive at launch thinking there would be a ton of problems but it went surprisingly well, there was quite a lot of minor bugs but overall it went pretty smoothly with nothing gamebreaking.


I also made a couple of devlogs about the game development side of making Only Way is Down so you can check those out if interested in more of the technical aspect of making the game: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzkmGWy7wnHxYySplMmY0Um8zWdiI_gDX

 

I’m currently working on porting Only Way is Down to xbox and also working on a few new projects which i’ll release details of in the coming months.

 

Here’s a copy of the tableau file i used to make the visualisations: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1T6vcbyBYfNlFeCe9ZhW8mi3k-5hghvMC?usp=drive_link

 

I used tableau public edition which is a free edition anybody can use. You can download it here and can just add dummy info to download if you want: https://www.tableau.com/products/public/download

 

You can add in your own csv files from Steam into the Tableau file and then see the visualisations for your game/s.

 

I hope this post mortem was useful to some of you and If you want to thank me for this information or the tableau file, the best way would be to buy the game and leave a review.You can also join the discord linked at the top or bottom of the page if you want to discuss anything, have questions or need help setting up the tableau workbook etc