Doujin circle Outside announced that Cosmo Dreamer, their first commercially, internationally-published STG, has sold a combined 5,000 copies across Steam and Switch—even some of the indie devs out there might be wondering if that's an especially notable number, given that the STG genre is sometimes perceived to have some sort of outsized cache within vintage game circles, but I can assure you that any indie/doujin STG that breaks a thousand copies sold is standing far, far ahead of the pack.
That said, there's a mostly-separate, mostly-silent ecosystem for euroshmups and other broadly shooty games the "real" STG community has deemed unworthy of attention that's happily bubbling along, and I do think it ought to be given more attention, if for no other reason than it's worth figuring out who's buying these games and why, and whether there's anything the creators of more conventional/arcade-rooted games should be doing to court them... when the ceiling is already this low, any little raise is going to be hugely beneficial.
Mando @MrMandolino
My experience with the genre is mainly Touhous and a few others here and there, but I was under the impression that it was in general very niche – even Touhou often feels less about the danmaku games and more about the gargantuan amount of derivative works it spawned. Where did this feeling of it having a massive cache come from? I feel there's a chunk of history I don't know about
I say "outsized" in the sense that there are certain outlets/platforms that do regularly review old STG ports or whatever, to the extent that some people have the impression that they're selling way better than they are or that the audience is bigger than it actually is, when they're really just a personal interest for certain individuals who want to cover 'em.
@superfunc left a comment on your post
Gun Trails has done about 3200 copies in 5.5 months (last I heard it was 3rd overall on the store and the fastest selling). Given, the playdate space is likely to behave different from steam, being a more captive audience with limited releases, coupled with the fact the game was pushing past what most games could run like (60fps) and look like*.
This kind of thing may/may not translate to steam/console. Games like Hazelnut Hex seem to do well by providing a level of visual polish uncommon to the genre (I hate it but the other example would be Jamestown here), so that may be a way for games to break out of the typical sales thresholds.
Last thought is, this may be an argument for developing in spaces like Playdate, Pico8, etc where you have a better chance of not drowning in the noise.
- (this is not a knock on other devs, my brother (the artist) and I both have a pro backgrounds, whereas many devs in that space are just getting their start)
There's certainly some value to being a big fish in a small pond, and that includes simply being an early entrant on certain platforms that are destined to grow very quickly, like console launches and so on.
Jamestown is one such game, actually: it benefited from being a danmaku game releasing on Steam during an era when that style of game didn't have much of a commercial presence on Steam, and then benefited again from being bundled to all hell before that was de rigeur, which helped it algorithmically and eventually allowed it to sell organically after a while.
Re: visual polish, it's a tricky area... I often see commentary/"advice" that amounts to "the devs should've thought about making their game look nicer" as if the entire look of their game is an area that they simply didn't consider, and as if the visuals aren't far and away the most expensive and intensive element of production—devs in this genre have to work lean or not at all, basically, and newer devs in particular are going to be at the mercy of their own immediate skillset, which they won't be able to develop if their games don't recoup. It's also a genre that tends to be more accommodating of programmer art, which has its own obvious pros and cons.
@ctmatthews left a comment on your post
that announcement is super useful to know, thank you for sharing it here! i had assumed that cosmodreamer and like dreamer sold around 7k copies each, but it's hard to estimate console sales so it's good to know that i was being a bit too optimistic.
i wish that traditional arcade-style STG sold more copies too. for what it's worth, there are quite a few that look like they probably sold around 2,000 copies or more, such as ganablade, gunvein, graze counter gm, hazelnut hex, sophstar, grand cross renovation, protocorgi, neko navy and raging blasters. but they do seem to be the exception rather than the rule, and selling 10,000 copies seems to be basically unheard of unless you somehow manage to get crossover appeal like zeroranger or drainus. even then, those developers probably would have sold more copies if they made basically any other genre of action game instead.
I don't have any real data but my observation has been that the games that are able to reach an upper sales threshold are the ones that make a sustained attempt to court a Japanese audience: not just offering a JP store listing or whatever but actively engaging with JP players, collaborating with artists/musicians, attracting the attention of JP media outlets, etc. There's a latent audience over there that will show up if you make the effort, and the % of JP purchases can be significantly higher than for other genres, even on PC.