Image & Form - SteamWorld Heist selling better than Dig, Wii U porting issues

A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with Image & Form CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson...

NL: First of all, can you give an impression of Heist's sales performance on 3DS? It's been around 9 months since it was released, so have you been happy with its reception?

BS: I'm happy to say that SteamWorld Heist has done quite a bit better for us than SteamWorld Dig, and it's been the follow-up that we hoped for! We obviously felt the pressure after Dig did so well both in terms of sales and reception. Expectations from fans and pundits, as well as our internal drive to "use the window of opportunity" we created with Dig, were quite present at times. We really wanted to prove ourselves, that we could make something completely different and way better than Dig, that we could make games that were truly world-class.

...It's holding up very well. I'm beginning to think there's now a crowd - a good chunk of the Nintendo community - that buys our games because they're made by us. They're confident our games are a cut above the rest and worth playing. Also due to the staggered release schedule - 3DS in December, Steam/PSN in June - Steam and PSN sales are playing catch-up. When we look back at SteamWorld Dig, which had a similar stagger, we see that 3DS, Steam and PS4/Vita are now roughly equal in sales. So far Heist has fared better on 3DS and Steam than on PSN.

NL: Has working on the Wii U version been a smooth process for the team?With respect to NDAs, confidential data and so on, are you willing to say how sales on the portable have compared to subsequent releases on PC / PS4?

BS: No, it hasn't really been smooth. We've been running into all kinds of problems porting Heist, both internal and external. Like I mentioned above, porting Heist has been very much harder than porting Dig, and much has to do with the higher complexity of the game. For example, when we ported Dig to PS4, it was the first game ever to go through the PlayStation approval process on the first try.

With that background, maybe we were over-confident in our porting abilities. We got through in the end, and the Wii U version is the best version of SteamWorld Heist to date.