Natural Selection 2 and Overgrowth Pre-order Bundle a Success

Earlier in the month, we reported on the 'Organic Indie Preorder Pack.' This developer-driven effort bundles preorders for Unknown Worlds' Natural Selection 2 Special Edition and developer Wolfire Games' Overgrowth into a "buy one, get one free" deal. Wolfire Games has since released some postmortem information about the sale on its official blog.

Overall, Wolfire feels the sale achieved better results than expected, noting that more preorders were sold during that week than in the entirety of the previous year. Unlike most other digitally-distributed bundles, which often have to pay a cut of each sale to the distributor, all of the preorder proceeds were split evenly between Wolfire and Unknown Worlds.

Sales for the bundle were steady throughout the promotion and spiked considerably as the sale drew to a close. The report notes that 1,658 packs were sold, totaling "almost exactly one year's worth of preorder revenue, in a single week." In a surprising twist, the bundle didn't have a negative effect on regular preorders, which were reported as "significantly up."

Wolfire also approximates that about one-third of of the total sales were generated thanks to social media services like ModDB, Reddit, and YouTube, alongside Facebook (shared 420 times) and Twitter (459 retweets). The sales attributed to social media reportedly, "dwarfed even the largest gaming news sites that posted about us, which then dwarfed the long tail of small forums and personal blogs that mentioned the pack."