The Astronauts have announced that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has sold over 60k copies in its first month, and have even produced an infographic helping dissect the data. Western Europe took half the sales.
The US gobbled the most units, followed by Germany and then Russia. Steam was the lead digital distributor with 77%, and over 480 players spent more than 20 hours in the game. Only 3 found the sniper rifle.
”On the surface level, 60K is not a lot, considering that currently Steam has over 100 million active accounts. It means that only 0.0006% of Steam users bought the game despite the critical acclaim and nearly 1.5K gamers giving us ‘Recommended’ rating on Steam,” said the team on their Tumblr.
”But when you dig deep, you will see that 60K copies is actually pretty good,” they continued. ”First, it’s a game from a new studio, in a genre the creators are not known from. Consumer trust is everything. Rust wouldn’t sell as much if not for the fact it’s from the developers of the legendary Gary’s Mod.”
”Our goal was to sell at least 50K copies in the first month, which is what Gone Home achieved. We chose Gone Home as a point of reference due to identical price and similar genre. I wouldn’t compare our sales directly, as – affair – Gone Home was only sold on Steam at the time, and without pre-orders, and we did pre-orders, and were available on GOG and in retail from the start.”
”But still, it seems like we have managed to hit the target. And that is great news, and our new target is 250K, which is what Gone Home sold in half a year.”
In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter we play a detective with paranormal abilities investigating the disappearance of a young boy who sent a letter asking for help. We’re free to comb over a huge environment that The Astronauts built using Unreal Engine 3, of which apparently there are almost 160 million blades of grass. Check out the infographic below for nerd stats.
