Road to Ruinarch Part 1: Wishlist Gathering and Expectations

Wishlist acquisition and its effects on game launches are a continuously evolving oft-argued topic among indie developers.  Which makes sense, since game launches on Steam can often make or break the long term success of a game and the livelihoods of game developers.

I'm writing this article for the purposes of tracking the wishlist acquisition process for Ruinarch and making our own contribution to pulling back the curtain and revealing more information about the business of games. I will also be making a bold and probably foolish prediction about how well we will do on Launch week. 

As a quick refresher, my name is Ryan Sumo, and I am a cofounder at Squeaky Wheel, a Philippines based indie game developer currently working on Academia : School Simulator.  Last year, we signed a contract with Maccima Games to publish their Evil Overlord Simulator, Ruinarch, which is launching on August 25, 2020.  Let’s begin!

Pre publishing announcement  March 8 2019 to October 20 2019

Daily wishlist average: 7 Total wishlists in time period: 1422

This period covers the time before Maccima and Squeaky Wheel were involved.  Starting from March 8 to October 2019, Maccima was doing its own marketing efforts for the game and netting a respectable 1422 wishlists in the process.

From Publishing Announcement to Steam Festival Oct 21 2019 - June 15 2020

Daily average: 11 Total wishlists in time period: 2318

This period covers the time in which Squeaky Wheel formalized its involvement with Maccima and Ruinarch.  The initial announcement got a small burst of interest, but eventually faded away. There is a 57% increase in the daily averages from 7 to 11 wishlists a day.  Our internal target was 6000 wishlists before launch, so we were a couple thousand wishlists away.

We hired a PR company called Indie Bros to assist us with PR.  I primarily sought them out because they had worked in promoting Rimworld, and since we were talking up Ruinarch as the “anti-Rimworld” I thought they’d be a good fit.  In general they helped quite a bit with checking out our tags and store page, but really I was investing in their network with streamers that had played Rimworld, which did pay off in the end.

Steam Festival (June 16 - 23)

Daily average: 48 Total wishlists in time period: 308

We were very excited to join the Steam Festival because we hoped this would take us to the 6000+ wishlist point. Sadly the sheer number of entries in the festival meant that we were buried in the crowd. While there was a small boost, it was hardly enough and did not really carry over

Before Streamers (June 24 - August 8)

Daily average: 21 Total wishlists in time period: 878

We’re quietly worried, calculating that if we maintain our progress we’ll hit 5000 wishlists but still be short of our target. I pour some more money into reddit ads (about $60 daily on selected subreddits) and it does pay off a little bit. A rough estimate would be we got a 1 wishlist for every $2.50 we put in. In retrospect this seems terrible. We do get a lot of impressions this way which may be worth it in the end? We were also more active on Discord thanks to our new hire Shannelle, who has been doing an excellent job of managing the channels.

Leading up to launch our plans are to send out a build to select streamers 3 weeks before launch and open it up wide to all streamers 1 week before launch. We were hoping that this would have some impact.

Streamers Ahoy (August 9 - August 24)

Daily average: 1565 Total wishlists in time period: 23,111

On August 9, SplatterCatGaming posted this video of Ruinarch.  On that day our wishlists shot up by 2891, and while it decline after that, it averaged more than a 1000 wishlist per day since that point.  This is where working with Indiebros really paid off.  While splattercat MIGHT have picked up the game on his own without us working with the Indiebros, I’m fairly certain that having them do the outreach for us helped. Other medium to large streamers like Arch and Dr Horse soon followed suit. 

Separate from Indiebros we did our own outreach to folks who had played Academia : School Simulator, and every day since that first big video by Splattercat has seen me looking up new Streamers and sending them keys (I should have prepared this beforehand, but I was also busy running our company and project managing Academia). 

We were also part of the Yogscast Tiny Teams Festival, which was a great stroke of fortune. However it’s hard to tell how much of an impact it had given the event happened at the same time content creators were picking up the game.

