“Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we’re at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven’t already heard, you didn’t get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch.”

So that means we hope you’ll really like HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we’re also trying something new. We’ve just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games – you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time – you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week’s top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game’s Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game’s ‘success’ at launch. One developer’s success criterion is different from another’s, of course – a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn’t about judging games as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ – it’s about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it’s pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!

A few things to note:

1. 1. All data we’re using is publicly available. We don’t have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
   2. The ‘Popular Upcoming’ list on Steam is region-specific, so if you’re not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in ‘Popular Upcoming’ that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you’ll discover some games you’ve never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
   3. We’d love you to join in if you’d like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
   4. This isn’t a value judgement on any of the featured games. We’re just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.

Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches – which are by far the scariest part of game dev – go brilliantly.

Now, I leave you with news that Cultist Simulator is today’s Daily Deal on Steam, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now. Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty and the Weather Forecast probably being embarrassingly wrong. Happy Friday, everyone!

How It Is

Something about the Secret Histories enthuses people. Fanworks, fiction, commentary, art; I’ve lost count of the number of TRPG homebrew rules projects I’ve seen. For a long time, our take on this was sure, it’s nice to see this kind of thing, use our stuff… as long as you’re not making any money out of it, because our IP is our livelihood, and we need to protect it.

But a few months ago I had a conversation with a smallish YTer who wanted to do actual-play videos with their own Secret Histories-based content. I said, sure, as long as you’re not making any money out of it… they said, well, we make a little bit out of ads. I pressed for details and when they said it was literally only a couple of dollars a month, I immediately felt abashed.

Lottie and I began to realise two things. Firstly, we get a lot of these sort of borderline requests – can I run a LRP based on your work and charge to cover costs, can I use your tarot deck to do professional readings, can I do DeviantArt commissions – and our answer is nearly always yes, but it’s often complicated and we have to think about it. And secondly, we really don’t mind if a semi-pro or even pro creator pays the rent using our IP, as long as it doesn’t hurt our own ability to pay our own rent. And if someone does really well and helps grow the audience, so much the better.

But what, people always ask, if Hollywood calls and then their lawyers say the IP situation is too complicated? Bugger Hollywood. We got optioned for TV a few years ago, did I ever mention that? Like most options, it never went into production, and I realised afterwards how relieved I was. Even though the people involved (a) were clearly nice and smart and (b) had actually played Cultist. If the upside of community licensing is that people make interesting things, and the downside is that we damage the remote possibility of a someday deal which would make us, eh, about as much money as a really successful piece of DLC in exchange for titrating away a quarter-soul’s worth of our distinctiveness over several subjective years of meetings… I lost my thread. You get the gist.

How It’s Going To Be

So we started talking about permissive licensing. This is where we ran into a snag. It’s the lore – the background, the story, the mysteries – that most attracts people. A lot of you want to write your own answers to the questions posed by Cultist Simulator et al. But we designed a lot of those gaps and mysteries very carefully, and we need to be sure there’s a clean distinction between Weather Factory answers, and everyone else’s.

Here’s what we came up with. There is not only one History, as they say.  The known Secret Histories are five in number. So if there were an unsanctioned, unknown, unlawed Sixth History… it would be your playground.

We’ve talked to our lawyers and we’re finalising the licence details. We’ll release the licence next week but basically:

You’ll be able to use the Secret Histories setting as a basis for your own TRPG, board game, app, fiction, art commission…and earn money from it, up to a limit of 50K GBP p.a… without needing to check with us… as long as you follow the licence, particularly by using the Sixth History logo to make clear it’s not an official Weather Factory project.

That’s the tl:dr;  but for God’s sake do read the whole license, don’t skip bits, if you’re planning a project along these lines. (And of course this is meant for small-scale works. If you’re thinking of proposing a serious commercial project that may make more than the revenue limit, or if it needs our direct creative involvement, like the Mysterious Package Company’s super-deluxe Lady Afterwards, or the Locksmith’s Dream, then you’ll still need to talk to us, and we don’t usually agree more than one of these a year.)

Where’s the licence again?

Here! Happy creating. 🙂

I have other questions!

r/weatherfactory on Thursday 1st December 2022 at 6PM GMT. Bring snacks and a post-work drink! Or if you’re in America and it’s therefore early in the day, I don’t know, bring porridge.

Sorry for the earworm! What I mean is: we’ve migrated to a new site. The migration has been challenging – more like the migrations of the caribou than of the blue grouse – so some bits may have fallen off en route. We’ve probably lost a few comments, and I know there are some images and uploads and things still missing. We’ll work on them this week. If you notice anything awry, please mention it in the comments.

…though its seats apparently want to make you AS STRESSED AS THEY POSSIBLY CAN.

ANYWAY. This sprint, AK uploaded a new, semi-Neville-borked build of Cultist Simulator, and wrote a horrible update about “a sort of quasi-digestive self-immolation”, because of course he did. We’d appreciate any and all feedback from the GATE_OF_IVORY_ALPHA_UNSTABLE branch on GOG and Steam, sent to support@weatherfactory.biz. Please prepare yourselves for Cultist to do strange things, though it will not endanger your save file.

The Lady Afterwards launching next sprint!

We’re gearing up for The Lady Afterwards‘ launch next sprint, on Thursday 21st October at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT. The components are arriving bit by bit and are exactly what I’d hoped they’d be. I wish I could share more of the artefacts and Game Runner’s Guide, but here’s a non-spoilery group shot instead!

 

 

This is about 70% complete: only half the artefact handouts, one out of eight character pins, one out of eight character sheets, a missing one-page Game Runner’s Journal and a missing digital download card. I can’t wait to photograph the final collection! Especially on, er, a non-reflective surface.

Ask Us Anything

We’re running an AMA in line with launch, starting on Thursday 21st October at 6.30PM BST / 10.30AM PDT over on the Weather Factory subreddit. Join us to celebrate The Lady Afterwards‘ release, ask us about That Damned Library Game and wonder at AK’s ability to avoid answering lore questions!

We’ll keep the AMA ticking over the whole weekend, so if you can’t make it on Thursday feel free to leave a question and we’ll answer as and when. We’ll be back in person on the subreddit on Monday 25th October at 4PM BST / 8AM PDT to wrap the weekend up. A weekend-long AMA!!!! No, we don’t have anything better to do with our lives. 🤩 🤩 🤩

More delicious things

We’ll have a few fun things to announce when we launch – a freebie, a semi-freebie, a special Skeleton Songs and some news – so keep your eyes on our Steam page and social media. If you’re signed up to our mailing list, you’ll get it all direct to your inbox. Thank you, invisible and untiring internet mules!

(Fun fact about mules: Alexandria’s second-century necropolis, the Mound of Shards, was lost and forgotten in the fourth century. It wasn’t until an ill-fated donkey stumbled into the covered access shaft in 1900 that the catacombs were rediscovered. WE SALUTE YOU, UNFORTUNATE FRIEND.)

Be Kind to Ur Mind

AK and I are big advocates for mental health (cf. “Everything is remembered somewhere”, “Living with depression that isn’t yours”, part of Dread in Cultist Sim*), and it’s World Mental Health Day this Sunday. So we’re donating 100% of our Steam revenue on Sunday 10th October to mental health charity Mind. If you’d like to donate by buying Cultist Simulator for a friend, Sunday’s a good opportunity to make a difference!

I leave you with news that no, I wasn’t microdosing when I announced naively that the website would be live soon, IT JUST APPARENTLY TAKES LONGER THAN I THOUGHT. Soon WF.biz will be shiny. Today is just not that day.

Get hype for The Lady Afterwards while you wait! I can’t wait to hear what you think. ♥

*AK is very clear that Dread is not a simple analogue for depression, though the wolf that devours thought and colours leeching from the world are closely linked to the depressive experience.

Imagine a dystopian future where big corporations sue other big corporations over mobile games, where everyone and their mum is making a PC game, and where eSports makes more money than any of us despite nobody really knowing what it’s for. You’re a small indie dev stuck in the middle of all this. How can you stand out and get noticed, in this picaresque world?

One way is to offer people something they can’t get elsewhere: top-notch merchandise. Indie merch is a blue ocean – most devs don’t bother with it unless they hit a certain milestone of success (think Darkest Dungeon or FTL). But it can make significant money – we usually make £2-4k profit each month from our our shop. It opens doors to other opportunities like attractive giveaways, and it diversifies your revenue streams so you’re not entirely dependent on the whims of store algorithms, influencers or press. In all, we’ve made around £75k profit from merch – this couldn’t sustain our studio like digital game sales do, but it’s very helpful as a side-gig!

Your first decision is what sort of shop you want. This’ll depend on your interests, skills and financial situation. Do you want a dedicated website? An integrated shop page on your studio’s site? Or would you like to be part of a larger outlet, alongside other games? A dedicated website requires the most technical set-up and makes you responsible for all the stock and ordering, but it gives your brand exclusivity. An integrated shop page keeps traffic on your site and moves the burden of stock-keeping and shipping to your provider. But it limits you to bigger, expensive providers like Shopify or Fangamer. Being part of a larger shop – getting a branded section on Gametee or Indiebox or AwesomeMerch, for example – brings great consumer traffic alongside threatening competition: someone who’s come to buy a Skyrim hat probably doesn’t want your octopus mug. And if they have come for an octopus mug, maybe Subnautica’s one is nicer.

[ This wasn’t out when I wrote this article, but I’d like to give a shout-out to Studio Zaum’s physical pop-up atelier in London, alongisde their online shop. Anything Zaum does is worth watching, ’cause they’re a smart, inventive bunch. ]

The type of shop you opt for has major knock-on effects. It’ll decide whether you design and produce your own items, and what items you can make in the first place. Most big producers offer a set catalogue: this makes your set-up easy but your offerings generic, reducing that vital stand-out-ability. Your shop front also determines customers’ experience: do you want social proofing, with your merchandise next to Destiny and Call of Duty? Or do you want to be a hidden boutique gem, at the expense of looking small? I chose to host our shop on Etsy, because it has a good balance between brand exclusivity and high-frequency footfall from people who are likely to want what we sell: notebooks, grimoires, tarot decks. Hippy-dippy nonsense for the magically-inclined.

The last major piece of the puzzle is pricing. If you’re making something unique and luxury – something people can’t get elsewhere – a good starting point is keystone pricing: essentially, your price is double how much it cost you to make. I found this difficult to swallow at first (what a bad deal for consumers!) but it makes sense once you add manual labour, postage, marketing and the human cost of doing business to the cost of actually making the things in the first place. Sense check your prices against the price of other similar items on your chosen platform to avoid looking like a bad deal in context, and you’re ready to go. It’s a bit of a guessing game – I’ve guessed wrong in the past! – but your audience will quickly tell you if you get it wrong.

All of this might sound like a lot of hard work. And it is. But play your cards right and you’ll not only end up with another revenue stream to feed your business, but a treasure trove of marketing fodder (think of the competition prizes, or the Kickstarter rewards, or the variety in your communication channels). If you’re at all interested in new business models and doing what other people aren’t, step into the church of the merch and take a pew with me.

I’m Alexis Kennedy. I run a tiny video game studio, Weather Factory, with my partner, Lottie Bevan. In August 2019, Lottie and I were cancelled on Twitter. Our networks were destroyed, our business was devastated, our mental health was shredded… you know this story. Everyone who’s heard of us knows this story. But very few people have seen what’s been going on behind the scenes since then.

Our cancellation, bluntly, was an intentional attack on us by a larger competitor. In an unusual turn of events, this was a studio I had founded, run for seven years, and had then left on very good terms in 2016: Failbetter Games.

We mentioned this obliquely last year, but we didn’t name Failbetter, and we didn’t go into the details. Initially, we were hoping that if we didn’t provoke them, they would leave us alone. Later, we’ve been hoping that we might be able to resolve the issue by talking to them. That may sound absurdly high-minded. It was actually pretty pragmatic. Let me explain why.

When you get cancelled, it’s like someone’s detonated a dirty bomb in your personal life. It wrecks everything, and then it leaves a lingering contamination for years. We’ve been dealing with this contamination and trying to rebuild our lives. Most people who were involved in our cancellation have moved on, or realised it’s A Bit More Complicated, or even emailed us to apologise. Unfortunately, Failbetter, with backing vocals from what I might diplomatically describe as ‘a determined rump of enthusiasts’, won’t leave us alone. There’s a constant patter of background nastiness, and every time we have a small success, they come back and have another go.

But it has also become apparent to us that there was never any kind of master plan. It’s just stupid beef with the management over there – based partially, we think, on genuine misunderstandings about what’s going on. So we hoped that maybe we could deal with this like adults. We knew that a lot of the information circulating on social media was false; so we sent Failbetter a GDPR request to try to get hold of the data from our personal records that would disprove it. They refused to give us that data (and called us names, and made a couple of legal threats).

We gave it some time. The attacks kept coming. So we mailed Failbetter again, as politely as we could. We proposed that both sides attend formal mediation – especially because we reckoned by that point there were some genuine misunderstandings. They refused, again.

We also proposed that I submit to a formal third-party investigation into the allegations, and that I abide by the findings and make amends if anything came out of it. (We offered to pay half the costs.) The allegations were about my time at Failbetter, so we can’t do that without their co-operation. They refused that, too.

All this has taken more than a year, and it’s left us at an impasse. We’ve been trying to address the allegations in private. But the people who made the allegations won’t let us. And because the allegations haven’t been publicly put to bed, we still get periodically monstered.

So we’re going public. We mentioned some of this in an interview last month, but here for the first time is the whole story.

Let me start with an email we sent Failbetter four months ago, in March. My annotations in [square brackets].

from: lottie@weatherfactory.biz

Thu, Mar 18, 9:59 AM

Dear Adam, Chris, Emily, Hannah, Henry and Paul,

[The management of Failbetter and, broadly speaking, the owners of Failbetter. Adam is the CEO these days.]

Alexis and I are writing to you in the hopes of resolving the difficult relationship between our two companies. We were greatly distressed at the concerns raised on social media in August 2019 and in correspondence with yourselves in July 2020. We’d like to give both companies an opportunity to discuss and resolve those concerns in a professional and respectful way.

[July 2020 was our GDPR request.]

We were saddened that no one spoke to us, during or after our time at Failbetter, as we’re confident that open and honest communication is key to resolving the issues between us. With that in mind, we’d like to suggest one or both of the following:

– Mediation between Weather Factory and Failbetter Games, where all issues of concern can be discussed with the objective of reaching some common ground. We’d suggest involving the Failbetter board, ourselves, and any Failbetter employee who would like to attend. We’d also suggest splitting the mediator’s fees between our two companies.

– An independent employment investigation into Alexis’s conduct during his time as CEO of Failbetter Games. We would of course abide by the findings of such an investigation. Again, we’d suggest splitting investigative costs equally between Weather Factory and Failbetter Games.

We’d like to resolve the issues between us amicably and professionally – we’re confident that you would, too. We believe that meeting to discuss the issues in good faith is the best way to move forward.

Our memory of Failbetter Games is of a good company that cares about its people. As such, we’re sure you’re as keen to end the tensions as we are. Please let us know if you’d like to go ahead with mediation or an employment investigation and we can get started. We look forward to a peaceful resolution and happier years to come.

Sincerely,

Alexis and Lottie

A month passed, and finally, we got a brief negative response from Adam. He did only call me one bad name, and didn’t make any legal threats. Righto, we thought, that’s progress, sort of.

So for another three months, we engaged in a correspondence of sorts – largely us expanding on the offer of mediation or investigation, and Adam repeatedly giving us the brush-off. We also got a couple of desultory social media attacks from other Failbetter employees, though more because they were bored than because of our mails, I think.

We weren’t really getting anywhere… but we had stumbled across something unexpected. Here the story goes from ‘basically nutso’ to ‘implausible in a film script’.

Here comes the science bit

I founded Failbetter; and by the time I decided to leave, I still owned most of the company. This made things complicated, so I made sure of a clean break by selling my shares to the company. I was a bloody hippie idiot and I wanted to make sure everyone’s jobs were safe. So I sold the shares for a fraction of their value – about 15% of what I could have reasonably asked for. (You can check the numbers yourself at Companies House.) It was still around 360K GBP – not much for selling a multi-million-pound business, but far more than I’d ever expected to see in my personal bank account, so it’s not like I walked away empty-handed.

