game marketing

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

pre-publishing.png

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

postpublishing.png

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:

Splattercat.jpg

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!










Why Isn’t Academia: School Simulator Selling as Well as Other Games?

Sorry for the rather clickbaity title! This will actually be a rather dry and boring dissection of why our game hasn’t done as well as similar games, and ideas for doing better.  Academia : School Simulator (henceforth known as Academia) has been out since September 2017 and has done pretty well for Squeaky Wheel. It recently went past the 50000 unit mark and was making a decent profit, at least until the dreaded Steam Algocalypse of October 2018, from which it never truly recovered.  We do have some savings built up and we’re more or less breaking even every month. Being on that knife’s edge of profitability does keep me up though, and I’ve recently started wondering, why hasn’t Academia been quite as successful as other, very similar games? I decided to do a deep dive and compare notes with some other trusted indie developers.  These are the results.

PS: I want to make it clear that we realize how lucky we are to be one of the few devs that are even surviving relatively comfortably. I’m just thinking of this an experiment, ie all things being equal why would one game do worse?

The games to be compared are:

We are comparing these games because they are the most directly comparable to Academia in these ways:

  • Graphics: All of them have a graphical lineage from Prison Architect (for which I was the artist), with some variation.

  • Team Size: Relatively similar team sizes

  • Marketing : Similar marketing output, which is to say that aside from doing their own marketing, none of these games have really gotten big marketing pushes.

  • Originality : These games are building off a relatively established framework. Obviously they are unique in their own ways, but they are different mostly in theme, not gameplay.

  • Launch Timing : These games came out within one year of each other, so for the most part the timing argument can be said to be neutral (ie one game does not have a huge advantage over the other due to being first).

  • Early Access : All these games are currently in Early Access.

  • Quality : I am coming in with the assumption that all these games are of relatively equal quality. That is to say one of these games is not clearly superior to the others at first glance.

We are excluding the following games from this comparison :

  • Prison Architect

  • Rimworld

Prison Architect can be said to have reintroduced the business sim genre to the world when it came out, and was wildly successful for a variety of reasons.  We cannot compare to that. Rimworld, while having similar graphics, is essentially a storytelling game similar to Dwarf Fortress, making it a massively different game.  Both games also came out much earlier, which means they have the benefit of not dealing with any “sim fatigue” that may be creeping in. In short, these super successful game are not a good comparison to Academia.

Assumed Units Sold

The goal of this exercise is to figure out why Academia hasn’t quite sold the same amount of units as these other very similar games.  We will not be measuring actual units sold, but merely comparing the number of reviews and using that as a proxy for units sold.

As of June 29, 2019, these are the numbers of reviews per game:

  • Academia : 522

  • Sim Airport : 1740

  • Airport CEO : 1772

  • ABITM : 982

Based on the above numbers we can say that very roughly, ABITM has sold twice as many units as Academia, and Airport CEO and Sim Airport have sold 3 times as many units as Academia. 

Pricing

  • Academia : $20

  • Sim Airport : $20

  • Airport CEO : $16

  • ABITM : $15

In terms of pricing the games are pretty close to each other.  ABITM’s lower price point may have helped give it an edge over Academia, but it has sold less than both Sim Airport and Airport CEO, so lower pricing doesn’t seem to necessarily lead to more units sold.

Launch Date

  • Academia : 8 Sep, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 24

  • Sim Airport : 7 Mar, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 62

  • Airport CEO : 29 Sep, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 81

  • ABITM : 4 Nov, 2016 avg. reviews/month to date = 30

The most striking thing here is that Academia and Airport CEO launched at basically the same time, but given that amount of time Airport CEO averages 81 reviews a month and Academia averaged 24 views a month.  

Trailer Comparison

There has been a lot of talk about how important trailers are to a game’s launch. Mike Rose in particular has mentioned in one of rhe GDC talks (I can’t remember which one in particular) that a good launch trailer is key to success. So let’s compare the numbers between the launch trailers of each game on Youtube:

These are current numbers, as I’m not aware of any way to access historical data.  There are some interesting comparisons to be made here.

  1. Airport CEO had the most views at almost 3x the number of views of Sim Airport, however this did not translate to 3x more sales.

