Sales Figures for Seawolves on the Commodore 64

By Kodiak

I have often wondered about the true level of digital download sales for commercial games on the Commodore 64 in the scene’s present middle-aged consumer market, and if you are an aspiring C64 games developer, you might very well be wondering the same.

Of course, when I say “middle-aged”, there is a subtle inference or subtext suggesting that, in theory at least, these are not penniless teenagers who must resort to piracy to get their hands on the latest “wares”.

No, I am presuming that most of them have had their financial “ducks in a row” for a long time by now and can therefore afford to indulge in a bit of retro nostalgia.

And sure, I know that statistically there must be some old sceners who are broke, but one tends to (or likes to) imagine that such are merely outliers unrepresentative of the scene as a whole.

So with that sweeping assumption laid down right at the start, I come to disclose and review the sales figures for my first ever new Commodore 64 game release, Seawolves, which was unleashed in March 2024, albeit only in a digital format.

Would you like to hazard a guess?

What would you think the sales levels would be of a very positively reviewed game that took approximately 15 months to develop, using some pretty exotic coding tricks and endless play testing and fine-tuning?

400 copies?

300?

200?

All wrong.

Try just over one hundred sales in the space of 15 months.

Yes, you read that right.

The customer list is just over 110, with the greater bulk of them loaded into the first 3-4 months.

Early Promotional Efforts + Buyer Demographics

I used my YouTube channel to spread the news, as well as my own website (before my appalling web host, tsohost, vanished from the face of the earth and took kodiak64.com with it).

Favourable reviews quickly followed from Retro Gamer Nation and BastichB (although he omitted it from his list of top 10 games for 2024), and it was on the crest of the ensuing waves that most of my sales came.

By far, most of the sales came from Germany, followed by the UK.

Understandably, very few in the US bought the game, given that it is PAL-only.

Why No itch.io Presence?

I made a conscious decision not to use itch.io to sell the game because, as a matter of principle, I did not and still do not agree with their sign-up terms.

Some have decried that as a mistake that has harmed my sales, and it may indeed be true that it has hampered sales, but not as much as piracy has.

Instead I have confined sales to my own platform which, as alluded to earlier, was offline for a period – I think 2-3 months – in the aftermath of my web host debacle, and during that period two or three people privately asked to buy the game.

In all, I estimate the game raised somewhere between £700 and £800 in sales (as some very generous people paid far more than the asking price), so one would be clinically insane to imagine it was a success.

In fact, I would say that unless I release the proposed enhanced cartridge version of the game, it has been a grade A waste of effort.

Lessons for Parallaxian

In many respects I saw Seawolves as a pathfinder for the planned Parallaxian release.

It helped me refine my own concept of what makes a game playable and addictive, shifting my natural focus on impressive effects away to gameplay instead, although I now insist that both are equally important, as opposed to my previous fixation on emphasising effects.

I also was keen to see how my enemies in the scene would react, but they largely ignored Seawolves, possibly due to the effusive praise the game was receiving.

That said, I knew they would not forget Parallaxian, as the December fiasco proved when it smoked out you-know-who.

One of the biggest lessons, however, that Seawolves taught me was the folly of digital releases.

Since the well-heeled middle aged scene (as I imagine it to be at least!) is still acting like spotty teenagers freely pirating digital content, the only path open to me for releasing Parallaxian is cartridge, and yes, I have asserted this before, but here I will do so again: there will NEVER be a digital release of Parallaxian, so if anyone wants to play it, they will have to use real hardware or else have access to a buyer of the cartridge willing and able to illegally copy it into a digital format.

Closing Thoughts

Overall then, my experience with developing Seawolves has been demoralising and demotivating to say the least, but was not entirely unexpected.

I am still working hard on Parallaxian and if it gets finished, boy oh boy, what a game it will be!

But it will also be my last attempt at any kind of “AAA” game on the C64, which means I am saying Deep Winter is hereby formally cancelled... To be fair, the total lack of encouraging feedback from those I sent early tech demos to had already decided that anyway.

Nevertheless, I would like to think I will carry on coding to keep my brain sharp even after Parallaxian, but only on minor projects, such as the planned Seawolves II game.

As for professional game development on the C64, I would strongly counsel anyone thinking about it to look for something far more productive instead and just let the shovelware keep on flowing to feed to the crackers until the scene finally peters out.

But that’s just my opinion, obviously.

Kodiak.

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