Every week I receive ICO Partners’ Steam newsletter. It’s a simple round-up of all the week’s latest Steam games, alongside their number of reviews and overall review score. As well as keeping me in the loop about new games I might be interested in, it’s also taught me a valuable lesson about nicheness, audience fit and what can be reliably termed the Law of Boob.

The single most consistent thing about new releases on Steam is that if you make a game with breasts in them you’re looking at a baseline of 80%+ positive reviews. This seems to happen with an uncanny consistency that makes me wonder if I and my heterosexual feminist principles are a blocker for good business decisions. Every week I see games called things like Hentai Asmodeus outrank games that are palpably higher quality, and while they might not make the megabucks of lower-rated but higher-grossing offerings, they show an audience resonance that many more successful titles fail to match.

This weekly trend is borne out across Steam. Monster Hunter: World is a cool 75%. Civilization VI is 71%. Once phenomenally popular, PUBG sits now at 51%. All are apparently less good than Cultist Simulator, the game my studio made in our pyjamas for £142k, which is niche and flawed and doesn’t have a tutorial and sits at 78%. This doesn’t mean AAA PC games are doomed to middling review scores, of course. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt  is 97%, and famously excellent AAA offerings like Fallout: New Vegas, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Divinity: Original Sin 2 are all happily 95%. But it tells me two things: one, that trying to please a wide audience tends to lower your overall review score, and two, we should all be putting colons in our games’ titles. 

You know what’s better than The Witcher 3? Meltys Quest, sitting pretty at 98% positive, which as far as I can tell is about a queen’s journey to find a bra. CD Projekt Red is also put to shame by DEEP SPACE WAIFU: NEKOMIMI, another 98% positive bastion of gaming brilliance where you’re a rat in a spaceship shooting clothes off megalithic cat-women. I think. Three other offerings equal The Witcher 3 and its 800 awards: NEKOPARA Vol. 3, ‘a heartwarming cat-comedy’ set in a sexy patisserie’, LOVE³ -Love Cube- which appears to have very little to do with cubes, and The Ditzy Demons Are In Love With Me which surely needs no explanation. All of these are 97% positive because the people who like anime boobs really like anime boobs and they’re all wonderful examples of product-market fit.

I’m not suggesting that games are at their best when they’re thinly-veiled pornography. But I am saying that we indies who don’t make boob games should consider what our version of boobs is. What’s the one thing about our games that will really resonate with potential players? What will excite people into loving our products, rather than filling the generic game-shaped space in people’s lives? If you don’t have an answer to this, you might be in trouble.

Every developer wants their game to be universally loved. AAA studios have the money to sometimes – sometimes – make that happen. Indies don’t. So don’t aim for everyone and end up making Meh Soup. Aim for one particular audience and really knock it out of the park. Or, y’know. Consider hentai.

This is an ode to organic indie streaming strategies. I’m confident Shakespeare will forgive me for the title. Firstly, he sounds like a hip kinda guy. Secondly, if streaming were a thing in Elizabethan England, he’d have been ALL OVER IT. Our closest gaming comparison is probably Lucas Pope in a ruff, and he doesn’t set up paid streams. He waits for influencers to come to him and simply gives them keys.

Bully for him, you might be thinking. Shame I’m not a multi BAFTA-winning genius. And that’s fair enough. It might take you a little longer than ShakesPope to tap into the ‘free’ streaming network, but if you put the time in and have a game that isn’t terrible, it’s entirely within reach.

Streaming is now the indie developer’s number one way to convert eyeballs to sales. It’s your most direct way to connect with consumers and their purses. People watch streams because they’re interested in games and because they like the person streaming. If someone’s watching a stream, it means they’re theoretically up for buying a new game, and they’re likely to be swayed by their chosen influencer’s opinion (hence the name). If you get an influencer genuinely enjoying themselves while playing your game, the marketing funnel you’ve been dripping consumers through suddenly gets a lot shorter. 

literally everyone
+
[ streamer who likes your game ]
↓
people who like your game
↓
£££

The way this worked for Cultist Simulator was simple but time-consuming. I drew up a list of similar games to the one I was developing, then went looking for streamers who’d played those games or similar titles. I reached out directly to offer keys, then repeated the exercise with YouTubers, Steam curators and whoever else I could think of. Once we’d seen a bit of pick-up, I started getting enquiries from streamers who’d seen other streamers playing it. We all watch our direct competitors to see what they’re doing, and so do influencers, too. They saw a bunch of people playing this weird game, and a bunch of nice audience response to it. So they wanted in.

In my experience, you can leverage this vast, unknowable community of photogenic game enthusiasts without a budget, so long as you put the time in. Time is something indies actually have. Anything that builds a community over the course of development is great for us. The author Roger Zelazny has an excellent phrase for this: 

“An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.”

And, you know, just replace the gendered language. It was the sixties.  

I don’t believe that spending on influencers is the key to indie success. Influencers themselves are – but in an unusual twist in the natural order of things, you don’t need cash to leverage the system.

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.

In November, Riot Games set the world on fire. The spark was K/DA’s ‘Pop/Stars’, a K-pop song which debuted at League of Legends’ 2018 World Championship. It came complete with Korean pop idols, augmented reality, a Justin Bieber protegée and a badass music video, which was watched 38 million times in the first week alone. Its coolest moment is an extended neon rap section, which is probably responsible for a 38 million percent increase in graffiti, too.

You might think all this spectacle was announcing a new multi-million dollar IP. Or to reveal something nuts, like Riot working with Valve to finally make Half-Life 3. It, er, wasn’t. Its immediate purpose was selling four new cosmetic League of Legends skins. It was part of larger marketing and visibility for Riot too, of course, but it remains the point where I, an indie dev, throw myself into the sea.

Don’t get me wrong: everything about this is epic. It’s a promotional triumph. It’s the catchiest song I’ve heard in while. It’s a PR stroke of genius, somehow managing to balance four consumable, sexualised women made by an allegedly sexist studio and dancing for a majority male audience with companionable Spice Girls-esque feminism. Who do you like the best? Meanie Spice? Painty Spice? Foxy Spice? Or the one who isn’t very memorable and gets the least screen-time, N/A Spice?

