Things were looking good for Planet Centauri. The pitch: Starbound meets Pokémon. Explore space, build homes, and capture and breed alien monsters.
A decade’s worth of work, which helped the game secure just over 138,000 wishlist placements on Steam. Early Access Steam reviews were mostly positive leading up to its 1.0 release. In December 2024, the multiplayer exploration game finally came out of development, launching on Steam for a reasonable $14.99. The devs weren’t expecting wild numbers or anything, but they certainly weren’t expecting to only move 581 units in a week.
“We never understood why until today,” Laurent Lechat, one of the developers wrote on social media earlier this month.
Turns out, it was a freak accident. The duo behind Planet Centauri liken it to winning the lottery, except awful. According to the developers, Valve contacted the French duo behind the space exploration game this month to tell them that the platform failed to notify the users who had saved Planet Centauri on their wishlists.
The game’s launch visibility was completely shot. Interest in Planet Centauri seemed to be there, or at least its launch trailer managed to get just under 500,000 views on YouTube. But the people who had already expressed an interest in checking the game out had no way of knowing Planet Centauri was available. Without some of those sales, Planet Centauri could never hit tabs like New and Trending, much less Best Sellers. The game was practically dead on arrival.
Speaking to Polygon, Lechat says that the team spent months feeling “intense” frustration, and that the developers were “questioning themselves” and felt a “loss of confidence.”
“We are of course perfectly aware of our own responsibility in the result,” Lechat says, “but 500 sales in 5 days was totally incomprehensible.”
Leading up to the game’s 1.0 release, Planet Centauri had moved around 103,000 units. The number sounds impressive, except it was accrued over the course of about nine years. Coming out of the early access period was supposed to kick things up a notch. Statistics show that games that release in early access and have a 1.0 launch make more money than those that have a normal launch — that is, assuming they’re successful at all.
Both Lechat and his development partner Boris had spent several years sharing an apartment to minimize costs during the creation of Planet Centauri. Laurent had to sell his car, and they both did their best to avoid non-essentials. More recently, Boris had to move to a faraway village while Lechat continues having roommates.
“All of this combined has allowed us to hold on for these 10+ years despite fairly lean finances,” Lechat says.
Hearing the news of the bug might’ve been heartbreaking enough to send Lechat into a rage on social media, but Valve wants to make things right. The studio is being offered placement on the platform’s Daily Deal to “make up for lost visibility from your launch day,” Valve said in an email. A daily deal would appear as a pop-up for all Steam users, if not appear on the platform’s front page, as well as on pages highlighting ongoing sales.
Can selling a game at a discount really rectify years worth of work, though? The studio wasn’t sure if it was going to bite, not after everything was said and done.
“I don’t even have the strength to be angry,” Lechat wrote on Reddit. “We’ve been so frustrated, disgusted, and in total confusion.”
It was an understandable reaction, but the feedback the studio got from other developers suggested that a Daily Deal could help turn things around, if not emotionally, then at least financially. One developer told them that they saw 10 times their usual revenue off a daily deal, and another said a Steam Daily Deal had the biggest sales impact on their game they had ever seen. If the studio followed that up with content patches and periodic sales, they could start inching their way back to a better situation.
“Players don’t meticulously track games,” one commenter offered. “People will see this and think it’s your 1.0 launch. You can even share the story for those that look into it deeper.”
After sitting on it for a while, Lechat says they’re going for it. What’s the worst that could happen? In some ways, the developers have already moved on. They’re working on a new game, which they hope to release in a year: a roguelike based on the same engine as Planet Centauri. The team says that it is under financial obligation to complete that project, and that doing so will help them bring future patches to Planet Centauri. As it is, due to the lack of sales, the studio couldn’t justify continuing to update a game that wasn’t financially solvent.
“It’s possible that Steam could have offered something more substantial,” Lechat tells Polygon. “It’s possible that the daily deal is, in fact, a great gift despite its limited 24-hour duration. We can’t tell, and we will see and hope for the best. But in any case, reality is what it is, and we won’t change it, so we might as well accept everything, take a breath and move forward.”
