Beholder: Conductor 发布15个月后销量再现爆发，Alawar 解析促销组合策略

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.

So how did it happen?

Winning combination

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. We aligned the Daily Deal with the festival, which ran from July 20 to 27. Then we added one more experiment.

We had recently started working with the creator marketplace Jestr, which connects indie game studios with video content creators, so we tried a creator campaign for a game that had been out for over a year. It ran from July 20 to 26 and generated 9.2 million video views.

The combination was all set: a Daily Deal at a deep discount, a relevant festival, and some extra attention beyond Steam. We had run Daily Deals before, but without this kind of overlap – and we had never seen a result like the one we got.

In one seven-day period before the campaign, Conductor sold 202 copies on Steam and generated $1,071 in net revenue. In the first eight days of the promotion, it sold 67,016 copies. By the end of the 14-day run, sales had reached 81,088. Steam recorded 41.73 million impressions and 743,055 visits to the store page over the 14 days. At the peak, the page received around 190,000 visits in a single day.

Across the 14 days, the campaign brought in $274,498 gross and $165,000 net after refunds and Steam's commission. That net figure does not deduct the $5,600 spent on Jestr, the only paid promotion outside Steam. Refunds totalled 2,781 copies, about 3.4% of units sold — a normal refund rate. At the time, lifetime gross revenue for Conductor stood at $1,496,735.

Steam's traffic breakdown offers another clue. Search Suggestions contributed almost nothing before the campaign, then peaked at around 36,000 visits in one day and passed 90,000 visits over the promotion. Together with direct external traffic, the two sources accounted for roughly 120,000 visits. That total is approximate, since someone might see a creator video, then come back to Steam later and find the game through search.

We cannot distinguish the 81,088 sales neatly between the Daily Deal, Train Fest, and the creator campaign. We do not need to. We had run Daily Deals before without this kind of overlap and had not seen results like these. This time, the activities supported each other: the Daily Deal put the game in a prominent spot, Train Fest kept it in front of a relevant audience, the discount gave people a reason to buy during that window, and the creator campaign brought extra attention beyond Steam. Together, they worked better for us than any one of them would have on its own.

Was the Daily Deal just converting old wishlists?

Of course, some of the sales certainly came from people who already had the game on their wishlist. But how many wishlist purchases came from older wishlists and how many from newer ones? We examined the cohort data to find out.

During the first eight days, players added Conductor to their wishlists 83,348 times, and the total grew by 61,182 net. We had not seen a comparable rise in wishlist additions before the campaign. The wishlist pool was growing while sales came in.

The table shows the number of wishlist purchases each month and when those wishlists were added.

*September data are through September 22.

Before July, most wishlist purchases still came from wishlists added in 2024–25, even as the share from 2026 wishlists gradually rose. In July, the balance changed: 64.5% of wishlist purchases came from the 2026 cohort. That share reached 72.9% in August and remained above 70% in September.

The cohort data does not tell us exactly when each player first heard about the game or which promotion brought them to Steam. They do show that the sales spike was not simply a deep discount converting years of accumulated wishlists: newer wishlists made up the majority of purchases, while the wishlist pool itself was growing. The campaign also created a sales tail of its own, as these newer cohorts kept converting in the following months.

The effect reached the rest of the series

Conductor wasn't the only Beholder game selling. During the campaign, the three other games moved 58,216 copies between them, compared with 5,080 in the preceding fortnight. Net revenue across those games rose from $4,806 to $60,800.

And the bundles were moving too. Three bundles featuring Conductor or the full series sold 37,684 units during the campaign, compared with 1,777 in the previous two weeks. Some players were picking up Conductor alongside other Beholder games, or the series as a whole.

For us, this looks like Conductor brought fresh attention to the wider series. Some buyers came for one discounted game and picked up more of Beholder at the same time.

What we'd take from it

Judging by our experience, developers should not forget about games that are already out. When several opportunities line up around a project, it can be a good idea to support them with other channels available to the team. The exact combination will differ from game to game, but if you try stacking channels around one of your own games, we'd love to hear how it goes.