But this sort of spectacle is impossible for indies. The greatest indie success stories – Stardew Valley, Papers, Please, Spelunky, even Minecraft – don’t have gigantic real-world annual events with K-pop supergroups selling in-game stuff. In Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light – a Buddho-apocalypse sci-fi novel you must read – he accidentally sums up the difference between AAA and indie:

“An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years.”

Riot Games, with its galactic user base, its top Twitch rankings, its live world championships, and above all, its whackloads of cash, can afford to nitroglycerin the internet with one huge event. Indies pootle along for years, picking up followers and building hype each day, generally trying not to die.

However, there’s yin to this yang. AAA’s weakness is that it’s hard to humanise spectacle. It’s shiny and awesome and memorable, but it’s not going to play in soft-focus on Christmas eve when you’re curled up with your loved ones thinking about What Really Matters. Rather, humans have evolved to respond to people. Even God’s portrayed as a benevolent old man because he’s more impactful that way. And this is where indies shine. We can say ‘Hi, I’m Lottie, and here’s my game’ and generate a different sort of interest than big shiny Riot can. If you’re watching the indie space, this is why there’s increasing interest in open development, showing your work, live coding, being all over the Twitters with a personal account… We can’t go head to head with the big dogs. But we can be Frodo, the likeable schmuck sneakin’ round the back while AAA’s Uruk-hai stomp off someplace else. 

I love Pop/Stars. I love its size, its pageantry, its chutzpah. But Riot have to computer-generate humanity, selling human skins to human people because they’re too big to connect with anyone directly. I’ll never be able to pull off a Pop/Stars, and my face isn’t half as symmetrical as K/DA’s. But it is, at least, a real one.

Indie devs know they need a punchy elevator pitch. ‘X meets Y’ is the classic formula, but the significance of genre is often overlooked. Genre’s the path that leads many players to your game in the first place – only then can you hit ‘em with your Wildean ‘X meets Y’.

Players who liked Rollercoaster Tycoon are liable to try management sim Two Point Hospital. LucasArts fans are likely to enjoy point-and-click Unavowed. Players of World of Goo may resonate with Semblance, ‘the first true platformer’. But what do you do when there isn’t a clear fit? My own game, Cultist Simulator, certainly struggled to belong: it’s a Lovecraftian horror card game! It’s a roguelike narrative simulator! With cards! It’s… oh it’s only £15 please just buy it. Please.

Genres are used as marketing touchstones, conveying significant information economically to players. Some are tight, functional labels: visual novels and racing games set clear expectations. Some are larger, contested groups: roguelikes are numerous and multiform and wrestled into apparent submission by the Berlin Interpretation, a crowd-sourced manifesto. But others are wide, woozy things: RPGs cover everything from Skyrim to Stardew Valley, no manifesto in sight. By the time you get to horror you’re wedged on a sofa with Amnesia, Detention and The Evil Within and it all gets a bit uncomfortable. What once were paths leading you to fertile ground are now deceptive tracks with many slip-roads and few signposts. And as one of the biggest dev pitfalls is setting the wrong expectation (please see No Man’s Sky), not playing nicely with traditional genre is a Real Problem.

In reality, devs label games with multiple genres. Hob’s an ‘action-adventure puzzle platformer’; Rocket League’s a ‘physics-based sports-action game’. But we’re now up to 200 weekly releases on Steam. Never before has it been so important to do something new and distinguishable. Taglines like ‘Lovecraftian horror card game’ are useful because it’s not just another Metroidvania, but they’re also useless as they don’t immediately convey what the game’s actually like to play. Therein lies the issue: indies have an increasing need to make games that break molds, but the more molds we break the fewer molds we have to shape our games into pleasing forms for the passer-by.

Alternatives to genre as indie filters include curation, nicher stores, better algorithms, crying. Newer, more specific genres may seem a solution, but they’re a perpetuation of the issue, not a fix. We’re seeing attempts at all of these (in order: the App Store; itch.io; Steam; myself), but nothing yet has really cracked it. Genres remain godlings and indies are polytheists laying offerings at one or two of their altars. But year on year their power shrinks, and all we can do is await the apocalypse when a new god comes. Whom that god is, I don’t yet know. But I hope they like card games.

The theme of July seems to be waves, I’ve decided. There’s a heatwave which no one enjoys and by no-one, I mean me, Claire. There are the waves of Brighton beach where the Weather Factory team spent a week at Develop Conference and finally, we won multiple accolades at the Develop Star Awards. It was an immense intense week, we slept hard and so post dreaming, let’s recap everything.

For those that don’t know Develop Conference is held every year in Brighton, usually in July which means the weather is often quite nice and quite warm. The consolation for us day vampires is that being by the sea air helps and there’s an abundance of ice cream options around. This year was special for two primary reasons. We were going as a full WF team and we were up for multiple awards. Awards are not why we make games, but it is a nice feeling to be nominated.

Develop is an event that is heavily focused on the business side where people can network, attend talks and for game devs to show of their games. The event is also open to the public which is great as that allows games to gain more exposure and vital feedback. It’s also wonderful from a recruitment point of view as many companies will use Develop to showcase their openings.

So let’s continue with what we actually did at this gaming conference. First up Lottie gave a talk with a title based on the core ethos of Weather Factory: Fun, Safety, Profit.

She explained with lovely slides and stellar memes the origin story of WF, how strategies were determined and managed and the results of our first year. This talk was incredibly useful for indie devs starting out and feeling daunted. Or those that have been around for a couple of years but need advice on how to continue to strive. Here’s where you can go through the presentation yourself and find out why gold sushi is prevalent and a woman carrying a hipflask is considered fitting under the category of safety.

On the Tues and Weds of Develop there were two award ceremonies, where either individuals or the entire WF company were nominated. First up was GameDevHeroes awards, where Lottie was up for Best Producer wooo and I was up for Best Marketing and Comms person wheee. The venue was packed with other nominees and supporters of their colleagues and after a quick slug of a pint they kicked off the announcing winners fairly fast. It’s always good when these events just get straight to the meat of things and even better if meat is supplied.

Oh we didn’t win by the way, which might be where I should have kicked off. Nevertheless, we were glad to be nominated, found the little comments beside nominee names to be super charming and interesting…We were impressed by how well run the event was, so big thank you and whoops towards Dan Dudley and Alex Boucher!

