Hey everyone. I hope you didn’t think I dropped off the edge of the world or anything; I’ll try to explain what’s going on the best I can.
Koya Rift released a little over a month ago. I admit, I did a terrible job at marketing the game. My sole focus was to create the best game possible in the time I had allocated, and I seemed to have ignored other important factors that would have contributed to more successful sales – such as making sure people actually know about the game.
There was my problem. I was ready to release a project I had worked very long and hard on, but nobody knew about it. I was very excited and nervous coming up to release day, but I was overlooking the fact that I had not prepared any press or worked hard enough at acquiring followers before the game had released.
Sales have been miserable since.
Shortly after release the fact that my game had pretty much bombed in sales became apparent and really discouraged me. The people that did buy the game were happy with it, and from them I got praise and my hopes had been raised some. But I was disappointed in myself for not marketing it better. And I’m not sure why I was so upset with myself – I was juggling school and my part-time job on top of developing the game! So on one hand I feel like there’s nothing I could have done (the quality of the game would suffer), and on the other I’m pissed at myself just because I’m a perfectionist and my pride-and-joy has fallen far short of my expectations and initially failed on the market.
Another reason I was upset is that I only started sending release announcements and asking for reviews after the game released – I wish I would have tried to schedule them before hand. Many websites are simply ignoring me, or telling me they’ll get to it but then never doing anything (you know who you are). This is most likely because they’re already booked with news about other games, and if I pop in and try to get some coverage it’s difficult for them to find time to get an unplanned article about this unknown indie game written.
I promised a demo within a week or two, but it’s been over a month and I have one prepared for you all only just now. My failure in sales had demoralized me, and I was unable to get my head in the game and continue to work on the project that was the sole product of my passion and became my ever-present reminder of my failure, my last one-and-a-half years of life that only led me to an empty wallet.
I kept the demo in mind and worked very slowly on it. I moved into my university almost two weeks ago, the move and the classes have been eating more of my free time. But I’ve had time to reflect.
I put a lot of work into a project that I’ve heard great things about from my peers, and the people on the internet that have played and know about it. The product is done, can’t I try to market it now? I’m supposed to start up with a new team soon on a new game, but I guess I can always try to improve sales on KR and at least keep a measly income stream coming in. Only that most likely won’t happen because one of my payment distributors only pays me every $500 I make, and at this rate I don’t know if I’ll ever see that money.
Koya Rift was reviewed by a few sites, and they were positive! Each review provided me with a little bit of positive reinforcement, but because they weren’t from very big sources, only one or two sales each. So my victory was short lived.
Here they are if you want to read, the people that own these sites are very nice so I suggest you check some of their other stuff out:
Astringent Gaming: http://astringentgaming.com/gaming_reviews/review-koya-rift_30131 (this site is back up now!)
Tas Gamers: http://tasgamers.com/pc/koya-rift-review/
Indie Game Reviewer: http://www.indiegamereviewer.com/koya-rift-an-indie-game-review/
Indie (Magazine); Issue 3: http://www.indiefunction.com/issue3.php
pigames (this is in polish, so if you want to struggle through a translated version you can try): http://pigames.pl/2011/06/koya-rift-recenzja/
And there’s a demo now, too. The differences in the demo from the real game are:
- No difficulty adjustment. It’s always at 480.
- No level generation. It’s one level. All the time. How lame.
- No campaign (duh.)
- No warm fuzzy feeling that results from supporting an indie developer.
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I would mention that you might want to use more of the community features at Desura. I see that you are not using the Forums there and you talked about putting some up. If they can handle it for you why bother with your own since it would be faster to use their’s. I would think that Desura would also help you build a community and keep in close contact with it given how I see other developers doing there.
You also mentioned that the Demo is out yet I don’t see it available on Desura. I can tell you that if you want to drive sales for indie games it is an absolute requirement to have a demo for people to try out the game. People have never heard of you and your game, so they aren’t going to slap down cash without knowing at least a little of what they are buying.
Sounds like you might want to come out of your shell a little and be a lot more communicative with the public and your fans. The more you can post and keep them aware of what you are up to the more they will want to come back and see what the latest news is. If you only post a couple of times a month then it tends to slip people’s minds.
Yes I have done some indie development in the past and learned some of these things the hard way. If you want just drop me a line.
Thanks for the reply, man. I know I haven’t been doing all that I could community-wise, but life’s been hectic since the University semester started. I didn’t want to use Desura forums because I wanted to be able to cover upcoming projects in one place, but I agree that setting up Desura forums would help. The demo was released but I will try to link it to the Desura page so people can download without having to go on a scavenger hunt. Thanks again for the help.
I’ll PM you privately more on Desura.
I’m sorry to hear it’s been so hard. It is a very common problem when people really focus on the game.
You might want to read the Spilt Milk Diaries over on GAMESbrief (disclaimer: tjhat’s my site) on how one indie managed its marketing.
http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/08/spilt-milk-studios-development-diaries-meta-post/
There is, unfortunately, no way round the fact that good games don’t sell themselves. Cliff Harris of Positech is also very open about how he thinks about marketing for his one man indie studio http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2010/07/27/the-marketing-production-tradeoff/
Good luck with the game in the future.
Thanks for the kind words and the links! I’ll be trying things from here and there in the future. I strongly advise people to look into this stuff more before they devote too much time to their actual product!