I made a huge mistake that ruined the launch of my 2nd indie game. Here's the story and how I'm going to try to save it: I built my autobattler "Some of You May Die" with the intention of making an "Autochess"-like multiplayer game where you could push synergies a lot deeper. When I announced it, a few people asked for Singleplayer and I stupidly thought, "yeah why not, I'll just add a singleplayer mode". This single decision ruined the launch. Since it was intended to be multiplayer, most of my effort went to multiplayer. It was designed around multiplayer. I thought of Singleplayer as a "bonus" but what I didn't realize (I should have) is that many people would buy it only for the singleplayer and judge it only on the singleplayer. Justifiably, these people were upset and felt that it was poorly balanced and overpriced. The price issue makes sense if someone is only playing singleplayer. That was something that I didn't foresee. The balance issue is mostly about it being too difficult. This was a secondary mistake that I made. I did a lot of "rebalancing" in the month before launch and made it a lot harder. Because there's not a whole lot of singleplayer (about 6 hours), I thought if it was too easy people would be upset and just breeze through it. I was probably right but the issue was larger than I realized. There just shouldn't have been singleplayer at all. If it was too easy, people would be justifiably mad due to how short it would be to beat. And when I made it too hard, people were mad too. The real answer should have been just to commit to multiplayer only. It's what I wanted in the first place and I made a bad decision. It may be too late to save the game, I'm not sure, but this is what I'm doing to address it: - I've removed all mention of singleplayer from the store page. It still exists but now it's truly a bonus. No one buying it now should expect to see singleplayer - I've redone the main menu UI to put Multiplayer as the first and primary option I really believe in its value as a multiplayer game. I love playing it myself - it still hasn't gotten old for me and a lot of players love it too. My hope is that my changes will "stem the bleeding" of the negative reviews and that long term it will be able to recover. My biggest takeaways are: 1. Don't try to please everybody. It should've remained only multiplayer 2. Don't make significant balancing changes after you've already validated that the game is fun with a large demo audience. As mentioned previously, keeping it easy may have caused it's own flood of negative reviews for a different reason but still, significantly changing the balance without re-validating with a larger population was a mistake. I'm sharing this so hopefully no one reading will make the same mistakes that I did. It's been a little hard seeing something that I love and believe in get hated on, but at the end of the day, if I had been wiser I could've prevented it. So I'm going to take in these lessons and carry on. I'm planning more updates and we'll see if I can turn this thing around in the long term. Thanks for reading <3 Jo