I had also created the original IP for Fallen London, both technical and creative, in my bedroom, a half a year before I ever founded Failbetter. I’d never got around to assigning it formally to the company. So when I left, we made sure (with my enthusiastic co-operation) that the possibly-complicated IP rights would be assigned to Failbetter in my severance contract.

Now the plot twist.

(i) The laws on this kind of thing in the UK are extremely strict. Failbetter didn’t follow those laws, and so the contract they gave me to sign was illegal and void. I didn’t realise this, because I trusted everyone completely and I didn’t take legal advice (I know, I know).  [EDIT: I was never permitted to see the legal advice that the Failbetter board received, which in hindsight I really should have worried about.] When Lottie and I, much later, stumbled across this, we checked with a fancy corporate lawyer who said, yup yup, the buyback seems to be defective.

(ii) But here’s the kicker… the contract was never actually executed. I queried a few of the details on the day I left (like giving up my moral rights as author), and my co-founder and I agreed to come back to it later. Then we never got around to completing the process (because good terms, total trust, etc). I forgot this. For years, I forgot this. But when I looked a few months ago, I didn’t have a signed contract, and when we pestered them, Failbetter eventually grudgingly admitted they didn’t either.

So (fancy corporate lawyer has confirmed), I’m still probably, technically the legal owner of Failbetter; and their rights to their core technical and creative IP are shaky. Also, everyone still on the board of Failbetter might be guilty of a corporate crime that carries a two-year prison sentence. Possibly me too. (I also owe Failbetter 360K GBP – about a half-million USD – which is more of a bummer).

This is what you and I would call a giant rolling ball of clusterfuck for everyone involved, and what expensive lawyers call ‘interesting’. If Failbetter decided to fight, it would need to be resolved in court. I’ll be honest, I have been rather tempted to go that route – surprise attack!! – but at this point, above all, Lottie and I just want our lives back. So we just shared everything we’d learnt with Failbetter, as a show of good faith, and suggested we fix the issue together as part of a mediation process.

Unfortunately, as soon as Failbetter realised what we knew, they stopped replying to our emails entirely. I assume they were embarrassed, and I assume they were concerned about what I might do. I think the original situation was an honest mistake (‘criminal negligence’ if you’re feeling uncharitable) but I sometimes wonder how long they’ve known about it. Regardless, it needs sorting out, and it needs sorting out sharpish (see ‘giant rolling ball of clusterfuck’ above).

A week ago, we sent them this final email. My annotations, again, are in [square brackets].

from: lottie@weatherfactory.biz

Mon, July 19th, 9:54 AM

Dear Adam, Chris, Emily, Hannah, Henry and Paul,

We’ve been trying to resolve the dispute between Failbetter Games and Weather Factory since March. It’s now July, and we haven’t had a response since the critical issue with Alexis’s severance contract was identified.

This is something both sides are legally required to fix, so the situation is now quite urgent. Additionally, as we pointed out in March, neither side has a full picture of everything that’s happened. Mediation is the most reasonable way to address this. We can’t force you to talk if you don’t want to, but this is our last attempt to convey why it’s vital that we do.

Below are the most urgent points that need to be addressed. We might have the wrong end of the stick with some of them: if so, please explain the situation so we can let them go or otherwise resolve them. It’s possible that not everyone on the board knew about all these issues: if so, it should be relatively easy to iron them out. Here goes.

1. In August 2019, @failbettergames on Twitter endorsed some false, and very serious, accusations about Alexis. Publicly available evidence later contradicted those accusations. We’d like to understand what Failbetter’s official position is, and to give you an opportunity to disassociate the company from statements that have turned out to be false.

2. Your official accounts have been silent since then, but some of your employees have continued to attack us personally. Sometimes they’ve been explicit that they’re speaking personally, but later walked that back and suggested they’re speaking officially. Candidly, either the accusations are real or they’re frivolous. If they’re real, we want to address them and, if appropriate, make amends. If frivolous, your employees should withdraw them.

[Through back channels, I’ve learnt that the @failbettergames tweets weren’t exactly officially sanctioned. They went out at half ten at night, UK time, when Paul Arendt, my original co-founder at Failbetter and still the most senior director, was out of the UK, on holiday and off the internet. Someone with access to the account apparently took the opportunity to stick the knife in, before the board could discuss properly.

That put them in a tricky situation, as their lawyers apparently pointed out to them. They were legally exposed, but if they deleted the original tweets that would be an admission that they’d lied. So they just never mentioned it officially again, ever, at all… although either through poor message discipline, or because management was turning a blind eye, some of their employees did.

‘explicit that they’re speaking personally, but later walked that back and suggested they’re speaking officially’ – in particular, a bizarre post by Adam Myers, which is sometimes unofficial and sometimes official depending on who’s asking and whether they might have spoken to a lawyer lately. More on this in a mo.]

3. Last year, when we secured funding for our next game, senior employees endorsed a Twitter drive to get that funding withdrawn. Failbetter’s position seems to be that we shouldn’t be allowed to receive funding and/or that we shouldn’t be allowed to continue making games. Please clarify things, if we’ve misunderstood – or we can discuss in mediation.

4. Some of your employees made and/or endorsed insults and untruths about Lottie. You know that there was never a complaint or concern raised about her conduct or character, and we suspect she comes in for a drubbing because of her continued association with Alexis. Please either confirm that Failbetter thinks this behaviour is acceptable, or ask your employees to apologise and stop.

5. You’ve given Lottie cause for serious complaint about the way she was treated as an employee – especially after Alexis’s departure. For instance, you repeatedly assured her that her relationship with Alexis wasn’t a problem, but later claimed it was evidence of Alexis’s professional misconduct; you also did nothing to address the concerns that she’d raised about Adam’s behaviour toward her. Again, if Failbetter is sincere about protecting women in the industry, this needs further discussion.

[If you don’t know the circs, this sounds a bit like Lottie’s accusing Adam of sexual misconduct, which, to be clear, she isn’t. But if you skim the bizarre post I mentioned above, you can draw your own conclusions. The post is about 20% disingenuous, 20% outright dishonest and 40% sanctimonious hogwash, but that leaves 20% residual truth. So it is indeed true that he saw me and Lottie flirting – flirting consensually! not even kissing! – at the Christmas party. It’s also true that he was so enraged that he fired off a rambling complaint about it to the second most senior person in the company, immediately before he disappeared on holiday for two weeks, without talking to either me or Lottie first.

Which put me in a pretty weird position when he got back, let me tell you. And Lottie, who didn’t like male colleagues discussing her personal life without talking to her first, in a weirder one. Adam and I did have a meeting, although the way he describes it is – how shall I put this?- ‘inspired by a true story’. One of the bits he left out is this: I told him that Lottie didn’t like men talking about her sex life behind her back, that it was her and my business, but if he had any questions he should address them to her. He never did, but evidently he hasn’t stopped talking about her sex life either.]

6. When we requested personal data under GDPR, you refused to provide it. When we pointed out that a senior manager at Failbetter had intentionally leaked our personal data, you dismissed our concerns. We’ve already had one complaint upheld by the Information Commissioner’s Office, but we’re holding off on the more serious complaint in the hope that we can address it in mediation.

[The ‘senior manager’ was Adam, obviously. In the Medium post I linked above, he’d fudged up some ‘receipts’ to smear both Lottie and me. Our GDPR request included things like our HR records, our chat logs, and our emails, which we knew would disprove his claims. (And the notes that I wrote up of that meeting, though I think he had a fair argument that this was mixed personal data.) Not entirely surprisingly, he wouldn’t hand any of it over.

But we also complained about the way Adam, specifically, had treated our personal data, because most companies would be less gung-ho about selectively and misleadingly leaking the HR records of a junior female employee. Adam blew us off there, too. The surreal thing is that he kept answering on Failbetter’s behalf, and we never got a reply from anyone else. I assume he doesn’t actually have the rest of them locked in a cupboard over there, but that was rather the vibe.]

7. In 2017, you told Alexis that due to an accounting error he was still owed a substantial sum in unpaid dividends. He asked you to donate it to a specified charity. The donation was never made, and when he raised the matter, you refused to explain why. We need to sort this out.

[The ‘substantial sum’ was 1043 GBP – about 1400 USD – which is either a hell of a lot, or an accounting blip, depending on where you’re standing. I think Failbetter forgot to make the donation and then, when I asked them about it three years later, were embarrassed, and tried to bury the matter. Still needs sorting out.]

8. One or more senior Failbetter employees appear to have intentionally passed sensitive information to Alexis’s stalker. They must have been aware that she would use this information to further her harassment of both Alexis and Lottie. We’ve asked for some remaining personal data (e.g. scans of our passports) to be deleted, and you’ve refused those requests. This has to stop.

[This is nearly, but not quite, as bad as it sounds. For at least three years, Lottie and I have had a stalker. She appears to be the person behind the @abuseindustry account that kicked all this off in August 2019. She’s posted my personal data and pictures of my house (my old place: we keep our address confidential these days), tried ineptly to hack our site, and bombarded us with malignant nonsense via social media and email in a style I would describe as “Enraged English Lit Undergrad”. Some examples further down.

The one saving grace – the reason I say ‘very nearly as bad’ – is that Failbetter might not know everything our stalker has been doing, and might think that they’ve been cosying up to a genuinely injured innocent, rather than a poisonous nut-job.]

9. A Failbetter employee seems to have subverted the BAFTA jury process in March 2019. At the same time, Failbetter began removing Alexis’s name from blog posts and other credits, including Fallen London and Sunless Skies. Alexis’s work (including a very personal post about the death of his father) is now presented as the work of later hires.

[re: subversion. This was Olivia Wood, on the Best Narrative Game jury. To explain: before you can be on a BAFTA jury, you have to sign a statement declaring that you don’t have any conflicts of interest that might prevent you from being fair and unbiased. For instance, if one of the shortlisted games was made by a man who jilted you, and the woman he jilted you for…. people you’re still so angry with that you spearhead a cancellation campaign against them six months later.

I might never had known about any of this. But in another odd twist of fate, I was originally on the BAFTA Best Narrative Game jury, and I had to recuse myself because of a conflict of interest, when I found out Cultist was on the shortlist. (We did get two other nominations, for the other two categories we’d been shortlisted for, which would have added to the frustration for Olivia and for anyone else at Failbetter she’s told.)

UPDATE! we’ve been discussing with BAFTA, and they want me to correct this. They say ‘[…]we have looked into this and concluded that the jury process was followed and that the outcome of the voting was conclusive and not impacted.’ They have been coy about the details, but as far as we can make out, Olivia told BAFTA that she and I had a former romantic relationship, but assured them this wouldn’t affect her judgement, and didn’t say anything about any ‘abuse’. They okayed her involvement on that basis.

On balance, I think this is likely true. I think Olivia didn’t claim ‘abuse’ to BAFTA, because there hadn’t been any. In which case there was no subversion of the jury process. In which case, of course, she was obviously lying four months later when she claimed I’d ‘abused’ her four years previously. In either case, Failbetter has some explaining to do.

re: the removal from credits. The WayBack Machine confirms that Failbetter took my and Lottie’s names off the blog posts the same week as the jury. Perhaps Olivia went through and removed the blog attributions herself; perhaps she broke BAFTA confidentiality rules and told someone else there, and they did it. I guess one is weirder and one is worse.

I’m not sure about the timing of the credits removal. The Sunless Skies thing is more funny than annoying, honestly, since I didn’t actually work on it. I started up the top, with ORIGINAL CONCEPT, and every time I did something to annoy them I got moved further down, until eventually I was just below DEVELOPMENT BABIES, and then I finally disappeared altogether.

The Fallen London thing, on the other hand, I don’t find funny at all. I created the game; it was my first ever commercial project; I worked on it for seven years; you can go through the entire site and not find one reference to me.]

10. You and Alexis are embroiled in a serious legal issue. You presented Alexis with an illegal contract, that contract was never executed, and your CEO has attempted to conceal these facts. This leaves the ownership of the company, and the IP, in dispute. It leaves Failbetter’s directors open to criminal prosecution. It’s essential that we all resolve this as soon as possible, but it’s difficult to do so without addressing the other issues above!

All that was pretty upsetting to set down, so we imagine it’s also upsetting to read. Thank you for taking the time to do so. You almost certainly have points of your own, which, again, we want to listen to and answer in a regulated and respectful mediation session.

Finally, we’d also like to urge you again to join us in conducting a formal, professional third-party investigation into Alexis’s conduct as CEO of Failbetter Games. We expect him to be exonerated, but we must, in good conscience, be open to the possibility that he caused pain that neither one of us saw. We’d commit to abiding by the findings of the investigation and remedying any wrongs. We’re sure you would too.

Here’s hoping the above makes the last two years of unpleasantness clear from our point of view. Let us know if you have any thoughts, and here’s to a happier future.

Yours sincerely,

Lottie and Alexis

Okay, that’s a lot, and we thought it would shake loose a response if anything would. But you know how this works by now: we didn’t get even get a form reply. I rather think they mistook courtesy for cowardice.

It’s very possible that we misunderstood something, and that I’m missing information that would make their actions look reasonable. If so, I’ll update this post with any response that Failbetter cares to send.

The backstory: why the hell even?

Things always get weird after a founder leaves a company. Various Failbetters, some of whom had liked me more than others, were now competitors but had to keep working in the IP I’d built, in the shadow I still cast. (I learnt that one person actually pitched a game internally over there called – I swear to God – Crone Simulator.). Then there were just years of rivalry, gossip, and people not talking to each other.

But we stayed on good terms for a fair while. I had lunch with Paul Arendt (co-founder, then CEO) every month. Failbetter boosted the Cultist Simulator Kickstarter. I was invited to the SUNLESS SKIES Early Access launch party. (‘It’s a very beautiful game’, I told a jittery Paul. ‘You’ll be fine.’)

There was one thing specifically that created the beef; and there was one thing, I think, that pushed them over the edge.

Where it began: the Great Failbetter Purge of December 2017

I’d left all that money in the company to make sure everyone’s jobs were safe. I went and spoke to Paul Arendt, my then friend and former co-founder, in August 2017, to check their jobs were safe.

Paul told me, and management later told everyone, that their jobs were safe.

Then in December management told everyone their jobs weren’t safe, two days before the Christmas party. Which they then cancelled.  Later, they posted a handsome profit for that year. Their biggest ever, I think.

I was incandescent. I wrote an open letter to Paul and to Failbetter, to urge him to look for another way… but I thought it over, and in the end never actually sent it. (It’s remained buried and unsent until now – check the last edited date – but here it is. It’s still a decent summary…. though a couple of my predictions were naïve.)

But then some of the people whose jobs were at risk went to Eurogamer. Eurogamer came to me and asked me about it. I told them what I thought, and I went on the record rather than be an ‘anonymous source’. The other aggrieved employees stayed anonymous, for obvious reasons. (Though many of them, in states of desperation, invited themselves round for Chinese takeaway and sympathy, and specifically asked me for employment advice – in one case, for a bit of emergency contract work so that they wouldn’t have to leave the country. This seems an odd choice for the vulnerable junior staff to make, if I were the abusive tyrant CEO Failbetter have since implied me to be.)

Talking to Eurogamer was a hard decision, but I was faced with a choice between two sets of friends, and I sided with the friends who’d been fucked over. I can see that this whole business must have caused some cognitive dissonance for the Failbetter management, who were evidently coming to terms with maybe not being the good guys on this occasion.

(For fairness, I’ll link here to Failbetter’s account of what happened. It’s a clever PR response and it won them a lot of sympathy… especially since you wouldn’t realise, unless you look closely at the timelines, that it was published before the Eurogamer article, but after Eurogamer had approached them for comment.)

This was the point at which everyone grumpily unfollowed everyone else on the Twitters, and this, I think, was the point at which Lottie and I were marked. For a long time I thought I was being paranoid about this.

Oddly enough, it was Adam Myers who confirmed that I wasn’t being paranoid.

I mentioned above that we requested our personal data under the GDPR. They didn’t give us anything we’d actually wanted, but what they did hand over included two alarming items:

• A PDF of issue 9 of a print magazine, WIREFRAME, for which Lottie was writing a monthly column. They’d only kept issue 9, in which Lottie’s column was about studio layoffs. Read it closely and you’ll notice one sentence halfway down about the Failbetter layoffs, though it doesn’t even actually name Failbetter. This was evidently enough to attract the Eye.

