Weather Factory

AK posted this to the subreddit last night:

“Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we’re at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven’t already heard, you didn’t get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch.”

So that means we hope you’ll really like HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we’re also trying something new. We’ve just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games – you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time – you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week’s top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game’s Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game’s ‘success’ at launch. One developer’s success criterion is different from another’s, of course – a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn’t about judging games as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ – it’s about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it’s pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!

A few things to note:

1. 1. All data we’re using is publicly available. We don’t have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
   2. The ‘Popular Upcoming’ list on Steam is region-specific, so if you’re not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in ‘Popular Upcoming’ that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you’ll discover some games you’ve never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
   3. We’d love you to join in if you’d like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
   4. This isn’t a value judgement on any of the featured games. We’re just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.

Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches – which are by far the scariest part of game dev – go brilliantly.

Now, I leave you with news that Cultist Simulator is today’s Daily Deal on Steam, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now. Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty and the Weather Forecast probably being embarrassingly wrong. Happy Friday, everyone!