First-person exploration game The Stanley Parable has shattered developer Galactic Cafe’s sales expectations by selling 100,000 copies since launching last Thursday, the 17th of October.
In a blog post on the game’s website, Galactic Cafe went over their views on why their humble remake of a Half-Life 2 mod did so well financially. They credit the game’s demo, which was downloaded up to 200,000 times on Steam before the game’s release. They also credit the gaming community for passing The Stanley Parable around via posts on social networks and Let’s Play videos uploaded to Youtube. These posts and videos showed potential customers that The Stanley Parable was a quality product, and let them know exactly what kind of game they would be purchasing.
Galactic Cafe’s advice for future indie games? “Release a whole bunch of things for free in fairly quick succession, then at the end of it put a price tag on the last one.”