• A chat log from the Cultist Simulator fan Discord, of the one and only time I ever talked about the Eurogamer article in there. So just to be clear, Adam or someone else was lurking in our fan Discord the whole time, just in case, or else combed through the logs to find any possible conversations of interest. Here’s the only conversation they found interesting enough to record.

I wouldn’t absolutely swear to it, but I believe those were the only two times in two years that Lottie and I even mentioned the layoffs in public. We certainly were very close-mouthed about it. I gave an hour-long GDC talk about my experiences running Failbetter, and never said a word on the matter. It was a pretty crawly-back-of-the-neck feeling to see those items in Adam’s response and realise how closely they must have been watching us. I gotta assume that’s why they were sent.

(Hi, Cultist Simulator Discord members! This is one of the reasons you don’t see me in there any more.)

Where it ended: ‘People have killed for less’

In July 2019, we – Weather Factory – got four nominations for the Develop Star Awards. So did Failbetter. Uh oh, you might think. You’d be right.

Lottie and I didn’t go to the awards ceremony. Mostly, we wanted some time alone together and a romantic meal. Partly, honestly, there was clearly beef between us and Failbetter, and whether we did well or badly, we didn’t fancy potentially sitting opposite them dealing with the old stink-eye (or resisting the temptation to stink our own eyes).

Failbetter did go. They turned up en masse. You have to purchase a ticket for everyone you want to bring to an award – that’s how the awards racket works – and it must have cost them a few grand, all told.

As we sat in the restaurant, our phone started pinging like crazy. We kept winning the noms: three out of four, as it turned out, and the press led with us being the ‘big winners’ of the night. One site couldn’t get a picture of me, because I was off eating monkfish curry with Lottie, so they led with my daft Twitter avatar. Our marketing rep had to pick up the plaques for us and make three (apparently very charming) spontaneous speeches.

And Failbetter didn’t win anything. I had mixed feelings the day after. It’s bloody nice to win awards, but I’ve been at a fair few ceremonies when I’ve won nothing, and I know what that’s like too. I could imagine horribly clearly how it must have been to see the targets of one’s beef walk off with all those prizes. I was a little sympathetic… and I was a little worried about what might happen next.

I was right. The following month, we got hit with viral allegations of misconduct tacked on to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, scheduled to land on my daughter’s tenth birthday, the week before we launched our long-trailed Kickstarter for BOOK OF HOURS.

BOOK OF HOURS… we had to abandon the Kickstarter. I nearly gave up on the game altogether. But Lottie, with typical determination, secured funding from Creative Europe. But then Twitter, with the enthusiastic endorsement of Failbetter, tried to get Creative Europe to rescind the funding. We had a grim month waiting to see if that would happen.

They didn’t rescind it. We still have the funding. The allegations don’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. We’re still making the game. But we don’t want to sit around waiting to see what form a third attack might take. That, above all, is why I’m writing this now.

Exhibits from the Museum of the Horrible

I’ve been reasonably polite for most of this post, especially considering the context, but I have spent a lot of the last two years being very cross indeed (non-Brits, plug that into Google Translate for more swears). I’m about to share a few more things with you which I still find very difficult to stomach. So I hope you’ll indulge me, here on the home stretch, if my tone becomes more robust.

Exhibit A from the Museum of the Horrible is this Twitter exchange between one of the loudest voices in the original allegations, and a very well-known and successful male game developer. I do have a little sympathy for Mr Very Well-Known, etc, because he’s plainly terrified out of his mind, and he has, at some point since then, deleted his side of the conversation.

Exhibit B. I also mentioned our stalker. Here’s an excerpt from one of the emails she sent us, a year after the whole cancellation thing. I’ve spared you the whole thing, because good crikey she does go on rather, but you’ll get the idea.

And so on and so on and so on. If you want more, I have you covered.

(‘Leaping Jesus!’, remarks Lottie. She hadn’t seen all of that.)

Exhibit C. Here’s that blog post Lottie mentioned in the Failbetter letter – the one about how the death of my father influenced Sunless Sea.

As Lottie also mentioned in the letter, it’s not credited to me any more. I comprehend, though I abhor, the temptation to take people’s name off game credits – either because you don’t like them or because you want to steal their rep. But I’d like you to take a moment to imagine how you’d feel if someone took your name off a blog post about the death of your father, and then, when you asked them about it, gave you the brush-off. I could have lived with them deleting it; but I guess they just didn’t want to lose any SEO content they didn’t need to.

My point is: this is not normal. None of the other Museum of the Horrible items above are normal. None of the stuff we described in the letter is normal.

What is going on here? Assume for a moment that all the accusations Failbetter has made about me and Lottie (and Lottie’s mum) are true. Then try to fit your head around the stuff above, again. It’s fucked up.

Finally…

I’ve gone out of my way to say that not everyone at Failbetter is involved, that probably not all of senior management knows everything that’s gone on, and that there was no master plan to destroy us, just a series of acts of spite. I still believe this. Take that blog post above. Perhaps someone took my name off in a moment of thoughtless pettiness, and then didn’t care enough to walk it back.

But everything I’ve described is something they’ve unleashed, endorsed and in some cases been directly involved in. They’ve made no effort to address it or even distance themselves from it.

So now I want to take a moment to address myself to those at Failbetter who did know what was going on.

Take some damned responsibility. You all have your excuses for what you’ve done, and what you’ve permitted. Some of you have grudges and grievances. But you’re adults in an extraordinarily fortunate position. You were handed secure jobs in control of a multi-million pound business. You’re there because I sold it to you for a fraction of its value, so that the jobs of our friends would be safe. You abandoned the responsibilities I’d entrusted to you; when I pointed out that wasn’t cool, it hurt your feelings and you started trying to mess with me and with my family.

Lottie and I worked side by side with many of you for years. I’ve known some of you for much longer. If you had really believed I was behaving badly, you chose to do nothing about it for years. You didn’t contact me, you didn’t warn Lottie, you didn’t do anything to fix issues or protect people. Either these accusations are frivolous, in which case you’ve tried damned hard to ruin my life for no good reason, or they’re serious, in which case you’ve shown no responsibility whatsoever. No leadership, no reforms, no truth-and-reconciliation, just some fire-and-forget accusations and some nasty gossip.

You ruined my daughter’s tenth birthday by picking that day for your callout. I sometimes pretend I think that was an accident, but enough of you had made a big deal of her previous birthdays when, I guess, you still cared about being in good odour with me. One of you chose that date because you thought I’d be out of town and distracted. A ten year old kid, for Pete’s sake.

Lottie’s mother. She’s a semi-retired special needs English teacher who had to protect her Twitter account because your god damned employees are prancing about the internet accusing her of being a racist aristocrat.

And, let’s not forget, Lottie herself. You blew up her feminist initiative and you did nothing to replace it. You pissed all over her career and you came damned near to driving her out of the industry altogether. You gloated about it publicly. ‘Protecting women in games… except the ones in AK’s family.’ Give me a break.

And take a look at the bigger picture. You took advantage of the #MeToo movement to make false allegations in pursuit of personal grudges. You’ve not only hurt me and my family, you’ve damaged the future credibility of every woman with a legitimate complaint.

So grow up. Show some leadership and some responsibility. We can still fix this. You owe it to Lottie, you owe it to me, you owe it to everyone you’re setting a bad example to.

I kept the leaving card you gave me the day I left Failbetter, five years ago:

Mediate, investigate. That’s how we resolve this. If we could determine in mediation that I (or Lottie!) had misunderstood the situation, we’d apologise and address it. If an investigation showed that I had done things I should make amends for, I would make them.

If you don’t want to do either, then look yourself in the eye, in the mirror, and say with a straight face: “Protecting women has been the real reason for everything we’ve done. We’re only refusing mediation and we’re only blocking investigation because it advances that noble goal.” I dare you.

Thanks for reading. If we hear from Failbetter, or if we learn anything else relevant, we’ll update this post.

UPDATE. This is what happened next.  (Plus some minor updates at the end of this post if you’re really curious about the detail.)

Links

Unsent open letter to Paul Arendt, then CEO of Failbetter, December 2017

‘Behind the Sunless Scenes’, 2018 Eurogamer piece on the Failbetter layoffs

Failbetter endorses misconduct allegations against me on Twitter, August 2019

My response to the misconduct allegations, September 2019

Lottie on the problems with cancel culture, September 2019

State of the Factory, Year 2: Why the Kickstarter Didn’t Happen, February 2020

Lottie on the ongoing attacks, June 2020

Twitter drive to get our funding for BOOK OF HOURS withdrawn, August 2020

Transcript of a Diabolical interview where we share more background, June 2021

A Selection of Stalker Activities, ongoing

UPDATE 13/09/2021: Seven weeks in. Failbetter still haven’t denied or contested any of this. But privately, they did contact us to negotiate.

Behind the scenes, they finally agreed that there had indeed been a ‘procedural issue’ (‘criminal negligence’, tomato tomahto) that left share and IP ownership unclear. They got a big IP law firm to put together a document that would assert I had no claim on the company, and asked me to sign it. Here’s how we responded.

—

“Hey Adam,
Thanks for your response. It’s wonderful to be talking practically about how to resolve our disagreements.
Alexis is willing to honour your request once we’ve worked out more details. But obviously that can’t happen until we’ve addressed the allegations by both sides.
Alexis has his own concerns, and we’ve repeatedly attempted to address yours, but you’ve once again sidelined my concerns, engaging only with the interests of the men in this equation. I’ve described in detail my continued harassment, and the continued sabotage of my business, by Failbetter employees. I understand you might not wish to discuss these in writing or in public, but how can we move forward if you won’t address them in mediation either?
We just want a fair hearing and a fair resolution, for both our grievances and yours. If you find it awkward to speak to me in person, I’m more than happy for another director to attend in your place. We’d recommend mediation with [redacted] who’s managed conflicts similar to ours in the games industry and comes highly recommended, or [redacted], a larger organisation with impressive credentials. We’re happy to do the legwork setting up dates and managing the admin – what would it take for a Failbetter representative to attend?
All the best,
Lottie Bevan”

—

(Meanwhile – very suddenly – Olivia Wood left Failbetter. We don’t know if she jumped or was pushed, but presumably Failbetter were worried about her actions bringing them into disrepute.)

A month passed. We heard nothing. Lottie did remind me that the last time Failbetter stopped responding was also the last time she raised the issue of her being harassed. But then at the end of last week we saw one of Failbetter’s senior people joining in another pop at us, and at our supporters, on Twitter.

Depressingly, it looks like they’re not going to talk but they’re also not going to leave us alone. So if we want our lives back, we’re going to have to escalate further.

UPDATE 13/08/2021: Three weeks in. Failbetter haven’t responded to press enquiries or made a public statement. But they have now responded to our email, and we’ve begun negotiations. So we’ll leave off the updates unless the negotiations break down, or both sides agree we should post something.

[edit: gi.biz have told us that Failbetter didn’t pressure them to remove the post. More on this below.]

UPDATE 02/08/2021. Two weeks have passed since we sent Failbetter management that final mail; a week since we published it. We were expecting that they would contest some of what we’d said; or disavow some of the odder statements made by employees; or at least put out a holding statement. They haven’t, either privately or publicly. But they do appear (I can’t quite believe I’m typing this) to be leaning on the press to squash the story.

The biggest site to cover us was gamesindustry.biz. This is the now-dead link to their article, and here’s the original article, plucked from the Google cache. We emailed to ask what was happening. GI.biz told us they’d taken down the article pending comment from Failbetter. We followed up a couple more times over the course of the week, but they’ve stopped responding, and the article now seems to be gone for good. The only explanation I can see is that editor-in-chief (who wrote the article) came under pressure to remove the piece. But if we’ve somehow misunderstood what’s happening here, we invite Failbetter or GI.biz to let us know.

[We went up the chain to the MD of Gamer Network. This got us a response from gi.biz:

"Apologies for the delayed response - been caught up with the Activision Blizzard lawsuit and fallout. 

We've been discussing this on the team and opted not to republish the article at this time. While we understand there is a call for an investigation, the situation as we have covered it does not appear to have changed. If an investigation begins, we will indeed cover that as news but at this time, we do not believe it is quite right to report on this.

With regard to the balance of our reporting, I'll reiterate that all articles we have run do include Alexis' denials. This is not an instance of us picking and choosing what to cover, but concentrating only on covering the developments that advance the situation (hopefully to a resolution at some point). The long-form denial posts, while giving plenty of arguments in Alexis' favour, do not significantly change or expand upon what we have already reported, i.e. that he has denied all allegations. From what I can tell, the posts were published long after the original articles, and we do not tend to update old articles after an extended period of time. Instead, we wait for a new development in the story, as I hope I've managed to explain.

We reached out to Failbetter to comment. They did not comment, nor did they pressure us not to run the story. The suggestion, as I've seen on your blog, that we have been coerced into not republishing the article is in no way accurate - and if anything your coming to this conclusion  highlights why we need to be so cautious when reporting on this issue when only one side is offering comment.

Please do keep me posted on the situation, and when it is appropriate to cover this again, we shall do our best to do so."

[They say unequivocally that Failbetter didn’t, in fact, pressure them to remove the post. I believe them, and I retract that suggestion, though I am sceptical about their rationale for the rest of it.]

The other development is that we heard back from the ICO about our GDPR complaint. They upheld it, but so far Failbetter management are ignoring them, too. I can’t help remembering the Wolf of Wall Street scene with Jonah Hill weeing into a bin full of FBI subpoenas. If anyone over at Failbetter is reading this, please, let’s not go down that road. We’re ready to talk when you are.

One more update. Read it if you have a strong stomach. It’s quite something.

Philip II of Macedon invaded Greece, won a lot of fights and trembled lustily on the borders of Sparta. He sent the Spartans a threatening message asking if he should come as friend or foe. The ephors responded: ‘Neither.’

This wasn’t the sort of thing Philip II of Macedon usually heard. So he fired off another message telling them they’d better submit to him, pronto, ‘for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city’. The ephors responded: ‘If.’

There’s a lot of lusty trembling going on right now at Epic Games. Devs are abuzz with their steady flow of tasty, dev-friendly inducements, and on paper, Epic’s deal is great. Devs get a higher revenue cut than they would on Steam: Epic offers 88%, Steam offers the usual 70%. Devs also compete with fewer games on the Epic Games Store, meaning they’re more likely to get high-visibility featuring and it’s easier for consumers to chance upon them while browsing. I can’t find any official data about how many games are currently on the EGS, but they confirmed they had ‘over one hundred’ games in July 2019 and some friendly people with browser scripts estimate it’s now just under three hundred. That’s a decent number, but not when compared to Steam’s 30,000. Or their 51,000 if you include DLC, software and video.

I’m not dunking on Epic. Its store is the most impressive, pragmatic and tenacious challenge to Valve’s supremacy there’s ever been – great news for developers. But this is the fly in the ointment: Epic give you a bigger slice of the pie than Steam! 18% more pie! But please note that pie is many times smaller than that one over there.

Take this from another angle. In April 2020, the EGS saw roughly 72 million visits. That lands the EGS a #391 ranking in global internet engagement. There are 1,653 external pages linking in to the store, and the largest percentage of the store’s traffic – a whopping 21% – comes from, you guessed it, people Googling ‘Fortnite’.

In the same month, Steam saw around 148 million visits, ranked #301 in global internet engagement and is linked by 22,178 external pages. The largest percentage of their traffic is a teensy 1% where people have just Googled ‘Steam’.

These numbers tell us what we already know. Steam has been around forever, is the place people go to buy PC games, and currently is the untouchable PC king. And this is why Epic are trying so hard. They’re being so generous with revenue split, refunds and publishing money because they need devs and consumers to come to them before they actually have a comparable offering to Steam’s. People go to Steam because it’s Steam. Right now, people go to Epic because they want to play Fortnite, or because they’re offered a free game. I’d expect the generous developer incentives to tail off as the EGS gets bigger and more successful.

Epic’s approach is ambitious and aggressive. I love a bit of chutzpah, and you need a lot of it to wage war on a titan. But right now Tim Sweeney is Philip II, sending threat after threat. Valve recline at home, on wheeled chaises longues. And they’re thinking: If.

Foreword

by Dr Matthew Hosty

Achilles eats barbeque every night. So do all the other Greeks at Troy. Their only available foodstuffs appear to be 1. roast meat, 2. bread, 3. wine. Here’s the most detailed description of a meal that we’re ever given in the Iliad:

                [Patroclus] threw down a great chopping-block into the firelight,

                and put on it the loin of a sheep and of a juicy goat,

                and the chine of a well-fed hog, rich with fat.

