What is the reason why Steam's VR bow game 'QuiVr' started from early access and succeeded in selling 35,000 books?

VR game " QuiVr " to repel the enemies attacking the base with the bow appeared as early access version (middle version in development) in Steam in December 2016, and it is about 35,000 in about 1 year and 6 months Succeeded to sell, its sales amounted to about $ 700,000 (about 78 million yen). How Jonathan Schenker, developer of QuiVr and Aaron Stanton, who supported him as a business partner, talked about Upload VR as to how the work which was an unnamed title was able to achieve large sales I will.

How QuiVr Sold 35,000 Copies In Early Access
https://uploadvr.com/quivr-early-access-35000/

Mr. Schenker and Mr. Stanton encountered Mr. Schenker got a job of web development after graduating from college and lived a daily life as a full-time worker. Also, since he had experience developing using the game engine Unity , he was also developing QuiVr in parallel at the free time. Mr. Schenker at the time was satisfied only by seeing the impression of the person who played QuiVr such as Reddit, it seems that development was proceeded with hobby without having especially large goal. The movie of QuiVr at this time was released on YouTube, you can see that the game was made with content that aimed at the bow at that time.

HTC Vive Archery: Week 1 DevLog - YouTube


Mr. Schenker, who had been living like that, met Stanton one day. Mr. Staunton had the experience of having established a startup named BookLamp that analyzes the contents of the book for big data and sold it to Apple. Mr. Staunton who felt possibility of QuiVr gave advice to Mr. Schenker to make QuiVr attractive from his experience of selling his company to a major company. One of the advices Mr. Stanton gave was "to outsource graphics for better design."

◆ Market Analysis - And, Mr. Schenker will start doing the project together in about a month after meeting Stanton. The work that they first collaborated was "market analysis". They analyzed the selling prices and sales situation of other games, and investigated the appropriate price to be set for QuiVr. The final price we decided was $ 19.99 (about 2200 yen), and we anticipated that sales from 2000 to 6000 were solid.

◆ Investment - Mr. Staunton, if you invest 30,000 dollars (about 3.3 million yen) from the anticipated sales amount, you can order the game's own graphics, not the material for games in the current Unity Asset Store I thought it would be like. So Schenker and Mr. Stanton both contributed $ 15,000 (about 1.65 million yen). In addition, it was said that the investment amount and the forecasted sales amount were estimated with a number with a considerable margin, and it seems that the forecast of the actual sales volume was a higher number.

◆ Determining release timing
The key to the development of QuiVr is the " Design of 18 pages " published in October 2016. I already released a free demo version of QuiVr at this point, but I did not know how many users would buy when releasing earlier access version. Therefore, by publishing the design document of QuiVr, it seems to investigate how many buyers appear from the access number of the design book. Mr. Stanton says, "It is important that the size of the project matches the expected earnings," he says, if the amount actually earned as a profit falls short of the forecast, the progress of the project will be affected. According to Mr. Huang said, "If the investment amount is less than $ 15,000, if there is even a little user recognition, it is also possible to immediately release the early access version and develop it with profit." I will.

◆ Early access version sales
QuiVr's early access version will be on sale in December 2016, with sales of 818 on the first day, from 100 to 150 per day thereafter, 15 to 20 sales per day after one and a half years It was said that it settled down. Mr. Staunton said, "I can make a very large profit at a timing like summer sale and get most revenue at this timing," he said, talking a lot of advance promotion etc. to attract users' interests If you do, it is said that there is a high possibility of releasing at the timing of sale and making a big profit. However, QuiVr has released the early access version early, so he missed the timing.

◆ Multiplayer
As a feature of QuiVr, multi-player support is cited. As a feature of multiplayer, it is condition that "a plurality of users are playing the same game at the same timing", but in the case of a VR game, since the VR headset has not spread so far, it is the same There was a problem that the number of users playing the game tends to be small, the skill difference of the participating members becomes large, and there are not players so that they can play multiple.

Although QuiVr recommends multiplayer, play skills of cooperative players are designed not to affect the other user. Also, even though there are no players logged in at the same timing, NPC (non-player character) automatically participates in multiplayer, so it seems to eliminate the problem that multiplayer can not be done.

Communication - Finally Schenker says that "communication is the most important to making a business successful." Mr. Stanton, "I am trying to exchange ideas without ignoring the opinion that was directed to me, from Mr. Stanton, my family, or any person, and I have my own strengths and weaknesses By firmly understanding, we will be able to firmly determine whether to respect the opinion of the other party or to select your own opinion ", he concluded the article of UploadVR.