Jan 22, 2023 3 min read Luck be a Landlord

Luck be a Landlord - Launch Numbers & What's Next?

It's been a wild couple of weeks with releasing v1.0 of Luck be a Landlord (and the 23 hotfixes that followed). I was absolutely floored with the reception to the game's full release! I've always heard that many players wait until the end of an Early Access period to try out a game, but I wasn't expecting the player numbers the game has had upon reaching v1.0:

SteamDB graph of concurrent player numbers for the past 3 months

The above graph, provided by SteamDB, shows that about 3 months before the game's full release, the game was averaging about 150 concurrent players on Steam. Luck be a Landlord has actually never dipped below 100 concurrent players on Steam since endless mode was added. This is an incredible number on its own, and fills my heart with joy to know that so many people are playing my game at any given time.

That having been said, now that the game has fully released, it has averaged about 1,000 concurrent players on Steam. I keep waking up expecting the number to go down, but it still hasn't. Thank you all so much.

In regards to sales numbers, I'm not going to disclose exact amounts, but I will say that the number of copies sold during launch week was roughly 30 times the amount sold in the first week of October 2022. I'm using that time period since it was roughly 3 months ago, which is a decent control group since it was before the game started getting more attention from the boss fight addition and Steam sales.

The fact that the game was in the New & Trending section on Steam for over a week definitely contributed to these high sale/player numbers. I've heard other developers say that it's very important to push for as much time as possible in the New & Trending section. This was proven as fact for me since more than 75% of Luck be a Landlord's Steam impressions during launch week came from being in this section. While I didn't intentionally do anything in particular to get algorithm-senpai to notice me, I'm certain I wouldn't have been in the section nearly as long (if at all) if the game didn't have an Early Access period.

This begs the question: What's next for the game and for me?

I've seen some discussion in the discord about minor balance changes that could be made, and while the game's balance isn't perfect, I don't foresee myself making any balance changes to Luck be a Landlord now that the game's out of Early Access.

I've also seen a few folks wondering if I'm going to work on another game at any point, and I absolutely will be! However, there's still some work to be done on Luck be a Landlord before Game #8 can enter production (I consider Luck be a Landlord my 7th released game, hence the naming convention here).

This is subject to change, but the following major tasks on my to-do list are as follows (in order of probably-done-first to probably-done-last):