The bad, the good, and the 70k Wishlists we got in 2 months
Pyrkon 2024 & Team Integration
2024-06-28
Empty, white canvas. What does an artist feel before his proverbial canvas becomes his work? “This will be the greatest work of my life!” Every marketer thinks the same when he receives a new title that does not exist in the recipient's consciousness. Regardless of what this new game is, a dungeon crawler, a great RPG with hundreds of hours of play, or an asset-store simulator like many of these days, when you get your hands on an unannounced game, you receive an early Christmas gift from the industry. Clay that you can shape as you wish, giving it momentum and determining its further reception among players.
However, if you expect that joining a large company, knowledge of the industry, Steam, or tools will protect you from novice mistakes or guarantee magical success, perhaps I will open your eyes to what awaits you in gaming communication in 2024. And if you have a publisher with whom you live in a happy symbiosis, look away, because today we will talk about...
My name is Kamila, I’m the Head of Marketing at Ancient Forge, and I will show you how we overcame the issues of a small, but extremely fast-growing studio taking its first self-publishing steps.
All the Mistakes We Made While Getting 70K Wishlists and Over 160k on Kickstarter in Just 2 Months!
Who are we?
Ancient Forge is a game development and publishing company from Poland led by experienced game developers with a strong passion for mechanics-heavy games. We are known mostly for our well-received landlord sim “The Tenants,” released back in 2022. Working fully remotely allows us to unlock the operational office budget for other projects, and thanks to that we are simultaneously working on multiple projects:
- Glorious Companions (delivering our first game from Early Access to the full release)
- Hotel Galactic (the subject of today’s article)
- The Constructors (announced game under our previous publisher)
- Unannounced AA RPG project (in advanced pre-production phase)
- and one new project starting with early pre-production
Plan your first steps
Fortunately, healthy marketing has an impact on the development of the company's offspring. So, planning to announce the expansion of our company to the world, we started by cleaning up the house.
- Rebranding, because no one knows us, and our greatest success so far belongs to the franchise of a large publisher.
So we created a new identity, full of brand books, organized existing and non-existent communication channels, and recalculated the design capacity for the newly emerging marketing department.
- Release of the game by our Greek friends - Blockbuster Inc. because after all, all children are ours, and this Movie Studio Management has been waiting for its chance for some time.
Thanks to this, we established our first business cooperation, set up marketing tools, and created lists of necessary contacts, as well as a marketing publishing pipeline, which very quickly began to adapt to our younger cousin.
My baby is the greatest
An empty canvas, like an unborn child, can be anyone and everyone. Just like our game. However, in this situation, the grandparents and the pressure from society are not the family, but the investor and yourself. Because what if no one likes your child? Have you failed as a parent? And can you help your game at a further stage of development?
We assumed that Hotel Galactic is our new child that deserves power over the world and everything that's best, after talking to publishers and investors. We felt unstoppable, and our gaming child was being born in front of the world to change the face of gaming! But no one knew about it yet...
Finally, we are prepared to announce our gaming pregnancy!
You've probably seen baby shower videos on TikTok where parents discover the baby's gender by popping balloons or cutting cookies. The best ones, of course, are the ones where nothing goes right, but when the mysterious blue or pink dye pops out of its too-well-planned plot, everyone rejoices and cheers.
Early, by involving friends and using proven baby shower event formats, on June 9, 2024, we announced Hotel Galactic.
And now, leaving behind the pregnancy analogies, it's time for a story based on facts about what the actual process looked like.
It is worth noting that, apart from the announcement itself, we have prepared a whole plan to follow up the announcement post. The idea was very simple, prepare, make a great WOW during the announcement, and maintain interest thanks to the favourable conjunction of dates:
1.Planning phase (a month of making relatively feasible plans A, B, and C, which will fail on the way to implementation anyway)
Knowing that the first 2 weeks of June would not only be extremely difficult for us due to the release of Blockbuster Inc., it was also a crazy busy time in the industry. It's E3 time, or today simply Summer of Gaming.
