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Comment by ad404b8a372f2b9 | Hacker News Reader

The drop-off after launch is pretty wild.

For normal commercial games there is a formula of how you can estimate first year and lifetimes sales of specific title:

    Sales in first 2 months * 2 = Sales in first year
    Sales in first year * 2 = Lifetime sales

Since DF is very special project it's will likely have much longer tail of sales, but most likely math would be about the same during first 3-5 years.

PS: I'm game developer and this is industry standard to estimate sales.

And that's for regular releases. I'd be surprised if the initial drop wasn't much stronger for something that has already been a living legend for many years. That initial wave of "oh, I've heard so much of them, probably won't play even with a graphical mode, but I still want it in my library" is one of a kind. The long tail will probably be much flatter, but only compare to regular releases once you separate out everybody who bought in roughly the same way those nice hardback Shakespeare collections are bought.

I'm a fan of the game but waiting for proper Linux support.

I also have a lot of other games to finish beforehand.

What issues were you having? I run it on a steam deck just fine all the time. I guess you mean you don't want to run on a compatibility layer? I haven't noticed performance issues if that's your concern.

Most games are developed, a bit of effort/money directed on promotion/marketing, dropped, and then onto the next project. So I think these numbers are more of a reflection of developer than consumer trends. Games that are developed in a different way often show [very] different trends. One of the most extreme examples I can think of is Kenshi. Its SteamDB [1] numbers are something else! It was made by one guy who worked as a security guard to make ends meet while making it.

Of course making games has to be a labor of love though. I mean the guy had double digit player counts for years, and sales likely reflective of that (if not worse), while he continued to keep developing a game that he was clearly building for himself at least as much as for "the market."

And as for Dwarf Fortress, it's kind of in a mixed zone, because it got the sort of big marketing/promotion push that's usually reserved for "fire it and forget it" type titles, and the consequent drop in players it entails as you ended up doing things like attracting players who thought they were buying 'The Sims - Ultra Detailed Dwarven Edition With Retro Graphics' and quit after 30 minutes. But I really don't think that's the developer's plan. So I suppose we'll see!

As indie game dev myself I totally agree with you, but while DF is special it still had usual marketing compaign and that big release date. My guess it will likely perform even worse than projection since a lot of people who played DF for years bought it more like a donation. E.g more of people who bought it wont actually play it much and game will game less of natural social marketing out of these sales.

Again I not saying that Toady gonna abandon the game, but sales will go down in coming months and it's very unlikely that in coming years they'll get another $7M of sales in one month.

I can see them earning another $7M over the next 20 years though.

No doubt about that. DF have very commited player base.

What dropoff? The newest number is on top.

(Though yeah, there will be a dropoff for sure, it's just not visible here).

Ha, I should really learn to read.

There has been a discount.

If you mean in player count, that's normal.

Peak is always during launch day, then there's a long tail, and very successful games might slowly rise after a couple years and surpass the launch peak.

While Dwarf Fortress has had a fantastic launch, it will never be a wildly popular game to increase its player base by much more than its release, especially in the oversaturated gaming market of today.

Yeah there's always a fairly substantial drop-off. Dwarf Fortress[0] dropping by half from 14k on average down to 7k one month later is roughly the same as Elden Ring[1] (522k to 211k) but on a slightly different scale

[0] - https://steamcharts.com/app/975370

[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/1245620

If you would like to hear an analysis of these two trends, Jason Rohrer goes over launch day sales for a game he released in 2014 and 2018 in this gdc talk [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/sIqz5xmQKnc?t=506 While the entire video is 32 minutes, the relevant section is about 5 minutes.

there is no drop off visible yet, the first number is also their latest (january but I guess it also cover the december sales)

I was confused initially as well but you are reading it backwards. They were getting ~15k a month before launch and that jumped to 7 mill after launch. I am very interested to see what it normalizes to. 100K a month? several hundred? 15K a month again?

Yeah, I'm waiting for adventure mode. That's the only part of this game that ever interested me; I wanna play it like a roguelike/dungeon crawler.

Still waiting to join the second wave of macOS buyers stuck on the original game.

Those are preceding months and are not sales but donations

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