  2. Academia had about 1.3x more views and ABITM had about 2x more views versus Sim Airport, but Sim Airport has outsold both Academia and ABITM

My conclusion is that while it is very important for your trailers to hit a certain mass (say above 20k views), after that a lot of other different things come into play when it comes to unit sales.

Sum of Top 5 Video Views on Youtube

While the launch trailer aims to measure initial impact and interest, this aims to measure long term interest in the game.  I am aware that there is a better way to do this via Steamspy, but I currently do not have an account set up with them so this is a proxy. I will add the top 5 videos for each game based on viewer count and compare them.

  • Academia : 9584000

  • Sim Airport: 2240000

  • Airport CEO: 1104000

  • ABITM: 1577000

Academia is clearly the winner here, with an almost 5x lead over Sim Airport. Our sales data also shows that we unit sales peaked during the times when these major streamers (jacksepticeye, DanTFM etc.) played our games. It seems clear that despite having a good lead in terms of views, it hasn’t guaranteed that Academia would do better over the other games.

Theme Comparison

When we made the decision to do a school-themed game, the thought process was that it would be relatable since everyone has (in the economic class that can afford to play games for leisure) has been to school. 

Clearly this was not a winning strategy, as it seems running a mall and running an airport (despite the fact that two games are duking it out) are still making more sales than a game about running a school.

Some developers did mention that the theme of the game did not particularly draw them. While the power fantasy of running an airport or mall may stoke entrepreneurial dreams, running a school may not quite hit those same notes.  It could be that there is a mismatch in theme and genre here, and that a school game might have worked best as an adventure game or even a visual novel, since this is where the story elements of running a school might shine.

Marketing Comparison

I am not aware of the actual marketing spends of any of these companies.  However I am on friendly terms with all of them, and as far as I can tell, none of them have made any real investments in marketing, whether it be purchasing ads or even showing up at conventions.

I know for a fact that the Sim Airport guy is very averse to going to conventions, he wasn’t particularly keen on going to GDC.  He’s also mentioned he hasn’t done a lot marketing, adhering to the belief that people buy the game “because it’s good”

ABITM is a dev based somewhere in France who also doesn’t really do the convention circuit, although I’m not aware of any marketing or ad spends in his part.

The only time I heard of Airport CEO in media or conventions was when Jason Rohrer mentioned it in his talk at GDC.

As far as I know none of us are doing any major efforts in terms of marketing, ad spends, or conventions, and yet Academia  has sold the least of the four games.

Youtube subscribers on company account

Another form of marketing is having your own Youtube account and pushing out videos.  This is something that Prison Architect and Production Line have used to very good effect.  Academia did this very well early on but we have lapsed.

Airport CEO has a very clear lead here, with Sim Airport coming a distant second. You could make the argument that community engagement through having a Youtube channel is a key thing we could be improving on.

As a counterpoint however ABITM has a meager 235 subscribers but has twice as many sales as Academia.

Another interesting point is that Airport CEO and Sim Airport have chosen to make channels out of their games, while Academia and ABITM are using their studio channels.  There is a case to be made that a game having its own channel increases the chances that people will find it, and also helps with brand building for the game.

Game/Company Website

These are links to company or game websites with little analysis except to say that Sim Airport recently updated their website, while ABITM seems to be the simplest website of them all. None of the websites seem to convey any advantage to any of the games.

Review Score Percentage

Review score are a touchy subject when it comes to games on Steam.  Steam reps will insist to their death that review scores have zero effect on their algorithm while indie developers like Cliffski will yell at you to get your total review scores percentage back up to 70% because it’s THAT IMPORTANT. 

When I first wrote this, the review scores were:

  • Academia : 68%

  • Sim Airport: 77%

  • Airport CEO: 78%

  • ABITM: 82%

Overall ABITM is in the lead here, but not by much.  And despite this, both Airport games have easily outsold ABITM. So while Review Score must have some psychological effect on a player’s decision to buy a game or not, in this case there is no clear correlation.

Recently Academia’s total review score percentage hit 70% again, so it will be interesting to see if this has any effect on future sales.