                Automedon held them in place, and godlike Achilles carved.

                And when he had chopped them up well and pierced them with skewers,

                Menoetius’ son, that man like a god, kindled a great fire.

                And once the fire had died down and the flames had dwindled,

                he spread the embers and hung the skewers above them,

                placing them on the fire-stones, and sprinkled the holy salt.

                Then, when he had roasted the meat and tumbled it onto platters,

                Patroclus took bread and laid it out on the table

                in lovely baskets, while Achilles served the meat. (Il. 9.206-17)

Throw in a couple of bottles of Sainsbury’s rosé and the bit where one sausage slips through the grill and drops down among the coals, to cries of dismayed mirth from anyone standing by, and this is very recognisably a British middle-class garden BBQ.

The eating habits of the Greeks at Troy have mystified scholars for, quite literally, millennia. These guys are camped out along the beach in the Hellespont, which a couple of hundred years after Homer was known as one of the finest fishing-grounds anywhere in the Mediterranean. But they never eat fish. Instead, they dine every day on meat – and fresh meat, too, not jerky or salt pork or anything like that. The steaks Patroclus slaps down at 207-8 must have come off their original owners very recently. So does the fortified Greek encampment on the beach include a pretty sizeable livestock ranch? We sometimes hear about livestock being carried off in raids, but it would be obviously suicidal for a huge stationary army to rely exclusively on plunder in order to feed itself: what happens when they’ve devoured every cow in the immediate vicinity? Then there are a couple of tantalising references to supply chains: earlier in the same book, Nestor politely suggests to Agamemnon that he can afford to stand his captains a drink, ‘since your huts are full of wine, which the ships of the Achaeans bring every day from Thrace across the broad sea’ (9.71-2). Are these same ships also bringing sheep and goats and pigs to provide the Greeks with their Mixed Barbeque Sharing Platters? Is Achilles getting Deliveroo?

Speaking for myself, I don’t care. I mean, it’s mildly diverting to think about, but it doesn’t matter. Homer’s descriptions of food and feasts are rich, detailed, mouthwatering. I don’t know of anyone who’s been unable to enjoy the Iliad because they can’t map out the beef logistics. A friend of mine who hates me told me the other day that the Iliad has an average rating of 3.9/5 on Goodreads.com. I’m not going to go and read any of the negative reviews, because I don’t want to die, but I’ll be pretty surprised if any of them singled out a lack of clarity re: hamburger provenance – and if they did, I wouldn’t even be angry, because I would just feel placidly and peacefully that this reviewer didn’t really understand what stories are. And that’s fine. If you give your new iPhone a 2-star rating because you’ve left a slice of bread on it for the last couple of days and the damn thing still hasn’t toasted, potential customers will probably feel safe in scrolling past your review.

One of the things I like about Alexis Kennedy’s writing is that he understands what stories are. Probably the most controversial piece in this collection, and therefore the one he wisely put on the front cover, is his 2017 GamesIndustry article ‘Against Worldbuilding’. In it, he argues that having an inch-thick notebook where one lays out every detail of one’s fictional world – its geography, its sociolinguistics, its numismatics, where it gets its dinner from – is not actually particularly useful when one is trying to tell a good story or make a good game. Compiling the notebook may be a lot of fun for you, the writer, but you shouldn’t confuse it with writing. Anyone who’s ever dabbled in tabletop RPGs knows that the fun part is making up six totally original fantasy kingdoms, none of which even slightly resemble 14^th-century Venice, and an elemental magic system based around gems. The hard part is actually running the game. I’m not a game designer, but I have for much of my life been a pretty committed game player, and I cannot name a single game I love or remember for its ‘worldbuilding’.

(Setting, maybe. Riven, Morrowind, and Disco Elysium are all games which got their hooks into me partly by dint of their bleak, haunted, or otherwise terrifying settings. But setting is an aesthetic dimension, where worldbuilding is an intellectual one. A whole game that took place in the crumbling ruins of an old nightclub, where some of the neon still flickers on forlornly at night, might have a wonderful setting and no worldbuilding at all – until you start trying to explain who owned the nightclub, where it is, what kind of music it played…)

Alexis Kennedy understands what actually helps a story work, and what gets in the way. He understands why most games don’t need toilets, but some absolutely do. He understands why some of the best stories in gaming feel like they happen by accident – the doomed Phalanx defending its city in ‘Blood in the Gutter’ wrenched from me a special whimper of recognition – but why, equally, that doesn’t mean game storytelling should abandon itself altogether to procedural generation and the human ability to spot stories in a crisp packet blowing down a road. He understands why being able to automate the production of things that look like narrative is still a long way off being able to automate narrative.

Which is nice, because it’s always nice when someone you admire turns out to share your views on things. But I didn’t start paying attention to Alexis Kennedy because I thought he said sensible things about worldbuilding. Back to Homer for a minute, sorry: I want to talk about the word ‘tumbled’, which I used in line 215. The original Greek work there is ekheue, which is a past-tense form of the verb kheō. kheō means ‘I pour’. It’s used of rain or snow falling to earth, of tears falling from the eyes, of leaves being scattered from trees, and of flung spears raining down on a target. Imagine getting a pan of roasted meat – all cut up into sort of chicken-nugget-sized chunks – and shaking it out onto plates. It would all sort of tumble out over itself, wouldn’t it? In English, it would be actively horrifying to translate ekheue here as ‘he poured’: ‘Patroclus poured the meat onto platters’. Argh. Anyone for pork custard? No, I didn’t think so. And yet you can see that ekheue is exactly the right word for the job. Homer – who was a loose aggregate of hundreds of years of accumulated oral-formulaic tradition, and therefore didn’t know anything at all – knew that, just like he knew that it matters for Patroclus to throw down the chopping-block rather than put it down (Greek kabbalen, from kata-ballō, like ‘ballistics’) and to do so very specifically en puros augēi, ‘in the glow of the fire’.

Alexis Kennedy, who I don’t think knows any Greek and to whom I will apologise if this is not the case, also knows those are the right words, and why. My favourite piece in this book actually started life as a Twitter thread, proving that it is actually possible for something good to come from Twitter. It appears here as ‘Writing Pithy Game Microtext: Dactylic Megaliths’, and all it does is explain how he wrote a 35-word passage of description in Cultist Simulator. It’s one of the best examples I’ve ever read of writing about writing, and that’s not even code for ‘I agree with it’ (I mostly agree with it). It’s because you get to see a writer paying attention to every detail of his craft: meaning, assonance, rhythm, tone, all tackled with painstaking jeweller’s care. Too many modern writers are embarrassed to talk about craft, and try to propagate a vague impression that the words just kind of spring onto the page, hooray. But all the best writers I’ve known – and I’m in the fortunate position of knowing some very good writers – can spend an hour trying to pick between ‘long’ and ‘lengthy’, and don’t think that’s a silly thing to spend an hour on.

I’m not in a position to talk about whether Alexis gives good game dev advice; I have never devved a game (although I did play a lot of Hazard/Rescue at primary school, the Game Which Even The Internet Apparently Forgot). But he definitely does good writing. There are sentences in Fallen London and Cultist Simulator that make me freeze in my seat. This collection of essays is generally not Alexis in freeze mode, even though ‘Quest Quest’ and its underlying principles probably should frighten us all, now even more than in 2015. It’s Alexis being funny, pragmatic, charitable, and humane. It’s like getting to sit down over a plate of enigmatically-sourced goat goujons and a cup of Thracian wine, and be told a bunch of good stories.

Matt Hosty

Oxford, 2021

Work has been getting on top of me over the last six months. Then I had a passle of family miseries and an unrelated health scare. Last weekend, I had a proper old crack-up with a full-on episode of depersonalisation. This wasn’t honestly so bad for me, because the emotional deadening component of the depersonalisation kept everything quite comfortably numb, but it was pretty upsetting for Lottie and for my kid.

Anyway, I’ve been here before a couple of times, although this has been a nasty one, and I’ll be fine in a bit. But if you’ve noticed the technical updates have been slow for the last few months, this is why. I think it’s my old friend burnout rather than anything more fundamental, and ‘reduced professional efficacy’ is one of the textbook burnout things.

So it does mean BOOK OF HOURS will slip a bit while I take a breather. I’ve suggested a two-week holiday, Lottie’s holding out for me taking a full month. UPDATE: Lottie has proposed ‘two weeks if you also see a therapist.’ She’s probably right.

The PSA bit. Burnout has a specific meaning, although it’s classed as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ and not a medical condition. If you’re feeling exhausted, cynical and disengaged from work, have a read of this and see if it sounds familiar. What with every day in the pandemic being like the last, what with it being difficult to feel like one’s work has any value when so much of the world is in suspended animation – there’s been a lot of burnout about, recently. The good news is it’s pretty fixable.

https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642

Have, as they say, a spooky day.

– AK

★ Please share this salary spreadsheet as widely as you can! The more data it accumulates, the more accurate and useful it is. ★

In February 2019, I set up a Google Form and Google Spreadsheet to track anonymised game dev salaries in the UK. British indie games isn’t centralised and we don’t have standardised wage expectations. A self-populated communal spreadsheet is the best solution I’ve come up with to give a general picture of what jobs tend to pay – and there’s a lot of variation.

Below are the average mean salaries the ~700 entries come up with. Please note these numbers are really rough as they don’t take into consideration regional variance, years’ experience or benefits. For a more accurate idea of how your salary compares to others’, search the ‘Salaries’ tab!

Production

• • Senior producer – £49,833

• • Producer – £30,196

• Junior producer – £24,005

Art

Design

Writing

• • Senior writer – £36,500

• Writer – £26,500

Code

• • Senior coder – £51,785

• • Coder – £36,672

• Junior coder – £22,239

Audio

• • Senior sound designer – £40,000

• • Sound designer – £27,000

• Junior sound designer – £21,000

QA

• • Senior QA – £23,789

• QA – £21,099

Marketing

• • Senior marketer – £42,678

• • Marketer – £34,600

• Junior marketer – £33,000

There aren’t many surprises here. Production, code and technical disciplines (like technical artists or UI/UX designers) are the best paying jobs in games, with 2D/3D art and QA at the bottom. So far, old news. But these numbers also offer two new things:

One, they give a general value baseline against which you can measure your own salary. It’d be great if this reduced the chance of devs being underpaid because they don’t know their job’s worth.

Two, they give an idea of likely salary expectations for people considering games. We’ve long known that rich coders work in FinTech, but an aspiring 2D artist couldn’t guess how much they’d be making ten years into the job. Perhaps this data will help inform those creativity vs. financial security decisions.

Some caveats

If the numbers above look hinky to you, please add your past and current salaries to the Google Form to make them more accurate. I’m the only person who has editing rights on the sheet, and the Google Form doesn’t give me any more information than what you see on the public spreadsheet.

It’s worth comparing a job’s average salary with the specific data points in the spreadsheet. Even discounting regional wage difference, there’s a huge amount of salary variance across the same job. Some developers seem to have generous salaries; others are paid peanuts. Careful who you work for!

You’ll notice that there aren’t average salaries for more meta jobs like CEOs, managers or team leads. There was such variance in job titles, duties, size of studio and money that you just can’t meaningfully compare those salaries with one another.

I attempted a comparison of male versus female average mean salaries per discipline, but the data pool is too limited. The result is more misleading than useful. If the spreadsheet grows significantly, I’ll revisit to see if we can come up with useful gender pay comparisons.

I also attempted a regional wage comparison per discipline, but it also failed because of the small number of relevant data points. As above, I’ll revisit this if the spreadsheet grows.

Let me know in the comments if you see things in these numbers I haven’t! And if you can, please share the Google Form and Google Spreadsheet with other developers. The more data we have, the better.

Below is the current list of places featured in EXILE (excluding the Priory of Captains, the Pentapolis and the other final destinations). Some of them I know, a couple of them I’ve even lived in, a lot of them I’ve spent the last month researching frantically. The divergent nature of Histories makes it easy for me to take liberties, but there’s plenty of material. Mid-1920s European history is fascinating, and butts in unexpected ways against what we know of Europe after WWII. (Don’t Google it: in our own History, which of these cities was martial law declared on May 9, 1926? Answer at post end.)

When we shared screenshots of the names of the Russian cities, we saw our Russian community get excited, and it occurred to me that it’s unusual to see some of these places appear in EFIGS games. Paris yes, Kaunas less.

So if you live in – or otherwise know – any of these cities, and there are aspects of its landscape or personality that you’d like more of the world to know about, please tell us. [EDIT:] History and mythology are relatively easy to find online, although details like the Venetian folklore that Tobia has provided below are very interesting. But more significanty, there may be ways your city looks or sounds or smells or feels, especially at particular times of day – things that easily go overlooked in research. If you’d like more people to know about your city’s distinctivenesses, tell us.

Mail us at contact@weatherfactory.biz, add a comment below, or tell me on Twitter. If we use anything, we’ll add you to the Special Thanks in the credits, so tell us if you want to stay anonymous.

(The answer is London, in the 1926 General Strike. Picture credit BBC News / Getty Images)

Sooooo. Everyone really likes tarot decks.

We sold all of our 500 decks within 36 hours. Thank you so much if you ordered one! My phone makes a cash register cha-ching noise every time we sell something on Etsy so it was the closest I’ll ever get to

BUT. We seriously underestimated how many people would want this tarot. Coronavirus means some people don’t have the money right now, or that they don’t want physical packages coming through the post. The decks went so quickly and it’s such a difficult time that we feel it’s unfair to disappoint people because I simply underestimated demand. So: we’re going to extend the Tarot of the Hours by another 1,000 decks.

To keep the exclusivity of that first batch, we’re not going to number the decks anymore. Only the first 500 are officially part of the limited edition. But we do want to make sure people have an opportunity to buy this deck, regardless of situation or job security or COVID-19 nonsense. MAY THE HOURS PROTECT YOU.

The new batch is in production now. I’ll announce their restock (in probably a couple of weeks…?) on Twitter, Facebook and reddit. View the ~ secret ~ delisted Etsy store page in the meantime! Delight in currently unattainable occultism! The real-world equivalent of not being able to enter the Mansus ’cause you don’t have the right goddamn card. 🤘

10,000 boos to COVID-19

The games industry is in a fortunate position. Many of us are naturally unsocial creatures who work on digital products that aren’t affected by real-world supply chains currently being severed by COVID-19. We’re a two-person family business who work from home, anyway.

Alexis and I wanted to do something useful in this crisis to pass on that good fortune. For the next three months, we’re going to give 10% of our total monthly profits to charities who can help. This includes everything on our digital stores (Steam, GOG, Humble and itch.io) and all our physical merchandise in the Etsy store. For the avoidance of doubt, this includes the tarot deck!

We’ll share the amount we’ve raised at the end of every month, so we can all feel good for having helped. Yay!

National Emergencies Trust

They step in whenever there’s a major national crisis in the UK. Working with the noble British Red Cross, they’ve launched a major coronavirus appeal.

Medecins Sans Frontieres

Also known as Doctors Without Borders and very dear to Alexis’s heart. An international and life-changing charity getting medical aid wherever it’s needed the most.

The Trussell Trust

A British food bank charity making sure the poorest and most vulnerable people are cared for. Coronavirus must be bloody awful for people who were already struggling financially.

We may extend this initiative for longer than three months. It depends on what the hell happens with COVID-19. Here’s hoping we don’t have to.

When you’re looking at a payroll of 9,800 names, it’s hard to see the human in the numbers. ‘Developers 1 through 799 have to go,’ you sigh, fleetingly considering the pain of telling Developers 1 through 799 their fate. Of course, you don’t have to. You’re just the finance guy. And this is just the best thing for the company.

Activision’s decision to lay off 800 employees at the same time as posting record earnings makes their priorities clear. It’s unusually brazen: the company are unapologetically exchanging employees for money, money that seems destined to flow into shareholders’ pockets or into other Activision games (themselves money-making vehicles which also flow into shareholders’ pockets). I’m not anti-capitalist, but I can see why people are miffed.

The thing is, the company is never your friend. It’s never on your side. Even when it’s run by benevolent humanists, the company and its employees have fundamentally opposing agendas: companies want to make money, people want to get paid. People who work for a company may value humans over cash, but the company itself doesn’t.

