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The original was posted on /r/godot by /u/oppai_suika on 2025-06-01 14:39:31+00:00.
Hi all,
So a little over a month ago I released Tuna Hake’s Underwater on steam. u/bort_jenkins asked me to come back and give my sales data- so here I am! Happy to answer any questions and hopefully this is useful for some of you guys who are planning to release a game soon.
Anyway- here’s a summary:
Most of my wishlist’s came after I launched (the spike is launch day):
At launch time I had ~240 wishlists I think
My costs:
- Assets: $204.35
- Music/Audio: $117.79
- Playtesting: $51.48
- Godot Tools: $6.90
- Reddit Ads: $80.06
Total: $460.58
Marketing
This is always the section I look towards in these retrospectives, so I’ll put as much detail as possible here.
My best performing organic posts:
- Launch video (twitter) - 3.1k likes
- Launch video (bsky) - 1k likes
- Launch video (reddit- here, literally this sub lol) - 1k upvotes
- Grind rails (reddit- here again) - 1.3k upvotes
- Dark souls death animation (reddit- r/ indiedev) - 7.6k upvotes
- performing tricks (reddit, here) - 800 upvotes
Based on the above, I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of buyers were other devs (even a significant proportion of my twitter/bsky followers are devs or involved in the industry in some capacity). I think this tracks because so far I haven’t received a negative review yet- despite definitely deserving it (there were a lot of bugs, especially in the beginning). I think developers are more supportive of other devs, so if the game ever expanded to a more general audience I’m sure the review percentage would tank a fair bit.
For paid marketing, I tried out Reddit Ads. The results weren’t great (lost at least $60 of my $80 budget lol) but I think it might be worth it if you have a more expensive game or are able to convert impressions better than me:
It was my first time paying for ads so it was a learning experience for me tbh, maybe I could’ve done better if I knew about proper marketing and shit
Then finally- streamers. I did provision keys for streamers, but I have a huge mental block stopping me from cold calling so I only used 1 which was for a very small streamer who DM’d me. The rest I just gave away to people on reddit & twitter.
That said, some streamers did play my game (I guess they bought it). Most of them were very small (<100 viewers) but here are some of the bigger ones:
- Vinesauce joel (twitch) - 25k views
- Squeex (twitch, played for like 5 mins because it was making him feel motion sick lol) - 93k views
- Michael_Cache (yt shorts) - 1.1k views
- LAZULI Ch. (yt) - 1.8k views
Anyway, let me know if you have any other questions. Obviously it wasn’t a crazy crazy success but I’m really happy with it- when I launched with 200 wishlists I was expecting it to sell like 20 copies and die and swift death, so it far exceeded my expectations