Another fun survey, this time mostly focused on perks in Get Stuffed
The following was copied from our Discord as I do not want to alienate our players that are not there.
Most indie-devs are given the wise advice "You should advertise!". So for the sake of transparency I'd like to address this in an area that can be seen and won't get lost in normal chat. No one wants our games to have more players than us, it is the core driving force into why we make games. We get more satisfaction from people having fun and being passionate about our games, than all that fat cash they generate.
The biggest problem we face is that discoverability is at its strongest on the release of a new title. So by the time we realize the issues that scare away new players, that pool dries up. This goes on until we're at a point where a lot of the issues get resolved, but the player base is already so small that it is very hard to reignite. We drive players to our discord (which is now common practice with games) to help ease the pains of having no one to play with. We can throw money at influencers. However, unless they like the game. They won't play it long enough to pull in new players and we're stuck gambling with the company's resources.
For instance, on our game Galactic Feud we paid a couple of indie game marketing companies to handle advertising. The only outcome from that was an expensive lesson and one of the paid influencers joining our discord and calling us some very spicy names.
Get Stuffed is an even riskier venture. We are relying on an influencer both learning the game and liking it within an hour. Which is an insane expectation for someone who also has to split half of their attention with their audience. Another thing we have to think about is that there has to be a breaking point on the amount we spend versus the amount of eyes that see our game. We can spend money on smaller influencers, but only get a few eyes on the game which may not translate to anyone actually trying to play the game. Or we can take a gamble and spend a large sum of money for a bigger influencer to play. Which would result in more eyes on the game, however that doesn't mean anyone will actually download and play it. This is further exacerbated by the fact that we make multiplayer games, which means that said influencer has to find a group of people to play with.
The risky nature of advertising is why AAA studios have multimillion dollar budgets for marketing. Which is an impossibility for us. Despite my attempts to wear different disguises to the bank. Making a “good”(subjective) game is not enough for it to become popular. There is an inherent lottery that all developers play when they release their game without a publisher. Games like Among Us only reached popularity because a handful of influencers picked up the game years after it came out. During a time when their concurrent player base was nonexistent. It also helped that their gameplay loop was very easy to learn.
For those of you asking “why not go to a publisher”. We don’t want to lose creative control nor do we want to trade company ownership or control to a third party.
We’ve had players think we are a 10-20 person team, we are not. Our studio comprises a business manager (Pajama), a finance manager, myself and we outsource music and voice acting to Sweff. This was all to say, if we had a sure shot way of spending money and guaranteeing growth in our player base from it, we would. For now we rely on word of mouth, Steam’s discoverability and the hopes that a larger influencer finds our game and falls in love with it. If one of our games were to take off in popularity, all of them would grow.