Release Stats and Bundle News!

Hello!

This is post is more of a news roundup of the past few weeks since release. I've got some release stats and also some nice news regarding bundles. I would have liked to make this post either exactly 1 or 2 weeks since the release, but I've been a little busy moving flats, but that's just given me a little more time to organise thoughts and data.

If you haven't played Deep Space Exploitation yet, there's an excellent (and quite long) demo available on the store page! And please do come join the Discord Server, the more the merrier. :)

Release Stats

General

- Development Time: 14 Months

- Steam Page Live Date: 2025-04-09

- Release Date: 2025-11-06

- Release Wishlists: 4,298

End of Week 1

- Units Sold: 960

- Steam Revenue (Gross): $7,049

- Wishlists: 5,805

End of Week 2

- Units Sold: 1,156

- Steam Revenue (Gross): $8,785

- Wishlists: 6,461

So all things considered I'm quite content with this. The sales are good for the number of release wishlists, and that's an actual amount of money which someone can (frugally) sustain themselves on. Typical Year 1 sales projections are around 3 times the Week 1 sales, so we're looking at roughly $21k Gross.

Marketing

(These wishlist numbers are rough estimates as Steam's wishlist reporting is currently down so I can't get accurate date range numbers.)

Throughout the 7 months running up to release that the game had a Steam page (it had an Itch page for a few months before that) I had been marketing it with social media (Reddit and Bluesky) posts and dev logs (Itch, IndieDB, and Steam). I would say that the social media posts netted about 1,500 wishlists, and can't really say that the dev logs did much.

I participated in Next Fest June, which was maybe a little early considering the ultimate November release, but I did honestly think I was going to release soon after Next Fest. Either way Next Fest was great for discoverability and wishlists, bringing in about 1,200 and also a lot of great feedback and new members for the discord channel. This was probably the biggest single event for the game's visibility, which made it even worse that I missed a couple of other fests that would have been great (Debut and Tiny Teams) because I wasn't keeping track of the right channels or knowing that I should really have been searching for them.

Two weeks before release I started my real marketing push, emailing content creators and journalists, posting my trailers, re-posting my best social media posts, and also paying for Reddit ads. This brought in the remaining 1,600 wishlists, which mostly came from Reddit ads, averaging about $0.60 per wishlist (difficult to know exactly since there was a lot of noise from other marketing).

The final wishlist count fell short of the magic number required to get on Steam's Popular and Upcoming tab, and I'm still not sure whether it would have been worth it to delay and push more money into Reddit Ads (because every other marketing avenue seemed to have run dry). I was feeling pretty confident about the release, and really wanted to get the game out there, but also felt like I'd done everything I could in terms of marketing. I had no coverage from journalists or the like, which I found surprising at the time (since there were two small articles written about the game after Next Fest) but now understand that that's just the state of things. I've had a fair few small