Deepest Discount

One could argue that one of the games might be doing deeper discounts to pick up more units.  During the 2019 Steam summer sale these were the discounts of each game:

  • Academia : 25%

  • Sim Airport: 40%

  • Airport CEO: 30%

  • ABITM: 40%

We assume that the Steam Summer Sale is the most recent and therefore the deepest discount for each of these games, since it would be very hard to try to discount to 75% to try to boost units but they go back up to 40% off.  Once players know that it was discounted so deeply, it creates an anchoring effect, and they will simply wait for the game to go back down to 75% off.

Regardless, the differences in deepest discounts seem close enough that it seems safe to shrug this off as having any meaningful effect on sales.

Conclusion 

Based on the varied feedback, it seems that Academias’ biggest issues when it comes to sales are a poor fit between theme and genre, An average trailer, and possibly less depth and retention than the other games.

There is very little we can do about the theme, although we could work that into the game more so that anyone who *wants* to feel like they are running a school really gets into the game.  More depth will be added as time goes on, and once that’s done, a new trailer will hopefully entice people to try the game out.

This kind of comparison is really difficult unless there are vastly similar games to yours out there, however it has been useful for our team in clarifying what kind of mechanics we should focus on adding to the game in the near future.  We hope it’s been helpful for you as well.

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! If you're interested in Academia, 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!


Indie Game Developers Should Sell Games in China (While They Still Can)

China Shakes the (Gaming) World

“The potent lure of the 1.3 billion person market, no matter how illusory it may be, has helped China to leapfrog some of the technology barriers that had stymied several of the Southeast Asian 'tiger' economies in the 80s and 90s" -James Kynge in China Shakes the World

Ever since China opened up its markets to the world companies have invested trillions of dollars into the country, hoping to be the one that reaps the rewards of access to that colossal market. Internet stalwarts like Uber and Ebay have tried and failed, and on the gaming side Sony and Microsoft are still barely chipping away at the market, yet somehow Valve has grown its Steam userbase in China, giving indie developers a crack at the Chinese gaming population.

China is well known in the gaming scene, but common wisdom was that the vast Chinese market was never going to pay for a game. Most people in China's first experience with gaming was through mobile phones, and with the subsequent turn of that marketplace towards F2P, it further entrenched the notion that Chinese gamers were unwilling to pay for premium games.

Even Valve's sideways entry into the market was via free-to-play. An alliance with Perfect World literally forced gamers to download Steam in order to play the Dota 2 in China. In fact many of them protested at having to download a piece of useless “zombie” software. But then a funny thing happened. While the Chinese government was busy banning Gears of War 4, Steam was subject to no such restrictions. The lure of ostensibly banned games being available on Steam seems to have led many Chinese gamers to buy and download GTA V on Steam. Enough of them have bought GTA V that China is the second largest country for GTA V in terms of units sold.

GTAV stats courtesy Steamspy

GTAV stats courtesy Steamspy

Steam took notice, and took steps to court the Chinese market by supporting payments in Chinese Yuan via payment services like AliPay and UnionPay, which greatly increased Chinese gamers' access to Steam games. In 2016 Steam also held the inaugural Lunar New Year sale to further embrace the Chinese Market. AAA game development has also taken notice, with increasing numbers adding Chinese language and audio to their games. Indie games like Lost Castle have also made a killing, selling 200,000 of its 300,000 total units in China alone.

There seems to be a growing appetite for paid PC games in China. On reddit commenter even mentioned that there is a sense of obligation on the part of Chinese gamers, saying “I have to buy (gamename)to pay back the debt no matter how bad it is. Because they have played lots of pirate version growing up lol.” And yet surprisingly very few indie developers seemed to be taking the Chinese market seriously, including myself.

Maybe We'll get Banned in China

Personally, as someone from the Philippines, I simply assumed that the Chinese market behaved in a similar fashion as the rest of South East Asia, where I grew up. Players bought pirated games as kids and then transitioned into playing free to play games. The population playing legitimate games was simply too small to mater financially. Our strategy was to try to make it big in Western markets (ie US and Western Europe) and the other markets would follow suit. We even joked that maybe the best thing to happen to us would be to be banned in China, because then at least we'd get some press from it.

