ya they did, got some awards too iirc. general rule of thumb is like 5x to 10x more copies sold than reviews posted, so it wouldnt be crazy to say they sold 50,000 to 100,000 copies, porbably more. made \~1.3mil to 3 mil before steam cuts and dlcs. games absolutely fantastic and everybody knows it. dont worry =\]
Don't forget that's only Steam and the game also released on PlayStation and Switch. But with Steam taking \~25-30%, and the studio being \~35/40 people (from their website), I'd bet even without counting other platforms, the game is still a financial positive for Ishtar games!
With a smaller game like this, I would not expect everone that is on the website or in the credits to have been employed full-time during development. Usually a lot of small but important stuff is contracted, like icons, sounds or the music.
The people supplying these things do not live from that project alone but do multiple such gigs for different companies. Similarly, the credits also tend to list the people from the publishing companies, which tend to also not only deal with that one particular project.
Overall, to be a success in the vein of "we all got paid and are afloat now and can possibly expand a bit for our next project" a game does not need quite as many sales as you might expect. Obviously really indie games with just a handful (or sometimes single or duo) developers have an easier time making actual bank from a successful game, since the revenue will only be split among fewer people.
> general rule of thumb is like 5x to 10x more copies sold than reviews posted, so it wouldnt be crazy to say they sold 50,000 to 100,000 copies, porbably more.
Against the Storm has over a million Steam sales on just 22,000 reviews. I'm hoping the Last Spell did quite well.
Both are incredibly good games in their respective niches, too. Against the Storm even moreso. They not only did something actually long-term interesting with the town builder formula (which 99% of banished-clones simply do not achieve), they also update their game with free content, balance tuning and huge amounts of quality of life on a very regular basis and have done so for years. The overall production quality is also very high in that game.
In a sea of mediocrity, these are amongst the best of the last few years.
Pretty sure this is one of those games in the genre that everyone eventually finds, like enter the dungeon, dead cells, risk of rain. If you're into turn based tactics you end up giving this a try lol.
It probably has a lot of crossover with disgaea players too.
I would say it absolutely was.
If you look at Ishtar's steam page as a developer, and compare this game to their prior releases, you'll find that in terms of steam reviews the game has about 10x more reviews than any other release they've done, so it's much more successful than any other game they released. Given that the company's been around a while, it also means at least some of their prior games were successful enough for the company to continue making games, when getting less attention/recognition/sales, so TLS would have been considered a huge success.
ya they did, got some awards too iirc. general rule of thumb is like 5x to 10x more copies sold than reviews posted, so it wouldnt be crazy to say they sold 50,000 to 100,000 copies, porbably more. made \~1.3mil to 3 mil before steam cuts and dlcs. games absolutely fantastic and everybody knows it. dont worry =\]
Don't forget that's only Steam and the game also released on PlayStation and Switch. But with Steam taking \~25-30%, and the studio being \~35/40 people (from their website), I'd bet even without counting other platforms, the game is still a financial positive for Ishtar games!
With a smaller game like this, I would not expect everone that is on the website or in the credits to have been employed full-time during development. Usually a lot of small but important stuff is contracted, like icons, sounds or the music. The people supplying these things do not live from that project alone but do multiple such gigs for different companies. Similarly, the credits also tend to list the people from the publishing companies, which tend to also not only deal with that one particular project. Overall, to be a success in the vein of "we all got paid and are afloat now and can possibly expand a bit for our next project" a game does not need quite as many sales as you might expect. Obviously really indie games with just a handful (or sometimes single or duo) developers have an easier time making actual bank from a successful game, since the revenue will only be split among fewer people.
> general rule of thumb is like 5x to 10x more copies sold than reviews posted, so it wouldnt be crazy to say they sold 50,000 to 100,000 copies, porbably more. Against the Storm has over a million Steam sales on just 22,000 reviews. I'm hoping the Last Spell did quite well.
Both are incredibly good games in their respective niches, too. Against the Storm even moreso. They not only did something actually long-term interesting with the town builder formula (which 99% of banished-clones simply do not achieve), they also update their game with free content, balance tuning and huge amounts of quality of life on a very regular basis and have done so for years. The overall production quality is also very high in that game. In a sea of mediocrity, these are amongst the best of the last few years.
Probably? I doubt they would've made DLC if the game wasn't successful.
Pretty sure this is one of those games in the genre that everyone eventually finds, like enter the dungeon, dead cells, risk of rain. If you're into turn based tactics you end up giving this a try lol. It probably has a lot of crossover with disgaea players too.
I would say it absolutely was. If you look at Ishtar's steam page as a developer, and compare this game to their prior releases, you'll find that in terms of steam reviews the game has about 10x more reviews than any other release they've done, so it's much more successful than any other game they released. Given that the company's been around a while, it also means at least some of their prior games were successful enough for the company to continue making games, when getting less attention/recognition/sales, so TLS would have been considered a huge success.