Though it’s been more in the news lately for Goat Simulator, Coffee Stained Studios’ Sanctum 2 – a tower defense first person shooter hybrid – was a stand-out title in 2013. While the game was successful on PC, it didn’t do as well on consoles and as one developer from the studio Johannes Aspeby says on Gamasutra, ultimately ended up putting pressure on the studio.
“In retrospect the console ports were a bad idea — 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. We’re still unsure of why we sold so much more on Steam than on consoles, but if we’d take a guess we’d say that 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.
Aspeby said the returns from the console versions as “hasn’t been anywhere near the work” that was put into it and that the low sales were “very demoralizing” the studio.
“One of our arguments for continuing working on the DLC was that we already had done so much work for it. Before we knew sales we had started setting everything up for DLC since we thought we were going to strike gold. Or at least find a silver vein. In retrospect we should just have looked at the figures and seen that the work wasn’t going to pay off and killed our darling with a hatchet.”
Hopefully, if a Sanctum 3 happens, Coffee Stained Studios will concentrate all their efforts on the PC version above all.