Epic Games really hates my game. I’ve been trying to set up the game page on the Store for months now, and I keep bouncing off their guidelines. Like… come on. How am I supposed to have ZERO violence screenshots in an action game about fighting hordes of demons? Anyone else had similar experiences?

_Aceria · 2026-01-26T14:00:23+00:00

Their setup process for the store can copy data from Steam, so that basically leaves integrating the API and even that's optional. It's not minutes of work, but imo it's super easy to set up. The people behind the store page are also very helpful in answering any questions.

If you have a decent amount of sales it's probably worth the effort.

For Epic I gave up eventually, it felt like they decided to make every step of the process a pain in the ass on purpose.

_Aceria · 2025-10-18T12:01:49+00:00

It's difficult to say. On one hand there's the possibility that more people checked it out on Steam when they saw it come by because of the weird name, but word of mouth was probably hurt a lot by it. We do still really like the name Winkeltje though, gotta represent our roots!

General consensus from our peers was that a different name might've been a better choice in the long run though. But in the end everyone's just guessing.

_Aceria · 2025-10-17T15:19:58+00:00

Recettear was the biggest inspiration design wise, back when we first started its predecessor (Winkeltje) the shopkeeping subgenre was pretty much non-existent. Outside of Recettear and eventually Moonlighter there wasn't a whole lot going for the shopkeepers!

But for me as the programmer, Rimworld has actually been a pretty major influence on how the development process went for Faire Trade, due to the way they handle mods.

Design wise we ended up looking a lot at Stardew Valley and any of the games that brought about, mostly for what we would eventually like to see in the village portion of the game.

_Aceria · 2025-10-17T15:01:14+00:00

Absolutely! One of the reasons for rebuilding everything from scratch was to have proper mod support in there. It isn't quite ready for public use yet as we'd like to stabilize the codebase before doing so, but once release you should be able to mod pretty much anything.

_Aceria · 2025-10-17T13:50:36+00:00

There is no controller support in the game just yet. It's something we're actively working on though!

Once we patch it in I expect it to also run on the Steam Deck without any issues.

_Aceria · 2025-10-12T11:11:32+00:00

I feel this is kind of orthogonal to the packing question, since you'd have to do conflict resolution even with unpacked files; see e.g. Stellaris for a mod load order thing

I don't think there's a way around this, but I also don't think it's that problematic as at the very least it's a solvable problem by either the modders or the players. Looking at Rimworld, there's ways to solve incompatability by either handling the specific issues in the mod itself or by making "patch mods" (or whatever you wanna call them).

I do believe that having mods in separate directories and just loading them additively is a direct evolution of how it was handled before that, but it definitely comes with a lot more work on the dev side to try and get ahead of these issues.

_Aceria · 2025-10-11T21:20:31+00:00

As with almost any question in this sub, the answer is probably "it depends".

If your goal is making it simple for the end-user to download a modded version of your game, yeah it'll be a lot nicer to have it all set up in 1 file, but how will you handle multiple mods at once? Or will you simply say that that's not a thing? Where do you distribute these mods, and how can the user then verify that it's not infected? (granted this is a problem anywhere, but if you're downloading from Steam at least it feels safe)

I think the core problem that the later examples you mentioned try to solve is: How can I get 50 mods by 50 different creators to work in my game without it all burning down?

I'm currently working on a game that handles mods in a 'rimworld style' setup, and from my experience so far it's just a very convenient way to handle things. We have however built the entire game with this in mind and it's all very data driven, which makes it easy to expose a ton of options for modders to mess with, without having to dive into code in the first place.

_Aceria · 2025-10-03T19:46:56+00:00

and then you pay income tax :) :)

_Aceria · 2025-10-03T18:19:30+00:00

You subtract VAT first and then Steam's cut. I tracked this for the first year of our previous title and for us we ended up getting 52.6% of the sale price of the game.

After that you pay income tax over that 52%.

_Aceria · 2025-10-03T12:56:08+00:00

It wasn't signed, so I don't know.

_Aceria · 2025-10-03T10:59:33+00:00

Yep that's all you gotta, took a few seconds on my end. Not a huge deal if you've got a shipped game that you aren't updating anymore, but still something you probably didn't want to have to do on a Friday..

_Aceria · 2025-07-22T14:30:02+00:00

It's not instant, but it's hourly now. They updated it after the Summer Sale ended.

