Hello everyone! The Early Access launch of shapez 2 went exceedingly well, so to celebrate the first month we thought it'd be fun to share some stats and share what we are already working on behind the scenes! PS: Be sure to also check out the new content at the bottom of this post! [h2]Early Access Launch Statistics[/h2] [h3]Sales & Player counts[/h3] In total, shapez 2 sold [b]273.000 units[/b] within the first month. Compared to our projection of 90.000 units, we were completely overwhelmed and surprised by the response and success of the game! Putting this into context, with all games released in the past 3 years on Steam that are tagged as 'Automation', removing the non-factory related games and use the review count as an indicator of copies sold, this means shapez 2 already [b]surpassed all factory games released within the past 3 years[/b], within just a month. It also has the highest review score out of theses with 98.5% positive reviews (!). As we are automation game fans ourselves and really enjoy those other amazing games, this really feels a bit surreal. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/3a65cd8df3674dbb51d0e8acf1820856b256100d.png[/img] [i]Games tagged 'Automation' (top 5 tags) and initially released on Steam within the past 3 years, ordered by review count.[/i] A few days after launch, we hit the milestone of 18,806 concurrent players, and 79,119 daily active users! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/60f23451a87ae5f1c8df9d495affc18b5d6adff2.png[/img] Out of these players, 2.9% were playing on macOS and 1.9% on Linux. Unfortunately, it seems that Linux players had by far the most issues on launch, with sound problems and some crashes that could be resolved with an Unity update in version 0.0.8 eventually. As we already stated in a previous devlog, we chose to cut the game length a bit in order to be able to deliver a more polished product on release. Still, we are very satisfied with the average playtime of almost [b]20 hours[/b], as we expect that to grow a lot over time and with future updates! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/866d97ea6d0c6ea5cb50c38c5afac46339b2d55c.png[/img] [h3]Community Stats[/h3] Here's a little insight into the community side as well. It's safe to say there's a lot more of you now! The [url=https://discord.gg/bvq5uGxW8G]shapez 2 Discord server[/url] almost doubled in size through August, from 16,000 to 30,000! From the release of the game until now, it's up from 19,000 to 32,000. Throughout August, 82,000 messages were sent by 2,000 people (up from 14,700 by 250) and there was 45,000 minutes of voice chatting going on. Sadly Discord analytics is having some issues, so we had to make our own graph. Shout out to one of our mods Loupau38 for the data points! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/548a46f1934a95f24feead9960aa995cd02b25ea.png[/img] [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/shapezio/]r/shapezio[/url] is booming as well, with the monthly posts going up from 99 to 1,212 and monthly comments from 740 to 8,800! The community got 1,269,000 views and 79,000 unique visits, up from 136,000 and 16,000 respectively. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/e45a44955b2ad647164751306ff88e6f6083bc63.png[/img] Back home on Steam, our blogs used to get around 30,000-40,000 impressions and 2,500 reads each. Since the release, there are a lot more of you! The Release blog got 780,000 impressions and 33,000 reads, the Update 0.0.8 blog got 550,000 impressions and 72,000 reads! [h2]Future Plans[/h2] The success of shapez 2 so far allows us to expand the company by getting new people on board! Hopefully, this will allow us to more efficiently go through all your feedback and suggestions, as there's a lot of it! We also working to adjust some of the initial plans we had for after the release, as we feel like we can do a lot more with shapez 2 than we initially expected. It's still too early to talk about this though, just know that you shouldn't look back to the plans we outlined before the release as they're likely outdated. However, there's a few things we are already working on that we wanted to give you a sneak preview on! [h3]New Content[/h3] We are currently brainstorming how we can introduce new content that justifies starting a new savegame. It's still too early to share details and we are not sure if it'll actually happen, but currently we are thinking about a new game mode that adds a significant twist, like building away from the vortex instead of towards. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/6aa785817531e609c0261f209a3047190bf40f20.png[/img] [i](Early draft of a new game mode)[/i] [h3]Multithreading[/h3] Right now, the game supports roughly up to 500,000 buildings, depending on your setup and factory structure. Some players have pushed the game to its limit already though, building factories with over 1.5 million structures. Currently the simulation and rendering both run on just a single thread. With this change, we are offloading the whole simulation to separate cores. We designed the simulation to work with this constraints, which made it harder to implement, but hopefully pays off now! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/280420ce7044ec99645529e9e8e1665c2b964c41.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/5cc758a8019e76814f1cb2df2184bdae9633c389.png[/img] [i]Performance improvements on a i7-10700 CPU - From 0.8 FPS to 43.7 FPS[/i] As a disclaimer - actual improvements may vary a lot, and other bottlenecks might occur. We also haven't been able to fully test it yet, so it will take a lot of effort to ensure the game runs stable. While we are trying to include it in the next major update, unexpected issues can already arise that force us to push it back. We'll most likely start by rolling out the build to our [url=https://www.patreon.com/tobsprgames]Patrons[/url] once we have a version that seems roughly stable. [h3]New Space Belt Visuals[/h3] The art team is currently reworking the space belt (and in the future space pipe) visuals, with the intention to make it more clear that shapes are delivered on separate layers. Here are already some concepts: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43169810/1ce0e7a9624203d0384369f97617887b6e65d1c7.png[/img] [h3]Vertical T-Pipes/Wires[/h3] Some frequent feedback we got were about the limitations of vertical pipes / wires. Making them more flexible required a huge internal refactoring to support buildings accepting inputs from the top / bottom. We finished a big part of the refactoring this week, and now need to add the actual support for these connections. In practice, this means being able to split a pipe to the side for example that is also going up! [h3]Further Improvements[/h3] While we haven't managed to go through all your suggestions & feedback yet, we feel we already have a good initial understanding of the current improvements that could be done, for example a Statistics Page, more train controls, improved space pipe visuals and so on. We will work through these over time and try to include a bunch of them as part of every major update! Be sure to keep suggesting and upvoting them on our [url=https://shapez-2.nolt.io/]Suggestions Portal[/url]! [hr][/hr] Thank you for being part of the statistics and we hope you enjoyed this little insight! We'll see you again soon. ~ Tobias & the shapez 2 Team [h3]Join the community:[/h3] [url=https://discord.gg/bvq5uGxW8G style=button]Discord[/url] [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/shapezio/ style=button]Reddit[/url] [url=https://shapez-2.nolt.io/ style=button]Suggestions Portal[/url] [url=https://twitter.com/tobspr style=button]X / Twitter[/url] [url=https://www.youtube.com/@tobsprGames style=button]YouTube[/url] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/