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PlateUp's solo dev shares recipe for success
09.02.2024 - 10:36 / gamesindustry.biz
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A week before the release of his first game, Alastair Janse van Rensburg went on an annual holiday with his family, nervous about the launch and still fixing a last few things. A year before, he had quit a £30,000 per annum job in Oxford as a cybersecurity researcher to concentrate on games development, and his family assured him that, so long as PlateUp made £30,000 in a decent amount of time, the risk had been worth it.
Just over one month later, van Rensburg's first royalty payment was issued. It was for more than £1 million.
PlateUp has since sold more than 1.5 million copies since its release in August 2022, and to say the game's success came as a surprise to van Rensburg is an understatement. He had been told that wishlists on Steam were a good gauge of how many copies you might sell in the first month or so; PlateUp had secured 25,000 wishlists, but sold approximately 35,000 in the first week and didn't slow down.
"The numbers just kept going up and we were [experiencing] this very fortunate scenario," van Rensburg tells GamesIndustry.biz. "Our top sales day by revenue was like a month after launch. So we had this period for a month where it was very surreal because every day I would just sit there and refresh the numbers and they would just be higher than they were yesterday. Our peak concurrent users were always in the US, but we were asleep."
PlateUp was so successful, in fact, that it broke the payment system of publisher Yogscast Games. Van Rensburg opted for bank transfer rather than cheque when it came to his first royalty payment, but the royalties he was owed exceeded the limit of Yogscast's bank. The publisher instead paid him in installments, as much as it could each day, but the game was generating more than they could transfer. Eventually, Yogscast had to send someone into the bank specially to arrange one payment.
Naturally, being published by Yogscast, the game benefitted from "massive support from steamers." Van Rensburg recalls being in the pub with some of the publishing team shortly after launch and them commenting how even big name streamers Imane 'Pokimane' Anys were dedicating time to PlateUp.
"PlateUp's roguelike structure mean when you start a new game from day one, everyone's on the same page"
"I had no idea about streaming and who streamers were," Van Rensburg confesses. "People would be like 'oh, Pokimane is playing it' and I'm like, who is that?"
People would ask Van Rensburg if he built the game specifically to be streamable, to which he says the answer is "kind of no." Instead, it was designed first and foremost as a co-op game that anyone could jump into at any point, regardless of how much other
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