The next day was a big one. We were very civilised and ate bits of kraken with Bossa Studio‘s Co-Founder Imre Jele, gamedev Husban Siddiqi and Yves Le Yaouanq,  Innovation Manager at Ubisoft. We talked about many things, but the main take away was that we all have far too many games in our backlog to get through, that even more wonderful games continue to come out and it’s making us cry a bit.

Some more meetings/interviews occured, games were checked out and a very important ice cream reprieve was had before the preparation process for what was to come.

The Develop Star Awards were that evening. We were nominated in 4 categories, Best Narrative, Best Game Design, Best Innovation and Best Micro Studio. Lottie and Ak were unable to attend given that Canadian game conference Gameplay Space was happening the following day and lasting the weekend. Lottie apparently hates sleep and had to set off for this as she was giving another super funky informative talk, which we’ll get to in a bit.

So where was I…oh aye the Develop Awards. I put out a tweet asking you all to wish us luck and do questionable things to your nan. You all must have at least patted nans on the head because it all turned out pretty good on the night.

WE WON 3 AWARDS AHAHAHAHA WOOOOO YEEEEEEEEH BOI!

Disclaimer: In the interest of brand representation, I’d like to say that the collective celebratory feelings of Weather Factory may, in fact, be expressed in a more delicate humble way and the above noises are primarily coming from my own face bits.

In all seriousness, we are so happy, excited and thankful for these awards. Each winner is decided by an industry vote open to more than 4000 people who have attended Develop over the past three years. I attended the awards repping the WF crew and 3 award wins, meant 3 speeches I had to give without making geese noises and evaporating on stage due to nerves. I think they went down well. People laughed and maybe one person cried but that might have been me.

The response we got online, in person and post the awards was incredibly heartwarming. It sounds cheesy but every time we meet someone who tells us how much they love Cultist Simulator and are excited about BOOK OF HOURS, it’s such a lovely warm feeling.

I suppose you’d like to see the actual awards. Here they are in all their starry somewhat stabby sadly forever smudged glory.

What was left of Develop Conference 2019 was to ride that buzz and follow up with some more meets, wandering and then enter stasis. Well me, Ak, Hannah and Marc were able to go to our respective homes and crash. Lottie was mid-air by then and even spotted by BBC News.

She flew over with Haley who is the marketing master at Mediatonic and an all-around wonderful human. Lottie’s talk was focused on a very important aspect of games, merchandise.

As usual, her talk went down a storm and I hope she treated herself to a ton of poutine. Well not a ton but at least third helpings. At the time of writing this blog she’s been inspired by the weekend in Canada and asked you all what your ideal items and trinkets would be in your very own library. We’re getting a lot of responses to this and just wanted to note that it’s unlikely we’ll have the entire Codex Gigas as a BOOK OF HOURS reward tier Damien!

That’s a wrap the events of last week. Depending on when you read this last week was July 8th-21st. It’s back to normal now, well as normal as things can be when you’re in the world of Cultist Simulator and BOOK OF HOURS. Speaking of we’ve got those super secret special Kickstarter rewards to sort out…

There’s a trope that comedians are all miserable people and that their sadness contributes to the success of their jokes and how relatable they are. In a way, pretentious as this sounds, the same can be said for marketers, especially those that work with social media.

I often joke that I hate social media, but I always preface that with acknowledging the pros both for business purposes and spreading messages. Maybe I hate myself for constantly being on social media and that’s not really Twitter’s fault, but the cat rulers of the world probably have something to do with it. Overall social media is engaged with by millions, every second of the day. There are obvious cons with that, but just happening upon a tweet about a really funky cafe you never heard of, that does geeky froth coffee might negate them.

My approach to social media is a mix of business and pleasure. I use my personal platform primarily as an extension of my career-related branding and to make people laugh. Or to help people by connecting folk or sharing links that support events, job seeking and exposure. Sometimes I post about tough issues that mean something to me, but that’s rare. But we’ll get into that further down in this blog post.

Apologies to Star Trek

So social media has its merits but mah lawd it’s a bit crazy and despite this being an area of expertise I still don’t always understand some of the why’s. To decipher what works on social media is a bit like cracking the code of an ancient puzzle.

To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s an example of a personal viral tweet.

This is an edited gif of Deanna Troi farting. I’d like to apologise in advance to Marina Sirtis who by all accounts is a wonderful human and was in one of my fav games of all time, Mass Effect. I’d also like to apologise to Lottie for reasons she knows.

5k likes and 1.9k retweets. The comments were gold too. A few days later I posted a link to a charity fundraiser for a child. I got 3 likes and one of them was me accidentally hitting the heart.

Why did this go viral? Because it’s really funny in a general sense and easy to share. Why did the charity tweet not go viral? I can only guess that it’s due to the fact that when it comes to sensitive topics, people are less likely to engage unless they have a connection to the content. That can be that they relate to the situation on some level or they will help you out if it’s connected and they’re not just followers but friends.

Is there anything wrong or shocking about this? No, not really, but it is a little bit grim, that some content needs sharing to make an impact on people’s lives and it just fades away.

Then there’s social posts that hit an impressive amount of shares and can lead to an ENTIRE GAME BEING MADE BUT WE KEEPING IT HYGGE 100 THOUGH!

Memays

“Claire, your life is a meme and your GIFs are so fresh and on point. How is this so?” The answer to this question I often get comes in the form of a meme, which might make some of you reading this cry or reach for the wine bottle. I’m doing both.

Memes are such a common everyday occurrence now. They should ultimately be humorous and harmless. But their power is such that they’re a vital part of marketing and engaging with communities. There’s no real twist as to why this is. Humour puts people at ease and if it’s relatable without being hellofellowkids.jpg it reflects on the accessibility of your brand.

Indie games haven’t succeeded as well as they have, just because of their art style or versatility. It’s because the barrier between creator and consumer isn’t as thick as with the AAA genre. If you can’t find a good meme, then shove a cat in there. I’m very serious.

It sounds like something to say for a laugh, but in all honesty, if you can inject your social media with a chonky dose of memes I swear your reach and engagement will skyrocket. Or at least perform somewhat better than without that spicy addition. Just look what the mothlamp meme did for this Cultist Simulator Tweet.