Was the choice of date a mistake? NO. We managed to release BBI as planned on June 6, just before the greatest flood of information began, and Hotel Galactic debuted on June 9 during the PC Gaming Show. And here... to put it mildly, what could have gone wrong, did.
First problem: Random Factors
Our first choice for a big announcement with a ridiculously expensive trailer was, of course, Summer Game Fest. We started talks with the organizers in February to make sure we would get in. This did not happen, despite our best intentions, neither our current PR agency nor we personally were able to request contact from the organizers. Until the last moment, we fought for the attention of industry bosses, but never receiving it, we moved towards plan B. PC Gaming Show.
We put money on the table, booked the best place in the show, and... watched with horror as our beloved show from the old days turned into an smaller games show, and the views on the live event and its restreams dropped in the blink of an eye as we got closer to the end. There were many more minor mishaps surrounding the event, but we knew that the milk had already been spilled and all we could do was strike while the iron was hot.
Effect: Using a large media event to publicize the Steam Page for Hotel Galactic gave us over 15,000 wishlists on the first day and the impact necessary for what awaited us just a month later.
2. Preparation phase (approximately 3 months of actual preparation between March and June)
During this time we created our absolutely amazing trailer in collaboration with Room 8 Studio. The cost of such a trailer is beyond the capabilities of an independent studio. Still, having an investor, we decided that the asset that will be our key promotional material for the next 2 years, and the asset that will best sell the game's vision to the community, simply has to be perfect. If we had to sacrifice anything else for the sake of this trailer, we would do it without hesitation.
In addition to the trailer, it was a phase of active preparation of assets and materials, collecting a mailing list for the newsletter, and searching for creators potentially interested in opinions on the Internet. We devoted this time to getting to know the community thoroughly, becoming part of it, playing the games that the community loves, and thinking about how to expand the community further
Second problem: Team Capacity
Our team was too small to cover all of our marketing needs. Running social media, creating marketing strategies, preparing announcements and assets, as well as taking care of the performance of this entire project is simply unrealistic. Apart from me, there was only a Content Manager in the team at that time.
Our budget for the marketing team was not optimistic either, social media will not manage itself, there is no doubt about it, but on the other hand, we urgently needed an advertising person.
If, like us, you have to choose, choose a good Performance Manager. There is no way that you will organically create a social power without favorable circumstances. Given the current operation of Meta or X, it is not profitable to focus on organic activities, especially at the initial stage of building channels.
So if you ask us whether it is possible to run social media without a dedicated Social Media Ninja, hundreds of posts, and content with happy cats, the answer is YES. Unfortunately, over time this need becomes real, and growing channels will at some point simply require care. And looking for a good community and social media person is unfortunately not an easy matter, because the person in this position simply has to feel what the rest of the team feels, and speak your language with the community.
Getting through this most important moment, i.e. the announcement of the game, without a stable, strong team is not impossible, but it is not easy either. We can only consider scenarios in which we would organize this aspect and what effect it would bring to our community, but what we learned from this lesson is prioritization and adaptation.
If you do not influence something, act where you have influence and minimize your losses.
Effect: Preparing ads and assets in stock and launching all communication channels that led us to our Kickstarter campaign on the wave of the announcement gave us an average increase of between 500-1000 wishlists per day.
3. Active promotion phase - June, which we will remember for a long time...
➡️ Between the announcement and the start of the Kickstarter campaign, we had exactly a month for active, expansive promotion using Meta, GAds, and Reddit. We also used what was available and developed it with additional activations:
➡️The only stationary event available is Pyrkon, Poland's largest fantasy and anime festival. The perfect setting for a Studio Ghibli-inspired piece.
Third problem: on the scale of global gaming, local events are too small to have a real impact on wishlists
The solution that came to mind was to combine the offline event with an online event organized on Gleam.io. Thanks to this, we could direct all assets, competitions, and traffic from the event to the international followers we had already gathered and further expand our audience through targeted advertising. There are many such platforms to choose from, practically at the same time, a similar competition was run by BioWare on another platform after the announcement of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, we used what was known to us.
