It’s been one year since I released Extraneum, so I figured I’d write a post-mortem to explain my process, what went right and wrong, and as a mean to reflect on my own experience.

How it started

I’ve always been creative and passionate about video games, and as soon as I’ve had access to a computer, I tried making my own games. I played around with Game Maker and RPG Maker 2000 as a teen, but it wasn’t until 2010, when I discovered I could get paid to make Flash games, that the idea to actually turn it into a business started. After working for a few years as a programmer analyst, in jobs unrelated to video games, and being generally dissatisfied with my life, I took the decision, in 2016, to go indie full time. In 2021, I finally had enough know-how and motivation to make a proper game I could sell on Steam, which I named Extraneum.

Picking up the pace

I had already tried to make a first person shooter, named Krankenheit, with the help of Conrad Korzekwa and Romain Trotel, but it didn’t work out in the end. It was still something I wanted to make, so I figured I might as well give it another try and do it on my own.

To make sure I had better chances of actually completing it, I reduced the scope, and went from a fully 3d style and gameplay to a pixel-art, retro style and removed vertical movement in favor of something more akin to Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone. I was good enough to make the graphics on my own, but I knew my music production skills were not good enough, so I asked Ben Sua, a friend of Romain, who agreed to produce the music for a low price.

I named the game “Extraneum”, which loosely means “stranger” in latin. By the time I realized it wasn’t nearly as cool as I originally thought, it was too late to change it so I stuck to it regardless. I made an itch.io page for the game and released a first demo in July 2021. The reception was surprisingly good, it caught on fairly well on Twitter, and some Youtubers even started covering it. We were in the middle of the “boomer shooter” craze, so that helped a lot, to be fair. In June 2022, the first episode was finished, and I took the decision to put the game in early access on Steam. The extra income would help me to keep going, and I figured it was a good opportunity to gather feedback as well. Later that year, I was approached by Hellforge Studios, who offered me a publishing deal, which I accepted. Eventually, my depression relapsed, and it became incredibly hard for me to keep working on new levels, so after a talk with my publisher, we decided to hire Philip “Liberation” Brown to help build the rest of the levels. We managed to finish the game and release it on Steam in September 2024.

The aftermath

So, one year after launch, what do the numbers say? The game took 3 years to develop, and after Steam’s cut, taxes, refunds, etc., it sold about 2,400 units and made roughly $12,000 USD. Obviously not nearly enough to live off of, but definitely better than the average indie game, according to statistics.

To my surprise, most of the revenues from the game came when it was in early access. When it came out of early access, almost nobody bought it. The game had 10,000 outstanding wishlists before launch, and I thought people were waiting until it released to buy it, but that number didn’t even go down, in fact it’s now at roughly 10,600, one year after launch.

So what went wrong exactly? A lot, actually. It was my first game released on Steam and I had no idea how Valve’s platform worked until I basically learned from my mistakes. Not to mention game marketing in general is not easy. Here’s a few things I learned the hard way.

The first and most obvious thing, which is ironically something not many developers have talked about until recently (from my personal perspective) is just how most of a game’s success boils down to plain luck. With over 18,000 games that have been released in 2024 alone, I was already competing with a lot of other games to attract players. And as more and more games are being released on Steam every passing year, it’s becoming exponentially harder for everyone to get the traction needed to make a profit. It’s clearly not enough to just make a good game, you need a strong hook and marketing strategy to increase your odds, and to be also prepared for the possibility of failing anyway, even if you do everything perfectly. All things considered, I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been able to sell so many copies. That being said, my expectations were way too high and it was still, initially, a disappointment. Just like Larry David, you have to “curb your enthusiasm”.

By releasing the game in early access, I lost the opportunity to participate in the Next Fest, which crippled my marketing efforts. I didn’t know it was a thing at the time, and by the time I learned, it was too late to go back. Also, during early access, I wanted the game to be cheaper, so as to incentivize people to buy it while it was cheaper, but by doing so, I couldn’t set a launch discount, because you can’t set a different price for the game and also have a discount for it in a span of less than 30 days. I then decided to only set the new price for the game two weeks after launch, but it obviously didn’t have as much of a positive impact.

Not having a proper “hook”, especially for such a simple-looking game, made it very difficult to market. Most people saw it as just another retro shooter and didn’t pay much attention to it, despite all of the positive coverage. Calling it “cute, cozy Doom” was a decent hook, but I feel it could have been much better.

Another less-talked about reason why I think it didn’t do well on launch is because it coincided with most of my community and fan base leaving Twitter (including myself shortly after), which is where I posted about the game the most. I don’t even know if most of them were aware that the game actually launched. I started over on Mastodon and later Bluesky, but I’ve yet to have the same number of followers there than I did on Twitter.

Finally, taking 3 years to finish this game was probably too much. I had seen a few people saying that Extraneum was a “dead game” that was in “development hell” after 2 years. The internet has a short memory, if you take any more than a year between the time your Steam page is set up and your full release, you’re at risk of losing people’s interest... unless you’re making Silksong, that is.

So all in all, do I consider the game to be a failure? Not really. It’s a failure in the sense that I still can’t fully live off of the profits from my games, but it’s a success in the sense that there’s hope it will eventually become a reality. It taught me a lot and showed me that I have the potential and resources to make and release a game that will eventually be successful in every way. So I’m not giving up just yet!

What now?

I now want to take it a step further and push my skills to the limit, so for my next big project, I’m planning on having, among other things, a proper story, narration, characters, a quest system, inventory management, upgradeable gear, skill trees, and a bit of urban exploration. It might seem a lot but I believe it’s very much possible with the resources I currently have.

For now, I have to start with something smaller, and so I’ve been slowly working on a short psychological horror game that’s yet to be officially announced. It will allow me to try out some new strategies and improve my workflow, so that it will be easier to work on a bigger game later.

It’s been a wild ride, and I had to revise my goals and expectations, but I still wouldn’t see myself doing anything else. I’ll keep making games and hopefully the future has good things in store for me. Whatever happens happens!