So I have to admit when I first received an email from Fall Ark of indienova with an offer to localize the game in Simplified Chinese, it wasn't on the top of my to-do list. I was flattered that he had been following the game on Tigsource for a while and thought it would be worthwhile to localize the game into Chinese, but I simply didn't take the market seriously. In my defense, September and October of 2016 were very trying periods for me. We were flying across the world to present Political Animals to gamers at PAX, EGX, TGS, and BICFest and trying to gauge feedback and finish the game all at the same time. It was probably the most stressful times of my life, and trying to add another language to our localization tasks might have have driven me crazy. But as I'll share with you all in a bit, I now really, really regret not having taken advantage of this generous offer sooner rather than later.

Political Animals in China

In our last blogpost, I mentioned that I was pleasantly surprised at how much our sales in China had picked up after we got localization done. I'll dig in to the numbers to give you some more context.

When I compared the two week period before we announced Chinese localization and 2 weeks afterwards, I realized that there was a 8x increase in the total number of units sold during that time. To take a longer view, I compared the sales for the 5 weeks prior to localization launch to a combined 2 and 3 week period after the launch and 3 weeks in January (excluding the units sold during the Winter Sale, which we’ll get to in a moment) and found a 3.2x increase in total units sold over the course of 5 weeks.

What can we learn from this? The amount of units sold in China was negligible prior to localization. It’s common knowledge that Chinese gamers usually won’t bother with a game if it’s not localized unless it’s massively successful. Adding localization to our game exponentially increased the chances that random Chinese gamers might pick up our game. Interestingly just as I was writing this we sold 4 more units in China, and 1 in Australia.

The only upsetting thing about this is thinking about how many sales we might have gotten on release day when we had front page status on Steam.

Steam Winter Sale

Things got even more interesting during the Steam Winter Sale, which according to Sergey Galyonkin on Steampsy drives the most unit sales of games. As you can see from the graph above, Chinese sales represented 17% of our total sales during the Steam Winter Sale, more than the UK and Canada combined! By comparison Japan and the Russian Federation, both large non-English speaking markets, only mustered 1% of the total sales each.

Obviously these are exciting numbers, but first you have to ask yourselves whether or not these numbers scale. After all, we’re looking at a very small sample size here in terms of units sold and time elapsed. But given the fact that games as vastly different as GTA V and Don’t Starve both have China as their number 2 region in terms units sold, I’m fairly confident that over time, that will be the case for us as well.

One major caveat that I have to mention here is that since Steam suggests pricing of 50% lower for China, that means that while the increase in units may be impressive, the revenue increase will be less so.

How to reach your Chinese Audience

Assuming you’ve bought in to the idea that there is huge potential in the Chinese Market, what do you do? First, localize. We were lucky enough that we were able to get free localization from indienova. They are pretty active about localizing games they like, so go ahead and get in touch with them if you haven’t already been contacted.

If you haven’t been contacted by indienova, there are indie game publishers in China that are actively searching for games to localize and launch in China. Another Indie and Coconut Island Studios are two examples of that. I would actually suggest this path for English speaking indies that don’t have access to someone who understands the Chinese market. These companies have relationships and fanbases that they can use to promote your game much more than you could do so on your own, especially given the fact that Facebook and Twitter are banned in China. Streamers are super big in China but unless you can read Chinese or have relationships with them there's almost zero chance you can get one of them to play your game. We actually pitched our game to Another Indie but they declined due to concerns over the political nature and style of our game (it didn't help that the game hadn't done well so far).

So for the most part we are DIY-ing it. We went and made a Squeakywheel Weibo account since thats what folks use there instead of Twitter/Facebook. We post there every now and then using either Google Translate or asking some Chinese friends to do short translations for us. As for stuff we post, we usually look at either reviews of the game in Chinese or screenshots people have posted of the Chinese version of the game.

funny.jpg

This funny review in Chinese got quite a few views. When run through Google Translate it reads:

