Anodyne gets promoted on The Pirate Bay, making over $12K for its creators
This past weekend, the two-man dev team of Sean “seagaia” Hogan and Jonathan Kittaka followed in the footsteps of Sos Kaminski’s McPixel and promoted their action RPG Anodyne on The Pirate Bay, a notorious website that allows users to “share” games, i.e., download pirated copies of them.
The developers made over $12,000 in 72 hours by doing this. Wait, what?
Hogan goes over the financial aftermath of the promotion in excruciating detail on his blog, but among the most startling facts is that the promotion only cost a mere $7 to put on, which went entirely to paying hosting provider Nearlyfreespeech.net for bandwidth. “There were no other costs,” noted Hogan. Not bad for raking in over 12 grand.
A majority of this was accrued through the Humble Store, where Anodyne cost a minimum pledge of $1, while it could be bundled with its soundtrack for a minimum price of $1.50. It turned out that 4,511 copies of the solo game were sold at an average of $1.74, while the soundtrack bundle shifted 1,750 copies at a $2.76 average. This comes to about $11,504 from the Humble Store alone.
At Fastspring, where the game was also on sale for $1 over the weekend, only 450 copies were sold at an average of $1.25, for a total of $576.90.
Meanwhile, at Desura and Gamersgate, Anodyne remained at its standard retail price of $10, where it sold about 30 copies.
Elsewhere, Bitcoin donations came to about $100, while around $175 was raised for the soundtrack at Hogan’s Bandcamp page.
Beyond the immediate financial success of Anodyne, its Steam Greenlight page skyrocketed from 28,000 unique views to 41,000, bumping the game into 59th place on Valve’s community lead seeing-what-people-want service.
Prior to the Pirate Bay promo, Anodyne had been out for 10 days, and Hogan noted, “I think we accumulated 40k uniques. This resulted in around 800-900 sales between all of our channels, at an average price of I think $8.” 900 x $8 is only $7,200, so essentially in 72 hours, the developers made over 2.5 times what they did during the 10 days succeeding the game’s launch.
Anodyne, a melancholy exploration of a man’s subconscious, doesn’t look too shabby either. It even has a demo on the official site if you’d like to try it for yourself.