The Dark Side of the Tweet

There are many negative sides of social media that we could discuss but let’s focus on its use for professional interaction and promotion. A few publications have touched upon the stress that those handling social platforms endure. From Vice:

” Social media can be a toxic place—especially for those of us who work in that space. Angry users on social seem to forget that a human being is behind the brand’s account they are screaming at or the story they are criticizing.“

When you are involved in anything that requires daily interaction with humans online, especially in the gaming industry, you’re open to abuse and uncheery interactions. Even if you’re presenting as the company brand and not your direct name. It’s your eyes being exposed to and your brain having to deduce replies if any. The veil is thin enough.

Different people will experience different levels of negative feedback and text-based abuse and will handle it in their own way. Some may not be phased but plenty are. Who can blame them?

Social media didn’t exist 20 years ago and in 10 years has evolved into an entirely different beast.

It’s worth noting that Weather Factory accounts have not suffered any tirades of abuse. We primarily get people asking questions or posting critiques in a manner that isn’t offensive. Do we get comments that sometimes hurt? Yes but it’s not frequent enough to impact and it’s never directed personally. I hope that remains and given how lucky we are to have a very lovely and active community, I’d be surprised if it changes.

Disclaimer: Just because I said this, if you’re listening Sod’s Law, please sod off.

Social media has now become a vital organ in promoting video games. It’s top of the list of what you need to set up, keep active and learn how to properly use. I appreciate its value, I love the variety of content, the way it can help people and I enjoyed every Game of Thrones Season 8 meme more than most of the episodes. We are truly blessed by this aspect of social. It makes sense and it doesn’t.

I like it but I also hate it. Maybe I hate it because it’s popular to say that. But I don’t believe that’s the case. I think I hate how it can tangle itself up in our lives in ways we sort of let happen without consciously consenting to. I hate that people are beholden to the physical representation of how well a post did, via a heart or whatever button.

To sidetrack a bit, analytics can help show that on the face of it, your performance may have not been great but behind the scenes, it did far better. So never focus purely on the aesthetics of a social post to determine its success.

In all honesty, the main reason I made this blog post is to vent at the fact that only 7 people liked this beautiful collage post of Jessica Fletcher in her various forms.

Based on that, social media is full of riff raff and that’s how I’m ending this elongated hot take! Good day to you sirs and sirettes!

TLDR

• Cultist Simulator mobile is 2 months on from launch on iOS and Android

• we signed a 50/50 rev split with Playdigious, a great porting house/publisher

• it’s gone middling-well so far:
  • €200k net rev
  • lots of featuring across both stores
  • great ratings (~4.8/5★)

• localising into simplified Chinese was a great idea

• premium mobile ports are a good strategy for extra £ if you’re a small indie studio (this was a moderate success, so we’ll probably do this again)

• but if you actually want to make revenue comparable to PC, F2P / subscription models are better bets (shocking, I know).

IN THE BEGINNING WERE TWO NERDS

Weather Factory was a two-person team in 2018. Our studio strategy was to get our name out there as wide and as impressively as possible. We needed to amplify our voice and add to the limited studio credit of a new, small start-up. (All we had was Alexis’s legacy and ~16k Twitter following, from him founding Failbetter Games and making Fallen London and Sunless Sea.)

We were severely restricted by being only two people. We could only realistically focus on one project at a time, but we knew that diversification – of audience, and of revenue streams – was necessary to insulate our indie studio against the unpredictability of game dev.

Gaining as big an audience as we could was more important than maximising revenue. This strategy was the main reason we signed a PC publishing deal with Humble Bundle. It also told us pretty clearly we should find a porting house and publisher to make a mobile version of Cultist Simulator while we focused on post-launch PC development.

ENTER PLAYDIGIOUS

I spoke to a bunch of mobile porting houses (hey, AJ!) before settling on Playdigious, the excellently French porting and publishing house currently working on the Dead Cells mobile game. Playdigious came with a personal recommendation from someone I trust and respect (hey, Tom Bidaux!) but were also the only specifically premium mobile specialist I found.

Playdigious felt right from the start, and now that I’ve worked with them for nearly a year, I can’t recommend Xavier and his team enough. We signed a 50% rev share deal where Playdigious covered the cost of porting and took responsibility for the project, leaving us to stick our noses in as much or as little as we liked. We were free to focus on Cultist‘s PC development and other Weather Factory projects (like, say, BOOK OF HOURS).

The plan was to launch on the App Store and Google Play in Russian and Chinese some time in 2019 for a £6.99 / $6.99 price point. Most of that happened!

PORTING CULTIST SIMULATOR

Here’s our timeline:

It’s all pretty bunched up towards the end, much more so than this producer likes. This is because premium mobile games live or die by features, particularly on the App Store, and plutonium-heavy hints were dropped that releasing at the start of April would definitely be a good time. We settled on the second week of April, only to be told that really, Tuesday 2nd April would definitely be better. This coincided with the start of the 2019 London Games Festival.

Tuesday 2nd April was 2-4 weeks earlier than initially planned, but Playdigious took it in their stride. We would not have been able to make this deadline on our own. It’s another reason I’m glad we signed with a publisher, and struck a deal that made them care about the port as much as we did.

However, there were casualties. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that only Chinese is noted on the timeline, despite us wanting to launch with both Russian and Chinese. Loc is a whole other story, but the short version is Russian translation was dropped in order to ensure we could meet our new, earlier release date. (We’ll release Russian later down the line – I hear if you’re smart you can have a pseudo second launch with a new language on the App Store. Time will tell!)

MARKETING

You don’t normally spend lots of money on a premium mobile game launch. Premium mobile marketing seems to rely on building hype around an upcoming release via pre-registration campaigns and social media, and then doing whatever dark magic you must to give yourself the best chance of a feature on launch.

Featuring is much more of a thing on the App Store, where they have multiple games editors selecting Games of the Day, ‘Games we’re playing now’, top genre lists, top indie picks, top ten games around a particular theme…

The Google Play Store is much more algorithmically driven. As far as I understand, Google Play wants its algorithm to recommend particular games to particular users based on their previous purchase habits. If you’ve played any premium narrative games in the past few weeks, you may see Cultist Simulator appear in your store. But if all you play is Candy Crush, maybe you won’t. Correct me below if I’m wrong!