"Political animal" by the United States Obama team carefully built three yuan super VR games, Obama, Trump, Hillary lead. AD 7, 1427, Azeroth, the mainland decided to elect the next general secretary, and you, as a person elected to be elected as a candidate, where you need to use a variety of moral and moral The way to beat your opponent. such as:
Hard point of a topic, so that people of this constituency to know you
To confuse a second time, so that the constituency of all the people plus one second
In the constituency to find a sister, through the point of praise to pay Po into the harem
Mourning is hereby, ask the constituency of the Tu Hao to Krypton a single
To a PY deal, so that those who do not continue to force a second to see Marx
In this process you can also have a bunch of little brother and thugs to help you fight home robbery, they each have their own good.
Especially for a constituency can put forward a big news rival
Donkey lions can bury your sins to help you cook
Prostitutes from Hong Kong to run particularly fast
Repair the computer can be made welfare
Activists are good at muffled fortune
Dogs feed more boys
Report can be power cuts
Rogue can pull the opponent's brother out of the base
Each character has its own characteristics.
And you need to decide whether you should pay more attention to the motherland's small loli, unemployed female college students, dirty PY transactions, Crystal Palace construction progress, loss of faith lost lamb or the national physical health of these six major issues.
In the course of the game continue to use carrots and sticks to buy people speculation public opinion.
Eventually, all the banknotes will be gone, and you will be honorable to the crowned King

Yeah, we didn't get it either, and when we asked a taiwanese friend to translate it he said it was just full of bad puns!  It's hard to really say how many people we're really getting to click on our link to go to steam, but it's a toehold and we're taking advantage of as best we can.

We've geared up for a 40% discount during Chinese New Year weekend. Luckily it's the year of the rooster, and whaddayaknow we have a rooster on our candidate roster. It won't be as successful as if we had some proper support in China but I'm hoping it will make some impact. I'll report on that in a future blogpost.

The Window may be Closing

I personally want to push this as far as I can to try and see if there is room for markets for us aside from the US and Europe. The larger and more diverse the markets that we can sell our games to, the more indie game studios can survive and thrive. If a game that doesn't do well in the US can thrive in China, that should be celebrated.

However the window may be closing on indie and PC game developers in general. As previously mentioned, the Chinese government takes games seriously. They have a government body that regulates each and every game that is released on consoles, and recently this also affected games that were to be released on the app store. This substantially slows down game launches as publishers and studios have to jump through numerous hoops before to release their games. Publishers and large game companies have representation that can explain to them how best to go through the process, but small indies like us will be shit out of luck.  A recent government pronouncement has already started moving in this direction, so it may not be long before Steam's free pass gets revoked, and it gets much harder to release games beyond the Great Firewall. 

Tech Conglomerate Tencent has muddied up the waters even more as it launched a Steam competitor called TGP and plans to launch a gaming console.  TGP is restricted by the same government rules as Sony and Xbox, but it understands the Chinese market better and has every opportunity to replace Steam as the go-to platform for PC gaming.

In short, if you're an indie developer that feels like they have a shot at the Chinese market, you'd better make your move soon before that window closes for good.

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to be updated on the latest Squeaky Wheel news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter!

Political Animals Sales Statistics

Hey everyone,  I know it’s been a while since we last updated you, but enough time has passed that we now have enough stats to share with you after 2 and a half months of selling Political Animals!

Preface

I’ve talked about the launch of Political Animals before, most of which you can find on our blog.  But here’s a little breakdown for the tl:dr folks.  Political Animals is a turn-based strategy game where you are an animal candidate trying to win an election and keep your morals intact.  We worked on it for two years, half of which was funded by our publisher, Positech Games.  Squeaky Wheel is a small Philippine PC game studio that has a bunch of veteran developers in it, and personally the biggest project I ever worked on was Prison Architect, for which I did the art.

The game looked promising in all the events we brought it to, as we even got a staff pick by Eurogamer as one of its EGX games of 2016.  We were on the front page of Steam on launch, and had quite a few people streaming our game, most notably folks like Total Biscuit, NorthernLion, Quill18, etc.  Given all of that, how did we do?

Did we Break Even?

We’ve already mentioned that we’ve had a very poor launch, but it helps to know exactly how badly we did.  During the whole of development our internal “break even” number was always 10,000 units x $15, which is the full price of the game.  This took into account both development costs and marketing as well as taking into account Steam’s 30% cut of the revenue.  So how did we do?
 