There are many pragmatic reasons why businesses might want to treat staff well: it’s more expensive to replace staff than retain them, mistreatment breeds bad PR, happy workers are more productive and do better creative work, some people want to go to bed at night feeling like they’re not a bastard. But if it ever comes down to a choice between ‘do the right thing’ and ‘secure company funds’, most people with a significant personal stake in the company’s finances choose the latter.

Again and again, I see developers expect their small indie studios to look out for them, or their kindly middle-manager protect them from the unknowable AAA board they’ve never met. I wish developers would place less faith in the machine, living as we are in an industry that makes a lot of money and fires a lot of people. 

The problem, as it usually is, lies in the money itself. Give perfectly decent, kind people shares in a big pot of gold and watch their priorities shift. Would you feel better about the Activision debacle if 800 people had to go, but the remaining 9,000 Activision employees got an equal share of the pie? What if you were one of those 9,000? How about if Activision had only fired 400 people and the extra cash got your project green-lit? One small studio I worked for binned four out of sixteen developers, then posted their biggest ever profit of nearly a million dollars. Choosing money over employees isn’t a problem unique to Activision, or to big business: it’s a conflict of interest in companies of every size. 

I’ve heard a lot of studios describe themselves as ‘families’, and some studios do treat their people well (see ‘pragmatic reasons why you’d want to do that as a business’, above). But families fundamentally care about the people they are. Imagine your mum throwing her hands up in front of a spreadsheet and saying, ‘I’m afraid we have to let you go, dear. It’s just the best thing for the family.’

We should stop expecting companies to look after us like friends and family would, because they consistently prove that they won’t. Unions are a great start – they should force workers into companies’ priorities lists, though they’ll never get them to #1. But I’d urge everyone who works for someone to remember that companies ask you to further an agenda that isn’t yours. Don’t let them fool you into loving them for it. 

As I said last time, these posts serves two purposes. One, it’s likely to be interesting both to other indie devs and to our community, but two, it’s useful to us. It’s a useful exercise to do a transparent retrospective on our year, and also I end up  summarising information here that I never actually write down otherwise (I’ve gone back and looked at our Year 1 post for reference a dozen times).

The story so far: I’m Alexis Kennedy, and I’m one half of a microstudio called Weather Factory. The other half is Lottie Bevan. In our first year of operation, we made a game, Cultist Simulator, that sold well and won some awards. By the standards of a small creative start-up, Year 1 was very good indeed.

Here’s what I said last time, at the end of 2018, about our plans going into Year 2:

“What are our priorities now?

In the short term, there are three projects fighting for our attention: the one we’ve codenamed Ophir, the one we’ve codenamed Procopius, and the one we’ve codenamed That Damn Library Game. You can probably expect to see us announce, and likely run a Kickstarter for, one of those this year.

Our next project will probably be a notch higher-budget than Cultist – same sort of scope, but slightly more adventurous UI and a few months of polish. I’ve never really made a game with polish. So we’ll be growing the team. I expect we’ll be four full-timers at the end of 2019, which might mean we’re five, because once you open the gates, head-count tends to tick inexorably upwards.

In the longer term…

In the longer term, I want to be a two-project studio sooner rather than later. I don’t like us putting all our eggs in one basket, and eventually a project will fail. In particular, as I said above, I don’t like being dependent on one storefront (sorry, Valve! but you know how it is). So I think, in 2020, I’d like us to be doing something ambitious and unusual on a larger scale.”

I’ll talk more below about how all that went. Let’s take it as it comes.

Cultist Simulator: the Story Continues

We started the year with no deadlines except those we imposed on ourselves, which was a nice relief after last year’s ferociously disciplined march to an aggressive release date. The one commitment we had was this: we wanted and also needed to release at least two pieces of DLC. ‘Wanted’, because there was a fervent community demand for it and we thought it was likely to make us some money, but ‘needed’ because of Perpetual Edition.

Anyone who backed the Cultist Simulator Kickstarter – or bought the beta when we were selling it before launch on itch.io – or bought in launch week – got the Perpetual Edition, which meant we guaranteed all DLC free forever to those purchasers. In order to make that promise mean something, we needed actually to release DLC. Lottie and I reckoned that three pieces of DLC was a decent number for people to feel like they’d got something worth talking about. We’d already released one piece, the Dancer, in October 2018. We planned two more pieces of DLC to release in May 2019.

Why May? Because that was the anniversary of the release of Cultist the previous year, and that was when we were going to make the ‘Anthology Edition’ available. The ‘Anthology Edition’ was a bundle of the game, with all the DLC, with the soundtrack, with a discount on each. Here’s why, and here’s where, in terms of community relations and audience expectation, things get fiddly and interesting.

The Perpetual Edition seems to have been a success. ‘Free lifetime DLC’ felt like an honourable thing to offer early backers; we think it pumped our sales in launch week; and, critically, it didn’t cost us anything extra before launch. (Well, I had to fiddle about for a couple of days with the Steam and GOG DLC ecosystems so I could make the Perpetual Edition banner show up right for people who’d bought it on those storefronts. Nothing’s ever really zero-cost.)

We’d probably do it again.

But you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and we had some grumbles from people who liked the lifetime DLC deal and regretted only hearing about the game on day 8, or month 8, when Perpetual Edition was gone for good. If we ever made Perpetual Edition available again, we might upset our early backers,  because we’d assured them it was a one-time deal. If we didn’t, we’d still get those grumbles, and miss a sales opportunity.

So we found a middle way. We announced that when we’d released all the DLC, we’d bundle it as an ‘Anthology Edition’. It was effectively the same as Perpetual Edition at a higher price and a year later. Everyone seemed happy with that. The early backers still felt they’d got a good deal, and the latecomers no longer felt they’d missed out entirely.

When we actually released the Anthology Edition, though, we ran into some other grumbles. None of these were serious or widespread, but I reckon they’re interesting because they shed light on how easy it is to make well-intended commitments that limit your options later.

For example, we released the first DLC, Dancer, at $2.99 / £2.50. We’re pretty certain now that this was too cheap for the amount of content. Even at the time we thought it was probably too cheap. Our players have certainly told us they think it’s super cheap. But we really didn’t know how to price a smallish piece of DLC. We havered over worrying about going too low and too high, and what decided us in the end wasn’t, honestly, generosity: it was that I’d got carried away and spent way too long working on the Dancer. We reasoned that if we set a low price, people wouldn’t expect too much content in the future, and that would allow us to do small pieces of DLC quickly rather than feeling we had to really push the boat out.

That worked out fine. The Ghoul and the Priest are noticeably smaller than the Dancer, but they’ve sold just as well and no-one’s complained they were light on content. And I wrote them both in about the same amount of time as I wrote the Dancer. This is a big deal when you’re a small team.

But… we had a couple of folk complaining that the Perpetual Edition was a bad deal, because you only got three pieces of $2.99 DLC. They were a small minority, and the community response to the grumblers was still, eh, it’s still free content. But I don’t think it was a wildly insane complaint.

Similarly, we got this:

I mean, it ain’t so. There’s huuuge quantities of content and story in the base game, and the DLC is bolt-ons. But some customers see three pieces of DLC at the bottom of the store page and decide that we’re gouging our players. I could go in and add a developer reply to this review and explain the whole Perpetual Edition context and talk about all the free updates we did…but when you need to explain your reasoning like that, then you’ve probably already lost.

Or take the soundtrack. We agreed early on to split revenues 50/50 with our usual collaborator, Mickymar. We released the soundtrack on Steam, GOG and Humble – and also on Bandcamp, Spotify, the other usual places. It wasn’t included in the Perpetual Edition. If you ask the next habitual gamer you meet if a soundtrack is ‘DLC’, they’ll probably say ‘no!’ or at least ‘no?’ DLC is new story content, expansions, horse armour. And anyway we couldn’t have given the soundtrack away for free without stiffing Maribeth and her compatriots.

But on Steam, in 2019, soundtracks were sold in the ‘DLC’ section of the game store page. This is just the way their distribution system was organised, and on GOG and on Humble and obviously on Bandcamp and what-all, soundtracks weren’t identified as DLC. In fact, even Steam have just changed it this year and soundtracks are no longer labelled DLC.

But what this meant was that a number of players, some of whom had supported us since the beginning, logged into Steam to get their free Ghoul and Priest DLC and noticed that there was something else labelled ‘DLC’ that they weren’t being offered free. Again, this was a minority, again, people basically understood the issue, and again, it wasn’t a big deal, but again, it wasn’t an insane complaint and we had to spend some time dealing with it.

The thing is this. When you make a commitment – whether it’s a Kickstarter stretch goal, a release date, or a promise of all DLC free forever to early purchasers – you limit your future options. If you’re a big company, your future options are surprisingly limited anyway, because there are bills you have to pay and things you have to do. If you’re a small company, your agility is your advantage. Anything that locks you in is a risk. And sometimes, with Perpetual Edition and DLC and our previous commitments, we felt like we were most of the way through a game of Twister.

It was fine! But it was fiddly. Next time, we’ll know about this stuff in advance. (And we’ll probably get caught out by something completely different.)

Here are the unit sales for Cultist, Cultist Perpetual Edition, DLC and the soundtrack to date (as of Jan 31^st 2020, twenty months after release). Don’t worry, I’ll share the revenue numbers further down, too, but I want to focus on the proportions for now. These are sales on Steam: they don’t include keys redeemed from Kickstarter, or from other storefronts. This also means that the DLC numbers you see there are people who’ve bought the DLC, not people who got it free from Perpetual Edition.

So ONE, yup, 22% of all our Cultist Simulator sales to date there are Perpetual Edition.

One way of looking at that is: there are 34K players out there who we can’t generate revenue from by selling them DLC. That sounds like bad news.

Another way of looking at it is: we sold almost 34K copies in launch week. Doing well in launch week – charting at #1, as we did – is really important for the long tail sales of your game. You can recover from a bad launch. People do. But you don’t want to have to. Perpetual Edition helped us do well in launch week. But we’ll never know how much difference it made.

And a third way of looking at it is this: we can still make money by selling any future games to those 34Kish early adopters. It helped us build a core of people who know they can trust us.

But here’s one final way of looking at it. there are at least 90 million active Steam users, and something over a billion PC gamers, in the world. We’ve sold Cultist to about a tenth of one percent of the Steam userbase, and a hundredth of one percent of the PC gamers in the world. Of course the vast majority of those people will never even hear the name ‘Cultist Simulator’, and most of the rest are probably busy playing CS:GO or Fortnite or something. But to quote Lottie: “The next time you hear anyone say they’ve tapped out their audience, kick them in the shins. No indie has ever tapped their entire potential audience. We simply do not have the money or resources.”

If you’re a small lifestyle business, it pays to keep an eye on the long tail and the long term.

TWO. Dancer has been on sale since Oct 2018, i.e. 15 months. Ghoul and Priest have both been on sale since May 2019, i.e. eight months, i.e. 53% as much. But they’ve both sold about 70% as much. I think this is because we made as big a splash on the anniversary of Cultist Simulator as we could.

THREE. Ghoul has sold very, very slightly better than Priest. Ghoul has 12 user reviews, 100% positive. Priest has 11 user reviews, 41% positive. I think the writing in Ghoul is a little better than the writing in Priest, and the design in Priest drew some criticism for being grindy (an Alexis Kennedy game? Grindy? Say it ain’t so). But it doesn’t look like players are very strongly influenced by the user reviews for a piece of DLC… at least one priced at £2.50. (Or very inclined to leave reviews on DLC. The main game is at 2,760 reviews, 80% positive.)

FOUR. The soundtrack has sold much better than we expected… although our expectations were extremely low. This goes against the received wisdom we keep hearing, that soundtracks don’t sell on Steam. We did sell it as part of a bundle with DLC, which must have helped. And it is, I think, an exceptional soundtrack that does a lot for the atmosphere of a game where atmosphere is more than averagely important. But we were still surprised. Make of that what you will.

Cultist Simulator: Life on Mobile

On April 2^nd, we released Cultist Simulator on iOS and Android.

Back in June, Lottie already did a gigantic data post on how that went, so I’m just going to re-summarise her main points, and then talk about what’s happened since.

What happened then

• We partnered with mobile publisher/porting house Playdigious. ‘Partnered with’ means they took care of porting to iOS/Android, the release, and post-release support, in exchange for a 50% revenue split. It’s been a very good experience and we would unhesitatingly recommend them.
• Sales have been decently good. We’ve proven to ourselves that premium/pay-once can still make enough money for a distinctive game from a small studio to be worth the effort. F2P would almost certainly have made more money, but isn’t our scene and would have required a much bigger ongoing commitment.
• We launched in Simplified Chinese as well as English (see Localisation, below). This proved to be a very good decision.
• We co-ordinated with Apple ahead of time and benefited from featuring at launch… but didn’t get featuring in the US. We suspect that’s because ‘Cultist’ suggests guns and Waco in the US, in a way it doesn’t in other parts of the world.

What’s happened since

Post-launch sales. As of now, 11 months since launch, Cultist has sold 120K+ units across iOS and Android, generating €350k+ net (split 50/50 between us and our partner Playdigious). This is, like most of our numbers, very respectable for a micro-indie, but still only crumbs from the big mobile studios’ tables. Lottie’s best-case estimate for Year 1 was 100K units, so we’re pleased with how it’s gone.

Reminder: always, always record your own estimate of your sales, even when you don’t really have a clue. Educated guesses get more educated every time you have data to compare them to. If you share your guesses internally, that helps keep you accountable and allows you to apply a bit of wisdom-of-the-crowd.

User response. Our reviews stabilised quite quickly around 4.7 on the App Store and 4.6 on Google Play. This is higher than I expected (and feared) because Cultist is notoriously divisive, partly because of its deliberate lack of a tutorial, and mobile audiences are generally expected to require more hand-holding than PC audiences. We do get a handful of one-star reviews saying ‘lol what the hell’ but they’re surprisingly rare. Here’s my hypotheses about why:

• We did raise this concern when we talked to Apple. They surprised us by saying it wasn’t too much of a concern, because customers self-select, but we should be clear in the app description that it wasn’t an easy game. So we were.
• The price (£6.99 / $6.99) is high for a mobile game. A few years ago it’d have been too high (and we applied a hefty launch discount) but higher prices are more common than they used to be for quality games on mobile. So a lot of people buying CS were looking for something unusual, and/or buying on the basis of word of mouth, and went in ready to give it a proper try.
• We’ve realised since launch that there really is almost nothing like Cultist Simulator on the mobile stores. In fact, there is a real shortage of thoughtful single-player premium games – they exist, but you have to dig to find them. This is obviously because the real money is in F2P multiplayer. It does mean there’s probably still an opportunity for smaller studios like ours.

China. Chinese players have responded extremely well to Cultist. We actually have a 4.9 star average on the Chinese App Store (Google Play isn’t, officially at least, available in China.) We’ve talked to Chinese fans and developers to try to get a sense of why the reviews are so good; but honestly the thoughts we have are so speculative and subjective, and I’m so wary of generalising about another culture, that I’m wary about sharing them.

However, here’s what our contact at Indienova (who worked with us on the localisation, and with Playdigious as the Chinese PR agency) thought might be reasons for our Chinese success in general:

“0. That’s the most important one, the game itself is content-rich and good enough.

1. Next, China has a larger population than other countries, obviously.

2. It’s very different to the other games on the ranking list you may have noticed.

3. We reached the core community who are interested in Cthulhu-like things very much accurately, they help us to build a very good public praise. (So we have a good base at the very first time)

4. Apple featured it and some biggest influencers recommend it once the mobile version comes out. (Then we have a fast growing spread)

5. For me, the Chinese localization is not bad but far from perfect at this moment (we are still working on it). [Note: this was back in March, and the localisation has gone through two rounds of improvement from our excellent volunteers.] However, I’m confident that it’s much better than average and it should help a little. (So we should be able to keep a high scores for a longer time.)

6. We have a very energetic Chinese players community now, we got 800+ followers on Weibo and 300+ players on our QQ group. We got popular in the timeline of Weibo.com too if you try to search “密教模拟器” on it, ppl talked and shared this game and it will help to bring some more new players.“

( I mentioned earlier that the title ‘Cultist Simulator’ doesn’t seem to have gone down too well with Apple in the US. Our very sensible volunteer loc team were concerned about the connotations of ‘cult’ in China, so they used 密教. We’re told that 密 is something like ‘secret, mysterious, inmost’ and 密教 is a term for the esoteric Buddhist traditions. I like ‘Esotericism Simulator’, actually. Apparently the original Sanskrit term for these traditions means something like ‘Diamond Vehicle’, and I think I like ‘Diamond Vehicle Simulator’ even more. )

A wrinkle. We did have one real headache with the Chinese mobile release, and I think it’s worth talking about – because it’s another really good example of how if you’re a small dev, then sensible commitments honestly made can box you in.

