Cyberpunk management sim Spinnortality made $90,000 in its first month

In Spinnortality you're the CEO of a corporation in the year 2060. Shadowy board members have given you the task of researching brain-transfer immortality so they won't die, and to achieve that involves raising a lot of capital. If you fail, the implant they've put inside you goes off and, bingo bango, it's all over. It's like Syndicate with finance instead of combat. Rather than miniguns, there's focus groups to figure out which megastate any given slogan is likely to appeal to.

James Patton, the Austrian indie developer behind Spinnortality, has made his sale numbers public via his blog. Though it didn't set the internet on fire, Spinnortality did sell "about 7000 copies on Steam, and 33 on itch" in its first week. As we know from Cultist Simulator and countless others, it's typical for indie games to sell significantly more on Steam than any other platform, though Valve takes a 30% cut of what, in Spinnortality's case, was "about $70,000".

Now, a month after release, that number's up to $90,000, Spinnortality having sold "nearly 9000 copies on Steam and itch combined". It's enough money for Patton to make another game, and he seems pleased with the result even if he puts a lot of it down to luck. "It’s no Minecraft, certainly", he writes, "But these sales numbers are as good as they could possibly be, I think: this is a first-time game from a relatively unknown person with very little PR footprint or established reputation."

For more about Spinnortality, here's our preview of it from last year.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.