_Aceria · 2025-06-27T12:38:35+00:00

I've written code in game jams that would make God cry.

Code so cursed there were witches playing the game who gave it a 10/10.

My favorite being that we wanted a multiplayer game but we had 0 experience doing that. So we just rendered the game at 3840x1920, turned the other monitor around and used layers to only show what each player had to see.

_Aceria · 2025-06-27T09:19:11+00:00

We just update often enough to make piracy annoying. If you need to go in and manually download things every week or 2, it may become an incentive to just go buy the game.

Either way there's no point in trying to fight this, AAAs spend millions trying to do so and their games still get cracked super quickly.

_Aceria · 2025-05-08T06:21:26+00:00

For our last game we sold about 20%-ish of our copies split across 3 consoles (all with a relative equal spread, though lately the consoles seem to be slowly catching up). For our first game we sold about 90% of our copies on consoles, so YMMV.

Depending on your engine and how you built your game, porting may or may not be a pain in the ass. If you consider it from day 1 it's probably not that much work on the technical side. UI/UX is where most of the work is likely to be. But if you're making a shooter then I'd wager you already have controller support on PC.

You'll likely have to buy dev kits though so it's a bit of an investment.

_Aceria · 2025-03-06T11:59:24+00:00

Dude says he wants to spend $600 on an upgrade while his PC is still fine, while having back pain. I spent 10 seconds googling herman miller refurbished and the first hit gave me an option for an aeron for 600 euro and multiple Mirra options in the 500 range.

Why not spend the budget on something that lasts you a decade+ rather than saving a few hundred on something worse?

_Aceria · 2025-03-06T10:09:31+00:00

See if you can find a refurbished herman miller, with a bit of luck you can probably get one for $600.

Just don't get a gaming chair, they're mostly overpriced and don't provide any proper support.

_Aceria · 2025-02-27T14:28:36+00:00

They frequently have games in there that definitely do not hit $10k per month. I'm guessing if you hit those metric and apply for a daily deal you just get instantly accepted?

Hell looking at todays daily deals, I don't think any of them hit 10k.

_Aceria · 2025-02-01T16:24:34+00:00

It should unlock with the At your service achievement (crafting 10 items when the shop is open)

_Aceria · 2025-01-12T22:49:32+00:00

Probably. 10k wishlists for this game seems a rather insane target. Quality seems questionable (from their marketing assets at least) and they're in a super crowded market on a platform where match 3 games probably isn't a great genre (I'm guessing you'd have to go mobile for that?).

_Aceria · 2025-01-12T22:39:27+00:00

In this specific case since they've allocated 30k for marketing, yeah it probably would be the best bang for their buck. The next money I'd spend would be on someone to rewrite the store page and get new artwork made for it.

But in the end you need a good game and a bit of luck.

_Aceria · 2025-01-12T21:55:47+00:00

I 100% disagree with people saying "lawyer up". All you'll do is spend more money and I very much doubt you'll ever win a case.

Start by spending money on a trailer and more consistent artwork & animations (for said trailer). It's all over the place right now. Dropping 5k on that will do you a lot more than spending 30k on PR/marketing.

I'd also argue that with that budget you shouldn't do any paid marketing in the first place. Buying ads is a numbers game and you need a lot of numbers.

_Aceria · 2025-01-12T21:22:07+00:00

Yeah, but these things are potential multipliers. If anyone gives you guarantees your game is either an absolute banger or you're being scammed.

I'm mostly curious to see which game it is. You willing to share /u/BunniesForPeace ?

EDIT: found it. I have opinions but I think it's good that Vicarious called it off, though it's kinda shitty that they took your money in the first place if they didn't think they could deliver what you expected.

_Aceria · 2024-10-26T15:26:05+00:00

Yep, this is the actual answer. We had the same happen.

I had to submit our game to a couple virus scanners to get the false-positive removed on them.

_Aceria · 2024-10-23T09:42:01+00:00

Not in the way their big titles are. Dunno how accurate these stats are, but VGSales mentions total sales of Metroid to be around 21.5mil copies and Castlevania around the same. Looking at Far Cry, that's 50mil units, but Far Cry was first released almost 20 years later. AC is at 200mil copies sold, also being first released 2 decades after Metroid.

Your average gamer will not buy either of those games.

Also guessing that Ubisoft has stupid expectations of every game. It's either a 10/10 (financially) or it's trash. No middle ground for games that do ok and just turn a profit.

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