Still glad that it's done!
It's now a year since Virtue's Heaven came out. The game is on sale for the entire week to mark the occasion and as always, I'd greatly appreciate it, if you could buy a copy, play the game and maybe even leave a positive review on Steam.
I feel like I have to write something about the game, now that it's been a year, but all I have are a bunch of lose thoughts.
The numbers
This is a post about a commercial indiegame, so you have to talk about the numbers:
As of the time I'm writing this, I have sold a total of 129 copies of Virtue's Heaven on Steam. It has 11 positive reviews, and is being listed by 9 Curators, one of which is some Nazi who took issue with me putting some of my games into a charity bundle that was organized in response to the ICE-raids in Minnesota.
The game earned something around 1,500$ since release.
In comparison: I sold 247 copies of GB Rober during its first year, but that game 'only' made around $800.
About a year before I released Virtue's Heaven, I spent several days thinking and calculating to figure out what the best price point for the game might be. I quickly realised that with my reach, it would be more efficient for me to sell the game at a higher price, because whatever increase in sales I would get with a lower price would be offset by the fact that I would earn much less.
I don't like doing this, because I'm poor and I don't like it that games have gotten more and more expensive myself. However, I'm also poor and let me tell you: That money I made with Virtue's Heaven was incredibly welcome since it actually enabled me to deal with a bunch of issues in my life without always having to ask for help from family members.
I'm also selling Virtue's Heaven on itch, and there I sold 6 copies. The game was featured on itch's front page from mid-March to late April, and despite actually putting the game on sale, and getting way over 1000 page views per day for a while, it didn't really do much for me. I don't know, maybe the page isn't all that good or there's something else I could've done to maybe get more people to buy the game, but it just once again showed to me that as much as I love itch, it just doesn't work for me as a place to sell games.
I still love that itch allows me to have community copies of my paid games. Especially for this game, because of its higher price point.
The reception
This is where it gets hard for me, because I'm scared of sounding ungrateful. People said kind things about the game, but I feel most haven't really tried to actually look at what the game was trying to do. To be clear: This isn't something you can expect of people. Everyone only has that much time, and playing games isn't, or rather shouldn't be like homework.
At the same time, I ruined myself in trying to squeeze some kind of meaning out of this work and I was really happy with what I ended up with by the end. However, with some very rare exceptions, most of the positive responses sounded incredibly superficial. I still hate it that it was called a "retro game" by some.
I honestly appreciated some of the more negative responses more, because of those most actually at least attempted to understand what I was aiming for, or acknowledged that there was something going on, but that it either didn't land for them, or they couldn't discern its purpose. Well, at least they tried and didn't just write "good explosions!" and called it a day. It's not that these other observations are wrong, it's just that to me it feels weirdly insulting to have something that took me almost eight years to finish be reduced to a set of visual descriptors.
And again: I'm fully aware that my negative response to these positive reactions is completely irrational and not particularly kind, but I also don't want to hide the fact that it hurts. Also if anyone reads this and feels like they're meant here personally, I don't hate any of you.
The problem really lies in the unfortunate fact that I've been trying to build something resembling an emotional connection to strangers via videogames and that kind of stuff is already very difficult when you can actually talk to people.
I also seem to generally struggle with giving off the impression that I actually have some degree of competency in the things that I'm doing, and it feels that this too extends to how people interact with my games.
My own thoughts
As you can see, I don't have a particularly healthy relationship to Virtue's Heaven. When I released the game and sent out the announcement posts, I broke down crying. I realized that the game that completely stifled me for so long was finally done and I could go and do something else. I was relieved, not happy, or proud, or god forbid sad that it was over.
The game is a mess. It is a mess on a technical level, because it grew out of a bad technical foundation that was never fixed. Did you know that the first version of this game was supposed to have mouse aiming and that remnants of that code caused it to crash a week before it was released? It's also a mess conceptually, because I started making the game, before I really knew what it was supposed to be, or if I even wanted to make another platformer. I kind of just put this on me by accident, and then couldn't let go of it. So instead I re-made it over and over again, which again made the technical debt worse, but also made it even harder to really make something coherent.
At the end, the only way for me to fix the conceptual issues I had was to fully lean into incoherence and ambivalence. Virtue's Heaven is a game that attempts to say that it is always worth struggling for a better world, even when it seems completely pointless, about finding friendship and hope in the cracks between an abstract oppressive system and how true liberation can only come after we've destroyed the ideological and material foundation of our current world. It does that in a genre that is fundamentally solitary and built around becoming the ultimate individualist.
The way I explained it to myself, is that the world in Virtue's Heaven is so far removed from the idea of collective struggle, that this strange uber-mensch like individualism that is so rampant in Metroidvanias was the only way to change anything. The game's protagonist admits as much during the game's final segments, but most of that dialogue is only available via finding the hidden bonus-fruits and according to my Steam achievement statistics, no one but me has done that yet.
I can't really talk about the game. I always struggle when I'm doing another sale and have to do a social media post about it, because I don't know what to say, or how to exactly describe the game. This is also made harder, because I genuinely feel that people don't want to hear about it anymore. I always found it interesting how some of my blog posts seem to get much more traction and attention on social media than when I remind people that this mess exists. Obviously there are exceptions sometimes, but it does feel a bit like I have to beat people over the head with this game and this also doesn't feel very nice.
All of this then collides with the fact that I really like what the game is. Most of the final act was built in the first few Months of 2025, in a time where it became very apparent that things were about to turn for the worse. Germany had just elected an evil, slimy bastard as Chancellor who I share the same last name with (thankfully I'm not actually related to that guy). The Movement and violence in Virtue's Heaven always had an air of desperation to it for me and I really think I managed to carry that tone into the game's final acts. I love the final fight against Vale, even though it's a pain and I think the final boss fight is great. I'm so happy with the track I wrote for it. And then there's the way the game controls, the whole reason why I couldn't let it go in the first place. I think I said it last year, but working on this game caused me to dislike other action platformers. I stopped playing them entirely, because they don't play like my game.
So everything is once again, ambivalent. I never want to touch this game ever again. I never want to make an action game ever again. I think Virtue's Heaven is a mess and I can see why it might be hard for others to see and feel what it is because of it. But considering all of that, I still think it's one of the best things I ever made, because it manages to express something that is very hard for me to properly articulate.
All in all, I'm still happy with what this game ended up becoming. I wish it would've resonated more with people and broadly speaking the sales are a bit below what I hoped as well (not by much, but still). In that sense, the best part of having released Virtue's Heaven still is that it's done, and that I don't have to work on it anymore. You could even spin the rather underwhelming reactions to it in that way, because the last thing I would want is to suddenly have to deal with people wanting more Virtue's Heaven.
I think what exists is enough for everyone.
To wrap it all up
The game is currently 15% off on Steam . I can't stress enough how much buying my games helps me plug the holes that Germany's crumbling welfare state leaves behind. If you can find it within yourself, feel free to leave a positive review on Steam. It might cause me a small existential crisis, if you just say "it's a cool pixel platformer with nice explosions!" and leave it at that, but Steam's SEO thankfully doesn't care about these things and just cares about the act of doing it. Also despite my existential misgivings, know that I still fundamentally appreciate it. Also, someone please try and find all the hidden fruits? I think there are 15 of them.