How Nova Drift sold 400k copies during 5 years of Early Access with community feedback and constant iteration

The Nova Drift case was shared by marketing expert Chris Zukowski in his How To Market A Game blog. Below are the key takeaways.

• Prior to making his own games, Nielson worked as an artist at companies like Zynga. In 2015, he also contributed to Pixeljam’s space exploration title Last Horizon and used some of its revenue to fund the early development of Nova Drift.
• Nielson was inspired by Path of Exile and its extensive building system. Instead of making an RPG, he wanted to create something simpler on the surface, but with that complex layer underneath.
• Zukowski also warns indie devs that making role-playing games might be a bad idea: “An RPG is basically 5 to 10 games duct taped together. If you have never made 1 game, there is no way you are going to make 10 simultaneously.”
• While Nova Drift may seem like an easy-to-learn arcade game, it has a ton of deep mechanics, and the game just kept getting deeper during development and its Early Access run.
• In 2017, Nielson raised $7,341 on Kickstarter, also building a small community of enthusiasts invested in the concept of Nova Drift. So they left the first batch of positive reviews once the game launched in EA in March 2019.
• Nova Drift received 219 reviews in its first month and reached the 1,000 mark in nine months. “We were able to maintain the 98%-100% range for years,” Nielson said.
• During Early Access, he focused on involving the community in development, listening to their ideas and iterating based on feedback. “Whenever I talk to another developer about whether they are doing this community engagement, they aren’t doing this stuff,” Nielson noted. “They feel it is a distraction. That is how I felt too, but I pushed through it.”
• He added that without the community, he would have been developing the game in a vacuum. “I am a reformed bad designer. My community taught me about source control, how to make code maintainable.”
• Crowdsourcing also helped in localizing Nova Drift into multiple languages, including Russian, French, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese, early on. Publisher IndieARK then helped with Chinese localization and publishing the game in China.
• Nielson tried to promote Nova Drift on social media, but those efforts didn’t result in much engagement (“I never got more than 70 retweets,” he said).
• To attract players, Nielson managed to grab the interest of various streamers, including those who played Path of Exile. Some of them made hundreds of videos about the game, resulting in 40k wishlists at the Early Access launch.
• Not only did Nielson continue to improve Nova Drift and add new content during EA, he also took every opportunity to discount the game with the help of publisher Pixeljam.

• The Vampire Survivors’ breakout success exposed Nova Drift to new players, leading to a surge in sales and CCU count. According to VG Insights, 61.4% of Nova Drift owners also played Vampire Survivord.
• “Steam is really good at showing players games that they might like, and it was of the distinct opinion that if you liked this funny vampire game, you might also like the silly spaceship game,” Nielson said.
• Nova Drift successfully graduated from Early Access on last month. It has sold 396,218 units as of August 2024.
• The game currently has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam, with 95 of the 11k user reviews being positive. It also recently updated its CCU record, peaking at 1,713 concurrent players.

Zukowski concluded that one of the factors that contributed to Nova Drift’s EA success is that Nielson was crazy about constantly iterating and improving the game over the years. “For developers entering EA, you are probably underestimating how hard it will be, you are underestimating how deep and systematic the game must be, and you are underestimating the amount of community feedback you must implement,” he said.

For more data and insights about the development of Nova Drift and its success on Steam, check out the full blog post.