Minimum viable Escape Simulator would NOT have: room editor, character models, support for more than two players in multiplayer, etc.” Online co-op and modding can make such a big difference - the team was right to focus on both for launch. Online co-op and Steam Workshop? Also vital: As Tom says: “You often hear about Minimum Viable Product, and Escape Simulator goes against the grain there.

Making this counter-intuitive move paid off.

Not making Escape Simulator AR/VR was key: Tom noted: “Escape Simulator started development as AR mobile game… we decided that we have a better chance on Steam, and it is a more accessible platform to develop for.” Bingo! Although AR/VR seems like the perfect platform, the target market for a game like this is so much larger on Steam.It looks like it’s attracting casual gamers who want to play, but don’t care about reviewing? This means the game sold something like 300k+ copies, but it only had 2,238 Steam reviews at the time. The game’s doing even better than we thought: it’s still difficult to estimate sales via reviews or CCUs, and we were surprised when Tom said “the game just passed $4M in gross sales”.How did this happen? Well, with the help of a Reddit ‘postmortem’ post from Pine Studio’s Tom, we can make a bunch of extra commentary on its road to success, as follows: And with 3,100 CCUs right this second, it’s clearly becoming a bit of a sleeper hit - we’ve been paying attention to it. That was #41 out of all games released that month on our Plus charts - not bad, and a 0.30 ‘Hype to Reality’ score, double the median.īut fast forward two and a half months, and the game is now averaging 260 Steam reviews per week, which is #17 out of all titles released on Steam in October 2021 (!) That’s a major jump-up in rank. It had 332 Steam reviews in its first week on sale. So, when Pine Studio’s first-person co-op escape room game Escape Simulator launched in October, it looked, well, medium popular to us. Let’s bring back this artform.)Įscape Simulator - why is it a (semi)-surprise hit? Imagine if we all still marketed via infomercials? ( Devolver’s E3 press conferencesare probably the closest concept nowadays. Semi-offtopic: musing on the weird viral ways that content gets discovered nowadays, I just discovered this bonkers 30-minute Philips CD-i TV infomercial from the early ‘90s. It’s a borderline giant newsletter this time out, so bear with us - we’ll take you through a cornucopia of relevant content. As you ease back into work, welcome to Wednesday’s newsletter, my friends in video game discovery.

Escape simulator cracked multiplayer