Helium Rain [Steam, Official Site], the gorgeous space sim from Deimos Games is really quite good so it's a shame they've seen such low overall sales. In total, they've had around 14,000€ (~$17,000) in sales which is not a lot for a game at all.
The good news, is that out of the two thousand copies they say they've sold, a huge 14% of them have come from Linux. It's worth noting, that number has actually gone up since we last spoke to them, where they gave us a figure of 11% sales on Linux.
They also said this, which was nice:
Linux is now a first-class citizen too, thanks to volunteer players who helped fix issues on their platform.
You might think "well, considering how high their Linux sales are, shouldn't they fix the issues themselves?" and it's a good question. However, they're also keen to remind eveyone, that their source code is up on GitHub. Anyone can come along and suggest fixes and working with the community is a great thing.
Here's a reminder of what you can see in the game:
Direct Link
They also said they plan to leave Early Access at the end of the summer, so hopefully their final release goes down well with people holding off while it's in development.
See the full update on Steam.
Thanks for the tip, TapocoL!
Don't get me wrong, sometimes early access is done right, moreover it's a good way to help small development studio; But I've seen many games stucked in early access and never finished. It kinda feels like gambling.
Just to clarify, we thank volunteers who helped us track issues down, but issues were always fixed on our side. We're not asking anyone to do our job for us ! We're just very happy that some users could help us by providing very detailed debugging information or by testing specific versions of the game.
Update: Done :P
Last edited by minkiu on 25 April 2018 at 6:59 pm UTC
I must say that I really like to have the convenience of steam and the freedom of GOG. It looks like the GOG release is not up to you, but is the Steam version DRM-free? Ideally, the game would be accepted on GOG and I could purchase it once to get it in both stores (did you think about HumbleBundle?).
Last edited by MayeulC on 21 April 2018 at 1:04 pm UTC
Quoting: StrangerHi, dev here - thanks for the kind words !Great to see you here :)
Just to clarify, we thank volunteers who helped us track issues down, but issues were always fixed on our side. We're not asking anyone to do our job for us ! We're just very happy that some users could help us by providing very detailed debugging information or by testing specific versions of the game.
Just to be clear, the way I wrote the bit about fixing issues yourselves was meant as a jokey way :)
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