Playdigious, our mobile experts, spearheaded marketing. They sent through a great marketing strategy which identified strengths (nothing else like it), weaknesses (what the hell is it), opportunities (featuring on stores you might not think of, like Razer) and risks (no China featuring, because it’s all about cults). As mentioned above, the campaign also centred on pre-registration.

Playdigious recommended focusing only on Google Play pre-registrations, as Apple’s pre-order system discounts pre-orders from your launch numbers and so undermines your app’s performance at launch (like the problems moving from Early Access to full launch on Steam). They also recommended pricing Cultist much higher than I’d expected – $6.99 / £6.99 – but offering a 30% discount (ish) for early adopters. This meant anyone pre-registering would get Cultist for $4.99 / £4.99, and to be fair to App Store users, we’d offer the same price point for one week at launch across both stores.

So: we aimed simply to get iOS users to sign up to a mailing list we could then ping when Cultist was out, and launched a Google Play pre-registration campaign along with a press release and social media fanfare at the end of February. Running roughly a month until full release, we managed to nab 200k pre-registrations by launch and, thanks to the efforts of Playdigious and their good relationship with Google Play, saw significant featuring in Google’s ‘Pre-registration games’ section.

(Weird that that 200k keeps popping up. Let’s annoy data analysts and conclude that 1 Google Play pre-registration = €1 net revenue in your pocket. Numbers don’t lie, right?)

In addition, Playdigious ordered a bunch of limited edition pins for social media giveaways…

…and commissioned a Chinese PR company, Indienova, to help handle our Chinese audience. In an astonishing middle-finger to probability, this PR company happened to be part of the same company we’d unknowingly used for Chinese loc (the wonderful Project Gutenberg), so we ended up working with our lead translator as our PR lead in China. A wonderful serendipity! Thank you very much, translation and PR people. <3

I wasn’t in charge of our marketing campaign like I was for the PC launch, but from what I saw, it seems (ironically) a lot harder to mobilise a mobile audience than a PC one. Everything seems more ephemeral: there are fewer mobile press outlets, much less interest in open development, and almost no mobile-specific communities you can tap on the road to release. I guess this is what you get from a much more casual audience who wouldn’t describe themselves as ‘gamers’ as much as your traditional PC player. There’ll be a way to nab ’em, I’m sure – but I haven’t figured out how yet!

LAUNCH

We launched on Tuesday 2nd April 2019, the same day as the London Games Festival started. There were very few technical bugs (yay Playdigious!) and we saw some decent featuring in our first week:

• Tuesday 2nd April: London Games Festival front-page featuring
  • iPads and iPhones
  • UK and Ireland

• Wednesday 3rd April: ‘Game of the Day’
  • iPads and iPhones
  • UK and Ireland

• Thursday 4th April: ‘Meet the BAFTA nominees’ editorial
  • iPads and iPhones
  • UK and Ireland

We saw a lot of smaller features alongside these, such as…

• ‘New Game’ featuring on iPad and iPhone in 42 countries

• ‘What we’re playing’ featuring on iPad and iPhone in 27 countries

…and we continue to see a lot of small-scale featuring even now:

You might be thinking: “Lottie! This is better than ‘decent’ featuring!” And you may be right. We probably did do better than your average Joe, because we’d timed launch well, had a bit of buzz and had some good connections. But our sales didn’t skyrocket with all this featuring the way they would have with lovely ol’ iOS10’s full-week feature slots, and I’m still hurting that we seemed pigeon-holed to the UK and Ireland, and didn’t get any featuring in the US.

I assume it’s because cults are funny period-drama things in Europe but serious subjects in America – but maybe the US editorial team just didn’t like the game! Either way, the US has always been our highest revenue-generating country, so this omission absolutely hurt our sales. We’ll see if we can wrangle a US feature with later updates…

THE JUICY BIT: SALES FIGURES

Right! Number time. All the following data is taken from AppFigures, which I’ve found comprehensive and easy to use. I’m not a data analyst, so you may draw different conclusions from the following than I do. If you do, let me know!

💸 REVENUE 💸

Just over two months from release, our overall performance looks like this:

That’s a net revenue of ~€200k (£178k / $226k), roughly split 60:40 between the App Store and Google Play. This means both Playdigious and Weather Factory have made €100k (£89k / $113k) so far, which is nothing compared to F2P revenues but a significant extra bit of cash for a small indie team like us. I’m happy! FOR NOW.

I’m surprised to see how similar the graphs are for both stores. Here they are separately:

Google Play’s spike on launch day was almost certainly down to our 200k pre-registrations. The App Store’s seen a few more spikes, first at launch, then our largest spike on the 7th April (when we were featured in China), its secondary bump on 12th April (another small Chinese feature), then a moderate spike on 30th April (a third, middling-level Chinese feature). Yes, I am relieved we localised!

The real question is how long-term this revenue is. I think it used to be the case that premium mobile games didn’t have a terribly long shelf-life, and that you turned the money-hose on during a launch feature and then threw the money-hose away as soon as it was over. Time will tell if the iOS11 App Store has solved this problem, and if Google’s analytics are worth their salt.

🌍 COUNTRIES 🌍

This is what we expected to see: Alexis’s games have always gone down particularly well with these countries, generally in this order. Take a look at our PC sales for Cultist Simulator, for example:

What I think is really interesting, though, is the country split between the App Store and Google Play. Here’re our top five countries in the App Store…

…and here’re our top five on Google Play:

Most significantly, Google Play is not currently available in China. This explains why China is missing from the top countries in Google Play, despite being our second-top country overall. But I find it interesting how big a jump there is between that top performing country and any after it. China dwarfs the US in terms of net downloads on the App Store (America shifted 30% of what China did). Equally, the US dwarfs the UK on Google Play (the UK shifted 20% of what the US did). See our major iOS revenue spikes every time we were featured in China…

⭐ RATINGS ⭐

I’m exceptionally happy with our ratings. We average 4.8/5★ across both stores: this is mind-blowing for a famously divisive game which regularly slips into ‘Mixed’ recent reviews on Steam after high-visibility sales. I believe this is the result of three things:

• Apple’s suggestion to lean into the difficulty of the game and flag the lack of tutorial as much as possible;

• Playdigious doing a great job of the port, and coming up with an excellent touch-screen evolution of our original UI;

• Cultist Simulator being a good game! Good job, AK.

