You may recall the sad case of Planet Centauri, an indie 2D sandbox game that spent more than a decade in development, amassed well over 130,000 wishlists, and then struggled to gain traction when the 1.0 release happened earlier this year because a bug in Steam prevented the it's out announcement email from being sent to people who'd added it to their wishlists. Ouch.
Honest mistake, though, and to Valve's credit it offered developer Permadeath a small makeup: an opportunity to spotlight Planet Centauri as one of Steam's Daily Deals, "as a way to help make up for lost visibility."
The studio has since moved on to other things, because there really wasn't any choice in the matter, but despite some misgivings it did eventually decide to take Valve up on the offer. So, as reported by Polygon, a little over a month ago Permadeath signed up for the Daily Deal spotlight on one of the dates offered by Valve: November 12.
November 12, as it turned out, was a very big day—but not for Planet Centauri. Because November 12 was the day Valve revealed the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller to the world, a move that completely dominated the videogaming news scene for days and buried everything else. "New Steam Hardware, Early 2026!" the Steam storefront blared, and if anything else was going on, nobody noticed or much cared. Ouch.
Planet Centauri developer Laurent Lechat told Polygon that Permadeath selected November 12 for the Daily Deal showcase "more or less randomly," and the team understands there's no way Valve would've spilled the beans on its very big plans to a small indie developer. "It's just bad luck and we must accept it," Lechat said.
The double dose of misfortune is very bad luck indeed, although obviously there's no malice involved: I do wonder why Valve didn't block out November 12 for such things, but with tens of thousands of games milling about on Steam it may have been simply impractical. And if it's inevitable that somebody is going to get stepped on by the Steam hardware announcement, well... What are the odds it'll be somebody we already stepped on a year ago? Right?
Unlike the Planet Centauri 1.0 launch, the Daily Deals spotlight wasn't a disaster. More than 5,000 copies of the game sold while it was featured on Steam, and while that's not quite up to what Permadeath was hoping for (or even what Planet Centauri reportedly sold after the story of its launch day misfortune first broke), it's a pretty decent number for a single day of sales. More importantly, "it's enough for us to survive for at least a year and allow us to finish our second game," Lechat said.
That game hasn't been announced yet but the studio says it plans to forgo early access and go straight into full release, with a demo that will be available as soon as possible. The studio also hopes to bring new updates to Planet Centauri—even though Lechat admitted that, "over the years, I really get the feeling that Planet Centauri is cursed." Can't say I blame him on that one.
Planet Centauri is currently on sale for $7.49/£6/€7—50% off—on Steam.
