How a front page Reddit post affected the sales of an indie game.

So, on the 11th of September, right as our latest Kickstarter was dwindling into another failure (We are back at it now) I decided to write a post on reddit and let people ask me anything. I headed on over to r/iAMA and posted this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3kj5ko/i_am_the_ceo_of_an_indie_game_development_company/

Needless to say I was a bit frustrated with the whole situation at that point, I needed to vent a little. I know the world doesn't owe us anything, and we chose to make games, nobody made the decision for us. Sometimes you still just need to vent!

What happened afterwards blew my mind. I refreshed and saw 4 questions had popped up. Ok somebody is actually interested, nice! Let's answer these. After I had answered I refreshed and saw another 6, the post was also getting upvotes. It took me a little while to answer these and after refreshing a third time I had dozens of questions! Once upvotes reached 700 I just had to look over to the Reddit front page and there it was!

The post ended up staying on the front page for the maximum 24 hours. I stayed up 12 hours straight answering these questions, eventually I had to go to sleep and continue on the next day. I got a lot of good and valuable critique, as well as comments like: "Why are you such an obvious loser?". This made me chuckle. I have no direct answer for this, my friend!

Almost a month has passed now and I wanted to share how all of this affected the sales of our then only mobile game Battlestation: Harbinger (Google Play)(Apple App Store). The game will be on Steam Q1 2016.

Google Play store page visitor statistics. Visitors from reddit can be attributed mostly to the third-party referrer category. In total the game app store page got almost 16 000 visitors thanks to reddit.

Daily Google Play sales of the game. Due to differing time zones the highest peak is shown September 12th instead of September 11th. 1779 units sold in total during these two days, and a total revenue of 3198€. 10 times more than normal at the time. All time record.

Apple App Store visitor statistics. Views hovered around 600-800 a day before reddit. Approximately 12 000 visitors more during these days thanks to reddit.

Daily Apple App Store sales of the game. 886 units sold during these two peak days, a total revenue of $2250. 10 times more than normal, all time record. The game was on sale in Google Play at the time, which explains the differences in units sold and revenue.

Google Play App Annie statistics. This shows the placement of the game in top paid lists in various countries. The game jumped from place 20 on the list to 2 in almost every country, selling better than it ever had before. Thanks to the better placement in the lists the game kept selling better for a while after the reddit post.

The sessions for the home page of the game. The link had to be removed from the reddit post due to the site not being able to sustain the traffic. Even so, the web site gathered 4700 sessions during these two days.

Twitter statistics from the tweet that served as proof for the r/iAMA post.

There you have it! Reddit was definitely a nice surprise in a dire moment for us, but by no means are we out of the slump yet. We are still, however, trucking on. Our next step is to bring Battlestation: Harbinger (Google Play)(Apple App Store) to Steam better than ever, and that means we need to make improvements, as suggested by our very enthusiastic community of players. We are currently running a Kickstarter for an Extended Edition of Harbinger, and we have had a great start.

Until next time!