I think it’s time for capitalistic celebrations and a Yayperoni Pizza, folks. Over on the Carpe Fulgur’s main page, they’ve finally made their big announcement as to how Recettear has fared in the market.
According to Andrew “SpaceDrake” Dice, Project Director at Carpe Fulgur, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale has sold over 26,000 copies through the various distribution channels set up to sell the game. That’s quite an impressive amount of sales for an indie game, to be sure.
I really like this portion of the announcement (well, most of the body actually) from Dice, so I’ll just quote it here:
Everyone at Carpe Fulgur is… humbled? Amazed? It’s difficult to put a name to what we feel. Recettear has done what we had barely dared to hope it would do: in a month it has secured the future of Carpe Fulgur by allowing all of its members to make wages comparable to “proper” jobs in the industry for an entire year, and has provided EasyGameStation with a massive new stream of revenue that they did not previously have access to.
The reviews of Recettear have been near-universal in their praise. Talk about the game all over the internet has been positive. The Recettear project is an unqualified success at this juncture – everything Carpe Fulgur set out to do has been accomplished. Recettear is available in English, people enjoy the localization and the game itself, and we’ve made enough money to continue with other projects with very little concern for the immediate future.
I, personally, feel the need to thank every single person who reviewed the game, talked about it in various places across the Internet, downloaded the demo, and most importantly bought the game. There are tens of thousands of you out there, from all across the planet. You made this possible. You fulfilled our dream – our dream of making a living from bringing the best indie games Japan has to offer to the English-speaking world.
I even want to thank the pirates, really – I know some of you have been “demoing” the game and then purchasing it, and I thank you for that. From our data via Steam and whatnot, our official demo-to-full conversion rate is somewhere between 25 and 30%… a number that I suspect is inflated in part by former pirates deciding to support us.
Dice also noted that due to the success of Recettear, we can expect some more news on future projects soon.
Congratulations once again to the team at Carpe Fulgur! They’ve definitely seized the lightning here.