As you can see after two and a half months on sale we’re about 30% of the way to breaking even.  Which isn’t so terrible, except this is after the first day sales bump and the Winter Sale.  The way things stand we’ll (or rather, our publisher) be very lucky to break even by the end of the year.  The only silver lining here for the studio is that none of us put our life savings into the game.

Sales per Marketplace

There aren’t any huge surprises here.  Steam is still the dominant digital marketplace when it comes to games.  Humble and GoG combined only make up 10% of our total sales so far.  I don’t really see this changing in the short term, as Steam really just has so many more subscribers than GoG or Humble combined.

Sales by Country

It gets a little more interesting when we look at units per country.  As expected most of our units have been sold in the US.  The UK comes in a distant second, which makes sense given Positech is from the UK and has a bit of a following there.  We’re not surprised that we quite a few sales in France, Germany, and Canada, as strategy games are usually popular in those countries.

Things start to get interesting when you notice that China is right behind Germany in terms of units sold.  When we announced the launch of Political Animals we were contacted by some localizers from indienova offering a translation to Simplified Chinese.  To be honest, the Chinese market was a bit of a mystery to us and it wasn’t high priority, but given our poor launch there was little to lose, especially when they offered to localize pro bono.  Since Chinese players mostly won’t both bother with a game unless it’s localized or super popular, this guaranteed us a few extra sales.  I even took the extra effort to start a Weibo page, though I’m not entirely sure if it really matters.

The process was pretty seamless, but took about a month to iron out the kinks.   The additional sales weren’t mind boggling, but we now had numerous people in China downloading and reviewing our game, and most of them seemed happy with it.  In the two weeks following our announcement of the localization our Chinese sale shot up by 300% (from a very small number) and during the winter sale Chinese sales were second only to the US.  The catch is that Steam’s suggested pricing is 50% off of our regular US price, so every unit sold in China is worth half a unit when it comes to our break even point.

We have localization in the works for Russian and Polish, and we’re hoping they’ll provide a small boost to our sales as well.

Sales by Platform

Once again no surprises here.  Windows makes up the majority of our sales and Mac and Linux combined make up less than 15%.  The only thing worth noting here is that the Linux sales were quite disappointing given how much work it took to get it working.  We used Unity to make Political Animals, and while porting to Mac was relatively trivial, making the game work on Linux’ multiple distros was a bit of a nightmare for us.

Steam Sales and Wishlist Graph

Lastly, here is the traditional reveal of the Steam sales graph! Our sales peaked at launch, as with most games, and shows a steady decline until a small peak during the Winter Sale.  We’d definitely hoped for more of a peak during the winter sales, but given the deluge of games on Steam in 2016 and the fact that we were only 25% off I should have expected that wouldn’t be the case.
 

As you can see with our wishlist graph, we have quite the gap between our outstanding wishes (players who indicated that they want to play the game) and activations (players who actually bought the game).  I suspect what this means is that there are lot of people waiting for the price to go down to an “acceptable” level before they pull the trigger.  We’ll find out in one of the future Stream sales as we slowly increase the discount.

What’s Next?

I think we followed a typical pattern of trying to save our game the best we can by pushing out rapid updates, talking to players, etc.  At some point you have to concede that the effort involved in this will bring minimal returns, so you have to go back to the drawing board and start a new game.  We’re still currently working on a major update to Political Animals that includes local multiplayer, but we’re also hard at work prototyping our next game and thinking about how to release it.  

If you have any additional questions about our stats, please feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer!

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to be updated on the latest Squeaky Wheel news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter!

 

Why I Made Challenge Coins for Political Animals

The salmon sushi seen above was excellent, if rather overpriced at 800 Yen.  Unfortunately that's typical of the inflated prices you find in every single airport around the world.  From here we fly to Portland, have another 4 hour layover, then finally take a 1 hour flight to Seattle for PAX.  I wanted to document the trip using one of the challenge coins I had made for the game, hence the "artfully" arranged picture above.  