We began localising Cultist to Simplified Chinese in 2018. Meanwhile, I kept adding free updates – including changes to existing content – to the game. We branched off a stable version for Playdigious to work on porting to mobile. The translators stopped work and then started work later on that version, because it’s not practical to translate constantly changing text. Once I’d finally finished updating the PC version of the game in May 2019, the translators started translating the PC version… which still took months to do, because there was loads of new content.

This meant that the mobile game launched with Chinese loc, and without any of the updates. It also meant that the PC version got DLC and updates, but didn’t have Chinese loc until six months after the mobile launch.

This in turn meant that mobile players were unhappy that they had an older version of the game, and Chinese players were unhappy that they weren’t getting a translation on PC. A minority took to Steam to voice their displeasure, posting negative reviews accusing of us of reneging on our promises to translate the game into Chinese, or of employing an incompetent loc team. We got enough negative reviews that it had a noticeable impact on our review score.

And it was almost impossible to communicate this complicated bundle of reasons for the delays usefully, across the language barrier, to an audience that wasn’t so used to developers communicating openly. I tried posting developer responses in badly Google-translated Chinese, and it didn’t seem to help much. I got grumpy and posted some more defensive responses, and that definitely didn’t help.

That was a silly thing to do. It was frustrating that people thought we were deliberately holding back a Chinese translation for our own nefarious reasons. But it’s never a good idea to let your emotions get the better of you when talking to your community.

(I should add that Indienova warned us that releasing earlier on Chinese on mobile might cause this issue, and I failed to take them seriously enough.)

In summary, we’re very glad we did the mobile port… but it wasn’t zero-risk or free money. Playdigious took care of the majority of the work, but it ate up a lot of Lottie’s time and a little of mine too. And it had other consequences – from the wrinkle with the Chinese loc that I mentioned above, to the complexities of scheduling releases on multiple platforms. When you’re a small team, complexity takes time.

And I think it’s worth saying that, from the start, I’d designed Cultist with an eye to porting it to touchscreen devices. I didn’t know enough to do a particularly good job of that, but I actually got a Cultist build running on Android as long ago as the alpha, just as a basic sanity check for whether it worked. This is why, for instance, Cultist doesn’t use tooltips. When I built Fallen London, I put tooltips everywhere, because although it’s a web app I was a PC gamer and tooltips are a good way to drill down into information. When FL was ported to mobile, this was a colossal pain in the bum, because there’s no way to mouse over and get a tooltip, and tap or tap-and-hold are different kinds of interaction.

So if you’re thinking about distributing your PC game on mobile – and if you’re developing on Unity, that’s much easier to do – think about it early.

Localisation

In 2019, we released Chinese and Russian localisations of Cultist Simulator.

This was also something I thought about early. If you’ve been following our work, you might recall that I tried to impose a maximum word count on myself for Cultist Simulator of about 70K – or 25% of the length at launch of Sunless Sea. This was in part because it had been challenging to localise Sunless Sea (the initiative was abandoned after I left) and impossible to localise Fallen London, and I wanted to keep the count low. In fact, with free updates and DLC, Cultist is almost double its launch size… but that was still practical to localise, though not exactly quick.

I’m using ‘localisation’ and ‘translation’ pretty interchangeably in this post, which will probably upset some experts, sorry! More properly, ‘localisation’ refers to the whole process of making a game suitable for an audience in a different culture.  That can also mean changing UI to suit local preferences, or to accommodate linguistic quirks – or it can mean a more all-encompassing process of culturalisation.

Offworld Trading Company, a game by US-based Mohawk Games, courteously offers a UK English localisation. I believe the only change in the UK-based localisation is that ‘aluminium’ is spelt with the additional ‘i’. God save the Queen.

But for Cultist Simulator, it was almost all about the translation. We did have to make some button sizes a bit more flexible, because Russian tends to run a little longer than English (while Chinese runs shorter). I’d also hardcoded a lot more of the UI text than I realised – because I’m so used to operating in a monolingual environment – and we had to put significant effort into sorting that out (or rather get Chris Payne to sort it out for us).  But mostly, it was the difficulty of translating a large body of deliberately allusive and elliptical text into very different languages with very different cultural references.

Which languages?

We wanted to begin with two or three languages. That would limit our risk, but if we just picked one, we’d probably not learn as much or get as good a sense of how worthwhile localisation might be. This was Lottie’s project, so she made the decision about which. Here’s how.

She considered EFIGS (English + French Italian German Spanish). The other four are relatively easy to localise from English, and my work’s often been popular in Germany.  EFIGS is also a requirement for some distribution deals. But four languages was a lot; and crucially, their home countries all have a high percentage of good English speakers.

She considered Brazilian Portuguese. Brazil is often talked about as an interesting emerging market. Portuguese is the most widely spoken European language by native speakers after English and Spanish, largely because Brazil is so big. And Brazil has a low percentage of English speakers. But we hadn’t seen much interest in my work in Brazil; retail prices are on the low side because incomes are low; and there’s historically been issues with piracy there (because games were banned, then heavily taxed).

She briefly considered Japanese, because we’d heard that there’d been a significant revival of Lovecraft-esque culture there recently, and because it’s a populous country. But translating to Japanese is very expensive, and the market there is of course very mature and competitive.

But when she looked at our sales data, she noticed that there were a disproportionate number of sales in Russia and China compared to other countries with few English speakers. ‘Disproportionate’ was only a little over 1% for Russia and 3% for China, but that still stood out. She remembered a similar effect in the data for Fallen London and Sunless Sea, too. It made sense. My previous work seems to have resonated with audiences in Russia (and I think in some other Slavic countries, though it’s very hard to generalise here). And China is just immense. I constantly have to struggle to remind myself that the population of China is larger than the USA, Russia and all of Europe put together.

Of course, Russian is relatively difficult and expensive to translate to from English. And Chinese is about as difficult and expensive as it gets.

Lottie, however, asked around and was recommended this volunteer initiative by Tanya Short of Kitfox. They’re selective about who they work with, but it offers the possibility of a Chinese translation for the irreproachable price of 0 USD.

I’ve mentioned Indienova before, and the relationship is slightly complex, so to clarify:

• Indienova put Weather Factory in touch with volunteer translators who localised the whole game to a good standard. Indienova handled project management, and the volunteers did the bulk of the actual translation. As far as I can tell this is one part enthusiasm and one part business development.
• Playdigious, our mobile publisher, contracted Indienova to provide PR support for the mobile launch of Cultist Simulator. This was a happy coincidence (except, I guess, that their loc program was successfully generating relationships!)

We also, ultimately, contracted QLOC, a Polish company with a good rep, to localise to Russian, for about 20K USD, of which our then-publishers, Humble, paid half.

So, translating to Chinese. That was a journey, because not only is Cultist allusive and enigmatic and poetic and all that jazz, but the references are generally to European culture and mythology.

And then, of course, we had the usual problems with words with multiple meanings in translation.

Then we had questions that I couldn’t answer without sounding like I was high…

…the questions I couldn’t answer without information that I realised halfway through would be basically useless…

…and the questions I couldn’t actually answer at all. Watch me trying to cover my embarrassment by sounding fancy.

We had a shared spreadsheet in which, ultimately, I answered three hundred and twenty seven of these questions over a period of six months.

Russian was a less arduous process. This was because there’s less of a cultural gap, and because we’d learnt a lot about how to work with loc partners during the Chinese translation (a lot of the questions we did get had already come up in the Chinese translation).

Just as with the mobile port, then, someone else did the bulk of the work, but it wasn’t zero cost or risk at our end. It soaked up weeks of both my and Lottie’s time. I guess it’s worth mentioning in passing that I had to fight to suppress my prima  donna instincts, too. I chose the words in Cultist very carefully, and seeing them translated into a language I couldn’t speak, with no real sense of how they came across, was painful. Talking to people on both loc teams who were attentive, thoughtful, and fans of my previous work – that helped a lot. But I basically had to nut up and get over myself.

So how did it go?

We released beta Chinese loc in September 2019, and full loc in October 2019. In the fifteen months after the release of Cultist and before the release of Chinese loc, 3% of our sales were in China. In the five months since then, 36% of our sales have been in China. It’s currently the country we sell the most units in (#2 is the US with 33%, #3 is the UK with 5%).

We released Russian loc in November 2019 (beta at the beginning,full release on the 25^th). In the seventeen months before then, Russia accounted for 1% of our sales. In the two months since then, it accounts for 3% of our sales. That’s a lot less dramatic. But there are a couple of giant provisos there. First, it’s a very short period of time which includes two major Steam sales. Second, we released the Russian version with almost no fanfare – no PR, no Daily Deal on Steam as we did with China, very little marketing. (This wasn’t intentional – it was for reasons I’ll talk about later in this post.) So far the additional sales have probably made us back about 50% of the cost of localisation into Russian, but I’d expect we’ll have recouped the whole cost by the end of this year.

All told, then, we’re glad we put the effort into localising Cultist, and we’ll likely do it again – with future projects, and with Cultist in more languages. We’ll probably start with the ones at the top of this section!

Cultist on Amazon Twitch Prime

This is a quick one. We distributed Cultist on Twitch Prime. It was a straightforward deal negotiated by our then-publisher, Humble: a flat fee in exchange for a DRM-free build of the game that they could distribute to Amazon Prime users who logged into Twitch that month. I don’t think I’m allowed to say exactly that the fee was. I can say that it was by no means game-changing, but was more than we make from Cultist Simulator sales in an average month, even after the 30% publisher cut.

Like everything else here it wasn’t quite zero-cost. We had to prepare a unique build for Twitch with some specific requirements. Unfortunately there was a bug in that version. We sent Twitch an updated build, but it doesn’t seem like there’s really a process for distributing updates. So we still occasionally get support requests for help with that build. We’ve put up a manual patcher here.

As hassle goes, though, this was minor, and it was basically a straightforward deal that we’re glad we took.

Awards and Recognition

This is pure puffery, so I’m going to keep it short.

In March, Cultist Simulator was nominated for two BAFTAs – Innovation, and Debut (we were shortlisted for Narrative, but didn’t get a nomination). Did we win anything? Good Lord no. These were the BAFTAs. Debut went to Yoku’s Island Express (from another small studio, but brilliantly executed, with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam), and Innovation went to Nintendo Labo. (Narrative went to God of War, obviously).

In July, we won three Develop Star awards – for Best Innovation, Best Game Design, and Best Microstudio. Lottie and I had actually gone out for a quiet dinner instead of turning up to the ceremony, so poor Claire Sharkey, who was handling our marketing at that point, had to give not one but three impromptu speeches for Weather Factory.

Also in March, this happened.

Hiring and Growing

We wanted our next project to be a slightly more ambitious and polished game than Cultist; and we wanted to run two projects simultaneously, so we didn’t have all our eggs in one basket. That meant growing the team.

We did that with some trepidation. It’s a big step to go from ‘romantic also business partners in a flat’ to ‘first actual employee’; but we had a good war chest and far more work than we could handle. So we went very carefully. Lottie and I wanted to make sure we hired competent people with a high degree of integrity whose skills complemented ours, and who could cope well with a high degree of autonomy. We were also keen to hire with an eye to diversity.

The most urgent pressure was to find someone to take over PR & marketing. Lottie was handling that, but she had too much to do already, and we wanted some outside expertise. So our first hire was Claire Sharkey, who we knew and respected already, to handle that side of things. We also needed some Unity expertise and UI expertise – I’m a software developer, but it’s not my strongest skill, and my UI skills are pretty dreadful. We hired Hannah Rose, a smart and versatile Unity developer with a good portfolio, for that. And finally we needed someone to support internal tools, so we could develop content faster, and to work on the unannounced second project. Marc Gagné, a community stalwart who’d built a number of fan projects, was a good fit for that. (We were hiring for a writer, too, when events overtook us – see below for more about that). With those hires made, we were that rare thing in game development, a majority-female development studio.

We got our shortlisted Unity candidates to spend a half-day building prototypes to demonstrate their skills. We paid them their (half) day rate to do that. This gave them an early signal that they could trust us, but it also meant we got code written in earnest that we could use to compare candidates properly. I recommend it. It’s not especially cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than hiring the wrong candidate.

We also made some unusual commitments – motivated in part by altruism, but also by pragmatism. I think there are good reasons to do all these things, at least at small company size. I know they may not scale.

• We guaranteed a no-crunch policy, and were explicit about how. I’ve been outspoken about this for years, at this and my previous studio. I think the evidence is pretty clear that prolonged habitual overtime damages productivity.
• We committed to being internally transparent about salaries. This was a slightly alarming step, but people always know in the end through the grapevine – or worse, think they know. Publishing salaries internally is a sign of trust, and ensured that if there was an unfair imbalance, we’d be accountable.
• We committed to a profit pool for 2020 – something I’d instituted at my previous studio, that had worked well. Again, the moral argument for profit pools is pretty straightforward, if not very sophisticated. It seems right that employees, as well as shareholders, should benefit if the company does well. But pragmatically, my understanding and experience is that it’s a better way to motivate knowledge workers than either high salaries or performance-related pay. People stop being motivated by high salaries quite quickly after a hire or a  raise –  it doesn’t feel significant any more. And if anyone’s found a good way to run performance-related pay fairly in a small business with highly subjective metrics, I’ve yet to hear about it.
• And we added five zero-notice days off per year (‘duvet days’, ‘mental health days’). I’ve always thought this was just a good idea for workplaces, at least where it’s practical.

Here’s the Staff Handbook we ran with as an addendum to our contracts, which discusses the points above and more. I’ve added a least-restrictive Creative Commons licence to it, so if any part of it is useful, feel free to use it.

Industry Contributions (and things you might want to do)

Lottie and I both were very conscious that we had had a fantastic first year. We wanted to pay it forward.

Mentoring. My thing was a mentoring scheme, because I had no clue what I was doing when I started out in this biz, and I wish I’d had something like that to help me learn more quickly. We had an informal mentoring scheme available in 2018, but the problem with an informal mentoring scheme is that no-one really has any idea how much time to expect or what to ask for, and from the mentoring side, it’s hard to budget time. So in 2019, we formalised it and spent some time carefully selecting five mentees. The scheme is now defunct, unfortunately (see later in this post for why) but here’re the original details, in case you want to run something similar.

Coven Club. Lottie’s thing was Coven Club, which actually began in 2018 but hit its stride in 2019. Lottie wanted to provide a supportive environment for women working in the games industry – something more welcoming and special than a corner in a pub – so once a month she rented out an unusually nice space and provided snacks and prosecco. Coven Club ran for a year and then, unfortunately, we had to put it on hold (again, see later in this post for why) but the original details are here if you’re interested in doing something similar and find it useful. It got a really warm response, and it’s a shame it’s gone.

Wings Fund. Lottie also spent some time volunteering for Wings Fund, a venture looking to provide funding for projects for diverse teams. If you’re looking to help with something like that, or if you think you might qualify for funding, they’re here.

Salaries Spreadsheet. Lottie also set up and maintains a spreadsheet of UK games industry salaries. If you’re hiring, or trying to get hired, you might find it useful. If you’d like to help, do please add your own details via the linked Google Form in there.

We also got involved with Ubisoft’s Open Innovation partnership programme for indies – a really interesting initiative in which indies share their unique experiences and Ubisoft offers expert advice, or other assistance, in return. I gave a day-long workshop at Ubi Berlin, in exchange for expert assistance with our second project, Procopius. In the event, the expert assistance was indefinitely postponed (see later in this post) but my impressions of the programme remain broadly very positive, and I’d recommend it.

Finally, we gave a bunch of talks (GDC, Develop, Disco Montreal,  GameDev.lv in Riga, Devspace London, yadda yadda). We posted the slides for our talks here.

The games industry is still new, chaotic and uncertain, especially at the indie end. An ounce of action is worth a ton of talk, but a lot of good intentions in our industry get diffused into discussion, and peter out. If you’re enthused by anything I mentioned above, please consider doing something like it yourself. You don’t need permission from the Twitterati or the establishment to do something like this – it’s not presumptuous to try. Good luck.

BOOK OF HOURS, and the Kickstarter

The next game we decided to make after Cultist Simulator was not the one we’d expected.

