Earlier this year, the Russian team Cats Who Play launched their new game — a real-time military strategy "Gostomelskie Bogatyri". Initially, the game debuted on VK Play (February 24), and later landed on Steam (March 31). Now, details about its performance on both platforms have emerged.
"Gostomelskie Bogatyri"
The metrics for "Gostomelskie Bogatyri" were recently shared by the studio's creative director, Vitaliy Shutov, in the Telegram group "Igotochka: Gaming Business in Russia."
According to Shutov, by early summer, the game's sales on VK Play reached 7,000 copies. In Steam, despite the later release, the results were significantly better — over 25,000 copies sold.
However, not everything is as straightforward as it seems at first glance. For a complete picture, Shutov also provided data on the demo version of "Gostomelskie Bogatyri." It turned out that VK Play users were much more willing to buy the game than download the free trial version, whereas in Steam, it was the opposite. If VK Play saw about 2,000 demo downloads (2.3 times fewer than sales), in Steam, there were 70,000 downloads (2.8 times more than sales). Shutov explains this difference as a result of audience mood: VK Play users had often heard about "Gostomelskie Bogatyri" beforehand and went to purchase it on purpose, whereas on Steam, many stumbled upon it randomly in recommendations, decided to check it out, and then filtered out for various reasons.
"VK Play is a quite decent regional platform. It's strange to simply release a game there and wait for sales, as there's less of an internal 'virality' mechanism. [...] Here, only direct targeted redirection of the player to the game page on the platform works. This is, of course, a downside. But we can’t complain, we're constantly featured on the main rotation. A huge plus for VK Play is the low platform commission and the hassle-free payment process," wrote Cats Who Play's creative director.
Shutov believes that VK Play needs to work more actively with international markets. He pointed out that currently, foreign gamers cannot purchase the game on the platform without "jumping through hoops," which costs VK Play part of its potential audience.