We’ve been so busy working on 7 Billion Humans, that we almost missed an exciting milestone last month: Little Inferno has sold over 1 Million Copies! If we include bundles, that number is actually closer to 2 million legitimate purchases of the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace – we hope they’ve kept everyone warm!

To celebrate we’re running a Summer in the Winter Sale on all of our platforms – starting today we’re putting Little Inferno and Human Resource Machine on sale everywhere (Thursday for the Nintendo Wii U and Nintendo Switch).

We wish we could visit everyone who bought Little Inferno and ask each person millions of questions – but until we’re able to do that, we thought we’d dig through the ashes and see what we could discover. Here’s what we found!

Timeline of Releases

We released Little Inferno in 15 different stores, starting in November 2012. Over the course of the next two years we released on all but the Switch, which we thought was pretty good for a team of 3 using our own home grown engine. Here’s a rough timeline:

• November 2012 – Little Inferno launches on Nintendo Wii U (NA & EU), Steam, and our website
• January 2013 – iOS version launches
• March 2013 – Mac version is available on Mac Store, Steam, and our website
• April 2013 – Linux version is available on Steam and our website
• May 2013 – Android version launches
• July 2014 – Humble Store launches
• June 2015 – Nintendo of Japan brings Little Inferno to the Nintendo Wii U Japan eShop
• October 2015 – Good Old Games launches
• March 2017 – Nintendo Switch (NA & EU) version with 2 player mode launches
• June 2017 – Circle Entertainment brings Little Inferno to the Nintendo Switch Japan eShop

 

Sales by Operating System

Little Inferno runs on our own custom engine, so each time we brought the game to a new system, we had to re-write a portion of the game to support the new hardware or operating system. Overall, we launched on 7 different systems – Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Nintendo Wii U, and Nintendo Switch. Here’s how they break down in terms of sales.

iOS (36.1%): Little Inferno released on iOS 2.5 months after the  PC and Wii U versions, but quickly took off. Little Inferno is a game that benefits from touch controls, and was a natural fit on iOS. Also pairs well with a warm blanket and a nice bag of wine.

Windows (25.8%): Little Inferno launched on our website and Steam, but soon came to many other PC portals. We were very fortunate to get picked up by streamers like Yogscast and an early JackSepticEye only a few months after launch, and while it’s difficult to judge just how much of an impact they had on PC sales, we do seem to notice an  uptick in sales after a new stream, as you’ll see below.

Android (15.2%): The Android version came out about 4 months after the iOS version.

Nintendo Platforms (12.6%): Little Inferno was one of 5 indie titles that launched alongside the Wii U eShop. We were delighted to see the fan responses and illustrations from the Miiverse, and we posted a bunch of them here. All three of us have been big Nintendo fans since childhood, so we were excited to be able to bring the game to Switch a few years later,  especially since we could finally give players 2-player mode.

Mac/Linux/Unknown PC (10.2%):  8.2% goes to Mac, 0.3% goes to Linux, and 1.7% goes to “Unknown” which really means Windows/Mac/Linux, but we don’t know specifically which one. We have a few stores where we sell all three versions, but no way of knowing which versions players are actually using, so they go into the unknown grab-bag category.

 

Sales by Country

In addition to English, Little Inferno is available in 7 other languages: French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese. While the first 6 languages were localized by our excellent fan translators, and were released on every platform, the Japanese localization was handled by our friends at Nintendo of Japan. Since Japanese was artificially limited to one console in one market, it is not included in this chart.

The Tomorrow Corporation mouse pad (not pictured), is the coveted 146th item.

Little Inferno is a content heavy game, with 7 catalogs, 146 unique items, and 100 combos. And a hundred billion jokes.  Item names, catalog descriptions, combo names, and letters written by the different characters are full of North-American humor, puns, and idioms.

It appears  64.7% of people that purchased Little Inferno, played it in English. And we assume that players in Scandinavian countries (roughly 5%) probably also played the game in English, making up almost 70% of players.

Surprisingly, Russia and Poland make up more than 5% of sales combined. We had heard rumors of a Russian fan translation, but never played it ourselves, so in what language are Russian and Polish players playing Little Inferno?

 

The Smouldering Long Tail

Sales of most games tend to spike at launch, followed by gradual sales over the rest of the game’s lifetime, and Little Inferno is no exception. Here’s a list of sales milestones:

• 250K copies – 6 months after initial launch
• 500K copies – 16 months after initial launch (66% slower than 0 – 250K)
• 750K copies – 37 months after initial launch (110% slower than 250K – 500K)
• 1M copies – 67 months after initial launch (42% slower than 500K – 750K)

While sales degradation is expected over the course of 5 years, the difference in time between the last two 250K copies sold is not that high: 21 months vs. 30 months. Surprising, considering Little Inferno was available on all platforms other than the Nintendo Switch 36 months in.