On Friday the 21st we hit the front page of new and upcoming. I would say we were probably at around 20k wishlists at that point. Getting on the front page of new and upcoming did have a positive effect, but the effect may have been buried by other factors that seemed to be pushing our wishlists upwards, so I’m not entirely sure how much to credit it. I did notice an increase in “Home Page” visits in the Steam marketing graphs, so that might be related?

Why Names and Words Matter

One thing that I want to make clear is that I think that the guys at Maccima did a really great job with Ruinarch. They pitched the game as a story generator, knowing full well that content creation is storytelling, and they were banking that this would entice content creators and entertain their players.  I’d also like to think we did a good job with the rebranding.  Initially Ruinarch was called “World’s Bane”, which, while kinda cool in a JRR Tolkien kind of way, just doesn’t sound like a game from 2020.  We workshopped a lot of different names (My early favorite was Mendaxarch, can you imagine?!?!) and finally settled on Ruinarch as a cool and unique name, and we have to give credit to Jakub Chilaber for helping us with a really kickass logo. 

The game description was also very crucial. Initially Maccima had pitched the game to people as an Evil Overlord Simulator. We all agreed that calling the game an Evil Overlord Simulator undercut the really cool art and style of the game, but it was decided that we would use that in all of our marketing material.  That means that on our Steam page, on the Ruinarch Website, and our pitches to streamers, we always led with the sentence “Ruinarch is an Evil Overlord Simulator…”.  We also dropped hints in the description and in our marketing that it’s “like Rimworld but you’re the bad guy”. Why is that important? Well for one thing it entices streamers because it’s that old advertising adage of offering something that’s similar, but different. And two, Youtubers are using those cues in their titles, which I suspect draws people’s attention.

So what does all of this mean? It seems like the combination of name, description, and cool logo are helping videos of Ruinarch outperform videos of other games by the same streamer. For example, check out these videos by Splattercat:

Notice that with the exception of “Going Medieval”, Ruinarch has more views than most of the other games within a +/- 1 week time period.

You can also see that with smaller streamers like Geek Cupboard:

Notice that most of his videos average around a thousand views, but his Ruinarch (Evil Overlord Simulator) video has 6k views.

So for whatever reason, videos of our game are generating more interest than videos from other games (even those with a much larger marketing budget for big name publishers). Taking the time to craft your name and marketing descriptions may seem like a waste of time initially, but it can pay off in very weird and unexpected ways.

Future Plans and Bold Predictions

After the initial flurry of activity we’re doing a soft embargo of videos until launch day, in order to maximize eyeballs at the point where players can throw money at us.  We’re also taking advantage of the fact that we now have 3 games under the Squeaky Wheel label. We’ve added Ruinarch to our complete the set Squeaky Wheel Bundle, and timed a sale and visibility boost for both Academia and Political Animals to coincide with the launch of Ruinarch.  The idea is to maximize every single opportunity to get Ruinarch in front of Steam users.

So now we’re at the end and we can do the fun part where I predict how many sales we’ll have in our first week! Jake Birkett’s original boxleiter number of 1st week sales equalling 0.5 of wishlists has been modified by Simon Carless’ updated stats. So given we have 28000 wishlists as of this post, here’s my predictions for week 1 sales:

Pessimistic Launch : (0.075 of wishlists) 2100 units

Realistic Launch : (0.25 of wishlists) 7000 units

Optimistic Launch : (0.5 of wishlists) 14000 units

I’ll be back in a week (or a month) to let you know how it went!

Lessons Learned From Two Game Launches

A little over a year ago I wrote a rather depressing blog post about Political Animals' launch. You can read it in full if you like, but the bottom line is the launch was a major flop despite the fact that it was featured on Steam's front page. Indiepocalypse aside, a front page feature should still have assured us a enough views to break even. It didn't. Academia : School Simulator, on the other hand, did well enough to ensure that we could continue development into the foreseeable future. In fact, despite not receiving any features from Steam, Academia : School Simulator sold almost 3 times as much as Political Animals in the same time period.

