NTC3'S PROFILE

Certainly a good idea! Call me a little skeptical, though, but "Spectral", "Mystic" and "Nightmare" don't really sound particularly different from each other; are there any strict distinctions between the three?

Well, that's good to hear. Keep going!

Well, let's just say Steam is a weird place. Some really cool games like Technobabylon can be out for 7 months without reaching 10k, while another Early Access crafting zombiefest does so easily a couple months later.

Also,

author=unity
My only foray into the commercial world of video games was the Remnants of Isolation post-contest Steam release, which didn't exactly set the world on fire, but it's a very different and small game, so I think something like Hero's Realm has a lot more potential.

I've always been quite curious about this, because RoI commercial is apparently owned by circa 60,000 people at the moment, which is actually quite good by Steam/ RPGMaker standards. Were most of these copies free gifts by Degica/IGMC to participants (since that's when the big jump for RoI and Last Word happened) or something?

Anyway, regardless of how they were obtained, RoI is still near the top (at 23rd place, to be exact) when it comes to rmk titles owned on Steam. You can see the full list here: At the top is obviously To The Moon (aka the only good RPGMaker game 95% of gamers know about), with nearly a million owners. (The days where Kan Gao was told to give up making games on here Quintessence review now feel like a glance into the mirror universe.)

Factor in the release date and the price, though, and our friend Sailerius' Skyborn is the winner by far: 430,000 copies distributed in 1.5 years, at the price of 15 $, vs. 910,000 at 10 $ over more than three years for Gao's standard-bearer (although To The Moon is also on GOG.com, where it must've turned enough copies in its own right). It's also a game that, quite obviously, goes for a whole other RPG audience than what Hero's Realm was designed for.

To cut long story short, and ignore freeware like Eternal Senia and horrors like Cthulthu and Labyrinthine Dreams, the only comparable title in top 20 is Memories of a Vagabond, which got 200,000 owners and has quite a few similarities in the way it's presented, though it's obviously quite different as well.

In spot 22, though, Epic Battle Fantasy 4 is quite similar and got 64,000 owners over 20 month timespan at 12 $ price, as well as wholly positive reception to boot. However, it does have some really high production values as well. Then, there's DarkEnd, which has the typical RPGMaker aesthetics, wasn't as good of a game, too, and still got 22,000 owners. It's ultimately difficult to perfectly predict how it'll turn out, but essentially, either one of those titles is now your game to beat. Buy them, play them, see what it did better and where HR is superior, and then apply that knowledge to the commercial release. Barring some unexpected collapse in Steam playerbase, you ought to do fine (and I say this as someone who started writing this comment in a rather skeptical mood.)

Well, I'll be waiting for it, just in case.

Yeah, I honestly would love to check out Operation: PROPHET, since those screenshots do look quite stunning.