Space Mercs Windows, Linux game

Space Mercs

Bearded Giant Games | Released 2019

Space Mercs is an extreme arcade space combat game where the amount of projectiles and lasers on-screen is only toppled by the amount of stars in the universe! Will you be able to complete all the mercenary missions and become the best pilot in the Galaxy?

Throughout the game’s 30 mission campaign you will dodge, chase, fire, escort and absolutely obliterate enemies ranging from small drones to huge battleships while bound to a single rule: “If it moves, it dies“.

The game features four different game modes, two available from the start and two that can be unlocked by progressing through the story:

Quick Battle: You are given a random ship, a random amount of wingmen, a random objective and must face off a random amount of enemies. It’s literal chaos bound to keep you by the edge of your seat.
Campaign: 30 action-packed missions that can be unlocked and explored via the Bulletin Board. You get one or more targets, an objective, reward and are sent out into space. Completing the objective rewards you with credits which allows you to purchase more ships. Destroying anything else outside of the objective will reward your with Prestige which allows you to upgrade your new ships. The backstory of the game, lore and conversation can be explored via the use of the Command Line Interface in the game. Read emails, access restricted folders and explore your Station’s computer via a bash-like interface.
Duels (1 v 1 / 3 v 3) is a mode unlocked via campaign progression that allows you to gamble some of your heard earned prestige in battle. Win and multiply your Prestige, loose and it’s back to grinding enemies on missions you can defeat.
Survival is your reward for finishing the campaign. Jump between procedurally generated sectors and defeat a ever growing list of enemies and go for the highest score possible.

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Marketing efforts and KPI's - Week 2

Jun 26 2019 News

Hello three-parts luck Giants!

Our second week of focusing our marketing efforts to get any kind of sales during launch has come and gone! We're going to review the current state of things, check for some improvements and then look at what we're going to do next.

Let's make one thing clear: For the most part, this week I focused on improving and updating the game. Beta 6 still hasn't released yet because I overhauled and re-written most of the game systems. So the results reflect that. Our current data puts us just bellow 600 wishlists for the end of the week. Here's the data:

Current wishlists: 588
Estimated week 1 net revenue: 1764$
Estimated copies to be sold: 294
Estimated year 1 net revenue: 8820$

Since last week our wishlists went up by about 100, at an average of 14 wishlists / day. That right on track with our needed wishlists ratio / day in order to reach the target wishlists of at least 1000 during launch.

It's good to be on track, let me say that! At a 10 wishlist / day rate (our current worst case scenario), we're looking at about 900 wishlists with one month and one week to go before I hit the publish button.

Wishlist conversion rate

Before we go further, let's talk about the 0.5 average multiplier (or conversion rate) between wishlist and purchases. As I mentioned in the previous posts, this is what it is. Just an average that Jake estimated based on his research. You can read more about it here.

However, just because it's an average that doesn't mean that's what it will be. For us it can be anywhere between 0.1, the more realistical 0.25 or a huge boon of 0.7+. Let me put it this way, with 1000 wishlists and a 0.5 conversion rate we're fine! It's going to allow me to work on another game this year in a similar 2-4 months time frame. It's good, it means we keep on going. However, if our actual conversion rate will be closer to 0.25 things won't look so good. In short, it's barely going to be enough to cover rent for the time spent doing development and would bring us close to almost breaking even, but not really. This would mean that I have to go get a job asap, so a bit of a more cloudy situation in terms of future Bearded Giant Games this year.

An 0.7 conversion rate would pretty much mean that I can take almost up to a year to make and release another game, giving me the option to fail at least once. It would be the best case scenario but it doesn't seem likely to me at this point.

I'm pretty sure I'm not lucky enough to achieve the 0.7 conversion rate however there is one thing that I can do, and that is, to do what I can do best: Polish the game even more and try to garner more and more wishlists before launch. A 0.25 conversion rate would be the same as a 0.5 at 1000 wishlists if I can reach 2000. So I'll do my best to push for as many as possible in order to assure I don't go back to designing free2play games.

Ogh, was I too gloomy? Sorry, here's another gif from the latest build to make up for it.

As for how development on the game is going, well, I tried my hand at a quick devlog where I talk about the changes the game received since the public demo up to the current (unreleased) beta! You can check it out bellow:

If you like the game and want to help us out, you can do so in a couple of ways:

The easiest way is to go to our store page and wishlist the game, so you'll be notified when it comes out.
Another way is to spread awareness of our marketing efforts, for two reasons:
- First one is that it's going to help other developers estimate their launch performances
  - Improve their marketing efforts
  - Adjust their expectations
- Second one is that it's also going to help boost the awareness of the game to people inside the industry. This doesn't mean just game developers, but also editors and writers. They might not want to write about the game by itself but they might find an angle about Steam's state and the game could get some more awareness because of that!
In order to help spread awareness about this you can link people to this blog post, the original one or the live data tracking document itself.
Third options to become our patrons. For as little as 1$ a month you can help us reach a steady revenue stream. We're up to 50$ a month right now and, long term, it helps a ton.
Forth option is to follow me on twitter and re-tweet my stuff! It's going to increase my reach and hopefully help get some more people to notice the game!