While October was ridiculously busy this year, the normally extremely hectic November has been slower. One of the games that has been released this month is Spirittea, a game that has often been compared to a Spirited Away-themed version of Stardew Valley.
It has generally been very well received (we are still working on our review), and it seems like it is off to a good start. In a series of X posts, Mike Rose - the founder of the indie publisher No More Robots - had tons of interesting details to share about the release. Amongst other things, it turns out the game is largely missing on YouTube, as he didn't want to pay YouTubers to stream his game:
"Now look, I get it -- that's just how this works now. YouTubers want you to pay them to cover your games. Alright, sure. But I just don't want to do that. It feels weird and icky and disingenuous, and I just can't do it. So I guess our games won't get covered on YouTube anymore!"
Rose also says they have 150,000 players of the game already, which became profitable day one and it has been on the Top Sellers chart on Switch ever since the launch last week. Spirittea is currently available for PC, Switch and Xbox and the console versions are "accounting for 80% of the revenue". This is the opposite of how it usually is, he says, but speculates that more and more AAA titles are being released on Steam as big publishers have "failed to make non-Steam PC platforms happen" - and this is making it harder to reach out for indies.
Another interesting nugget is that he says "Game Pass has (as usual) been huge for us" bringing over 100,000 players, and the deal actually helped improve the game for everybody as way more content was added as a result:
"Spirittea was actually meant to launch in 2022, but after we got a Game Pass deal we decided hey, let's make this thing even bigger and better -- hence the delay into 2023, and the 100+ hours of content"
As already stated, we are currently working on our review and will get back to you shortly with our full impressions. Have you tried Spirittea yet?
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