Why was that? Since we're talking about first day sales, I posit that it cannot be the actual quality of the games that mattered. Because if Political Animals was simply a bad game, what we should have seen was a flood of purchases based on that front page feature and then a subsequent amount of bad reviews, returns, and refunds. Instead, what we saw was people finding our steam page and then immediately deciding “nah, I'll pass”.

I realize now it's the months leading up to launch day that matters most.  I'm going to describe and differentiate what we did for Political Animals and Academia : School Simulator with the hopes that you can use the lessons we learned for your own game launches.

Social Media

Political Animals:

This was a social media failure. While we had a Website, Blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts where we would post sporadic updates, we weren't showing anything that the players could engage with. This was our fault. Cliff from Positech would push us to do video devlogs, but we would demur from lack of ability/time. This shot us in the foot at launch, as we had not built up the requisite trust and awareness from our target market for a good launch.

Academia : School Simulator

We did a MUCH better job this time around. We decided from the beginning that we would do youtube devlogs. So as soon as we had a primitive prototype that we could show off, we started doing devlogs. They were really bad at the start, but you can see the improvement in the devlogs and the game as time moved on. We had a very strict once a month devlog rule, even when we had little to show for the month aside from polishing the game for launch. While we didn't get hundreds of thousands of views, we had an active community that was asking questions and sending suggestions, excited for every month's update.

For every devlog, we posted it on Twitter, Youtube, and our Mailing List. There was a great feedback loop where at the end of every month we would see our Mailing List numbers increase.

We've been a bit negligent on the Youtube side since launch, something I'm going to rectify at the end of the month. The honest reason is that these videos are exhausting and take up a huge chunk of time to work on. So at the end of an exhausting dev month, the last thing any of us wanted to do was to make a video of our progress. But they're the touchstone of our outreach to players, so we need to get back on it.

Conclusion

It's important to have a good, consistent media plan and follow through on it. Start as soon as you can, especially if you know you have to build up trust and create a community around your game.

Steam Store Page

This was a fail for both launches. Aside from filling up the requisite store information (which by the way takes a hell of a lot of time) we essentially did not do anything with the store pages before launch. This is a huge mistake. Like it or not, many gamers are treating Steam as a one-stop shop for their gaming information these days. So there will be a lot of people ending up on your Steam Store page that will never have heard of you before or seen your Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube account. So if they end up at your store page and there have been no updates since yo made the store page live, it will look empty, and emptiness breeds mistrust.

This is even more important for Early Access games. Because so many people have been burned by Early Access games before there is a huge hurdle of trust that you have to overcome with skeptical players. In fact, some people on our Steam discussion boards for Academia wrote saying they initially thought we were scammers because of the similarity to Prison Architect and the fact that there were no updates. The worst thing is we only saw this comment days later, making us look even more suspicious! It took us a few days to gain players' trust by sharing all of the devlogs that we had previously made on Youtube and establishing a track record of development.

Conclusion

The lesson here is that once you publish your Steam page you have to start treating it as another social network that you have to manage, if not the most important social network. An active Steam store page assures players that developers are legit and communicating with the playerbase, which gives them more confidence in the game

Conventions

Political Animals

For Political Animals we went to quite a few conventions, the most important of which were PAX West and EGX in the UK. We got some good press out of it, with Eurogamer even giving us a small writeup as one of their “Best of EGX”. We met some cool players who were super into the game, and it gave us hope that we were on the right track. Sadly, it turns out that this was not the case. We spent a lot of time and energy going to conventions around the world, but I think that money was essentially wasted, especially since for Academia we didn't even go to a single one.

Academia : School Simulator

Aside from our disappointment with the results from Political Animals, the easy answer for why we didn't go to any conventions is simply because we had nothing to show yet. We were way too early in the dev process to be showing it off.

