Weekly Update #68: Graduation Day

Yesterday, Starcom: Nexus graduated from Early Access after exactly one year.

It’s been a pretty stressful week, largely due to anticipation. If you are not a game developer, you may not know that a game’s first week on Steam in a huge predictor of its lifetime sales. It gets more complicated with Early Access titles, because their launch is sort of split between entering launch and graduation (with a large number of games languishing forever in Early Access). As a result, there’s less data to predict how an indie title will fare when it finally dons its cap and gown. This uncertainty provokes a certain amount of anxiety.

Now that it’s out the uncertainty is lessened with initial numbers looking good, but I’m still in high stress mode. Not quite as stressful as when the game first entered Early Access, but still a bit hard to focus.

There hasn’t been a lot of time for development work this week between various launch-related marketing activities, but I’ve started compiling a list of fixes and features for the first post-launch update, both lower-priority issues from before 1.0.5 as well as requests and bugs uncovered since.

Until next week! As always, you can always find me on Twitter, Discord or the game’s Steam Forums.