The developers of an indie space sandbox game say a rare Steam bug butchered their long-awaited 1.0 launch out of early access, leading to startlingly poor sales that a make-good from Valve has seemingly done little to offset.
As Polygon spotted, Laurent Lechat, one of two developers on Planet Centauri (who I've been unable to reach for comment) recently shared their plight with the gamedev Reddit community. "This is how Steam can ruin more than 10 years of your work," Lechat wrote.
Planet Centauri had nearly 10 years of development and early access work under its belt, and had sold 103,400 units in its lifetime. Those sales may "seem incredible," he wrote, but "it's not with so many years" involved.
"So we were eager for the release of 1.0 because with so many wishlists, the game's visibility would be good, we would appear in the new and trending categories due to sales, etc.," Lechat said.
Steam had other plans. Despite 138,675 wishlists and 76% positive reviews, Planet Centauri only sold 581 copies in five days after releasing version 1.0 in December 2024. This dev says "the game didn't even appear on page 2 [of Steam trends]; we were invisible; the release was a total flop. And we never understood why until today."
Wishlists never convert to sales at a ratio even approaching one-to-one, but from the reports I've seen, and conversations I've had with other indies, the sales gap with Planet Centauri, especially given its previous updates and following, is definitely an outlier.
On September 12, the Planet Centauri devs say they received an email from Valve. It confirms an issue with Steam wishlists that "impacted a very small number of game releases (less than 100 since 2015) where wishlist email notifications for the launch of a game were not sent.
"Unfortunately your game Planet Centauri was among those included," the Steam notice continues. "We intend for this feature to work for every game and we’re inviting you to a Daily Deal as a way to help make up for lost visibility from your launch day."
Daily Deals can be powerful visibility tools to help games reach more players on Steam, but they generally can't even compare to – or make up for – a whole 1.0 launch. A deal slot would surely help Planet Centauri financially, and experts like Chris Zukowksi have gone to great lengths espousing the benefits of leveraging any visibility tools possible to get to so-called "Real Steam," but it wouldn't be a silver bullet.
Lechat reckons "it's incredible to win the lottery like this: 100 games impacted in 10 years out of the 86,000 games on Steam. And to reward you, we're giving you 24-hour visibility (which is nothing special; there are 6 slots available for this visibility every day of the year for various Steam invitations)."
"I don't even have the strength to be angry," Lechat laments. "We've been so frustrated, disgusted, and in total confusion. Now we know, we understand better, it's unfair, and we can't change anything. We've started a second project because it's financially impossible to continue patching our game, and we're moving forward, because it's the only thing to do."
Speaking with Polygon, Lechat acknowledges "we are of course perfectly aware of our own responsibility in the result, but 500 sales in 5 days was totally incomprehensible."
This downturn saw the small team "questioning themselves" amid a "loss of confidence." And this followed years of scrimping and saving to support Planet Centauri's development, with Lechat saying he and his partner minimized non-essentials, shared an apartment, and at one point sold a car.
"It's possible that Steam could have offered something more substantial," Lechat told Polygon. "It's possible that the daily deal is, in fact, a great gift despite its limited 24-hour duration. We can't tell, and we will see and hope for the best."
On the other side of the Steam lottery: Right after Silksong, a day before Borderlands 4, and just ahead of Hades 2, a new dev's co-op roguelike threaded the needle to become a top 10 seller on Steam with 100k copies sold in a day.