We did go to a convention, but only to a local one in the Philippines called ESGS. While ESGS is one of the biggest gaming conventions in the Philippines, it pales in comparison to PAX and EGX. We also went there post-launch, meaning we already had a game we were selling and could sell to attendees at a significant discount. We also had a free booth courtesy of indiearena, and we wanted to support the local game industry and meet our peers while we were there.

As with Political Animals, it was great to meet the players of our games, and we even picked up some local press. We also found out later on that we'd been nominated for a local industry awards, and even ended up taking home best game! So there's certainly a lot of emotional value to be gained from doing conventions, but don't go there expecting to boost your sales.

Conclusion

There are many reasons to attend conventions. Meeting players and fellow devs, getting feedback from them, and just enjoying the experience of seeing the other games. PAX was a whole lot of fun when we didn't have to man the booth. But our experience is that they are not very good value for money.

For ourselves, I think we will only go to conventions if we can get a subsidized spot, like with the Indie Megabooth, or even a free booth as with ESGS or Busan Indie Connect. We'll only go if we already have something to sell, so that we can subsidize the cost of travel. While some devs may find value in the cons, there are many devs that completely avoid them as a policy (Rimworld's Tynan Sylvester and Zachtronics for example) but are still successful studios. That's the model we want to emulate moving forward.

Streamers and Press

Political Animals

We reached out to streamers and press a week or so (memory fails me) before launch. I think we gave press a headstart just because it takes them a little longer to write an article, but that was the gist of it. We got some pretty big streamers on board, the biggest of which was TotalBiscuit. It was amazing watching him stream the game. Unfortunately I think it was a mistake to share the game a week early. By the time the actual launch rolled around, interest in the game had dissipated. Every second between the initial impression and clicking to buy a game is crucial. Bigger studios can rely on marketing right before the game's launch to help cover for this, but for a small studio it can be the kiss of death.

Academia : School Simulator

This time around we were adamant that we wanted to close the gap between first impression and game purchase. We released keys to press and streamers a few days before launch with a loose NDA that basically said “We are releasing this to you early so you can familiarize yourselves with the game, but please release your content only after the game is available for purchase. Otherwise you will receive a long, heartfelt email full of disappointment from me.” There were one or two outliers, but for the most part people stuck to the NDA.

Just to tie this back to social media, one advantage of doing those early youtube videos and spreading the word early was that we got youtubers emailing us asking for access even after our first devlog. So they were primed and pretty pumped to share the game by the time we finally released the keys.

For Academia we used a combination of both Keymailer and Woovit, so people could choose what they felt most comfortable with. Email or Twitter was a last resort, but we would ask for some verification before we would give out the keys to avoid the inevitable scammers.

Conclusion

I realize now that I didn't really write too much about press. That's because for the most part, press outlets hold much lesser sway now than then used to. I would suggest picking out the most important one for you and sending out a personal email, then crossing your fingers.

Build a marketing strategy that will inevitably attract Streamers and press to your game. Release as close to launch as you can to maximize day one sales. Cross all fingers and toes.

Timing

Political Animals

We launched Political Animals on November 2.  This was awful timing because A) It was a terribly fatiguing election (The US election in 2016) and people were sick of it and B) November is a very heavy month for launches, and we were sandwiched between some really big attention grabbers.  We had no choice with this as we could not have launched any earlier, and launching AFTER the US elections might have been even worse.

Academia : School Simulator

We consciously went for a September launch.  Our actual target was August but we needed just a tiny bit more time so we settled on September 8.  There was less of a crowd when we launched, and I think we came out the better for it.  We also had the benefit of three successive sales (Halloween, Autumn, and Winter) coming one after the other, where people are primed to buy new games.  We carefully set the discount to 10% so as to be part of the sale but not undercut the value of our new game's release.