This graph looks the same whether for the App Store and Google Play. What this tells me is ratings are similar to the MMR (‘Match-Making Ratio’) I’ve banged on about on Steam. It seems that a premium game’s launch is the moment you have to set a good rating for your game. I imagine it’s quite hard to come back from a low-rating premium game launch.

📈 RANKINGS 📈

Here’re our rankings over the last two months on Google Play, focusing on our top three performing countries: the USA, China and the UK.

Here’re our comparative rankings on the App Store:

😱, right?

These images are more for shock factor than purpose, so let me give you the highlights in our first week:

Rankings change daily, so these are extremely nice numbers, but the top ranking spots would only last a day or so. Still, I’m not complaining!

What I take away from this is there really is a much longer tail on mobile than I’d thought. I was expecting high rankings on launch to quickly tail off into nothingness. That doesn’t look like it’s the case.

SO: HOW DID WE DO?

Before we launched, I did a ‘top down, bottom up’ estimate for our best-case sales figures, bearing in mind

• I’m not particularly experienced estimating launch figures, and

• IT IS VERY HARD TO FIND MOBILE GAME DATA (hence this post)

I started with the numbers I had from launching Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea iPad port and compared them to an extremely conservative % of ustwo games’ Monument Valley 2 sales figures as a sanity check.

Here’s my working out for my best-case Year 1 sales on the App Store, as an example:

Sunless Sea was an expensive premium mobile game with a very similar audience to Cultist Simulator

BUT: it only launched on iPad, not iPhones

AND: it only launched in English

AND: it released in March 2017, when iOS10 still offered week-long global featuring (which Sunless managed to snag)

***

Sunless saw ~183 million impressions from its week of global featuring on iOS10 in 2017, so:

– let’s assume Cultist gets good featuring on iOS11, and that’s ~50% of good iOS10 featuring (= ~90 million impressions)

– let’s assume 10% click-throughs (= ~9 million page views)

– let’s assume 1% conversion (= ~90k sales)

Comparing that to Monument Valley 2…

Monument Valley 2 is one of the most successful premium mobile games ever made

it has a very different audience to Cultist Simulator

it also launched in June 2017 when iOS10 was still a thing

***

So:

– let’s assume Cultist does ~5% of Monument Valley 2‘s business (= ~2.1 million copies)

= ~105k copies

90k isn’t too far off 105k copies, so I met in the middle and used 100k units for estimated year one sales on the App Store. This meant we were working towards:

Best case: 100k units

Middling case: 50k units

Worst case: 2k units

Two months in, we’ve shifted ~59k units across the App Store (~35k) and Google Play (~23k) combined, so we’re out of worse case territory and firmly on track for ‘fine’. I don’t know enough about the long-term viability of iOS11’s smaller but more frequent featuring + whatever arcane magic’s behind Google Play’s analytics to estimate where we’ll be at the end of Year 1, but I suspect it’ll be significantly below my best-case estimate. Still, this is extra revenue we wouldn’t have seen if we hadn’t ported, and signing the 50% rev deal with Playdigious meant we didn’t invest much hard cash into the project. So the effect is as close to ‘free’ money as it’s usually possible to get.

If you’re reading this with more mobile experience than me, tell me how many units you think we’ll make by the end of it all! Xavier estimated 80k units in the first year across the App Store and Google Play. But he’s cheating because he’s good at this. Let’s play ‘test the mobile specialist’ and see how these numbers stack up in April 2020…

TAKEAWAYS

I intend to fold mobile ports into Weather Factory’s projects here on out. Time will tell how much I also fold localisation in automatically (essentially, once I’ve seen how Russian and Chinese perform on Steam), but I’m extremely likely to include simplified Chinese as part of mobile porting.

Cultist Simulator‘s mobile port hasn’t made us millionaires, but we didn’t think it would. It has significantly shored up Weather Factory’s coffers, and given us a significant boost to audience size, whom we can now tap about future games. This is a process I’m very happy with for my studio, but like most processes we currently have at WF, it’s unlikely to scale well. So my main advice here is: if you’re a small studio without the resource to tap mobile yourself, it’s absolutely worth seeing if you can find a publisher to push your game to new platforms if that takes the development load off of you.

I intend to experiment further with other platforms, but have no official news on the subject right now! Let me know your thoughts on our data above, and if you have any additional numbers you’d like to see. Hope our figures prove useful for devs considering mobile porting themselves. 🙂

We like to have fun at Weather Factory, but cults are serious business. While knowing your eldritch monstrosities from your treacherous tomes is all well and good, you won’t get far without a special element. Beguiling willing acolytes takes more than charm and instilling fear.

You see it’s all in the headgear. How can you be taken seriously as a potential Long, if your noggin isn’t presented fabulously?

The power of a good hat is not meant purely for fashion statements, but to denote hierarchy and sheer pizzazz. One of the earliest examples of head coverings includes this 27-30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf figure. Archaeologists believe this depicts a wearing a woven hat, which might be a bit of a stretch but we’ll play along.

Let’s look at how some of the best gaming characters are adorned by incredible hats. Some of these might not even be that memorable character-wise, but if from their forehead and above is stylin’, they’re on this list!

Professor Layton

Hershel Layton does not mess around. He’s a world-renown detective and let’s face it, would not be too pleased about what you get up to in Cultist Simulator. But it’s clear that this distinguished beast wants you to know that while he’s solving crimes, you’ll want to be arrested for even glancing at his tower-top hat.

Hat Kid

A Hat in Time is about a little girl trying to return home in a spaceship. Every facet of the game is cute and cuddly. Hat kid is much more humble in comparison to Layton. She’s ascertained her brand colours, gone with a twist on the standard angles of a top hat and somehow installed balancing mechanics so it doesn’t fly off her head. Style, practicality and high levels of kawaii. 10 hats out of 8!

PaRappa

There are days when you need to unwind and relax. Being the best cult leader doesn’t mean that you exert yourself constantly. PaRappa beanie serves as your cheat hat. Cosy and luminous, yet featuring what could be a simple frog but the more you stare at it, the more you feel its eyes boring into your very soul.

Dough nose fuzz lip man

Came across this hat and really like it. Anyone got the source on the game? Cheers.

