Valve apologizes to devs for ruining game's Steam launch (1 Viewer)

[Matthew]

Valve apologizes for ruining a Steam game's launch

A decade's worth of work in Steam's early access went down the gutter, and the developers spent almost a year wondering why their game failed

www.polygon.com

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.

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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.

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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.

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What an absolute travesty for these game developers. Hopefully Steam comes up with a better deal. They really should spotlight the game for 24 hours after this.