Challenge Coins

I first heard about challenge coins from the excellent podcast 99 percent invisible.  Essentially they're a way for a military unit to identify and and tell a story about themselves.  They can also be passed on to people outside of the unit as a sign of gratitude, friendship, or to mark any momentous occasion.

These days almost anyone can go ahead and have a challenge coin made.  They're made for schools, companies, sports teams, etc. as a really neat way to show a sense of shared community.

I'd been thinking about getting challenge coins made for a long time.  Video games are such an ephemeral medium, especially in this day and age of digital distribution.  Sure you can "make" a game, but what do you really have to show for it if you don't have a computer screen near you?  A challenge coin solves this problem.  It gives you a physical object that you can look at and say "yup, we went and made this game."  It's a physical manifestation of the hours of stress and sweat and care that went into the production of the game, all held in the confines of a single metallic disc.

Plus, coins are super cool.

How to have Challenge Coins Made?

I wanted to have some challenge coins made before PAX, so my original idea was to order some from a company in the US and have have them shipped ahead.  I sent an inquiry to numerous companies but the quickest one to reply was allaboutchallengecoins.com.  The process couldn't be easier.  You can either download their template and design your coin in Photoshop or Illustrator, or just send them some designs with some ideas and let them figure out how to go about it.  They did a super job, but just as I was about to order the coins, I wanted to test an idea.

I knew that a lot of these websites were basically the storefront, while the actual coins were made in China.  Given that the Philippines was pretty near to China, I wondered if I could figure out a way to order direct from the supplier and save some money that way?

Wandering into the Land of Alibaba

Alibaba is the gateway to the factories of China.  Like a giant marketplace, companies display their wares with slogans and assurances of quality and environmental protection:

"Our factory is approved by many famouns brands such as Walt Disney / Coca Cola / McDonald's etc. To avoid causing pollutants, we obtain the electroplating license from China government and build sewage treatment plant."

Once again I cast my net wide and emailed a bunch of different companies.  My criteria was simple, I wanted a lower price than the US company, as well as a company that could communicate fluently in English.  As a bonus test I sent my original design ideas to them to see how they compared with the US companies.

The first companies were a bit of a bust.  One of them charged almost double the original asking price of the US company.  Another came back with enthusiastic Google translated Engrish.  But one company really stood out and offered rates that came out to almost 50% cheaper than the US company and spoke great English. 

Dongguan Jian Plastic & Metal Products Ltd. 

Dongguan Jian Plastic & Metal Products Limited has the wonderfully succint slogan of "Think of emblems, think of JIAN"  Their original copmany name, according to the brochure they sent me, was "Punctual Company Limited".  I liked them already.  

Their sales agent Ella was super professional and treated me like an important customer even though I know most of their orders were probably magnitudes larger than my measly 100 coins.   She guided me through the process step by step until the final point, which is when they asked me to fill up a form and attach pictures of the front and back of my credit card.

I know, I know, a lot of you must be freaking out right now.  That's one of the things every IT security expert tells you not to do. But I did ask around and at least in these parts this is pretty typical for a company that doesn't have e-commerce built into its online presence.  I was fully prepared to cancel this card in case any funny business occurred.  I sent in the application and waited.  I was informed by my bank that the proper amount had been charged.  Then I waited some more.  About 3 weeks later I got a call from Fedex saying my package was en route!  

So it was a little scary but the final product was definitely worth it. If we manage to make more than one game, I want to start a tradition of having coins minted to commemorate each game that Squeaky Wheel makes, especially now that I'm confident with Jian.

How do you get one?

I've been rather surprised at the amount of attention the challenge coins have gotten.  I guess it just confirms my suspicion that people really do value having some tangible to hold on to (and that coins are cool).  I initially intended for these to be souvenirs for the team and specific people that have supported us along the way to making this game.  We're also looking to give them to the first person at each convention that wins a campaign of Political Animals with more than 75% of the vote. But if there's enough interest we'll definitely look into a way where people can buy the coins, maybe as part of a limited edition boxed set or something like that.  But that'll have to wait until after launch!

If you're looking to get challenge coins made for yourself and you live in the United States, I would highly recommend allaboutchallengecoins.com but if you're outside the US and don't have a local company that makes these coins, I can vouch for Jian Pins.