Viewed another way, here are average sales by month:

 

Little Inferno sold relatively well during that first year, culminating in a holiday sale at the end of 2013. Another interesting thing to note is that sales remain fairly constant from 2015 on – there are high points around major winter and summer sales, but otherwise it’s fairly consistent.

One major sales bump stands out, however, which is June 2015. It turns out that month was a collision of three things: the release of Little Inferno in Japan, a second Let’s Play series from Sugar Plumps’ old friend JackSepticEye, and the Steam Summer Sale.

 

Little Inferno was internally called “Project Stove”. Nintendo has the best code names!

Fun Fact: For Little Inferno Wii U in Japan, our friends at Nintendo of Japan created a total of 150 unique combos, like “Marshmallow Girl Combo” (Low Self-Esteem Action Doll and the Marshmallow) and “Moon Bunny Combo” (Mini Moon + Eager Bunny Plushie) which are cultural in-jokes as much as the “Cold War Combo” is for North America. The Japanese version seeds 100 randomly selected combos at the start of each game, so each new save file has a list of different combos.

 

Other Fun Facts

8-bit Nate was a character that never made it into the game. We hope he’s still somewhere out there defragging spawn campers or whatever gamers do!

• 92% of our players (and 88% of the World’s population!) hail from the Northern Hemisphere, which maybe accounts for our higher sales during the cold months of November – January. As far as we could tell, Southern Hemisphere-ers didn’t buy the game any more during their Winter months than they do during their Summer months, but perhaps that’s because it snows less in those parts of the world.
• We started working on Little Inferno in November of 2009, after working on “Robot and the Cities Who Built Him” for 5 months. It took roughly 108 man months for our team of three to complete.

Early lighting tests. Very few of these items survived!

• 0 copies of Unity were used in development of Little Inferno.
• Little Inferno is a little over 100,000 lines of code.

We spent months making a satisfying 2D fire. The sound of items crumbling had to be perrrrfect.

• Allan Blomquist created the Tomorrow Engine (TM), our own home-grown engine from scratch and filled it with all sorts of fancy effects. For this mammoth task he won the IGF’s final Technical Excellence award. This was the last year the Technical Excellence award was ever awarded. We assume because no other tech could ever be as excellent.
• We developed our own in-game translation tool, which allowed our 17 volunteer translators to localize the game in real time while playing it. 
  
• The ESRB gave Little Inferno a T for Teen rating because of some of the catalog descriptions (Midlife Crisis Mitigator, Puff Pack), and the “whimsical poop coils” emitted from the Kitty Kitty Poo Poo Plushie.

• Despite the concern of Sparky The Fire Dog, incidences of arson have steadily decreased since 2002, thanks in part to cathartic fun of Little Inferno, we’re sure!
• Little Inferno’s meaning is intentionally open ended, but this interpretation comes pretty close.
• Little Inferno was originally going to be called “My Fireplace”, a name as intentionally boring as possible. But then another company announced a game called “My Fireplace” for Wii – a much more straightforward and earnest game made by and for fireplace enthusiasts, we assume?

 

Chimney Stuffer, the first catalog in the game.

• “Smokestacks, Over Burnington”, the name of a fictitious book written by the Tomorrow Corporation receptionist (and author of “The Terrible Secret”) was also an early candidate for the game’s name.
• Little Inferno was added to 222,867 Steam User wishlists. 81,476 people deleted it from their wishlist – perhaps they were spooked by Sparky the Fire Dog’s warning. Little Inferno also has a Lifetime Conversion Rate of 30.5%. We’re not sure exactly what that means, but our Steam page tells us it’s “Above Average”, so nice work everyone!
  

Concept art for a meme inspired catalog. Anyone know the two things this is referencing?

• We revised the items over and over, totally recalling more than 1/3 of all the fireplace items we made. Some didn’t fit thematically, while others got the axe in favorable of better items with overlapping purposes or jokes.

Inside the amazing Tomorrow Corporation World Headquarters.

• Despite the name, Tomorrow Corporation is not actually a corporation, but is in fact a company.
• Tomorrow Corporation is made of three old men who don’t know how to use social media. To date, the Tomorrow Corporation twitter account has made fewer than 450 tweets. Dandy Wheeler, where are you? We need help.
  

Thanks For Playing!

And thank you for your legitimate purchase of your brand new Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace!

When we started this strange little company, we never expected a million people would want to play anything we made, let alone a game about burning things but that’s actually about other things. Over the years we’ve received wonderful piles of supportive fan art, emails, tweets, pokes, and jabs. While we’re not the most talkative bunch, we are truly touched to have your support.

So… THANK YOU! Miss Nancy is available for hugs.

Kyle, Kyle, and Allan

Tags: indie games, Little Inferno, Little Inferno 1 Million, Little Inferno One Million, Tomorrow Corporation

Wednesday, June 13th, 2018 at 8:00 am
by KyleGray
filed under Human Resource Machine, indie games, Little Inferno, news, Tomorrow Corporation, Welcome to the Information Superhighway