Reasons for Somnium Eleven’s Limited Release
Our team had to make the extremely difficult decision of not releasing Somnium Eleven worldwide. You can read the announcement here.
One of the reasons that contributed to this decision is due to the sheer cost that goes into worldwide availability. There’s a few cost factors:
People Cost
We are an Indie team of three women working full-time at Nochi Studios. If we were to release the game internationally, we won’t be able to handle the sheer number of customer service needs that would come in from all the different time zones. We currently receive messages every day from the US alone - and these are for simple things such as not being able to locate their game account verification emails to specific phone-model issues and compatibility troubleshooting. So having tested out supporting the game for 7 countries, we’ve realized that we’re unable to support worldwide customer service needs with our small Indie team.
Beyond supporting Somnium Eleven, there are also other things we’re working on, such as updating the game for performance improvements or new things we’re creating! Least to say, our hands are pretty full from all sorts of activities including continuous game support, new game development, and normal day-to-day business operations.
Tech Cost
While Somnium Eleven is a free game for players to download & play, it is not free for Nochi to operate. We do pay for cloud services, so the number of people on the game platform and where they are physically located does increase the fees we have to pay to third party providers - including companies like Amazon, Unity, and Google. However, services like these are a must for optimal game performance, including a better saving system.
Illegal-Activity / Security Cost
There are users who choose to download illegally or to hack into games. Unfortunately, Somnium Eleven is no stranger to these activities. We have data that shows that one out of every five android players attempt to hack into Somnium Eleven in some way, such as using cheat systems to get through the game. This is also costly for our team to deal with.
The above three reasons alone wouldn’t bring us to make the hard decision to not support worldwide release because there are two sides to the equation of being a sustainable studio! 1) Keeping costs down and 2) Making revenue. We explained the cost side of things that players may not be aware about in the prior section. As for the revenue side, we’re seeing some redflags for Somnium Eleven in regards to worldwide release.
Ratings
While in the US and Canada, the game is consistently rated 4 stars. However, internationally, it has been rated lower. Normally ratings wouldn’t drive the final decision, but it certainly has given our team a pause and caused us to be hesitant to rollout worldwide, especially given the cost concerns.
Lack of purchases
Given that we are a small Indie team of 3 adults, we do hope that people support us by making In-App Purchases since this game is free to download. Unfortunately, when we released this game internationally, we have not seen much in-app purchases for certain regions, which is understandable given cost of living and other factors in those regions. For example, even though Brazil was one of the top most requested countries from our player survey of which country to roll out to, we had only one single in-app purchase over the course of one month. As you can guess, this is not sustainable for our team.
We hope this blog post helps explain the details on how we came to the decision of not releasing Somnium Eleven worldwide. There’s a lot of factors that go into game development so we also hope that this has been informative for aspiring developers who are considering making games!
In the meantime, we have already released Somnium Eleven to a few other countries as we had Kickstarter Backers located in those countries and want to honor their pledges for bringing Somnium Eleven to life.
If you would like to support us, there are various easy methods to do so!
Rate and Write a review for our games on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store - every positive review truly helps make a difference!
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