Effect: During the offline and online events, the daily wishlist growth ranged between 1000-1500, at the same time we observed an increase in the Kickstarter followed by another 500 people.
We ended June with active promotion with a Wishlist of 46,000, 5,000 followers under our Kickstarter campaign, and a mailing list of over 3,000.
… And a July that we will remember for even longer
Kickstarter
A crowdfunding campaign, while not an actual source of funding, works to the advantage of game developers today in 2 main aspects. Firstly, it connects you directly with your new community and its early feedback, and secondly, it provides a core community that will act as an ambassador program and will also provide you with the necessary traffic around the game during the launch.
Despite my experience with crowdfunding from another platform, everything that could go wrong did. Starting with technical problems at the beginning of the campaign, which is its most important moment, through banned advertising accounts during and various levels of cooperation with agencies dealing with advertising for Kickstarter campaigns.
There were two ways out of this situation: cancel the campaign and start over in a few days, losing a certain amount of money pumped into the remarketing of followers, or patch the problems and react to events, adding a new agency to the ads to increase conversions, managing the campaign content and maintaining the best for last. What problems video gaming encounters in the campaign and what advantages and disadvantages it brings deserves a separate text, which will probably be written soon.
SimFest 24 and the last Kickstarter boost
The next stage that we managed to accomplish was joining the SimFest 2024 event on Steam. We simultaneously managed traffic between Steam and Kickstarter. Daily Wishlists again jumped above 1000, making a noticeable peak.
The choice of this particular date for the announcement was a good one, looking at the Steam events that follow them, such as SimFest or the Wholesome Games Steam Celebration coming on August 15. Despite high competition from other games in June, we managed to maintain a constant interest in the title and ensure cyclical wishlist growth peaks of 1,100 to 1,600.
At the same time, we brought in the Backercamp agency, which provided us with a good boost in backer conversions, and we increased the advertising budget, spending ¾ of the budget last week.
And although within 3 months of launching the following page and under a couple months after the announcement, we gained 6,200 followers at the start of the campaign, we cannot forget that crowdfunding is still ongoing. These backers will become part of our daily work, and open communication with your community is the key to success. Today the campaign already has 8,300 followers and the counter is still counting, providing us with additional funding and community continuity.
Based on the last months, we have defined several points that turned out to be crucial to coping with this crazy time:
- Plan and execute surplus assets before the campaign starts.
- Plan X overlapping activations that will support each other's activities. In our case, we made sure that most of the communication beats were supported by influencers, thematic groups on Facebook, media, or paid ads.
- Make sure you launch the Steam Page in its best form, especially before events.
- Leave yourself a loophole for plans B and C, if plan A requires correction, everything very rarely goes according to plan, and you have to adapt
- Plan what to do next with each variable. Especially after such an intense interval, just verify your old plans, do they still make sense? Has anything changed along the way? Don't beat your head against the wall when meeting your initial assumptions.
And looking at the last item on the list, what's next? What to do when marketing budgets have gone up in smoke, daily wishlists are at the level of 200-300, and you are only part of the campaign behind you?
Action-reaction, i.e. look for opportunities. Your task is to make sure that the wishlist growth continues to peak and remains at a satisfactory level between peaks. Steam Events will work perfectly for this, but what about in between?
The answer has been coming to us over the last 2 months, Sarah Sunstone and other influencers we have connected with for the future, Kaila from the rapidly growing Cozy Gamers group, people from BackerKit, Kickstarter, and Backercamp. They were all part of our journey, and it was their actions and support that were crucial when things didn't go to plan.
As a marketer, you only have one asset as important as the product itself - people. Therefore, become part of your community and fight for their trust by feeding them new content and allowing them to participate in your journey. If you stumble, it will catch you and won't let you fall, no matter how many obstacles you encounter along the way.
The future is bright ahead of us. Next week Hotel Galactic will be part of the Wholesome Games Steam Celebration. This month you will also meet us at Gamescom with our first playable demo, in September we will show up at the Tokyo Games Show and continue to build our community around the globe. And we are only just starting!
