You’ll remember Coffee Stain Studios lately topped Steam’s charts with Goat Simulator – but before that they made similarly profitable waves with first-person tower defence game Sanctum 2. Unfortunately, they didn’t manage the same on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
“In retrospect the console ports were a bad idea,” says Coffee Stain’s Johannes Aspeby. We’ve made about 95 percent of our revenue from PC, so having a day 1 port is not something we want to do again.”
Coffee Stain aren’t entirely sure why they made such a dramatic majority of their sales on Steam – but Aspeby hazarded a guess at “visibility”.
“It could be because visibility is much easier to get on Steam with daily deals, free weekends, etc, compared to consoles, where we got pretty much no visibility at all,” he said in a Gamasutra postmortem.
Two months of crunch time means Coffee Stain have mixed memories of porting the game to consoles – but they were able to improve stability and lower the system requirements for Sanctum 2’s PC version as a result through “harsh testing and optimising”.
“Since the consoles weren’t able to deliver the game we wanted them too, the game had to take some hard punches,” explained Aspeby. “Limitations on how many enemies we could have and introducing a tower cap wasn’t something we wanted to introduce, but were forced to since we couldn’t release a different version of the game on Steam.”
A “double-edged sword”, then. Did you buy Sanctum on PC?
Cheers, Polygon.