The developers of the Ukrainian game Back to Hearth, about restoring a village, spoke about the project’s sales three months after its release and named their main mistakes.
The developers of the Ukrainian game Back to Hearth, about restoring a village, spoke about the project’s sales three months after its release and named their main mistakes.
«This was a project after which I clearly decided that I needed to make small-scale games. Because if there are more than three locations in a game, the work time starts to increase disproportionately. And in some cases, you can simply not take it out and end up in production hell. It’s like you’re working, doing something, but there’s no end in sight. I can’t imagine how small teams or solo developers make large, complex games,» one of the Back to Hearth authors said on Reddit.
In Back to Hearth, players must restore five houses—sometimes with a hammer, sometimes with a broom, and sometimes with a screwdriver. Afterward, the residents will return to tell their stories. According to the developers, the game, which can be completed in just one hour, took two years to create.
«Each yard is unique. Each yard has its own house with a unique interior and characters. Also, each level has many special activities that are not repeated. It turned out that the player completes one level in less than 10 minutes. That is, we spent a lot of time developing levels that have very little playtime. It was necessary to saturate each level with activities more to bring the playtime of each to at least 15 minutes,» the creators of Back to Hearth note.
They pointed out that their game was not completely «cozy», but had additional melancholic, dramatic and even disturbing notes. Therefore, fans of exclusively cozy games did not like it. According to the developers, it was necessary to play 10-15 similar projects and better research the potential audience.
«We made a game that is fully purchased only by Ukrainians. At the moment, 53% of purchases are from Ukraine. Another 20% are from Japan (this is a separate story). The USA and European countries gave us no more than 8% of the total number of purchases each. On the other hand, this is quite predictable, because at the stage of collecting wishlists, Ukraine was also top 1 with approximately 45%,» the developers reported.
According to them, the Ukrainian village is interesting only to Ukrainians and a small part of foreign players who can find Ukraine on the map, so for a wider audience, a broader setting should be chosen.
Back to Hearth was released at the end of September and currently has 2,500 copies sold and 10,000 wishlist additions.
«Such a large conversion from purchases to reviews is explained by the large number of Ukrainians among the players. It’s hard not to leave a review for a game that takes you back to your happy childhood with your grandmother in the village. But the conversion of wishlists to purchases is not very good. It turns out that out of 12,500 people who added something to their wishlist, only 2,500 bought it, that is, every 5,» the project authors noted.
