Open Letter to Gabe Newell
June marked the 10th anniversary of Barony's launch on Steam and to commemorate the occasion I wanted to write a personal thank-you letter to Gabe Newell and Valve Corporation expressing our sincere gratitude for the success we've achieved on Steam over the past decade.
Barony was in rough shape when it first launched to Steam in June 2015. At that time, the Steam Greenlight program was the path to getting published, and during our first week, Barony was passed over quickly by users who saw no appeal in our undeveloped and unpolished art. In so many words, our game looked bad, and many players assumed it would play only as well as it looked. However, I was convinced that if the Steam community tried my game or at least saw it in action, they would find the fun in it. Fortunately, I found my audience when a small group of streamers on Twitch discovered Barony and agreed to play it together. It was this audience that provided enough votes for the game to be accepted onto Steam, and over the next two months, I prepared the game for its original release on June 23rd, 2015.
Despite the help, release day forced me to face some hard realities. Barony sold about 1400 copies worldwide in its first 24 hours, netting roughly 30k over the following two weeks. Sales fell quickly until we were moving fewer than 1,000 units a month. While this still would have provided reasonable income for a single developer, the reality was that even in this nascent state, Barony had been brought to bear by a team of talented young developers which could hardly be sustained under a single developer's salary. After years of toiling together, we were demoralized. It seemed unrealistic to expect anything greater to come out of our project.
In the years before Steam, this way of looking at the life-cycle of a video game was fairly realistic. The games I personally grew up with tended to age very quickly against the tide of increasingly impressive competitors. And as video game technology advanced rapidly, one year's best seller was always expected to become next year's bargain. The idea of supporting a game several years after release was essentially unheard of, at least for commercial video games. So this is how I expected things to go for us as well.
What I didn't understand or expect was that Steam had already begun to transform the marketplace into a platform that would continually drive new players to discover our game as long as we continued to update it. Even though we never received attention from the gaming media, never won a publishing deal, and never spent a dollar on advertising, our audience and our income did not shrink to nothing, but instead grew slowly and steadily over the following several years. Eventually, our very small team of 3 developers had pooled enough funds to deliver a large update which dramatically overhauled Barony's appearance. This free "Quality of Death" update, delivered years late to a game which by most metrics could hardly support itself, was the watershed moment that transformed our personal fortunes almost overnight. We went from working part-time on this product through evenings and weekends, to quitting our old jobs to focus on our studio, expanding our team and taking full control of our careers.
Today, Barony is a big success for a small and independent team, having frequently reached the top 10 games in its category and giving us the bandwidth to continue feeding our community with new content while we develop our next major product that we hope to introduce to our fans soon.
None of this would have been possible if Steam hadn't rewarded our dedication and effort by driving new players to our game, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. As I look back on the past ten years, I am astounded we made it this far on a plan as vague as "build a good video game and it will sell itself." At the start of our journey I didn't have a clue what it could take to get my game in front of potential customers, but Steam obviated this for us so completely that all we had to do was focus on making a good game, and the customers would come.
For a penniless college dropout from the Midwest USA, Steam offered an opportunity unlike anything that had ever come before it. In so many words, it transformed my life, the lives of my teammates and all of our families as well. So on behalf of us all I wanted to acknowledge the part that Gabe Newell and his company have played in our success and offer our sincere thanks for making it all possible. To me, it is patently obvious that Gabe and the rest of the folks at Valve care deeply about games, game developers, and the entire gaming community. So I am hopeful that their leadership in this industry continues for a long time to come, as I look forward to the fruits of our future collaboration together.
Thank you Gabe!
Sincerely,
Sheridan Rathbun
Turning Wheel Games