I reckon Planetary Annihilation has been a huge success for Uber

Ok, so I've been looking at the top 100 sellers chart (http://tools.garry.tv/steamchart/?show=233250&range=180) where PA has been in the top 100 for months. Maybe not super high, but respectably at least placing in the top 100 pretty consistently.

That's frigging amazing.

Found the Ars Technica article on their 'Steam Gauge' stat collection, and they had this chart:


Now they were working with a larger sampling of course, but over the course of 6 months PA has been in the Top 100 pretty consistently. Taking a wild guess at some of this data, and you could guess that since PA has been selling consistently at the > 100 mark for about 6 months, it's been doing *very* well.

I'm still trying to find more information on how well it's sold (because it's not just sold on Steam), but my guess is something in the range of 150,000 - 250,000 copies.


Add in the fact that they have the funds to split off and begin dev of another game, they've got enough funding to support another team of people, which from the beginning of PA they didn't have.

Put it all together, and I think perhaps some of the 'Hey, Uber you're doing it wrong' threads fell on deaf ears due to the game actually being successful.

Getting a lot of sales ≠ being successful. (see the newest Sim City and Sims)

That being said, this is pretty cool data, and I'm glad PA is doing so well.

Lets help it continue to do better!

Sales are only relevant for making money. You need retention if you want the game to succeed. Poor experience = lower retention = worse experience due to fewer players = even less retention = downward spiral that extends elsewhere and results in a sales drop due to people hearing about it.

Well, figure that the top 100 sellers is rated based on value sold. So, by that metric, PA has successfully outsold for six months, even in pre-access, all but 100 of the most profitable games on Steam.

Yes, player retention is a point, but it's a pretty small point, value-wise. Player retention only counts for multiplayer games (see that article I linked for details) - and by anyone's reckoning, an hours-long strategy game is going to have a vast majority of offline players compared to online ones.

In fact, it seems likely that HR is going to be a stronger multiplayer game in any case - the premise seems much shorter and geared towards fast paced, 20-30 minute battles.

Possibly. I am personally glad Uber is doing well enough to run 2 projects, as well as their ingenious idea to burn their candle from both ends and use their engine to develop opposite spectrum RTS. They chose PA because it was a spiritual successor of TA, the nanolathe commander genre done their way, full scale macro. They chose HR because it is a new entry to the micro scale C&C/Starcraft style RTS where you use 30 units tops instead of 300, and that gives them the reason to develop the collection economy, unit abilities, detailed graphics, frequent terrain manipulation, and other stuff not needed for PA.

Really, the drama is silly, I see no reason to be full scale supportive to get the best out of this opportunity. Then again, I was more a C&C fan then a TA fan tbh, that is no secret either.

It would be really cool to have solid numbers. Hopefully one day we will.

1.Uber doesn't seems to be at a good financial state before PA, due to the failure of SMNC.

2.Neutrino mentioned many times that the PA kickstarter campaign was merely testing the water, and 2.2 millions was small money to them. It seems the real budget of PA isn't far away from a "AAA" RTS game.

3.I'm mostly certain that SupCom sold much more than PA, and SupCom didn't generate enough revenue to THQ, according to Neutrino.

So I guess at best PA returns Uber's finance to a mildly good state but damaged their reputation a lot, at worst it damaged both and the Human Resource kickstarter is a desperate attempt.

Well, take 20 people (rough guess for the team), average salary at 65,000, and you've already got 2.6 million spent. That's nearly covered by the kickstarter, and the KS team was 10 people.

Assuming that salary is about 75% of business cost (probably low considering they only produce software), we could come to a number of maybe 3.5 million cost total up to this point. That's still a small fraction of the initial 10 million of Supreme commander.

Assume again that at minimum they've sold as much product value as they did to Kickstarter backers, and you've got another 2.2 million - leaving them with a surplus. Which I don't think is a crazy idea, considering that early access etc has been priced similarly to the kickstarter. And that would be only 50,000 units sold after the KS.