In January 2019, I was finishing off the extremely savage New Game+ endings (‘not just difficult, but unfair’) for Cultist, and I found myself hankering to work on something more relaxed. So I tweeted:

It got an astonishing response. ‘This is what’s been missing from my life,’ people constantly said. In a follow-up tweet, I committed to trying to convince Lottie to let us make the game if we got 1000 RTs. It took about 24 hours to get there.

“….we have a road map until April for Cultist”, I wrote in a follow-up blog post, “and we had one and a half other projects we were going to do pre-production on real soon. So assuming we make That Damn Librarian Game, then we will need to rejig our planning, and that’s not something we want to promise on a whim. BUT after we get Christopher’s Build / the Major Victories (free update on Jan 22nd, folks!) out the door, Lottie and I are going to sit down and look seriously at how we could make this work. It’s not out of the question that you might see a Kickstarter this year.”

It did mean reworking a lot of planning. But that level of enthusiasm isn’t something a creative business readily ignores. And besides, we really liked the idea.

So we contracted Adrien Deggan for some initial concept art and Catherine Unger to provide us with a visual direction. I started work on the design. Lottie and Claire began spinning up a Kickstarter, scheduled for September. Hannah and Marc began working on the UI and on the tooling for a new content framework. We had a promising initial prototype which we reckoned would be demo-ready before the end of the campaign. And after months of referring to it as That Damned Library Game, we chose BOOK OF HOURS as a title.

We wanted to be a bit more ambitious than we had with Cultist Simulator –  probably 1.5x the budget, maybe 2x by the time we’d finished prototyping. That meant about 200-250K GBP. We chose 100K GBP as a Kickstarter funding threshold – not a small ask, but I’d raised almost as much for Cultist Simulator as a solo dev. If we got overfunded to the point where we covered the budget, great, if – more likely – we only raised 100K, we were confident covering the rest with our Cultist monies. And if we failed to get funded, we’d take that as a sign that the pitch wasn’t as strong as we had thought, and we’d rework it.

We were very jittery, but about as confident as you can be on the eve of a Kickstarter. Lottie and I between us had worked on five Kickstarters, four of them successful. We had a strong community and a lot of buzz. We’d shared the pitch with hundreds of potential backers and got buckets of helpful feedback. Lottie and Claire were working through a rich schedule of publicity  and promotional stuf for the two weeks before launch, to get the buzz building towards launch day. I started to hope that it might be our most successful KS ever.

Why the Kickstarter Didn’t Happen

On August 27^th and 28^th, a larger competitor went public with a smear campaign against both me and Lottie. It hit the week before our Kickstarter, and on the one-year anniversary meeting of Coven Club (Lottie’s feminist initiative, for which she’d just got funding after a year of Weather Factory paying for it).

Most of you reading this will already be aware of these events, in outline if not in detail. I want to talk about it dispassionately and usefully. The story of this year makes no sense without it, but also, it’s extremely rare for a small business facing catastrophic PR to talk openly about the detailed effects. Posterity, you’re welcome.

It might be difficult to understand what follows without understanding the mechanism of operation of this kind of attack. That mechanism is this: a minority of people will believe the smears, think badly of you, and act accordingly, but the majority will mostly be worried that other people will think badly of you, and distance themselves accordingly.

Commercial effects

The BOOK OF HOURS Kickstarter never ran. We had to cancel it two days before launch. The team’s last two months’ work was rendered obsolete.

All three of our new employees left. When the extent of the damage to the company’s reputation became clear, we offered them either or both of (i) a week’s paid leave to think things over (ii) a bonus payment of one month’s salary in addition to their month’s paid notice if they chose to resign. They were caught in a situation that they hadn’t expected, and we wanted to give them all the time and space we could.

In the event, all three left. They liked their jobs (“Working here is honestly a dream come true,” I’d been told in a one-on-one the week before the attack) but it was too traumatic and miserable, and the potential damage to their careers was too great. (“I thought I could weather it, but I can’t,” said the last to leave.) We don’t blame them, and they left with our regretful blessing.

BOOK OF HOURS was indefinitely postponed. We couldn’t make the game as originally envisaged without the two developers I’d hired to make it, and I was incapable of working for some months in any case. (We’ve since resurrected the idea in a different form with a much lower budget.)

‘Procopius’, our more ambitious second project, was permanently cancelled. There’s no way we can make it now.

Our community was devastated. We were particularly vulnerable to this form of attack because we’d invested so much in a friendly and transparent relationship with our fan base, many of whom now didn’t know what to believe. A civil war erupted inside our community. I had to leave the fan Discord after one of the mods joined in the personal attacks. All told, our mailing list and social media followings – the result of two-three years’ promotional work – were reduced by on average around 25% in the space of a month. (If 25% doesn’t sound as bad as you expected, imagine losing 25% of your home or your salary.)

Around half of our business partners terminated their contracts and/or their upcoming deals with us. There are legal reasons why I can’t be specific about which and how, here.

Revenue from Cultist Simulator went into free fall. Here’s our Steam revenue in the two weeks before the smear campaign hit, and the two weeks after. Any indie looking at this will experience a violent lurch in the pit of their stomach. Sorry about that.

Valve are still a little nervous about sharing sales figures at this level of granularity, so I’ve had to cut off the labelling on the Y-axis, but the delta should be clear: in the course of a week our daily sales plummeted by 75%, and hit their lowest day ever. We had no idea whether that was rock bottom, or whether they’d continue to drop.

If we hadn’t had an exceptional previous year, Weather Factory would have gone out of business rather quickly. (Of course, if we hadn’t had an exceptional previous year, we wouldn’t have registered as a threat to our competitor’s prestige.) In fact, without one stroke of unexpected good timing, we would still probably have gone out of business. I was largely unable to work by now, and would remain so for some months. Lottie was better, but demoralised and overwhelmed nevertheless.

This was the stroke of unexpected good timing:

On September 12^th  2019 we released the Simplified Chinese localisation of Cultist Simulator on the beta branch. This is what it did to our sales graph. We saw another uptick the following month, when we released the full public localisation, by which point Lottie was in good enough shape to do some promotional work.

Eventually, as the months passed, it gradually became clearer what was going on, or people decided they didn’t really give a stuff either way, and our sales recovered to about where they had been. But it was a close thing. The loc release had been scheduled for months. I had often been quietly sceptical of the benefits of a Chinese release, given the time and effort involved in translating the text. It had been Lottie’s initiative from the start; she was right; and it saved the studio.

Effects on industry contributions

Mentoring. All but one of our mentees withdrew from our mentoring scheme. We had to shut it down.

Coven Club. Coven Club was the subject of some particularly vitriolic online personal attacks. Lottie had to put it on indefinite hold.

Wings Fund. Lottie was asked to step down from her volunteer work at Wings Fund on the basis that (unspecified) allegations had been made against her character.

Talks. All our speaking invitations were withdrawn.

I’m happy to say, however, that the salary spreadsheet is still going as of the time of posting.

Personal effects, a.k.a. health and wellbeing Year 2

The most significant of the effects of this kind of experience is, unmistakably, the toll it takes on your state of mind, and that shaped the last four months of 2019 for us. It’s especially difficult to talk about this part dispassionately. So I am going to try for a tone of dry flippancy. But I don’t want the tone to suggest that this is a trivial thing, so I’d like you to be  aware that as I type this, I am remembering last August and September, and my hands are shaking, and yes, I did indeed have a full-on couldn’t-look-after-my-child, emergency-mental-health-referral, Lottie-had-to-explain-to-the-GP-because-I-couldn’t-speak-coherently, Internet-access-restricted breakdown from which I am still recovering. I don’t recommend it. I’ve been through a rancorous divorce, and I’ve been through my brother killing himself. This was worse than either.

I was largely out of action until the end of the year, I still find it difficult to communicate with people unless I know them very well (if you’ve emailed me, sorry, I have to work up to responses!) and I’m unlikely ever to speak publicly again, but I’m now capable of working at my usual pace on light medication.  Lottie’s morale and health have suffered (she has a problem at the moment with recurring nightmares), but she was less dramatically affected and she’s mostly recovered. Some days we’re quite cross, most days we’re pretty cheerful. We’ve mentioned previously that Lottie’s mother was also targeted for some unpleasantness, but she’s a tough lady, she was on the periphery of it, and she’s fine.

On the flip side, the work-life balance issues that I mentioned in last year’s post have been less of an issue lately.

More about this sort of thing

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You%27ve_Been_Publicly_Shamed

Year 2: Where We Are Now

In summary, in 2019, we released Cultist on iOS and Android. We released two more pieces of DLC, the soundtrack, and the Anthology Edition. We released Chinese and Russian localisations. We won some more awards. And for a few months, we were that rare bird, a studio of five with a majority female team and no gender differential in pay.

Here’s where we were at the end of 2018 compared to where we are now.

Here’s a similar 2018-2019 comparison, but in money.

And here’s our revenue breakdown on Steam for all products to date. (NB this is before Steam’s 30% cut). Revenue breakdown on other platforms is in similar proportion, and in total runs about 10% of the Steam revenue.

Those are numbers since Cultist’s launch, i.e. 20 months of sales. My prediction for year 1 PC sales, based on Jake Birkett’s formula  and our week 1 sales of 34K units, was 157K units. Actual Year 1 sales on PC, all storefronts, was around 110K units. So 157K was much too optimistic, but still illustrative. The Birkett number still looks useful as a rough estimate, and it’ll help me refine next time.

Mobile revenue: here’s Lottie’s detailed breakdown. The bottom line for ‘units shipped on mobile’ was 59K when she wrote that post, four months after launch. It’s now been eleven months since launch, and the total of units shipped on mobile – as I mentioned above – is now 120K, or €350K + net (of which 50% has gone to our partner Playdigious).

We’re ten thousand words in, and nearly done. Here is the traditional kitten picture:

This is Sulochana, one of Lottie’s two beloved ragdolls. What isn’t visible in the picture is the damage to Sulochana’s left front wrist. On 31^st of May 2019, the anniversary of Cultist’s launch, when Lottie and I were drinking prosecco and marvelling at how well everything seemed to be going, the wind blew open a carelessly closed door and Sulo got on to the balcony and leapt from the sixth floor. She survived, and is mostly recovered, but she’ll walk with a limp for the rest of her life.

That’s pretty much where Weather Factory is now. We were grievously wounded and almost didn’t survive, and we’ll never be what we were, but we go on, and life’s not so bad.

Shorn of metaphor, that means that Weather Factory is just Lottie and me, probably for good. We won’t ever be a two-project studio, and we won’t ever work on the ‘ambitious and unusual [thing] on a larger scale’ that we had planned. But we will continue to work on small, carefully scoped, experimental narrative games. I can’t imagine giving talks or mentoring or hanging with the scenesters any more. But we hope to keep sharing data like this; I can probably manage some more design streams; and I intend to keep making games until someone breaks into my house and forces me to stop.

Our plans for 2020, then, are much more domestic than last time:

1. Spend some of that Cultist money on a house (I’m 48 and renting)
2. Get married
3. Get BOOK OF HOURS to beta. We’re very wary of running another Kickstarter, but we haven’t quite ruled it out.
4. More book, more podcast, more fun merch.

Thanks for reading to the end! I hope it’s been useful. And if you’ve stayed with us through the rough times, we really appreciate it, both of us. A heartfelt thank you. It’s probably meant more this year than any time before or since.

Here’s our mailing list.

Here’s our podcast.

Here’s our YouTubes.

Here’s Cultist Simulator.

And here’s BOOK OF HOURS.

I had no experience marketing games before Cultist Simulator, so I taught myself with Gamasutra posts, Googling and YouTube videos. There’s loads of useful stuff out there about how to get your game to launch, but there’re slim pickings on what to do afterwards.

Here’s an attempt to bridge that gap. The below is a close look at Cultist‘s storepage traffic breakdown from Steamworks. I’ve taken snapshots of the game’s performance over the past two years and thought about what this tells me about post-launch marketing. I’ve restricted myself to speaking only about Steam to avoid data overload.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Cultist, here’s a cheat sheet:

• Niche, text-based, Lovecraftian card simulator by Alexis Kennedy, of Fallen London and Sunless Sea fame

• Critically divisive – you either love it or hate it

• Two-person dev team (plus freelancers)

• Launched on 31st May 2018

• Sold 50k copies in mth 1

• Released three DLCs, two new languages, several free content updates and a bundle edition in the following 1.5yrs

I’m not a data analyst, so you may draw different conclusions from the following numbers. Please leave me a comment at the bottom if you do!

THE TIMELINE

Alexis and I talk a lot about keeping the balloon up: how selling your game post-launch is like continually batting a balloon up from a gradual downwards trend. The higher you bat it, the longer it takes to come back down. If you don’t keep batting it up, it will eventually end up on the floor. The floor, in case you missed it, is zero sales, and gravity in this metaphor is the decreasing relevancy and commercial viability of your game over the course of linear time.

Cultist‘s lifetime graph looks as you’d expect, with a few peaks rising out of an otherwise stable, low rate of daily units sold. The major peaks are all launch and seasonal sales, with a few secondary peaks from releasing new content (DLC, soundtrack and major languages). Nothing ground-breaking here, other than a few minor good blips from Steam events and high-profile streamer coverage.

FULL TRAFFIC BREAKDOWN

The key metrics here are impressions, visits and CTR. More on them below, but first a caveat! You’ll see on the anotated traffic images that there’s something helpfully called ‘(other pages)’ that’s always near the top of the list and/or CTR scale. By far the largest proportion of (other pages) is, apparently ‘(various features)’ with no further information available.

I’ve not commented on ‘(other pages)’, because honestly, I don’t understand it. I’m not sure what’s accounting for these numbers or what they mean, so… if you know, please share!

Now, here’s the data in its full glory. Click on each image (and then ‘View full size’) for a larger version.

I’ve annotated these with my major takeaways, but here’s a closer look at our major three metrics.

IMPRESSIONS

I erroneously used to think of impressions as ‘eyeballs’. In reality, they’re the number of times your stuff was displayed, regardless of how many people actually looked at it. The key thing is that these numbers are really big – the top of the marketing funnel – and they get smaller and smaller until they turn into actual unit sales. I find it useful to think of impressions as opportunities: it’s the largest possible number of times Cultist could have made contact with an eyeball, and therefore the largest possible number I could realistically hope to convert. The closer my number of visits match my impressions, the more people are seeing and being interested in Cultist Simulator. The closer my number of sales match my visits, the better my store page is at converting considerers to customers.

This is, of course, a crude oversimplification of what’s actually going on, but it helps me visualise how these metrics interact. Anyway, here are our top three performing impression-givers across Cultist‘s life:

It’s a no-brainer that the Steam home page is the most significant impressions feed across the board. Steamworks proudly claims 94 million MAU and 1 trillion daily impressions, so… there’re a lot of impressions to go around.

‘Tag pages’ are tag-specific subpages which function much like the genre subpages and are in effect particularly focused mini-home pages, with featuring for recommendations, new and trending titles, etc. Cultist‘s data shows a pretty sharp divide between the Top Sellers and the New and Trending tag lists: these top two feature spots are by far the most significant areas of the page, and there’s a drop-off from 4mil impressions down to 189k with the remaining . This implies that these two lists are the main ones people look at, and that games featured in these lists make up a lot of that juicy feature carousel right at the top of the page.

A tag page for ‘Lovecraftian’

‘Specials – Full List’ refers to the ‘the full page of search results’ when you click the ‘Browse more’ button at the top of the ‘Specials’ section on the home page. They get special front-page featuring, so it’s not surprising they give lots of impressions. But it probably also means that lots of people click through to browse current bargains, and is further proof how important sales are.

‘Friend is in-game’ notifications are a different story. Jason Rohrer talked brilliantly about the power of ‘infinite unique situation generators’ at GDC last year, arguing that the most important thing for an indie game to do is to keep people playing over a long period of time. The longer and more frequently people play, the higher their chances of converting one of their Steam friends to a customer via repeated ‘friend is in-game’ notifications. How much advertising has this provided the likes of Stardew Valley and Rimworld? And how much more convincing is it for a friend to recommend a game by playing it, than a paid marketer who has vested financial interest in getting you to buy their product? These notifications are a big, big opportunity.

