http://www.wrackgame.com/blog/2014/01/hot-steamy-analysis/

You may by now realise that I do like these developer post mortems, and I like sharing them.

Wrack is a cell shaded FPS with very old school mentality, still in alpha. It is really fun to play. Wrack has been sold in its alpha stage for a year and a half now, and got greenlit 2 months ago.

There are a few interesting point in this analysis I find interesting

1- They made as much in 1 week on Steam as they did through 1 and 1/2 years sold combined.
2- When they got on Steam, other sales dried up, even though the others comes with Steam keys
3- They got highest sales after loosing the community vote during the christmas sale :)



And finaly, vote for Wrack on the wishlist: http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/wrack

I was going to point out that they got significant exposure during that community vote, even if they lost. It's really not surprising they had got their highest sales after that.
As for point 2, one thing I've noticed so far (and I find really disappointing) is that most indie developers don't even try to match the game prices on their websites with those on Steam during the big sales. I wanted to get games like Steam Marines or Delver, that I noticed during the winter sale, but the developers didn't have any kind of sale on their sites. I can't recall if that was also the case with Wrack.
I found this pretty unexpected though:
"When I heard that Wrack was up for a vote, I thought to myself “Well, I guess we’re not going to have any sales over the next 8 hours while people wait to see if it wins or not.” Not only was I (as usual) wrong, but sales actually picked up big time! Whether it was from people wanting to support us developers (THANK YOU!), or people not wanting to wait 8 more hours to get their hands on Wrack, sales really shot up over that period."

Yeah, that was what I meant... even though they still had not finished the vote, sales picked up. You would assume that people would wait until they see who won or not.

Getting on Steam really is a big thing for indie developers. As much as people here hate Steam (with some valid points), we can't deny how important it is for the indie scene. The amount of exposure an indie game gets on Steam is just insane.

Thanks for the article OP. All i can say is, its all about exposure. Steam has what.. 60million in their customer base done they?. Plenty of people to show off new games (even among the tons of games on that site). It seems weird a dev tells people to buy it off steam (unless he has a weird deal, he gets more of the $$ if bought through his site).

Yes.

Basically, Valve do not care what the developers/publishers does. Valve give them access to the backend and steamwork tools, and leaves everything up to them to use and do with as they wish. I think Wrack is a DRM free game on Steam, the builds on Desura, Gamers Gate and from the Devs are, if I remember correctly.

See, that makes me wonder why an indie developer would CHOOSE DRM (being the Steamworks CEG) over DRM free.

same reason as anyone else would. Some just don't believe in DRM free. It is a personal choice.

Some don't also believe that Steam is true DRM either. I would imagine for many devs, the pros of getting your product out there and making it successful to the widest audience possible outweigh whatever negative comes with Steam (and to be honest, I've never seen an indie dev or any dev for that matter constantly rail against Steam).

The fact that sales go down once it got on Steam tells you all you need to know about the current digital marketplace climate. Everyone else is fighting over the scraps.

It depends on what your definition on what DRM is. For some the use of a client in itself is not DRM per see, but rather whether the software is tied into it or not. If so, then the use of Steam as a delivery system is not DRM, and it is optional to use Steams DRM systems (which is CEG).