Planet Centauri, a 2D sandbox game blending survival, creature collection, and automation elements, didn't have the 1.0 launch it expected. Despite making over 100,000 sales and earning spots on more than 130,000 Steam users' wishlists in over 10 years of early access, indie developer Permadeath watched as Planet Centauri's full release day came—and the world barely noticed (via Polygon).
"We sold… 581 units in 5 days," Permadeath developer Laurent Lechat wrote in a Reddit post last week. "The game didn't even appear on page 2; we were invisible; we were a total flop. And we never understood why until today."
After nine months of confusion and frustration, Permadeath finally received an explanation from Valve itself: When Planet Centauri finally launched, nobody who'd wishlisted it knew—because Steam never told them.
In an email to Permadeath, Valve said that Planet Centauri's 1.0 launch suffered from "a bug that impacted a very small number of game releases (less than 100 since 2015) where wishlist email notifications for the launch of a game were not sent."
While it's unlikely that all of Planet Centauri's 130,000 wishlists would've translated into sales, Steam's failure to deliver those launch day notifications meant that Planet Centauri didn't receive crucial momentum when it would've mattered most to Valve's infamously competitive discovery algorithm.
Steam's curation algorithms are a black box, but a burst of day one sales might've placed Planet Centauri—whose 1.0 trailer has been watched almost 500,000 times on YouTube—in Steam's New & Tending listings. If launch notifications had been sent to interested users, it might've appeared on the radar for YouTubers and streamers, who might've contributed to further ripples in the attention economy.
We can only speculate how much better Planet Centauri might've sold, but it almost certainly would've sold better than it did.
In its email, Valve offered Permadeath a chance to spotlight Planet Centauri as one of Steam's Daily Deals "as a way to help make up for lost visibility."
"Now we know, we understand better, it's unfair, and we can't change anything," Lechat said. "We've started a second project because it's financially impossible to continue patching our game, and we're moving forward, because it's the only thing to do."
Lechat told Polygon that Permadeath's efforts are now focused on a roguelike being built with the same engine as Planet Centauri, as its financial situation makes further support for its failed launch unfeasible.
On Reddit, Lechat wrote that he shared his story as a "way of expressing my anger," but also to bring attention to "the problems that a platform holding 99% of the PC gaming market can cause when the cogs don't work as they should."
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