Cerebella

Skullgirls is a fun fighting game and it knows that style and function are paramount, especially in the arena. That’s why Cerebella decided to have two massive sentient fists for a hat. Standard really. How does this help a budding leader of the forbidden arts? Simply put, who would dare defy your orders, when one whip of your neck would lead to them being kamehameha’d. The Mansus has no walls, but one whack from your hat and your foes will meet brick!

Link

Iconic. Trailblazer. Ceramic pot smasher! Savior of Hyrule. All these titles and more befit our hero Link, but the first two are the most important because his hat is a definitive fashion statement in the video game world. In a world where turmoil seeks to reign, having a bright fairy tale green hat is a bold move and one that shows true leadership qualities.

His hat even has different titles, such as Cap of Time, Cap of Twilight and Cap of the Hero. Who better to dawn the mantle of a Cultist Leader than someone who has headgear for every season.

SPOILER: SECRET CULTIST SIMULATOR HOUR REVEALED BELOW!

With that, you’ve all learned some valuable lessons about what truly matters when you endeavour to form and lead a cult. You don’t need to thank us!

This is the basic motivation behind most press comms you’ll come across on social media or your inbox. If you were to receive a message that read almost word for word like that, you’d probably not be too keen to engage.

Communication or comms, is a powerful marketing method, used via/for PR, Direct/Indirect Marketing, Advertisement, word of mouth, personal and group promotion. While comms is the blood of good PR, we won’t be diving into details of successful PR campaigns this time.

So while obviously comms are integral to many aspects of business, there’s an art to ensuring that you present your product and brand, without sounding greedy or robotic. How you communicate can sometimes be determined by brand guidelines or a principles documentation. Some companies are able to take risks and amend their comm copy to suit a societal audience.

Wendy’s is a classic example of a company you would not expect to be so sassy in their messaging. Yet they realise that people love humorous public engagement, the more savage the better.

Does this mean you need to replicate risky, meme-centric posts in order to reach a wider audience and maintain your existing one? No not at all. Consumers aren’t fools, but people who hate cake are. That sentence veered into irrelevancy but seriously who hates cake….

The skill in comms comes down to determining what works for the brand itself. What works for Doom, does not work for Animal Crossing. But if they made a crossover game not one of you can deny you’d snap that right up!

Being engaged in your community as well as the wider industry, helps tremendously with finding a good tone of voice. Equally so the want to be genuine. It sounds cheesy, but if you care about your product and community, then that helps sincerity show and with determining how to achieve your desired outcomes.

Purpose of comms: Engage, promote, support and retain, both B2B (bizness folk) and B2C (players/communities).

Say you have new game content or an event you want to share with the world. Sure it’s great if people just say “yes” and hop on board. But the chefs kiss of comms is to relay news in a way that generates and sustains actual excitement.

Two methods of doing so are: tease and tantalise, then reveal or DROP AN UPDATE NUKE OUTTA THE BLUE!

To plan your tender attack begin with selecting your goals and who helps tick them off.

Who am I reaching out to? How do I want them to feel? Do I want the messaging to rely on visuals, copy or both? How can I make comms easy to share? How can I make people care to share? Did I find memes or did they find me?

It depends on the platform, be it press releases, on site landing pages, social media or carrier pigeon. Once you’ve determined the purpose of what you’re communicating, the presented style will vary. Controlled direct targeting occurs via press releases usually shot at email inboxes. Somewhat controlled targeting on public platforms.

Social platforms allow your plan to be seen beyond your targeted parameters. Best of all you don’t have do anything else, which is just lazy lovely.

Here at Weather Factory, we have a certain flair, a vivacious graceful blob squat style. But the essence of how we want to communicate is based on 3 key points:

Transparency, creating experiences people feel something about and injecting creative personality into the content we make and share.

If you want to get people to attend your event or buy your products you need to think as your audience does. Most of us want content we’re excited by and often enthusiasm by the creator can instill that feeling, even for something new we’ve not yet encountered. In the finance or rock painting world, this trait is not as vital to comms. In the video game industry it behooves comm-anders (huehuehuehue) to think beyond “this exists, expose and purchase”.

These heading puns are getting a bit wild now. So you’ve got your battle plan for announcing something fun that consumers will enjoy and biz folk will see as schmart. But comm planning is not just a prerequisite tool. It’s an important part of handling any issues that erupt along the way.

I could go into intricate details about this, but instead I’ll be boring. The premise behind crisis control, should follow the same format that you’ve determined for all messaging.

Most of us are mortals and errors can happen. Some errors can be detrimental and whether they could be prevented or not, depends. But for lighthearted issues your comms can be a saving grace to your brand. People merge themselves more with what is relatable, owning your mistakes and being up front about it helps with that. But that’s toe-dipping into PR and I said NO PR TIPS THIS TIME!

Let’s hit the finale, if you’ve survived that noise of letters above. What are the most important points when creating and sharing business communications?

1. The goal and outcomes desired
2. Who is being communicated with
3. Creation in accordance with the above and your brand

Bear in mind that adaptability is also essential, as your company and projects grow. With that I’ll leave you with an inspirational quote that I believe all indie devs and marketeers can learn from.

We launched our Church of Merch on Monday 17th September, so it’s high time for a retrospective! I’ll break it into three parts, so it’s not a total beast: this one’ll take you through the set-up, the next the merch itself and how it did in Month 1, and the final blog will be some searingly insightful amateur takeaways on, like, the ontology of enamel pins. It’ll be a zinger.

If you can’t be bothered to read ’em all, my conclusion is that if you have anybody in your team who’s interested in doing it, you should totally set up your own merch shop. It’s worthwhile and biz-sensible! Also, you make friends with nice people at the Post Office. 

☽★☾

TLDR: merch is just another game dev project. Be clear about what you’re trying to achieve.

Weather Factory has a rich, weird, jazzy IP that lends itself nicely to merchandise. I wanted to lean into this and personally design rich, weird, jazzy items (#branding). Cultist is a niche game, so I also wanted to see if I could make merch that appeals to people who haven’t heard of Cultist as well as its core fans.

This meant our stuff had to be high-quality enough to attract buyers without relying on the quality of Being From That Game You Like. This put extra pressure on initial design, but I hope pays long-term dividends by enabling us to reach beyond our game’s user base and generate sales from a wider, non-Cultified audience.