The recommendation feed is that whole section at the bottom of the Steam home page with a variety of recommendations by tags, playtime, wishlist, curators and friends’ reviews. They’re not the high-profile recommendations you see in the top carousel, or the variety of other, more foregrounded features in the top half of the home page. They’re the nitty-gritty bits at the bottom for the jaded Steam browser who’s not yet seen anything that caught their eye. It’s still front page traffic, though, so it’s logical this ranks high on impressions. If there’s a moral here, it’s to use whatever you can (including Curator Connect!) to get your game appearing as many times as possible in different subsections here.

VISITS

These are “unique page loads of your product’s store page”, though it’s important to remember they’re not unique people looking at your store page. Steam points out that “customers frequently return to a product page multiple times before deciding to make a purchase, so… [visits] convey the variety of places where customers are finding your product and clicking to learn more.” I looked at the top three visits in each instance below.

I’ve already discussed Steam’s home page above, so I’ll move straight on to ‘Other Product Pages’. Steam defines this as “traffic from another product page or visibility that takes place on another product page within the Steam store”, and breaks this section down into things like ‘More Like This’, ‘Bundle Contents Preview’ and ‘Similar Recent Apps’, among many others. This seems to be ‘general traffic from generally being a thing on Steam’ and as such is hard to capitalise on specifically. Make sure you have good Steam tags, I guess?!

External websites cover everything from Google to the various social sites (in our case, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, in that order) but also include links from games press sites like RPS and Kotaku. This tells me that we’re doing something right outside of Steam to get significant visits from other hits on the net.

‘Direct navigation’, according to Steam, “represents hits in the browser where [they] could not determine the origin. This may be a link that was clicked in an app on the user’s PC, a website that sets rel=”noreferrer” on links, a bookmark, or other navigation not accounted for in External Website. Many sites set rel=”noreferrer” on user-supplied links, including Reddit, Twitch, Discord, and many others”. This is a big 🤷‍♀️ from me.

Search suggestions specifically mean “the results that appear immediately below the search field in the upper-right corner of the Steam store when you start entering a search term”. As with external websites, the fact that this ranks highly in our Steam traffic tells me we’re doing something right outside of Steam to get people searching for Cultist in the first place. Hooray!

Direct search results means “the full page of search results that you see once you’ve entered a search term into either of the search fields in the Steam store”. For example, people searching for ‘cards’ will probably see Cultist in the results page. It’s an alternative focused results page to the tag or genre pages, and again, it makes sense that someone looking for something specific enough to bring up Cultist in the list of results has a high chance of convincing ’em to click through to our store page.

I’ve one last, very important thing to say about these visit stats, from a post-launch marketing POV. Look at the percentage of new visitors:

• 1wk: 86% of visits (17,326 out of a total 20,164) were from people who didn’t own Cultist Simulator. Those aren’t 17,326 individual people, but it’s still a huge number of new eyes which could be converted to customers. Most people looking at Cultist are new people.

• 1mth: 89% of visits (137,825 out of a total 155,044) were from non-owners.

• 6mths: 92% of visits (625,952 out of a total 682,458) were from non-owners.

This shows a huge amount of potential interest in Cultist that I’m not capitalising on. This is very positive – it’d be a pretty poor-selling product if 86-92% of views were from people who’d already given me their money. It shows that even if your game’s doing well, there’s SO MANY MORE PEOPLE you could be selling it to, whether through a more convincing store page, tempting sales, better marketing outside of Steam or additional localisation. The key thing is that if you’re an indie developer, there are always more people out there who might buy your game.

CTR

Click-Through Rates tell me when something’s resonating with the people seeing it. Showing an image of a spider to me, an arachnophobe, is not going to make me click on it. Showing that same image to r/spiderbro will get lots of clicks, because you’ve matched content to a relevant, interested audience. I looked into everything with a double-figure CTR next to it, because my (basic) understanding of CTR tells me that double-figure conversion is on the high side of what you should expect.

Genre pages – the links under the ‘Browse by genre’ header in the Steam home page sidebar – make sense as our highest overall CTR, because people are likely to be matched with relevant content by browsing games like Cultist Simulator before they see Cultist Simulator. The ‘Genre pages’ traffic breakdown includes featured segments on genre pages like the Top Sellers List, Daily Deal and New and Trending list, so it’s a bit like an extremely focused Steam home page. High traffic and high conversion. Yay!

The ‘Package Page’ section comprises the ‘More Like This’ section on another game’s store page and something just called ‘Package Page’ which I don’t understand. I also don’t understand how this plays with the ‘More Like This’ section included in the ‘Other Product Pages’ above that gave us a lot of visits, so leave a comment if you do! 99% of our Package Page traffic comes from the More Like This section here, so again, it makes sense that people browsing similar games to yours are going to convert well. If they like other Lovecraftian text-based simulation games, they’re probably gonna like Cultist as well.

I’ve already discussed search suggestions above, but here’s one CTR-specific thought to add. People are specifically searching for your game in Steam, so this absolutely should convert well unless you’re doing something horribly wrong on your store page. I suspect conversion rate is lower over time than the genre pages or ‘More Like This’ section because people are quite likely to wishlist after hearing about a game if it’s not currently on sale. Genre pages are most likely to send traffic to your store page if you’re on sale, because that’s when you’re likely to get those extra feature slots at the top of the page. That’s my two cents, anyway.

The community hub is the player-centric section behind every game’s store page, comprising your Steam forums, screenshots, artwork, broadcasts… Most people engaging in your community are likely to have already bought the game or be right on the tipping point of doing so, so it makes sense that already invested customers would click around the store page again for additional info / DLC purchases / whatever. What’s interesting about our figures is that people seem to browse the community hub primarily to check reviews, then to check out Steam broadcasts, and finally to check out videos, in that order. Maybe I should focus more on video content than I’ve previously done.

‘Recommendations – Main’ is a hodgepodge of different channels, including things like ‘Recommended – Recently Viewed’, ‘Popular Games from Random Genres’ and ‘Friend Recommendations’. I assume this is part of the pool Steam draws on for that ultra-high-value ‘Featured & Recommended’ section at the top of the home page. It’s interesting that there are actually two recently viewed recommendations tracked here: ‘Recommended – Recently Viewed’ and ‘Recommended – More Recently Viewed’. This implies that Steam repeatedly and increasingly shows customers a game the more often they’ve viewed its store page.

Finally, and most unexpectedly, come microtrailers! I had literally never even looked into Steam Labs’ six-second automatically generated microtrailers prior to checking these numbers, so I’d never have expected them to appear on any high-performing lists for us. The community hub breakdown already told me people are particularly interested in gameplay videos for Cultist, so it tracks that microtrailers would be unusually good at convincing people to click through to our store page. You have to go looking for microtrailers to see them, but once you do you get a host of really interesting and in-depth filters (‘Mood’, ‘Time Flow’, ‘Challenge Type’, ‘Visual Style’…) which are likely to match people quickly with games they haven’t heard about but are liable to like. Very interesting indeed.

(Fun fact: if you search by the ‘Lovecraftian’ microtrailer tag, Cultist is currently wedged between Lust for Darkness and Lobotomy Corporation. Cosy.)

One more thought on CTR, more generally. Here’s Cultist‘s overall CTR breakdown:

The last month has been Christmas, and we’ve been on holiday, so our usual bustle of social media and general noise has been quieter than usual. This accounts for the lower than average CTR of the last month, and it’s nice to see that something we’re doing has kicked CTR back up again in the last week, now we’ve announced new stuff like our podcast and BOOK OF HOURS and have restarted social media. Phew!

The only CTR figures I’ve seen recently are Victoria Tran’s from her Kitfox marketing write-up. So share yours if you can, so we can all get a better sense of numbers to aim for.

ONE FINAL THING: VISIBILITY ROUNDS

Visibility Rounds are dedicated space on the front page of Steam and on the ‘Recently Updated’ page to highlight significant updates.

• They last for 30 days.

• You automatically get five per game, but can earn more.

• They only appear on the front page to customers that already have your game in their library or wishlist. This means impressions / clicks can wildly differ between games, due to how many customers and wishlisters you have.

• They appear to everyone on the ‘Recently Updated’ page.

• They don’t show on the front page during major seasonal sales.

• They’re randomly selected from a pool of other active Visibility Rounds and refreshed each time a customer views the home page.

It’s interesting to see that we’ve ~tripled our original views in our last two rounds. It’s also interesting that we’ve dropped CTR at the same time. What I think this tells me is our wishlist and playerbase increased dramatically from Feb – May 2019, which makes sense bearing in mind:

• we launched a successful mobile port in April

• we were also nominated for two BAFTAs in April, which came with a spike in visibility / hype

• we released two further bits of DLC and a premium bundle in May

However, this also tells me that we’ve been flagging less and less compelling content over time. This also makes sense because:

• VR1 highlighted our first DLC, The Dancer, which converted well with an audience which was still buzzed about Cultist but had run out of new content to play.

• VR2 highlighted a big free update + our soundtrack release, which was potentially relevant to every single owner of the game.

• VR3 highlighted two more DLCs (The Priest and The Ghoul), though by this point Cultist had been out a year and we had higher numbers of wishlisters. This meant we converted fewer existing customers and showed irrelevant content to some people (DLC to people who didn’t yet own the base game).

• VR4 announced Chinese localisation, which wasn’t relevant to anyone unless you spoke Chinese.

Similar to the vital importance of your initial MMR (see Lauren Clinnick and Matt Trobbiani on MMR here), this data implies that success breeds success. We can put out increasingly less interesting content and still see more people click through, even though CTR went down, because we’re continually growing an audience of wishlisters on Steam after a successful launch. This isn’t a recommended strategy – I’m going to try an be more interesting in 2020! – but it’s significant. And this is before you get into those ‘earned’ Visibility Rounds, which I believe are awarded at Steam’s discretion based on generated revenue.

My final takeaway here is that Chinese loc on its own gave almost the same visibility boost as two entirely new bits of DLC and an entire Anthology Edition bundle. So happy goddamn Year of the Rat, China!

CONCLUSIONS

These numbers support a bunch of received knowledge: post-launch sales are vital for keeping your game selling; front-page featuring on Steam is priceless; localising your game into Chinese is a very sensible thing to do.

But there are some takeaways here that I didn’t expect:

• Genre pages and tag pages are vital. If you don’t manage to end up on the front page of Steam, they’re your second chance at the impressions hosepipe, and the barrier to entry to appear on them – how much you have to sell – is much, much lower than for the front page. You can also expect excellent conversion from a filtered, specific audience. So make damn sure you’re in the right genre with the right tags.

• ‘Friend is in-game’ notifications are big. By compelling users to return to your game again and again – whether by addictive game loops, DLC, in-game events or something else – you can turn your userbase into an army of marketers. Your customers are more numerous and better at selling your game than you and your marketing team will ever be.

• Anything you can do to up your chances of appearing in one of the many ‘recommended’ slots is huge. Selling lots of copies and making lots of money are the quickest ways to appear, but smaller things – like Curator Connect recommendations, friends’ recommendations and, again, good tags – are excellent avenues to pursue.

• Microtrailers are a thing you should properly think about! WHO KNEW?!

• It is not enough to expect Steam to sell your game for you. If you play the system right it can give you huge, huge numbers of potential customers, but use your analytics to prove your marketing outside of Steam is actually sending users usefully to your store page. If it’s not, fix it.

• The next time you hear anyone say they’ve tapped out their audience, kick them in the shins. No indie has ever tapped their entire potential audience. We simply do not have the money or resources.

• Visibility rounds can give you a great steer on where you’re going right and where you’re leaving some of your audience behind. Also, don’t schedule them over Christmas. 😱

Let me know your thoughts on anything in the above, and if you drew any different conclusions to me! If you’re interested in more data, we’ve a collection of blogs and data dumps here.

For now, a tarot update! I have learned a great deal about DIE CUTTING (goth) and BLACK CARD (goth) and 350GSM ZANTA GAME BOARD (………………post-goth). The short version is our test deck showed me I needed to pay more for a black-card deck, lest the edges of our glorious set look like they’ve been nibbled by Worms when they’re still brand new.

I can at least start confirming some of the correct guesses I’ve seen about our suits and face cards. I’ve only seen two correct guesses so far, so if you think you can work out any of the below, leave a comment and I’ll update the chart!

Finally, a pre-Christmas treat for the last production update of 2019. Some of you may remember a certain Serena Blackwood from the last letter to cross my path from Hush House. Well, an official missive from Serena herself has come to light. Read the original below, or a transcript at the bottom of this update. Click for larger versions.

Thank you to everyone who’s been supportive over these last few months. I can’t tell you how much it’s appreciated. Take care, Beloveds, and see you on the other side. ♥

OFFICE OF THE CURIA
Hush House, Brancrug
June 22nd, 1924

Detective-Ostiary Pender –

Thank you for your time last week, and for your patience. I’ve reviewed your requests for limitation. Most are acceptable to the Curia. Some are not. In this letter, I’ve outlined our objections. I hope that we can find common ground, and an acceptable compromise.

Nix Abolix. You marked as ‘Suppress’. No arguments here. Quite frankly, I don’t know how it ever made it to the main collection. We don’t need any more Worms in the world. I mention this only to say that we do, despite our differences, appreciate the Bureau’s efforts and contributions.

On the other hand, My Most Violent Enterprise. You marked as ‘Restrict’. That’s a little extreme. I really don’t think it even merits an ‘Advise’. The contents are certainly pretty despicable, but if Enterprise is limited, we are going to have to revise classification for a great many other equally despicable items. The function of Hush House is not to protect, but to preserve.

The Almanac of Entrances. You marked as ‘Suppress’. I can see the risks, but I don’t believe suppression is merited. We’ll agree to ‘Restrict’.

OGHKOR OGHKOR TISSILAK OGHKOR. You marked as ‘Restrict’. I understand your concerns, but the author has not been witnessed abroad in the world for at least two centuries, and can reasonably be considered defunct. I’ll allow ‘Advise’, and we’ll revise to ‘Restrict’ if the author is ever verifiably reported active again.

A Child’s Treasury of Golden Afternoons. You marked as ‘Expunge’. This is a proposal we would consider only in the most extreme circumstances. The text is already categorised ‘Contain’. I’ve discussed with the Librarian and we are confident that the theoplasmic contamination – which is, I grant, quite advanced – can be purged. If it can’t, then we will consider the ‘Expunge’.

Codex Acephali. You marked as ‘Contain’. I agree that this is a reasonable request, and once again, I wanted to thank you for drawing it to our attention. As a matter of fact, the contamination has also reached the neighbouring texts (The Radical Measure and In the Malleary) and we’re going to mark those ‘Contain’ too, pending review.

The History of Inks. You marked as ‘Suppress’. Now this is not the first nor indeed the second time that the Suppression Bureau has taken issue with this book, and I do see your point, some of the inks are extremely significant, but with all due respect, Hush House has its purpose, as you must know, and the Suppression Bureau’s place is not to question that purpose. Your Suppression request is denied. My patience is wearing thin. If I see another such request for the History in future years, I’ll take up the matter with our patrons.

The Kerisham Portolan. ‘Suppress’. I don’t think so.

Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1922. ‘Restrict’. I assume this is some sort of joke. I must assure you that no-one in the Curia is laughing.

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Serena Blackwood, D.D., O.F.S.B.

I’ll keep you all updated with news as and when I have it. <3

• Steam
• GOG

Fixed Notoriety from decayed, wounded corpses being treated as wounded followers.

Fixed Glover & Glover superiors sometimes unexpectedly returning to life after the player’s demotion.

Fixed an issue with reloading games which could prevent some recipes from running.

Fixed old Ghoul saves (from before the hunger fix) preserving their negative hunger values. Hunger will be reset to 1 when the Season of Ambitions rolls around.

Fixed poisoned Mansus Ways not always triggering their traps in Apostle legacies.

IT’S THE SAME FIXES! BUT I’M TRYING TO BE HELPFUL!

• Steam
• GOG

The game will now try to save in the background where possible, which should nearly eliminate the auto-save stutter.

Fixed Notoriety from decayed, wounded corpses being treated as wounded followers.

Fixed Glover & Glover superiors sometimes unexpectedly returning to life after the player’s demotion.

Fixed an issue with reloading games which could prevent some recipes from running.

Fixed old Ghoul saves (from before the hunger fix) preserving their negative hunger values. Hunger will be reset to 1 when the Season of Ambitions rolls around.

Fixed poisoned Mansus Ways not always triggering their traps in Apostle legacies.

That’s all for now folks! If you encounter any issues when playing Cultist Simulator let us know via: support@dweatherfact.wpengine.com