Alawar's head of marketing explains how a combination of promotions helped the indie spinoff to sell 81,000 units in two weeks – and lift sales across the series, too

Once a game is out, its post-release story can seem almost settled. After the launch window, a DLC or major patch might give players a reason to return – but if the team has no plans to keep working on the game, what is left to do except watch the sales taper off?

That view makes sense. But 15 months after release, Beholder: Conductor (a spinoff from the Beholder series) had another launch-scale moment. We changed nothing in the game or its Steam page – no new trailer, no new capsule, not even a minor patch – and it sold 81,088 copies in 14 days, on par with its launch sales.

The story starts with a Steam Daily Deal. We try to secure one for every game in our catalogue that meets the requirements. Valve decides which games get the slot; we set the discount. For Conductor, we went to 70%, lowering the US price from $13.99 to $4.19. We had never gone that deep before. Most of the reasoning for the decision was that we had seen discounts below 50% convert worse, and Steam recommends a deep discount for a Daily Deal.

Then Steam Train Fest appeared on the calendar. Beholder: Conductor, which sees the player monitoring passengers on a train, was a perfect fit for the event, and the game appeared on the festival front page.

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