Its not uncommon for developers to outright state that there game has not sold overally well, but its a sigh of relief when the studio willingly accepts that perhaps it was them. In a new developer blog the studio Juicy Beast stated that their game Toto Temple Deluxe “didn’t sell very well”, however in the blog they go on to provide reasons for this reflecting on some of their ideas and “hooks”.
Here’s a notable excerpt from the piece:
There’s a good possibility that the game didn’t have good enough “hooks” to captivate people’s attention. Sure, “fighting your friends to put an egg-laying goat on your head” sounds funny and weird, but it doesn’t really give you a clear idea of what it’s like to play Toto Temple Deluxe.
At the end of the day, we think the biggest factor is because it’s a local-multiplayer game with no online play. The game is aiming at a pretty niche audience by requiring actual human friends to play, and we can’t ignore the impact it has on sales. A quick look at comments on YouTube, Reddit and such, and it’s obvious that a lot of people are simply not buying the game for this very reason (that along a lack of solo experience).
On top of all this, we also think the game came out almost 2 years too late. Back in 2014, when the local-multiplayer boom was happening, Toto Temple Deluxe’s development felt more logical. Today, it feels a bit out of place, as we think a lot of player might have bought popular local-multiplayer games in the past, then realized that they would play them less and less frequently. We definitely can’t blame them, since it’s pretty much the same for us.
Toto Temple Deluxe is available across numerous platforms including the Wii U, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Steam, and more, but the developers are likely right in their thoughts on what their game is missing which possibly turned people away. They probably should have incorporated both local and online multiplayer into the game to add further appeal and better demonstrated the fun side of the game.
