So EGX is over and since I wasn't there I have no real idea how well Virtue's Heaven was received? I got a relative ton of new wishlist entries (more on this in a moment), mostly via the steam event that was running alongside it I suspect, but I haven't really seen anyone mention the game on the internet, which is fine, but it also demonstrated something to me.
You see, I've been looking through who mentioned Virtue's Heaven on twitter and basically since I announced its Steampage in June, the only mentions of it that you can find are from me. Which heavily implies that the only person who does care about the game and its development is myself, and that's fine to a degree. Though it's not great when your goal is to either bargain whatever attention you get into a publishing deal, or to just outright sell enough copies of the finished product that you might not have to keep getting welfare for the rest of your adult life.
Yeah but what about those wishlist numbers? Relatively speaking, the EGX event went about as well as when I put GB Rober into the Steam next fest. Which for Virtue's Heaven meant, that within three days I almost got four times the amount of new wishlist entries, than I did over the last three and half months combined. That sounds impressive, but then you look at the actual numbers, and see that they went from around 250, to just shy of 900 entries. That's still a nice number of people, but compared to the amount where I could confidently project that the game is going to earn me enough money to live on my own for a year, it is just preposterously low.
So what does this mean? Now this might also be my antidepressant withdrawal talking (I'm in the process of weaning myself off of them right now), but I think it's fairly safe to assume that Virtue's Heaven won't be doing any better commercially than my previous attempts. I might still try and approach publishers for it, but I'm fairly certain that this too won't get me far.
However I also don't see a reason to stop working on it. Not for some weird notion that I have to finish it or whatever, but because I know of at least one person who does care that this game exists: Myself.
I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't hurt when something you personally are very invested in, just keeps getting met with almost complete silence, because I would be lying to myself here. But I also know that there are things in this game that I have been wanting to express for almost ten years now and I just need to do this.
A good thing that came out of this whole affair is that the past few weeks really confronted me both with what a mess this project has been so far this year, and also how much I (once again) fell into the trap of believing that for some reason I could do the impossible (make a commercially successful videogame with no budget) just by willing it into existence. So I accepted the reality of things, looked at what I needed for this game to actually exist and made a plan. My estimate says that I will have something that's technically finished by early April of next year, which is totally doable. I will just focus on doing this and just completely ignore all the number stuff, because unless something really weird happens, my efforts would not make much of a difference anyway. So I'd rather put them towards something I actually care about.