Finally, we want to incorporate physical items into future Weather Factory games, so our merch experiment was also about market research and practicalities. Is it possible to set up and manage a merch store with only one part-time resource? What sort of items do our fans particularly respond to? Are there any types of merch which are a particular pain in the butt to make, so we can avoid them in the future?

In short, and in order of importance, the Church of Merch’s aims were to:

• Create attractive, boutique, on-brand merch within a sensible indie budget
  
  
• See if selling physical merch was a viable long-term option for us, in terms of pipeline, storefront, profit and time

• See what sort of items go down well with ‘our type of people’: people who are already playing Cultist Simulator + the people who aren’t but like weird occult stuff
  
  
• Make some money!

TLDR: there’s no single ‘best’ place to sell merch. Pick the best shop for you, based on your project aims.

I looked into a bunch of options. Did we want a dedicated page on our Weather Factory site somewhere? Did we want an entirely separate site? Did we want a ‘buy’ button on our website which would lead to some external seller like Shopify?

Bearing in mind our whole studio ethos is boutique, personable open production, I ended up settling on Etsy. It’s friendly and personable too; it’s full of weird individuals making weird individual stuff; it’s entirely controllable by us, without complicated add-ons; it gives our merch the chance to be seen by a wider consumer audience who are looking for other things; and I personally understand it, because I’ve shopped on Etsy for years.

So far I’m very happy with it. The back-end is slick, there’re a lot of marketing options I haven’t yet made much use of, there’s a nice app, etc. If we scale up, maybe it’ll be less sparkly, and it’s a shame there isn’t (yet!) a Slack integration. But otherwise, it’s pretty perfect for what we’re trying to do.

TLDR: we spent time and resource on this. It was worth it.

The Church of Merch cost ~£7k to set up. This includes all stock costs, store listings, and my time. Our estimated profit from selling all our base stock comes to ~£7.7k, which already tells you merch stores are worth it for cashflow-delicate indies!

I love getting my art on, so I wanted to be the core designer on our merch where possible. I drew up a list of some feasible-sounding but not entirely generic merch ideas then looked around for specialist producers, who’d offer me the biggest range of highest-quality options. This meant I took on a time-cost of looking for specialists and talking to multiple people (rather than a quicker, more expensive one-stop supplier), but I think it also meant the end result was unusually weird and wonderful. YOU DECIDE!

For each item we made, the basic process went something like this:

• The first step is your GRAND VISION. You take your GRAND VISION and you email a supplier and you say are you able to make my GRAND VISION a reality.

• They email back politely saying yes if you make it less stupid, how about this mock-up?

• You have a back and forth about colours, material and costs per volume.

• It all ends with a big boss battle between yourself and TNT delivery who insist you haven’t been home since March 1943 but eventually you receive your goods and weep delightedly over their beauty.

Leave time in your schedule for these initial designs. If you want to open your merch shop in time for a specific event (e.g. Christmas), leave waaaaay more time than you think you’ll need. All in all I think I spent 2-3 months setting up the shop, though I wasn’t working to a fixed deadline, or working full-time on it.

One final thing to note is: even though I spent considerable time on finding suppliers and commissioning weird stuff, the majority of this pain is now over. Restocking is as simple as pinging someone an email or clicking a big blue REORDER button. If I  branch out and decide to make a new bit of merch that’s totally unlike the others, I’ll probably need to go out and look for a new specialist supplier again. But over time – as I collect a larger and larger group of friendly people to make my stuff – this’ll go away, too.

TLDR: what’re your brand and project aims? How much do you want to be involved?

We worked with a different supplier for each bit of merchandise you see on our shop. This is because I wanted specialists, I wanted to keep costs down, I wanted unique rather than scalable items, and I figured we’d have more creative control with a smaller producer than in the production line of a bigger company.

All of our producers are in the UK, bar one that’s in China, because it didn’t make sense to pay international shipping for stuff I can get made here for roughly the same amount. China makes sense in one instance (our USBs) simply because the cost per item is so much cheaper than in the UK, even with vastly more expensive shipping + hefty customs charges.

If you’re looking for quantity and budget-friendliness instead – less ‘ooh, so boutique’ and more ‘make this not my problem’ –  here’s a list of larger suppliers. This isn’t remotely exhaustive, it’s just a collection the various names I’ve been recommended by kind devs who passed on their own pearls of merch wisdom when I was asking around.

• Gametee
• IndieBox
• Happy Worker
• Merchandise.game
• Fangamer
• PowerUp Factory
• AwesomeMerch

In case it needs to be said, there’s no shame in wanting to fling your merch over the fence to make it someone else’s problem. It may well make more sense for what you’re trying to achieve. Please don’t take my interest in the strange and smol as a critique of a more scalable, economic approach!

TLDR: it’s a total pain in the butt, but you get there in the end.

Let me introduce you to the Babadook that’ll haunt your own Church of Merch. It was hard working out shipping costs ahead of time (see mad scrawlings, above), as there’s a lot of inconsistency across weight, size, service speed, item value, delivery country, etc… You also have a significant time-cost of actually posting stuff when the orders start coming in, the fact that countries are constantly buggering about with customs checks and postal strikes, deciding whether your profit margins can eat the cost of postal fees (which significantly helps shift items), and managing ongoing customer queries about where things are. Budget for all of this!

BUT. Once you’ve shipped a few things you’ll know how it all works, you’ll learn all the boring parcelly things you didn’t know you didn’t know before, and you’ll realise how insane you were to not have a Drop & Go account. The admin side of shipping stuff is a real, significant pain in the butt, but so long as you *expect* it to be a pain in the butt and leave time to get to grips with it all, you’ll be fine.

One final bit of advice here: draw this tedious shipping stuff back up into your #branding. For example, every Weather Factory parcel comes in some fun colour-coded parcel, with ribbon and hand-written cult thank-you cards and some of them are holographic fuschia parcels. You could opt for the most economic options, but then your studio’s brand becomes ‘Most Economic’. Maybe that’s you! But if it isn’t, seek ye some jollier packaging.

☽★☾

Thus endeth Part the First of my merch research! Next time: the stuff we actually made and sold, and the numbers the Church did in its first month (with little to no marketing, I might add).

If you’re an indie and have questions about setting up your own store, ping me in the comments here, or on Twitter. And of course, if you ain’t bought it yet…