Ukrainian indie developer Shreibikus has seen an unexpected surge in sales after his decision to remove his visual novel JUSFASLEX from Steam. Over 100 users purchased the game at full price within a week of the announcement of the removal. The developer explained why.
Ukrainian indie developer Shreibikus has seen an unexpected surge in sales after his decision to remove his visual novel JUSFASLEX from Steam. Over 100 users purchased the game at full price within a week of the announcement of the removal. The developer explained why.
The developer shared his experience in a post on the Kutok platform. According to him, the latest sales boost brought more profit than in the previous two years and allowed him to fully recoup the costs of developing the project.
The main reason for the game’s removal was the unsatisfactory, in the author’s opinion, quality of the debut script.
«I am grateful to everyone who purchased my first novella and supported me. The game will remain in your library forever. For now, I have decided to remove it from Steam, as it is not very high quality, in my opinion. Initially, the idea was to rewrite it a little, but when I started rereading it, I realized that the novella needs a complete rethinking and writing from scratch. Perhaps one day the world will see the so-called RE:JUSFASLEX (although, I think, the name will be different), but I can’t promise anything right now,» Shreibikus explained his decision.
The process of preparing for the game’s removal lasted about six months. However, instead of a quiet delisting, the developer received anomalous sales: upon learning of the project’s impending disappearance, video game collectors began buying it en masse immediately after submitting the application on Steam.
«In general, I applied to remove the game from sales and noticed something strange. A sudden jump in sales. On the day of the removal announcement, more people bought my game at full price than on the day of release,» the developer notes.
As it turns out, there is a large community of gamers online who purposefully collect games that are disappearing from Valve’s digital store forever. Some of them even asked the developer to hold a farewell sale, but the author of JUSFASLEX decided not to do so, as he primarily wanted to hide the weak work and «quietly remove it.»
Despite the lack of discounts, over 100 people purchased the project at full price within a week. The funds received helped the developer fully cover the direct costs of the release (payment for the Steam Direct slot, services of translators, musicians, and artists), as well as compensate for the spent working time at a modest rate.
Finally, the author advised his industry colleagues to use this method for outdated projects: «If you have a game that is no longer selling well and you don’t have warm feelings for it, you can delete it and have a final sale. It won’t get any worse.»
JUSFASLEX, a kinetic visual novel with Ukrainian voice acting, was released on Steam in March 2024. It tells the story of a lonely guy trying to build a utopian society in another dimension. Shreibikus has previously experimented with monetizing his projects — he made another of his own novels completely free after two years of paid sales.
Звичайна, але дуже грамотна піар-кампанія. Схема проста як двері:
Оголошуєш за 6 місяців, що гра зникне (створюєш штучний дефіцит).
Про це пишуть усі геймерські медіа (отримуєш тонну безкоштовного трафіку).
Збираєш касу з колекціонерів та тих, хто купує "про запас", бо завтра вже не буде.
Якби дійсно хотів піти тихо - видалив би за день. А так - красиво вижав із проєкту фінальний максимум грошей під соусом красивої історії для преси..
.