Conclusion

The general rule for indies is to try to launch around February or August because those are the quietest months of the year for launches.  Given the number of games coming out every day on Steam this rule is rapidly losing currency, but I would still advise you to never try to launch in the October to December window because you will be facing up against studios with huge marketing budgets that will drown you out.

Final Thoughts

We learned from the mistakes we made with Political Animals and applied them to Academia : School Simulator. While it wasn't the best launch in the world and I'm sure we could have done better, we did do well enough to keep the lights on. In these dark days of the Indiepocalypse, that's already quite a feat.

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! If you're interested, you can buy the game now! If you're not ready to buy, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel and help us spread the word!

What Does it Feel Like to Launch a Game?

It's been almost a week that Political Animals has been on sale on Steam/GoG/Humble.  It's been quite the emotional roller coaster.  I wanted to take a week to absorb all the emotions and share it with gamers and gamedevs alike.  My apologies for a lack of stats.  I was hoping to share some in this post, but given I can't be too specific with them as per Steam's rules, there's nothing super interesting to show you right now.  I may do a more stats heavy blog in the future once we have a bigger sample size.

Launch Expectations

Given we're not allowed to share actual Steam data, the best we can do is compare out expectations of launch versus how things actually turned out.  We had reasonable expectations for a good launch.  Our publisher, Positech Games, has a good track record and fanbase fond of political games to draw from.  We had positive experiences from players at PAX and EGX.  We gave out keys to press and Youtubers (This is the funniest LP by far) a week prior to launch and we were getting a lot of positive feedback.  Total Biscuit even responded with a Steam key request right after I blasted my press release, which was quite exciting. And we were able to launch right before the US elections, which was our target all along.

There were some warning signs though.  The Halloween Sale happened right before launch, and that's always a terrible time to launch a game.  It was not quite as big as a summer sale, but it's always bad to chase after customers after their wallets have just been emptied.  We were also having a hard time getting traditional press coverage, which would be an issue later on.  And Positech has had games do poorly before, with Democracy : Africa and Gratuitous Space Battle 2 being the biggest disappointments.  

Launch Results

Given we worked virtually (we all live in different parts of Metro Manila and meet once a week) We'd made a team decision to get together after the launch instead of waiting for it together.  I personally went to watch Dr. Strange (entertaining movie, if you can get past Cumberbatch's strained American accent) and waited up for the launch with some close friends before calling it a night.

Note: because we live in the Philippines, the 10am launch in the US was actually 1am in the Philippines.

After a less than restful sleep, I woke up to immediately check on our first day sales so far. We'd previously been informed that we'd be featured on the front page so I was a little bit excited. I'm struggling to remember what I felt when I finally saw the numbers.  Shock?  Sadness?  Probably a stunned silence.  Surely they couldn't be so low.  I impotently clicked refresh a few times until I was satisfied that this wasn't some error.  When it finally sank in that we were probably Positech's poorest performing game, I was a little surprised at how I felt.  I just sat there for what felt like ages thinking "well, we flopped."  I sank two and a half years of my life chasing this day and we flopped.  I was a little worried about how numb I was feeling.  Shouldn't I be crying or something? Is this what shock feels like?  

I stood up and told my wife the bad news.  We sat for a bit while she comforted me.  But it was a weekday, so she soon left for work while I drifted back to stare blankly at the computer screen to click on refresh yet again.  Then I did only thing that I could do, which was try to figure why exactly we'd flopped so badly.

Why Didn't People Buy our Game?

The Halloween sale probably had a bigger impact than we thought.  It's hard to ask players for more money when they've just shelled out for games.  Double Fine also had their day of the devs bundle out at the same time, providing incredible value for just a few dollars.  While there will always be other games out when you launch, I think we picked a particularly poor time to do it.  

"Looks really cute and could be a lot of fun. But as an American I really don't associate fun with elections right now. Dread, yes."

The above quote was from a comment on GoG.  I'm not putting too much stock in just the one comment, but the electino cycle in the US takes an obscenely long amount of time, and my sense is that at this point most people just want it to be over already. Had we launched a month or more ago this might have been less of an issue.