Judging by the graph in my original post, I'm guessing that it's even higher than that.

Finally, add in to the mix the fact they've literally hired a new person (Jables) to manage PA post-release, he's mentioned they have heaps of plans yet, and you definitely get the feeling things in the PA universe are flowing along very steadily.

Put it all together and it comes out seemingly pretty rosy for Uber - it also might explain a little why they may have dismissed some of the early warning signs of discontent in the forums. Why worry if your product is selling enough? Are we perhaps just a vocal minority? etc. When the discontent came out on the HR kickstarter and PA reviews etc, I suspect they may have gotten a bit of a shock.


That's my theorycrafting at least

A large part of the team are not average game developer, comparing them to the average could possibly like comparing average actor salary to a film star's.

Most people in the industry are probably the developers of third-rate mobile and social games, not someone who has chance to work on a major kickstarter project.

Sorry just dont think it would make sense for a struggling studio to pay super star top rates for a developer regardless of their talent. Not least because Neutrino reckoned he had enough to fund pa at 900k. That to me doesnt say team of 10 making 150k a piece. I figure neutrino and a couple other guys perhaps but I'm just pulling numbers out my *** at this point and probably making the entire Uber team chuckle at me

How do you make talents work for you if you don't pay them enough?
Neutrino is the CTO of Uber, CTO annual salary is about 200k on average, and Neutrino isn't a average CTO, he's the kind of technician that is capable of creating revolutionary engine techs. PA is a very tech heavy game, it has been in development for at least two years and Neutrino sometimes works more than 40 hours a week on it, not only work on the tech part but also on the design part. I'm fairly certain 900k isn't even enough for paying him alone.

Getting a lot of sales is the definition of successful within any industry that costs money to produce products for.

* or rather, getting enough sales to make back investment plus ROI for the investors concerned. This doesn't always have to be a "lot" of sales. But it usually is.

It's not a multi-million company that makes billions of dollars a year. It's a small business. From what I know of small business, you're not going to suck money out of your company by paying yourself a huge salary when you know that putting that straight back into the company is what's going to make the difference between success (and a return on your investment) and failure.

No matter how much you want to deny it, Uber was the main source for the drama and it's obviously having an effect on the current Kickstarter campaign. The only thing I agree with you is that yes, Command and Conquer is a fantastic game and, if you don't already know about it, you should check out Grey Goo - currently in development by Petroglyph (whom are staffed by Westwood alumni).

Supcom was a more expensive game to make than PA, mainly due to factions and a campaign.

It may have an effect, but I also know a big effect is just the fact KS isn't as popular anymore, I've seen really great KSs not get funded. :/

Neutrino, Berry and Scathis created Uber out of a bedroom. I'm fairly certain their salaries are the lowest out of all Uber mainly because they're still investing that money back into the company. Besides, all of them are successful developers and I'm sure they all have a lot of cash saved up from their previous work. 20 years in the software dev industry can bring you a lot of money.

It would be different if Neutrino was hired to be a CTO, then I assume he would request a full salary or leave. This way this is his company, something he created and something he loves and I'm sure the money comes second. As for the other employees, many would leave if not paid, same as it happened with SMNC years ago.

Sales is a factor.

And some people may consider sales to be the only metric in success, but that is definitely not the case, again, as we have learned from many other games.

There's a reason why game franchises will be dropped or firms will close up even after releasing a game that got a decent amount of sales. If a game is poorly made, even if it sells a lot, it can still kill a franchise.

I hate to say it, but PA is kinda an example of this. Even though it got a lot of sales, because of the many issues, it doesn't look like HR is going to get funded because of how PA was handled. If PA had been handled better, HR would have been funded no problem. I just hope Uber can recover from how PA has been handled.

What games have sold fantastically but still managed to kill the franchise? I genuinely can't think of any.

TA: Kindgoms