Multiple Switch indie devs see major success with drastic eShop sales

There's been a trend on the Switch eShop in the past few months when it comes to sales. Some games end up seeing insanely large price cuts, with games temporarily dropping their price 95%, if not more. Sure enough, the sales tactic works, and the game shoots up to the top of the eShop charts. In an interview with Kotaku, multiple indie devs have discussed how the over-the-top cuts have lead to some big sales and recognition for their games.

Jordan Taylor, Draw a Stickman: EPIC 2 dev

- sales increased 1,000 times with a drop to 99 cents

“This one made me a bit nervous. We definitely did not expect such a substantial increase.”

Matt Bitner, creator of the roguelite Metroid-style game A Robot Named Fight

- sales increased 1,500% compared to the previous month

“I was vaguely worried that it may devalue the game, but it was already out on that shop for a year and a half, so I didn’t have a lot of reservations. It was night and day. During that sale it performed better than launch. It’s done well enough for me to continue making games.”

Seth Scott, dev on Membrane

- just 1% of total sales for the game came from when it was at regular price

“We got some visibility in the Coming Soon section, but we saw that once we were out of that page, our sales would drop to practically nothing. We had the idea to start experimenting with putting it on sale and hopefully get into the Great Deals section. We want to find the sweet spot where people buy it without thinking about it,. We just eclipsed 100,000 sales with our last discount of 99 percent off.”

Milan Babuškov, dev on Quest for the Golden Duck

- made it to the digital-only Best Sellers list after being discounted from $9.99 to 39 cents

“I cannot compete with companies like Forever Entertainment or QubicGames, who develop small games and push new ones all the time. So I decided to go into smaller games myself as well. I had been developing a lot of small games in the past, most of those open source or free to download. I started to port some of my old projects to Switch, with updated graphics and improved game mechanics. I sold those games for as low as 19 cents on eShop. The price does not matter much and it might even be good to keep the price high, but the rankings are done by number of copies sold, so the more units you sell the more visibility you get.”