After noticing some people on our game's discussion page opine that the game A) had great art but B) "looked like a mobile game" and C) lacked strategic depth (despite their not having played the game), I decided to take a look at our Steam store page.  I got really upset at myself at that point.  The store page is the first thing most players will see of your game, so it's important to make a good impression.  Your trailer, screenshots, descriptions and reviews all have to work together to convince the prospective player that your game is worth buying. Our store page had an incomplete description and no links to reviews.  It's no wonder people were making these assumptions about our game.  If we couldn't even put together a proper Steam store page, how could we make a good game?  Sadly, the biggest thing that might have affected our sales was something that was very much in our control, and I dropped the ball.

Lastly, I should say it is entirely possible that the game just feels too expensive for what it is, and that maybe the game just isn't good.  As for the first, I suppose we'll find out in a few months.  We've got a surprising amount of wishlists, and if a bunch of those convert during a sale, then we'll know how much people actually value the game.  As for whether or not it's good, we're happy with the feedback the game got at PAX and EGX so we're pretty confident saying we've made a good game.

Engaging the Community

Now that I'd identified some of the launch day issues, the only thing left to do was to try to rectify them as best as we could.  First, that meant fixing the issues with the Steam store page.  Next, we dived deep into the Community discussions and responded as best as we could to people's concerns. In some ways, this is a dangerous move.  Developers can get very defensive about their work, and it's very easy to get into an argument with a player and become labeled an angry dev.  Any devs who want to wade into community discussions need to approach it with an air of humility.  Always assume that any complaint is a valid concern, even if it seems dismissive.  My father in law once told me that a customer that complains is valuable, because they could just as easily have walked away without letting you know why.  If they're complaining, take that as opportunity to convince them to give you another chance.  Which is exactly what I did with one guy who was on the fence.  I asked what was keeping him on the fence, then we had a short back and forth which ended up with him saying :

"Well, with Steam offering a 2-hour refund window, I decided that I'll go ahead and grab the game and give it a whirl."

How did I do it?  It's not magic.  I never once tried to "correct" his intuition that the game was lacking in strategy.  I merely explained that based on our experience at conventions people were happy with the level of strategy, and also linked to a Eurogamer article about it.  That was enough to persuade them to try out the game, which is all I really wanted.

Aside from that, we took note of what people are saying they want from the game.  They say the game feels a bit unbalanced.  We'll look into that.  A lot of people are asking for multiplayer, so we've penciled that in as an update.  There were a few questions about Linux. Assuming all goes well that will be coming soon. More than anything it's the fact that we're engaging with the community that makes people commit to the game.  They feel like we're not just gonna drop the game and never update it again.  We're also still actively looking for press to cover the game to try to keep it in people's minds and give the game some more legitimacy.  

We've also been approached by localizers in China, Russia, etc. places where games don't traditionally do very well due to piracy and a lack of English speaking players.  Localization is definitely a pain, but maybe taking a broader outlook is the way we can keep the game relevant in the coming months and years.

Conclusion

We're proud of the game we've made.  We're also proud to contribute to the number of Philippine made games on Steam.  That may not seem like a big deal to countries with a wealth of developers and games, but it certainly means a lot to us.  It still seems almost impossible that we managed to put the game out on Steam.  

We regret being such a poor investment for Positech in the short term, but they'll make their money back over the long haul, and hopefully even sooner if we manage to play our cards right.  

As for the team, it was definitely pretty rough.  Our first meeting after seeing the sales numbers was pretty somber, but we ended it with a rousing karaoke session that lifted our spirits, if not our sales.  We'll keep working hard to make sure that this game is the best it can be, and hopefully we'll have a chance to make another one.

Thanks for reading. Political Animals is out! If you're a games journalist or streamer that wants a review copy, please check out our press kit and distribute() link.  If you'd like to be updated on the latest Political Animals news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter!