Discord Live QA for HTMAG Summer Sale

so here's the deal um I'm recording the sound so if you um chat I'm going to be bringing people on stage to chat and if you bring on stage just know that you're going to be recorded and anything you say is recorded and I'll upload it to YouTube so everybody can hear that I'm just giving you the warning right now so that you know what's being shared now there's another thing there's a new Channel that I created called QA questions please uh just put questions in there don't chitchat you got to write question and all text so I can answer the question I'm going to be bringing people up on the stage to talk by voice but I know some people are uncomfortable speaking with their own voice or for whatever reason so I want questions in the thing that's called QA questions I know it's redundant to say QA questions that means questions and answers questions but please um don't answer anybody else's questions because it makes me very hard to find out who's got a question so please only post questions in there if you want to chitchat during the Q&A then by all means post them there's a chat built into this thing

that's the one thing that Discord has given us is a little chat and you can raise your hand so that I can call on you and bring you up on the server okay so here's what I want you all to do if you have a question for the live Q&A Callin which will be recorded yes it is being recorded um raise your hand and I'll bring you up on stage now double check that your mic settings were working because this is Discord and you why do they have so many settings there should just be a button that says I want to talk but no there's so many settings so make sure that push to talk is off make sure you get the right mic selction make sure your mic is plugged in please everybody who wants to speak um actually say it uh do all this mic check now so that when I call you on stage there isn't that fumbling thing if if it takes too long for your mic if I call you on stage if it takes too long I'm going to put you back off of stage and you fix your mic problems and I'll bring you back on it's just I don't want to have dead time okay so that's the whole uh kind of background so start figuring that out start raising your hand if you want a question and if you

have a question that you want to do by text put it into the channel called QA questions and please nobody else answer those now the reason I'm doing this is because I'm in the middle of my summer sale I do a summer sale every year um I'm going to post in here the link to it my my courses uh are on sale now people always ask is my always ask Chris how do I support you why do you do all this stuff for free um if you look I'm going to um I'm GNA uh put this right in the chat if you check the chat for this thing I post a link to my courses this is how I do it this is this is how I make my living this is how I am able to provide a weekly blog all these free chats this is this is what makes it possible people ask often ask like hey how can I tip you how can I support you can I give you a patreon patreon sucks just as much as Discord I'm GNA tell you right now this is how I do it I want I don't want I don't want tips I don't want free stuff I want you to learn and the way you learn is with these courses I put them together using everything I know okay everything I know is right in these courses and they work because some

of the top games have used them like tiny Glade has a million wish list and I'm not saying that like oh a million billion wish no they literally have a million wish lists and they are one of my earliest students and they they stand by the course and everything they they use the same tactics that I talked about in the course now the game is awesome that's why that game did so well because it's a beautiful awesome game so that is the main reason but the courses provide you that roadway so that you know which way to follow to get yourself there the rest is your game and that's what you should focus on is your game I provide the course so that you don't have to think about the marketing as much you just focus on your game and that's what I provide so all my courses on sale and because you all showed up and stuck through this Discord anomaly um I'm going to if you buy one of the courses during this hour and I'll even backtrack it to 9 9 o'clock if so if you bought a course from 9 o'clock I'm in Pacific time so 9:00 a.m. Pacific until this ends if you buy a course during this hour or hour plus I will give you a free copy of ins I uh game marketing ideas

game marketing ideas is where I put extra talks I've started doing these demo plays where I play demos and kind of analyze what are the trends and stuff like Hey how do they say wish list now how do they end the tutorial how long is the tutorial what what kind of content do they do that's a big question I've started adding that to game marketing ideas it's my new set of content so if you want that do it um uh so if you buy one of the master class it's got to be the master class can't be all the stuff it has to be the uh pitching and Master Class or it has to be the um game uh pitching master class or U game marketing ideas Master Class sorry it has to be the the wish list invisibility master class or the pitching masterclass and then I'll throw in a a free copy of game marketing ideas again it's it's a $37 on sale I'll give that to you free but you got to buy it during this hour and I filter out it doesn't happen automatically I have to go back at it later so please bear with me so I'll do all that um and uh that's that um I

think that's it of the rigma Roll I see Four Hands raised please raise your hands the link to those courses is in the chat again this is how you support me this is what makes me able to do what I do and if you have bought one of those courses any of the courses not just the big ones I want to say thank you I don't have a full-time job this is my job like this is a dream come true that I'm able to do this full-time and it's only because you people buy those stuff so um I really appreciate if you have bought it you have supported me but you're also helping yourself that's why I like get better I like I don't want free support where you just give me money I don't want that I want you to get something out of it and that out of it is this course so I see three hands raised um I'm gonna bring Arya up on stage because I know Arya uh he he's made it to the uh the Meetup so I'm inviting Arya to Stage please Arya um welcome Arya hello good to see you again question yeah nice to nice to hear your voice thank you for accepting the question question um yeah

I'll make it quick basically I'm making a horror game and I was wondering how much of my focus should be on the unique selling proposition and the monster versus making it very deep insistance heavy um specifically like I'm thinking of making a game where you're like managing your gear and upgrading your gear to climb Mount Everest while there's like a monster on there yeah hey that sounds pretty cool um my bet again see this kind of gets into that game design aspect of it I'm always not comfortable doing as much um I think horror games can be a little simpler they don't be you know I always say steam loves deep systematic hard games with all these upgrade trees and Tech and all that stuff um I think horror games can be shorter and a little bit easier on the on the system side you just need a really good compelling monster and I think um the monster is what what it the the scenario the setting and the monster all kind of come

together to make that perfect Synergy and it's it's kind of like why is something taste good or why is this song Popular I can't tell you what is like if you were to come to me and say Chris this is the monster is this a good monster I don't know it it it tickles the horror games that are popular they tickle people in the right way and so my suggestion to you is try your best to come up with a good monster and maybe put it out there and see if it goes viral I'm actually working on a blog post about a couple horror games recently that have just gone viral and the typical pickup for a horror game is you put out the trailer and you know real quick whether it's got the the magic tickle to make you scared or not and get people right I don't think it's the mechanics as much I think what you said where you're like hey it's a backpack horror where you're hiding uh you know you're climbing the Himalayas or whatever um I think that's enough of a pitch I don't think people pick the horror game because they're like well I'm not scared of the monster but the Mechanics for the backpack are really

compelling that's not it and I think this is what horror games I think some people run into is they spend too long trying to be game designers like that you know like oh I'm gonna do this uh narrative thing where it's you know there's no Ludo narrative dissonance and it's so perfect no as long as the monster is scary I think that's what really makes the horror game a horror game I think game designers have to turn off their game designer brain and stop making so many like oh well there's this compelling mechanic and all this and there's this Resource Management no it's a monster scary that's the most important thing does that make sense ARA that's that's that's perfect as always well said thank you so much Chris I appreciate it he good talking to you again Arya I'm gonna hopefully I don't end everything here and kick everybody off let me see you're gonna we're gonna hang out a little bit while I figure out I gotta remind myself every time how I hang out Arya um the audience so thank you so much Arya um I'm call up the next person thank you so much ARA and again if you're too shy to to provide with your voice

I'm going to pull I'm going to do three voice calls and then I'm going to do three Q&A chats so go to Q&A questions post your question there if you're too shy to talk and I will read it but please if you see a question in there please restrain yourself and don't answer somebody else's question it just makes it really hard for me to see which questions are being answered or are an actual question so and yes this will be recorded so don't ask the question is this recorded everything I've ever done and ever will do is recorded all right I'm going to bring in Dan inviting you to speak I'm going to click you up there so Dan he's got the yellow text which means he's a purchaser of the uh Master Class when you have master class access when you buy access to the master class um game marketing uh visibility and wish list class one of the special perks is you get access to the secret Channel with the master class chat and we turn your uh name gold so Dan is gold so thank you so much Dan for buying the Master Class

I mean first of all I want to say thank you Chris you're awesome I think I follow up you since like uh game gamasutra I think that there was a website um you I you published a lot of useful information and that was very helpful um I think I have two questions and one is first of all um I saw your newsletter and it said that you can update wish wish wish list and visibility master class is it is it correct or maybe it's something missing yep so um is that your question question I I'll go on a long question or what so uh and the first question is what you recommend for the somebody who just just started in the game industry like who just learning finish like for example UD Me classes and like what's what will will be the best um game to pursue I think so okay great yes okay so thank you so much um all I actually answer both questions so um for the master classes I update them and if you buy the Master Class you get lifetime up updates so if

a tactic changes or something doesn't work I take it out I archive it and I don't ask you to buy it again it's like lifetime access where it's actually masterclass 2.0 I've already updated it once and whoever bought it before still gets the updates same thing with the pitching master class I we're updating that I work with Jason deloka on that one as it updates you get access lifetime so just to kind of answer that first question you had down there Dan okay so what would I recommend for new students getting into games so um there's a blog post that I wrote called The Missing middle which I think is really great for that and there's another blog post I wrote called um uh triaa dev's guide to Indie Game Dev it's kind of the same thing it's it's written for I started writing when everybody was getting laid off for from Triple A unfortunately um for them and I wrote it as kind of a guide like I see a lot of mistakes but even if you aren't a former AAA person I think it applies to you now

my thought is get something out fast and get it out as soon as possible and the reason is and here's the main reason is you don't exist until you sell something and in the internet in in everything and like even if you tweet about your game you put out a trailer you don't exist it's not until you have something on the store that you start ining income and so I think it's very very important that somebody gets something up and ready to buy because steam promotes games and this is some of the research I've done um page views triple once your game goes on sale so because if you think about it steam valve really only wants to promote like when they spend their time showing your game off if they do it pre-release they're not making any money that's kind of like anticipating that traffic so they're kind of giving away stuff once your game is for sale even if your game doesn't sell very well they still want to send more traffic to it because some some portion of it will get more traffic so with that in mind even if your game kind of sucks and doesn't cell well you're still getting a lot of visibility

on that first game so that's why one of the reasons I say get a game up something fast and you see this all the time like bipp and bits I I can't tell I didn't see a BPP and bits now they made of mice and moggies before they made domee keeper and they they're very smart they said let's just get that up there so that's the first mindset shift is get something small and nobody remembers your first game anyway so a lot of people are like well if my first game sucks people will think I suck or steam will put a black mark on me valve will put a black black mark because I how a poor Sol that doesn't exist the main thing is you just got to get good at shipping now from a game um I only hear music just checking to make sure that it's still there okay so the ne the next question also is here's the thing is game design is hard I'm not a game designer like I tried it I don't think I have the magic juice to be a good game designer whatever it is I don't think I have it but I think it's very important that people learn game design and I think I think people should put out

quick games like mods you don't even need to learn how to code I think modding games it's it's kind of people are debating the ethics of it I think Roblox is actually good for game designers as a practice whether that's financially whether we're monetizing children I don't know but I think um Roblox no the the ethics of modding is no problem mod modding is great like do it for free don't charge for modding but if you do Roblox if you make Roblox games the ethics there but people debate that but I think it's really good just to learn what do people actually care about a game and you learn what to concentrate on what should I spend like an extra month or two months perfecting because a lot of times people spend a lot of time perfecting things that don't need to be perfected you know it's like hey Skip that nobody cares about that move on to something else what really matters is X or Y and I think just by making games and putting them out there you learn what is actually important and I think it's a lot lower risk if you

focus on making mods and you focus on um uh just like Roblox or something so those are the kind of things that I'd say is You' got to get it out fast I don't like the idea of I'm working on my dream game I've spent four years working on this game and it's my first time no get something out get it out that's my main advice so Dan did I answer that question right yes Chris as always thank you so much I appreciate it okay I'm going to answer one more question and then I'm going to switch over to the questions in QA questions I know it's redundant but that's just what I came up with so check QA questions uh but please folks keep them limited to questions don't chitter chatter in there because it just makes it hard all right I'm just going to go based on the sort that Discord gives me so big whoop I'm gonna put you down to the audience Dan big whoop big entrance onto the stage welcome big whoop what is your question hey Chris how are you fantas go for it

so hey I um I you actually covered uh or you reviewed my store Page a while back it's a i symmetria if you remember that um but yeah so I uh my question is I'm kind of sitting at uh about 5200 or so wish list right now and I feel like I've been reaching out to every single influencer uh every single um website like IGN and PC Gamer and all that kind of stuff and I've been desperately trying to get any sort of coverage any sort of you know YouTube video that's going to push me over that edge to get to 7,000 and my question is basically how can I do that like what's the most effective way of reaching out to these people getting that extra coverage getting that extra like that extra oomph to get over that line and uh and really get over there so that's really all I'm all I feel like I need to do this is the Eternal question okay so one other question for you Big W um um um how many streamers have you

reached out to so far streamers not so many actually but I've been trying to get mostly the uh the websites like the uh YouTubers the coverage that's kind of more uh Eternal I guess because a YouTube video always exists versus a stream which is very shortlived so maybe should I be focusing on streamers instead or well when I say streamers I just mean some doofus that plays the not a doofus but some game some guy that some guy or somebody on the internet who plays a game for and puts a video somewhere that's why I typically say streamers people like oh do you mean YouTube yes I mean all the time I just mean somebody who who puts their game up on the Internet to play somebody else's game whether it's twitch YouTube that sort of thing so how many yeah I I I would say yeah you know not as many as I should but uh probably probably I don't know less than 50 right now but is that a low number I'm guessing that's a low number yeah that's a low number okay so here's what I try

okay so I have this um there's a blog post and this for everybody not just you big whoop um I have this blog post called why am I not getting wish lists a troubleshooting guide and I just kind of go through it's kind of like a a thing that just solves problems to like okay did you do this did you do this and it's kind of like a stepbystep how did you solve this problem so I'm looking at the isometria steam page um I let's see if I can put it in the chat too did I put it in chat sometimes I can't remember if I actually did something it's right there so I put in the chat um and the so I'm looking at it it's also if you're watching on YouTube I'm I'm going to re-upload this thing it is being recorded um I'm pulling it up on the video side too so you'll see this when I look at it so um the game looks awesome by the way um it's it's really cool looking and it looks like a perfect steam gam if it's as everything like you've got lots of like resources all this stuff and so what I and you've got the demo up which is great I agree that 5,000 wish list you've got that's about it is 5200 right is what you said yeah

so um and I'm also looking at so you had like a huge increase at the right at the beginning what happened there I see like you got like2 200 right when you put it up uh at the very beginning I got randomly picked up by uh I guess a Taiwanese website uh for gamers. tww or something like that okay um so actually a lot of my wish lists are actually in uh Thailand or or not Thailand um what's it Taiwan yeah sorry um and uh you know so I've actually been working on internationalization so I just actually completed a kind of system to do that um it's not quite done yet but I will be able to support a lot more foreign languages a lot easier which is uh another thing that I'm I'm hoping to get done here soon but um but I do have a lot of um you know wish lists from that region of the world right so I I'm trying to get simplified Chinese at the very least working um and then you know so I got a lot of coverage or at least that article of coverage right when I

released the steam page and then I've done a couple festivals and I uh I made the mistake of of doing the uh doing the the nextfest too too early I I I screwed that one up big time but um but I've been uh in a couple of those festivals for steam a uh you know the open world survival crafting one and uh you know I've gotten a couple like you know a thousand wish lists from that or something like that and um you so uh and I I listened to all your comments and feedback from the you know I guess I don't know what it was uh six months a year ago whatever it was uh you know changed up the steam page here added those gifts added a link to the Discord redid the trailer um I've been improving the graphics of the game ever since then and you know I've redid the steam capsule which still I feel like I need to do it again honestly it's kind of kind of wonky looks a little different than than other games but here's what I think okay so I I remember

your steam page because you you had a lot of night mode and you mixed it up you had more biomes okay so here's my general thought you're in a very hot genre which is open world Survivalcraft your game looks like it should be really good on Steam like it's got all the it looks like deep systematic sandboxy open world SurvivalCraft all that stuff you're in the right spot so what this is telling me is May there's two things that I think is is the issue is okay you got to hit streamers as hard as you can uh you've got the demo up and when I was talking to um like um uh if you take if you do one if you buy one of my courses or the um um inside conference the latest one for 2024 I talked to Jenny winom Windom and um she her job is to reach out to streamers for companies and I said Jenny how how many streamers do you reach out to she said for a typical game 300 for a very special game where I'm really pushing hard a thousand that is the scale that you need to reach out to streamers it's it's a numbers game okay and I think you

just so your type of game it looks cool but it's not like um it's it's kind of like what I say like Minecraft which is totally fine it's just it's a game that's not going to impress on the graphics but I'm not saying that in a bad way it just means like it's a very like uh pixel art style games don't always do as well on social media that's just a fact and it's not pejorative or anything and I I I I like your art style but I just think that your game is going to win itself on the demo the demo and streamers playing it and people playing for hours and hours and hours which is what a um open world survival craft does um is the the the the marketing strategy that you need to take and there's one other component and I know it doesn't seem like it's related but it's the capsule because the way the capsule works is um streamers like to look at a good capsule because they use that capsule as the thumbnail for their YouTube channel when they cover your game um so what you need to do I think you need to get a new capsule find a new artist hire an artist I would also get

them to do your your text isometria I don't like that pixel art text logo I would hire somebody pay the money I mean it's not that much in the big scheme of things especially for your game so I would pay somebody to do it and look at open world survival crafts the to do an open world Survivalcraft thumbnail you basically do the back of a character and it's a big open world with the shadow of the back and I kind of see you have that but the way it's rendered it's kind of hard to see what's going on in the in the thumb nail so I would get a very big bright colorful thumbnail look at like Minecraft's thumbnails not they don't have a they're not on Steam but you know they they're promo art it's got these like bright characters yes they're blocky looking but it looks very well rendered it's very um saturated colors looks really cool do something like that for your game hire an artist who does kind of like cartoony a little bit cartoony not super cartoony but like Minecraft cartoony have them do that and then um do small streamers or um reach out to people who really like open world Survivalcraft and have them play test it

they might have feedback from the super fans that they're like oh man well you don't allow me to uh build an axe I have to be able to build an axe to like this game listen to those super fans because they know these common tropes that if you don't hit them they hate your game okay there every genre has them and so my other suspicion is maybe you're sending it out to streamers streamers play it for five minutes and like oh I can't craft an axe close it delete this game I don't like this game I'm not going to play it on my stream there's certain things that certain genres must have and if you don't have that the fans revolt and they don't like it so my suspicion of three things there's something with the demo either the demo or the game itself that needs to be fixed that's a game design problem reach out to open world Survivalcraft designers we I think we have some on our server or or get feedback from super fans of open world survival crafts two fix the capsule make that more attractive easier to read shrink down the text hire a text also somebody to draw your logo text I think that that that title text is too bold too much and you can't see the rest of the capsule

and then three once you've solved those other two then go as hard as you can and keep a spreadsheet we're talking 300 to a thousand streamers you need to reach out to open world Survivalcraft is the number one genre on Steam it's been that way for the last two three four years 10 if you count Minecraft 15 if you count Minecraft it is the hottest genre you should be doing better and I think there's something there that's blocking you so that's my that's my breakdown that's great that's right thank you so much yeah great job I really think that your game has the ju like if you solve those problems like this is in the perfect genre for steam it looks your game looks cool from screenshots and I love I like the open world Survivalcraft so I think it's got potential it's just you got to solve there's there's like a blockage in the pipe and you just got to be like a plumber and clear that blockage out so sure um sure good luck I'm gonna move you back to the audience now that is three people I'm going to switch over to the um QA questions still raise your hand if you have questions and I will do it in there um so I see you everybody's

done a great job listing questions out so great job in this thing it's making it very easy to read when I see these questions I'm gonna pick one of these I'm trying to go back back into this to find where the questions start okay citizen Kabuto I'm GNA go with you um I want to make my game cost 25 USD but people told me 25 USD is very high and received inquire very high quality so I thought I'd settle for 20 when is it okay to sell game for 25 USD and what thought process are the players okay citizen Kabuto look up a blog post I have just search price in my um just search price on my blog and I wrote a whole blog post about this but my general thought is you are relative to the other games in your genre and the price point okay so I don't know what J game you're making I don't know what genre I don't know what your graphics look like what you need to do is you have to play a lot of games and this is one thing I find new designers new developers and people who don't typically do as well on Steam they don't

play enough games like you have to play every game in your genre play the winners the losers the median winners use VG insights filter by the tags you might have to pay $15 but this is the life of your game this is going to be determining how well your game does filter by your genre pay for one month of VG insights do this research in one take a weekend play every game in your genre and you start to feel a sense of where your game lies in this and you're going to be you got to be honest with yourself you're like you know what I'm just not as good as this game I'm just not and then create a spreadsheet and track all the prices and then kind of line yourself up and be totally honest dead honest with yourself hey my Graphics aren't as good as this game or my game's not as good-looking but it's much deeper or that kind of thing just be honest with yourself and really look at those games and you'll see where things kind of lie out and I I when I do my research I'll do some of these um you know blog posts on a certain genre or something I start to get a sense like you can kind of get

the sense where you could just see like a couple screenshots and a description you're like I bet this game cost this or I bet this game did this well and you you kind of hit it you're like yeah I'm I'm within range you'll do that if you play enough and you look at enough games so take the weekend play a bunch of games figure out where you are and then base it off that and wherever you think you lie I say add 20% on top of that because games are not in these when you look at that blog when you search price when you look at games um on Steam AAA has been raising their prices the triple I the big Indies have been raising their prices but the new Indies are not in fact they've actually dropped their price a little bit like if you look at the median Revenue per year the median cost per year of a game it actually is declined a little bit like we the median used to be $9 and now it's like $7 and I'm like what the hell IND so the way we fight that is raise your price by 20% so look where you lie in that whole list and then increase your price by 20% because we should be increasing our prices we really should be because we deserve it we we're

working hard on these games all right the next question I only answer questions if the word big Tech says questions so make sure you have that how is it possible the game has had over 2ou 2500 followers so roughly 20,000 and it only made roughly 3,000 sales well let's take a look now you can't see this because um I'm looking at the steam page this is by ingar Trump that's um quite a name uh so uh the way um the way we look at this I'm looking at steam DB you listed this out so I'm going to look at some charts there's you never know exactly the reason okay so um I'm looking at some things so 2019 was there so 2019 oh so steam goes back um way back but um steamdb only started tracking followers now I I'm I'm uploading the video to YouTube so you can't see this so I'm recording this on my screen but um uh I'm looking at steamdb and I'm looking at their follower chart and when I look at 2019

that's when steam be started tracking things so at 2019 it was uh about 10,000 um followers uh or 1,000 followers which about 10,000 wish lists at launch they got that up to 46,000 uh 40 4,600 followers which translates to about 50,000 wishless seems like you might you said the range um and that was in 2021 so at minimum they were probably doing a uh probably like two years I don't know when 2019 start like before 2019 went happen so a lot of times what I see is very long periods of time it's not that the wish list got old I know people are thinking that it's really not like to have 50,000 wish lists over two years two three years that's not that many that's like 20,000 it's good that's healthy but it's not like oh this guy's going to be a millionaire you also have to factor in that and this is what we

call that wishless velocity like how how well it goes um so let me so that's one thing that I look at is like okay well it's not that hot like that and what that is is I more look at excitement in other words like okay did the game like um are people like super excited they think this game's great you know like um that sort of thing um if if it's long time I'm looking at their steam page now because I'm also looking at their ratings um if you look at The Long Time games it's just that that wasn't very exciting they had a slow median Revenue time slow growth rate um the other thing I'll look at is reviews it says I look at negative reviews I want to like this I thought the combat was going to make this game pretty cool but it's way too bare boned Bingo right there um thanks to the Eastern European conflict the game oh it sounds like they're Ukrainian developer and they had to put it on hold for a while um so let's see really want to like this and I love games where your action is dedicated gos I'm a fan let's see reason for the refund this person

refunded there's too little control over the characters The Story Goes from battle battle with no exploration to strategy interaction with the world so here's what it is this is my thought it looks cool in screenshots it looks like a deep world then people play it and it's shallow or the combat isn't as good and this is very typical this is I'm been kind of teasing this this kind of theory I'm I'm still baking it I don't know if this is fully there when you control the main character I think it's risky and this game is why I think this it shows that I'm risky is controls are very hard it's very hard to get good controls you are getting compared to the best game with controls which is like Elden ring you know the souls likes um if the that's your bar and if you don't meet that many people get disappointed and the other thing is so it's very hard to make quality content that big that good as Dark Souls when you control the main character because that's what you're get get judged against and also when you're a main character you have to have a lot of content where you're running through an environment it sounds like there there's not many choices so you have to make

this big open world and it's very hard to do that um when you are controlling the main character and I think that's what happened is and this is what happens is the game doesn't live up to as good as the screenshots or the trailer reveal in that genre expectations and that's how it happen so it's a combination of the wish list velocity wasn't as high as you would think and then combination of the gamees game blade just wasn't as good as you thought or people thought these reviewers thought that is my theory of how a game does that so that's my general theory when I look at a game like that I see and you'll see a lot of comments like yeah this game is pretty good yeah the controls are pretty good I see this all the time especially games where it's combat focused with a sword and you're like swinging a sword at somebody the these the audience is very excited by these types of games you see this with a lot of souls likes the the people are really excited about souls likes but then as soon as they reveal it and they let people play it they're like oh the combat's not that good or it's very shallow there's the it's it lacks depth and then they just don't like it because that is make or break for them and so that's one of the things that I

see that's the also the reason why I like demos because demos solve that problem real fast you know ahead of time is the combat good or bad and you can get that feedback and there's no thing it's like it's like there's there's nothing missing in the middle you don't you don't know if it's like an a Schrodinger's cat you don't know if there's actually a cat in a box or is it if the cat died basically is a cat Dead or Alive you don't know that until you open it with release or if you have a demo then you basically open the box early and you find out oh God the com combat's bad or shallow and you get that feedback before you release so that's generally what my thought process is doing this live there's probably a lot more depth as to why the game didn't do well as people have projected but let's see let me just do one more quick calculation here so let's pretend they had 50,000 wish lists and let me just I'm doing the math on their review count I'm just going to do super basic math they have 87 reviews times a box later of 30 so they sold 2000 2,600 copies I know there's it's more Comon than that

so 50,000 um 2,600 divided 50,000 that's technically a conversion rate of 5.2% conversion rate s wish list to sales that is totally normal a 5% conversion rate if the game underperforms or is not um selling as well a 5% conversion rate I see all the time like 1% all the way up to 5% is usually if the game's not as exciting as people had imagined and then if the game is really hot I see 10% to 30% and then it's a scale from there but 20 to 30 happens 203% conversion rate happens when a game is like hitting all the numbers lots of wish lists so this is totally fine this is totally I mean not fine I feel sorry for the developer but this is not some weird anomaly that's totally crazy oh my God okay so I only answer questions if you got the word question and nice big text just write the word question big bold text I love how I only answer it so I'm skipping questions it's because you didn't write in big buold text question

what's a good wish list to mailing list signup ratio it doesn't matter don't worry about that that's I don't know I don't know don't worry about that one I'm going to skip to another one um I've been working on a tactics game for 1.5 years and it'll probably take me another two years to finish and release it I just had what I think is a good idea for an incremental game that I can think I can make in a year would you recommend shelving the tactics game for now switching over to making this incremental game also do you think military industrial complex armed dealer theming would be good for incal games I I'm going to be totally honest I love the idea of switching to an incremental game um especially it sounds like this is your first game maybe you didn't say but the signs I'm seeing sounds like an incremental game like this is your first game tactics games are very difficult I was actually just talking to a a fellow um Discord member about tactics games the thing about tactics games very similar to souls likes is there's a bar of quality and that's XCOM and if you don't hit or exceed X quality for these tactics games um you

get punished very harshly by the community they are a very hardcore Community whereas idle games do not have that yet or at all um and so if you're making your first game and you're going to spend three and a half years on this game that is a very big risk and when I started one of the first questions was like what would I recommend first time devs get something out so I would get the idol game I highly recommend Idol games as one of your first game my first first game genres that I'd recommend are Idol games horror games um Auto Battlers to a sense um those are like the basic entry ones um maybe a room decorator game maybe those are the great starter genres for this stuff I would do that I would do an idle game maybe not even do it a year try for nine months push yourself for nine months don't crunch but push yourself to even simplify it a little bit it's good just to learn what people care about and you're going to go back after releasing ing this um theoretical Idol game in going back and

um uh you're going to go back to your tactics game is like oh my God I made so many design errors now that I've gotten feedback I've sold a game You're Gonna Learn so much by releasing a game you will um so I I highly recommend going to an idol game and I do think the military andul strol complex arms dealer whether you have moral compunctions other people are like oh I don't like that I the I hate the military industrial complex yeah I totally acknowledge those things but steam really likes that stuff steam's like kind of rightwing when it comes to like the military stuff uh deep love of that stuff and and they do they like it so I do think that it's a good genre and I do think that there's um an under representation uh it sounds weird to say that in other words I don't think there's enough games that Indies don't like to make games in that type of genre or something but I think there's a very thick desire for that thick desire uh I don't know why I said that way but I do think that there is um a lot of people

who really like that theming and that kind of stuff so yep um good question um I'm going to do one more question down here um you said that all the Indies should make at least a horror game what would be the next genre that an indie should do to try out if horror didn't work somehow also is it better to make a multiplayer horror game than a single player one um we'll find out what you like so even if your horror game fails if you can I mean if you're still vibing with it try another horror game like sometimes I think one of the main things where a horror game can go wrong is they just pick the wrong um monster they're like it's a giant tree and it turns out people aren't scared of trees it's like but a giant spider train yes people are scared of that I again really it is amazing how different just making the monster matters in a horror game like and it's just like you know why are we attracted to some people and not not like if they if she just Combs her hair a different way it's like oh my gosh she's

beautiful you know and it's like just slight changes to somebody these appearance just like a slight change can make you fall in love or not it's really crazy and I don't mean fall deeply in love I just mean a first initial sexual desire or something what am I even talking about but anyway so um um it's very subtle the differences that can have a big impact and so if you're still vibing with horror games try a different monster or something you can reuse a lot of code I really think that really hinges it and really matters with a horror game um there are other things where it's like the other mistake I often see designers do is they went to game design school or something so they their brain is full of complex game design mechanics and they try and overdesign a horror game when really people just want to run away from a scary monster that's all people want to do and sometimes game designers put too much paika on the sandwich they they just larded up with all this game design nonsense and so the reason some horror games fail is it's just like well you tried to make a card battler City Builder horror game and it's like just build a freaking horror game where

somebody chases you and they're really scary looking And so there's several reasons why a horror game can fail and so that's why I think if you're first one you're like oh this is why I like making horror I I suggest people make horror games is like you learn real fast you're like oh god um I I just need to get down to the basics so um that's generally what it is okay now that uh thanks for asking those questions I'm just kind Maring them off as I answer them um uh let's see here so um I am going to go back to call-in questions while I'm doing that uh raise your hands um just reminder that um anybody who buys uh the master class the wish list invisibility master class or the pitching Master Class during this call I have to go back in after I this call sort byy and figure out why the um what people um bought it during this hour so it'll take a little bit I will give away a copy of um game marketing ideas which is my kind of like grab bag of cool things that I don't know where to put anywhere else but so it's like some secret talks that I've done that I

don't publish on YouTube or have ever given anywhere else on there I'm also doing these live playthroughs of demos to see how people structure demos so that they reveal just enough to get people excited but not so much that they've given away the game for free I'm really interested in that design question so I've started doing let's plays that I don't upload anywhere don't load them to YouTube they're secret on this ideas thing so you get that for free um and the other thing is I have a 30 back 30-day back guarantee so if you buy either one of these courses you're like I don't know if I should or not the sale ends on Sunday well the basically July 1 I shut it all off if you are questioning um like whether you want it or not you can buy it and if it turns out it sucks you don't like it you don't Vibe with what I put out just email me you don't even have to say anything you just say refund you don't even have to give me an explanation I don't care if you just say please give me a refund I will just refund it I'll just go into the system and give you a refund I promise um and I even say it on there 30day no no back guarantee no questions

asked guarantee I will do it um it's really easy in the system if you wait 30 days I can't do it just and that's not because I don't want to it's just because the the system does not let me do it I go through teachable I'm kind of by their rules I have to push the refund button it it deactivates the refund button after 30 days so please you get 30 days of just trying it out and if you don't like it again no fuss no nothing I won't I won't uh hate you or anything I just will I promise I just click the refund button so if you're still wait wondering like oh will I like it or not just try it and if he doesn't fit just refund okay I'm going to go back to live questions so I'm G to bring Tom null pointer definitely a c programmer in the in the house here so Tom uh what is your question hello can you hear me loud and clear okay cool um yeah so I'm making a game called the horror at hierck and I put the page up in a oh March April time

and I'm I'm doing okay so far I've got about 11,000 wish lists but I'm sort of talking to Publishers and marketing people and I've noticed there's a sort of pivot at the minute for people like Publishers and PR agencies offering to Market only deals where they don't invest in any development funding but they provide all the marketing aspect for a smaller Revenue share and I was wondering what you thought about that of current change and how to assess if that's actually worth it for someone like me yeah um I on its face I actually kind of like it I think it's cool um and now get a lawyer to look at any contract because any contract could have some weird oh well will you actually own your IP or something like that so always get a lawyer and I'm not a lawyer I just want to put that out there um so get a lawyer to look at whatever contract but I do in Broad Strokes like the idea sometimes I think that

Publishers in general as a whole in median if we were to find the median publisher don't necessarily do enough to justify the whatever cut they make and so if they're not taking funding if they're not giving you funding and they're just doing marketing I actually kind of think it's okay provided they have a track record um now look at other games and talk to people who have been published by them and ask them hey did you like it because here's a couple things that Publishers these theoretical publishers could do that you can't pay for with like that is one Cross promo so if these theoretical Publishers have published other games they can hopefully get your game inserted into those other games like a Cross promo or on their steam page they can also if depending on how the agreement that works is um if the publisher makes enough this theoretical publisher marketing publisher um they might be able to get a steam page deal because if they have a hit they can go to steam and say can we have a daily deal and then on the daily deal they could say hey can we get front page featuring um and they say yes because they've had some previous hits

they can put your game in there you can't buy that that's only comes from if you've got partnered with some of these publisher type things so those things are very valuable and can actually get you somewhere so and plus marketing help where it's like oh we do the market stuff I actually kind of like it I I think it sounds good provided you get a lawyer to look at the contract and there's nothing Shady on make sense yeah okay no that's cool it's it's it's good tips on how to assess I guess their performance by talking to people who've already worked with them and like looking at what they do yeah a warning sign here's one warning sign other that I'd look at is do they do this for like you know like 50 games a year and it's like it's like one out of uh you know there's like a 20% hit rate or something and if it's like because a lot of sometimes full Publishers and stuff they just they go a numbers game where they just try and publish as much as they will and then it's the game's natural lift you know I always talk about these games it's not necessar whatever this theoretical publisher did

it's just that the the game's freaking awesome so whether they were published by them or not the game did well but if you could see oh yeah this is definitely um most of the games they publish do well or something um then I then I think that's a a good sign okay cool thank you hey thank you so much Tom I'm gonna move you back to the audience I'm gon to do another one assassin monkey welcome to the uh thing um uh your question hope you can hear me all right yep cool uh so I'm curious what you think right now about the Tower Defense genre I saw someone else asked a similar question so maybe that answers it a little bit but I know from what you've said in the past it's kind of a very oversaturated genre uh but how do you think it kind of fits into your new idea about like controlling the main character yeah um thank you great question okay Tower Defense I think I I always see when I do those median charts I I see Tower Defense kind of underperform even though Tower Defense

on its face should do very well because it's um not controlling the main character you're controlling you know it's almost like a city Builder you move a cursor around and then you place it now there are some games that you control the main character but you're not really they're basically like a cursor like I there's this game Pixel junk monsters I played that game it's a tower defense game where you control the main character and you run around and you buff I played that game on an old plasma TV I played it so much the UI burned into the screen remember those old plasma screens if you're old enough so that is a game where you control the main character but it's a tower defense I think that they actually I think tower defense in general the the basic gameplay Loop actually kind of works but I think it's evolved slightly um actually and what I think is it's turned on to have a little bit more of a strategic crafty buildy element onto it um there's a game put out by hooded horse and I it's my new favorite game right now like I've been playing the demo over it's super fantasy Kingdom

demo well I don't know why I said the word demo that's just what it is super fantasy Kingdom look it up it was one of the top 50 games on steam's nextfest that's how I found it well I I play Everything hooded horse does um but it is Tower Defense light like it's a little bit of city city builder plus a little Tower Defense you kind of build these hero units and they kind of act like Tower Defense units to point but that's where I think tower defense is going is it's it's evolving there's also that game Jonas Tye roller put out I can't remember the name of it but it similar has that aspect where it's Tower Defense elements you'll like build a tower but you also have to manage resources you have to manage the village behind it and the resources gained by The Village then go support the um towers that you manage I think that's where Tower Defense has morphed it's not as um much about placing the towers and then um you know the old style of doing

it I think that's just been saturated and there's nothing new in that design and that's why I think a lot of people they just make a straight up tower defense game like the old ones and that design just isn't interesting to people anymore um there was a tower defense game in the 50 top played demos it was forget what it was called steam's top 50 demos there was one of those I didn't have a chance to play it in time they pulled the demo before I got a chance to play it I can't remember what it was called let me let me see let me look it up real quick do you know that off the top of your hand uh if you told it to me I'd probably recognize it let me let me look it up I'm going to look it up right now creeper world or one of those not creeper world but I I do I do like the creeper worlds I was just talking about somebody with um let's see let me see I'm just looking it up right now it's loading the steam page is a little slow um sorry um it is called I'm looking it up sorry if anybody found

it and they're messaging in the chat it's called Artisan TD I didn't play it so I don't know um what they've done on my curiosity my what I was curious about why I wanted to play the demo is did they do the same thing where they added this city Builder metal layer kind of strategy secondary layer so in general I think Tower Defense has evolved a little bit more to include a secondary gameplay layer that's my theory make sense yeah okay I think you that makes a lot of sense yeah and so I'm going to move you back but yeah in general with Tower Defense yeah I think you just need to kind of you need to um add a little bit more complexity it's no longer you can just like oh the fire tower oh the cannon Tower you can't just do that anymore you have to you have to catch up with this stuff all right Wilbert welcome I just invited you to the thing sorry I just sprung it on you Wilbert wybert um wybert what is your question okay um I recently released my same page uh I released it without a trailer which was definitely an l and after about a

month and a half has 60 wish list uh the genre is like the car build type of games like stack lands and witch hand uh I read like your your witch hand blog um I know like my next step is to like have a demo but like I'm really struggling to find my voice on social media mainly I'm on Tik Tok and x and I released like five videos on Tik Tok and they're not really doing too hot so I'm I'm pretty sure like my next Milestone is definitely the demo uh I have my CRM ready uh and I'm working on getting everything in order for the demo I was just wondering if you had like any thoughts on like genre or like how to Market it because that's just like my main problem right now I think yep okay so just real quick question I don't think I missed it so how many wishes are you sitting at 60 okay um and do you still not have a trailer no I we had a I swapped with my buddy from college to work on quick on real horror

game but um we released the page for that and we're kind of working in between both of them right now okay and so um here's the thing is I would focus on the horror unity game or unreal horror game try that one I don't like splitting time between two games it's too hard to do both because you really need to be splitting your time between the game and marketing I understand those are two really hard things so first bit of advice is pick one and go all in on it for now I would go all in on the horror game just because they are so hot but anyway um one thing that I would recommend so first step is you still don't know if it's doing you really need a trailer and the reason is you need to announce your game you basically hav't you don't exist even though you have a steam page you don't exist you need the trailer not because steam does some special algorithm with the trailer on your steam page just because you need to create a call a trailer called announce trailer and you put it out there and you hope it goes viral and you your game has to look really good to go viral with a a trailer and you're trying that okay and so you

you make that trailer called announc Trailer you send it out you do a press push you do all that stuff hopefully it goes viral maybe IGN will pick it up if it doesn't that's no guarantee then you go to the demo mode because I'll be honest the the the card deck games that you're talking about the witch hands they're a demo focused marketed game they don't look as amazing because it's really hard to make cards look interesting it really is and so I don't know if you're going to go viral with the the card it depends on your art and the theme but if you don't most likely you won't go viral with the trailer alone but it's worth a shot and then um because I don't know what your art looks like and then uh you need to go to the demo which hand took off after the demo like the demo dropped and then streamers picked it up and then it went viral that's just the the nature of it so if we could step back what I would my recommendation for you and again I'm not your dad you can do whatever you want want but my recommendation is pick one of the two games to spend all your effort on work with your buddy on it I

would I would do the horror game first um then I would if you don't if you go to the card game I'd do the trailer call it an announce trailer do a big press push try and get it out there then I would work depending on whether it went viral or not then I would s side step and then Focus everything you got getting that demo ready then do a big streamer push get streamers in general like YouTubers twitch whatever and then see if you go from there and then itate on your game design from there that's my general advice so good right all right thank you so much wybert good luck good luck with your projects I'm going to do one more I'm going to do morphus a gold text person um welcome gold text person means that you have purchased the wish list invisibility Master course thank you so much for your support your patronage I really appreciate you Morpheus drop us the knowledge what's going on yo yo can you hear me yep I can hear you just fine awesome well thank

you Chris all your stuff is incredible uh two questions first question hopefully really easy are you offering Consulting in 2025 I am probably not um I just don't I don't have a lot of time for it um and I don't do as much so nope sorry I'm most likely not gonna do it a dang okay well then my my real question I guess is in your most recent talks about picking your genre I've seen you remove RPG like the whole category and some of your past talks that's one of the things you kind of recommend uh I'm curious is that related to the controlling the main character thing or is that just that there weren't a lot of RPG games that came out last year in the Indie space Here's my thought on RPG great question great question um it depends like sometimes I I mean okay so the the recommendations so um sometimes I just put up there are certain blogs

where I just like I do the simple math where I'm just like hey what's the median income and then I rank them by median income and RPGs up there um and you'll see that and there's a couple things with that and so I don't know specifically which blog or update you've seen um uh where I referen that and I'll see RPG in the list and I agree that um RPGs are hot because they do the Deep uh they're usually the good ones are deep strategic long running that sort of stuff um the the side thing the other reason sometimes they show up in large medium income is or medium revenue is RPG um has um a um is is a tag in general RPG tag shows up in almost every game because it's like if the character gets better because of experience points people will throw on the RPG tag so that's why I say it's like it depends on the blog post because if I just do a straight up no filtered Revenue per game

genre RPG will show up in the top of those charts just because of that feature that RPG is tagged on everything and so that does it um if I'm doing a if somebody asks me like should I make an RPG I typically say no like for a first time game um should I do an RPG and the reason is kind of that first person character thing but you know not all RPGs are first- person controlled or primary character some of them are they're turn-based you know you you pick a unit and then you move it five units or something the main reason I don't typically recommend RPGs for firsttime developers people who have never released their first game is they are an absolute time sync because they're story B they're like five genres smashed together and when we say RPG and the very traditional sense like whether it's crpg or jrpg they're typically five games duct taped together and I and when I mean that is like you've got the combat which is sometimes could be as hard as a Souls like you know like really live real action with blocking and pairing and all that sometimes they're very complex systems driven um

combat like a final fantasy where there's all these like Buffs and debuffs and all these kind of like sequences there there's several ways or it could be a tactical combat like a Final Fantasy Tactics or something so there's that's a game by itself there's the story which is like a narrative game and so you've got this branching path narrative then you also kind of have an open world aspect of it where there's like this big open world and you explore and you know so that's like a game too you know so you basically got like three or four games duct tap oh plus like an incremental game where it's like oh as you gain XP you unlock skill trees and you can specialize in skills and you're incrementing stuff so again those are like four or five genres smashed together and you have to make all four of those um together and I if any one of those is not good people will hate your game like an RPG if your story is bad or it's like very linear we even saw that in that game that I was somebody asked oh why why did it sell bad it was like oh it's very linear and RPGs had to be

sprawling and big and branching so it's a very very very hard genre and so the people who take it on I'm like um you know I don't typically talk about it because most people who read the stuff and asking about genre have never made a game before so I don't recommend RPG straight up crpg jrpg as a first game I have seen I've been following devs that are making an RPG for years and they still haven't released it and so I just think it's so risky and so what I typically recommend for people who are like I want to make an RPG it's my dream game RPG I was like which part of it do you like do you like the combat part do you like the um XP part do you like The Narrative part do you like um the combat did I already say combat but the open World part of it if and then I listen and I say like which one of those four parts of an RPG do you like and they're like oh I just like the XP like growing and building a character it's like oh okay well they make an incremental game you get the same basic GI you know the basic Vibes of that in an incremental game like increasing skills and characters and upgrading

things that or if they're like no I just want to tell an epic story about a dragon and a sword cool then make a um a narrative game like uh I always called rad Warden is a great example of that where it's just like straight up narrative doesn't have as much incremental doesn't have as much um open World stuff it's all like a visual novel so my thought is you should make an RPG after we released four other games and those four other games are the four genres that I mentioned are duct taped together to make an RPG that's generally why I don't recommend an RPG because they're so hard and they're so complicated but if you manage to do it it does sell very well and so that's why I recommend that's why I always have context and why I was kind of Heming and haing when I first asked like they just straight up ask me um do RPGs sell well on Steam I'd say yes but then the second caveat is they're very hard to make very timec consuming and most Indies do not have the skills yet to make a good RPG that will sell well

and instead level up your skills with lots of smaller games that are those kind of feeder genres to that game do that does that answer your question yes yeah completely understand perfect well I I will just say absolutely would love to see consulting or even previously you had like just an hour of time that would be super helpful if you offer it next year sure sure and in general thank you I'm moving you to the in general the reason don't do the um the hour Consulting I mean I know it's like oh it's just an hour yeah I I spent a lot of time thinking about the game and you know if you're like oh cons I do a lot of it's not just the hour it's the other things around it and plus then it puts a big brick in my schedule where I have to work around it and stuff so it just uh the in general the consulting stuff is just hard um it's just really hard to fit in when I'm doing my stuff all right I think that was three I'm going to move to questions the physical questions um we're coming up on well we've blown past the first hour but I had technical difficulties I'm gonna keep going I you know speaking of hour blocks I I got an

open hour so this is being recorded I I don't have another thing I do have to take my car in for emissions testing in my in my state you always have to do emissions testing every year so I do have to get my car in just to check to make sure that I'm not like burning oil polluting the environment but I don't think I have a hard time that I have to do that so I am just going to go back to the questions um if I I see some people that are have their hand and they asked a physical question if I've already answered your question please delete your question in here just so that I can kind of more easily find out where I've left off and if I've already answered it um how do you suggest someone with extreme levels of anxiety to do marketing on their game some context my game has already released an EA released about nine months ago I made a lot of mistakes before finding this community great thank you so much I understand what you say about the anxiety I get it um here's the thing about marketing and this is what part of the reason I wanted to start this blog and start writing about it here's the deal marketing is

not as social as people think people think that to be a good marketer you have to be like the social butterfly life of the party this like out there like Mr party pants um and you are like the funniest guy or you're just so Charming that is actually not good marketing and then it also flips people out because they're like oh it's called social media that means I have to be social um and you look at social media and that's like the funniest people get all these like retweets and stuff they have the best memes and they're like they're like standup comedians on the on the social platforms here's the thing social media one doesn't move the needle for most games and when social media does move the needle when you actually see it doing well actually converting uh like selling the game it's just a gift of the gameplay or gift of the character it's not like because you told some funny joke or something um usually when

somebody like has a spicy meme or something that doesn't actually sell the game it might go viral this funny meme or something but those in my experience typically don't convert to wish lists like everybody shares it but it goes viral because it's funny not because people are interested in your game and so what I want to try and dispel is you do not good marketing is not being a social butterfly it is not I mean that's fun you it's great to be a social butterfly you are but that is not good marketing good marketing is much more tactical um and I actually wrote about this for zier Nelson Junior's um uh game I am your Beast look it up I am your Beast it is more I like I think good marketing is actually much more tactical it's almost like playing a card game where you're stacking things and you're getting combos so in general like ziver Nelson Jr is pretty funny he's really funny on social media but that's not why his game imb's your Beast did as well as it did uh on its announce it was strategic because he's made multiple

games and all he did or not all but the game his games have been out there and so people knew him and they reached out to him and said hey we've got a festival coming up do you want to be featured and he said yeah because he has had pass games and so he got featured by there and then he rolled it up to also time he he decided to pair that with steam NEX vest now I always say do the last one but strategically he was making a strategic play and say yes well I'm going to get all this visibility with this um PC Gamer show I'm going to stack it right next to uh my previous with um with steam nextfest and I'm also going to get all my previous games see it's strategic plays that you're making it's not social and being out there and like being the life of the party that stuff is overrated in my in my thing of like having the best means and the funniest person on Twitter that is not what sells games what sells games is knowing what your what your game is and where it can play in with other things and you're lining up deals more to say now

technically yes you might have social anxiety around talking to people but most of it like an email like hey I saw you got featured here uh I saw you featured this game can I get my game featured that's it and a lot of these like reaching out to streamers it's almost a form letter that you're writing it's not you being super social about revealing yourself you're like here's my game I saw you played this game I think you'll like my game try it like just search my blog for I think IGN or something I have a Blog how to reach out to IGN you just swap out your Game's name and your game's hook with that it is yes you're sending an email but it's not like you're putting yourself out there in the personal sense you're just like reaching out to people and I know that might be socially anxiety but hey it's a template it's basically a template and so hopefully that releases the anxiety but again you are not standing up on stage and doing that most marketing is a strategic play where you're trying to find these opportunities and the best just to say what one of the other thing that's really good About Steam marketing or how you Market a game on Steam the real way to move it is festivals and streamers

and I just said streamers it's basically you're sending a form letter out to hundreds of people 300 as I mentioned with the previous caller or you're entering festivals and you enter festivals again with a form letter you're like here's my game here's the trailer you just fill out a form and that's it you know I know I say just it but those are the two best ways to get your game seen and that's all it takes it's not you like having to be again the social butterfly life of the party Mr party pant okay so I hope I hope people kind of get over this sense of social media means social person means marketing social media is not marketing that's just one specific channel that it is so please I hope people get over that that thing all right Gabrielle next question just purchased the bundle in what order you recommend taking the courses yeah thank you so much for the bundle I appreciate it again folks this is how I make my living this is how people support me me this is this is how I'm able to do this full-time and do all this free stuff is people like Gabrielle buying this stuff

um here's what I would do um if here's what I do is take the the master class the the wishless invisibility I mean it depends on where you I don't know who you are or where you are I like the master class this my favorite thing the wish list invisibility Master Class find out where you are in in the journey because the the master class is lined up like a journey it's lined up sequentially from before I have a game idea all the way to I've released the game so I would start find out where you are in that master class and go to that start of the lecture and I'd watch all the stuff the the previous chapter just before you are where you are and then I'd watch the one just after okay and then you it in with a little game marketing ideas there's some fun lectures in there if you're making your demo watch all those demos that I've been doing let's plays for that's kind of where I would start um and then browse and then so the game marketing ideas and then the online m master classes or those um two conferences that I have spice those in just add a little

little little spice they're the little sugar crystals they're The Salted carel on the top of your ice cream just little Speckles of salt um find if there's any lectures in there that you liked because there's people that I interviewed somebody who's a law I interviewed a lawyer and said how do I find a good contract I found um Jenny Windam who does the streamer Outreach I've got somebody who does narrative games and I interviewed them about how do I make a good narrative game so there's lots of like special genres within there scan that let's see if there's something that's special that is pertinent to who you are and what you're doing and spice those in like like I said like the salty caramel um and then go back and do the whole Master Class top to bottom for the wish list inv visibility and then if you're doing um if you're going to a conference to pitch to Publishers I would watch the the pitching master class because we we again we frame that one as building the pitch deck if you're getting ready to go to Gamescom we've got a whole unit just on Gamescom how to get your pitch ready for Gamescom how to do um meet to match which we recommend

um so again it depends on where you are in your journey so that's how I would uh kind of line it up but great question Gabrielle thank you so much for uh your support and I really appreciate it and uh be sure to fill out oh the the one thing is when you're doing your um master class go in and the first step in the master class says here's how to get the gold profile we have to do it kind of manually so follow those steps to get it in the profile the other thing that I should recommend of this is for everybody out there sign enable if you buy my courses you may have seen something that says like opt out of messaging opt in I don't spam those channels I only do that I use those channels there's there's something says opt into marketing messages from Chris or something please check yes and the reason I say that is sometimes I do q&as and I am actually going to do a Q&A I'm going to announce it I'm I do q&as for people who bought the master class and I only send the email of the link of how to sign up for the master class through

the course and so if you don't let me opt in I can't message you but by law like it says like oh this person opted out of messages so I don't send it so even if you own the class you're going to miss out on these q&as so go into the settings look at your log into the course click the thing that says like um profile and then look I can't remember where it is exactly but look at your profile and it'll say opt into marketing messages I wish I didn't quite say it that way that's how I can communicate to the people who bought the course I try every other way I'll send it in the newsletter and I'll say like hey I'm going to do this thing make sure to check it but please enable Communications otherwise I can't reach out to you I can't I can't I just can't so I can't tell you hey we're doing a live Q&A so make sure you please do that please please please I'm not gonna I don't spam you I don't sell you stuff through that channel um so please all right I'm going to go one more question on the one more text question and then I'm going to go back to the um live call in okay um how compatible is the slow

cooking demo strategy with the missing middle strategy of a few months from start from development to Ras yes okay so uh great question so it's a strategy really okay so I there are developers in all walks of life okay this is kind because there's no one unified there's no one marketing strategy like a unified theory of everything you know what I wait I'm getting a message somebody mentioned me just making sure that I'm not talking to the void um okay yes um yeah if anybody dashes sorry I'm I'm I'm really paranoid when I get an alert because I have to um um me mean I'm not talking so I'm recording all this so if you do have to leave early I promise I'll record it um and um so the other thing is uh let's see where was I going okay so the grand strategy so it depends on where you are there's no unified theory of marketing you know where it's like you do this one trick and everything works um it depends on your

journey and it depends on your strategy so here's what it is the missing middle if you don't know search my blog for missing middle I I really uncovered this when I talked to John Romero so if you're starting out or if you're burned out of long games like maybe you came from Triple A and you got all your projects cancelled there's one thing called The Missing middle that's a strategy that I talked about um and this came from John Romero when he was just starting out before he formed ID or he kind the formed ID he and John carac started their company and they had no money they were they had no visibility and so they would make a game like every month and they would publish it and they would get 5,000 they worked out a deal with this publisher because back then they didn't have the internet you couldn't just like upload steam you used to literally have to have a 1 1800 number to sell your game okay so the costs were much higher so they went with a publisher and the publisher paid them $55,000 a month this is $1 1993 19991 $1 19991 $55,000 a month

which translates to about $10,000 in today's 10 to 15,000 in today's dollars per month they got 10 to1 15,000 from this publisher okay and they use that money to make as many games as they could so they would release a game a month and they get about $15,000 from that in in today's dollars this is what people always mess this up when they they quote that blog post so if you were starting out and you were trying to figure out how do games work how do I make games what do I do how do I get my name out there I think the missing middle is a perfect place to start now you don't have to do it once a month I tried it I tried doing once a month and it's really hard but the idea with on the other thing with missing middle is these are small games and they are not going to sell well they will not it's it's kind of counterintuitive like or not it's it's counter to what I say it's like you just won't do well like you maybe if you're lucky maybe get 10 to$ 15,000 for these games but in the beginning the missing middle is not

supposed to make money you were not I'm just going to be honest and this is where people always get tripped up when I talk about the missing middle is they're like well there Chris just said you won't make money releasing quick games Bingo you are not going to make money with a missing middle strategy what you're trying to do is build an audience and build your skills and build your code base that is what your primary goal is not money you're just trying to build your company getting used to releasing games getting used used to releasing um content just learning that that cycle that's what you're thing it's Equity You're Building Equity so you release all these games quickly to build that stuff up and one of the tricks with missing middle is and this this is what I got from John Romero is you're building your engine live so you release a game and his first game had no stairs and by the end after releasing four or five 3D games their engine could only do stairs after like the fifth one you the fifth iteration of their engine so they would just build the engine with features so they'd releas a game with one set of features then they'd add

features on top of that engine and that's a second game then they'd add another feature to that engine and that's their third game and that's really what the missing middle is and that's how you were able to actually release a game a month in that time period okay again you not going to make much money doing that you're G to make very small bills okay very small amounts of money then when you're like I think we got an audience we know how to release let's take the time then you stop and you do the longer build and I'd still say like six to nine to one year most you build that engine that you kind of built up or that code base that you built up during your missing middle period and then you spend that longer time and that's when you release the demo and that's when you um start building over time where you release the demo reach out to streamers and build up wish lists over the proper time that I always say which is like six months minimum and that's recommended by Valve and that's what I mean by that is so it depends on your thing if if you are a new Indian everybody always ask oh I'm brand new Indi I don't know anything missing middle definitely do these games

and the missing middle also is it's bigger than a game Jam game but it's smaller than those typical people games where people are like oh I'm spending a year and a half it is in between those two that's why I call it the missing middle because back in the day people made nothing but missing middle games and I call them missing middle because all of a sudden when steam could make you a million dollar people jumped over the missing middle and they were like I only want to make games that can make me a millionaire and they forgot about the middle period when most developers used to be making Flash games or like John Romero was making games for this publisher where your goal was to get like $10,000 and if you made 10 games per year you would make $100,000 plus you know taxes and all that salaries and stuff so it always came out to like you could make like a slight living for one person if You released one game a month basically and sold it we used to do that that used to be flash games that used to be publishing back in the old days before the internet and somehow we got rid of that now everybody is only shooting for million dooll games and I think that's a real lack in our industry

and that's why so many studios burn out that's why so many studios have to like crash and burn it is that missing middle period that we just got rid of because of steam being possible to make a million dollars okay that's that's where I came from that's what I mean by missing all right that's my rant about that I'm going to go back to live call in I see your hands raised Baba reawaken Gold Member thank you so much for buying the master class you have the gold badge I really appreciate your patronage before anything I just want to say thank you so much for what you do to support me I really appreciate it so Baba what is your question yeah no problem first of all thank you for making uh what's essentially the blueprint on the best chances to survive out here but um yeah so I'm working on an anime themed game and I'm just kind of wondering if there's any advice on how I can reach out to anime fans themselves cuz that's part of the audience I really want to reach out

to okay sounds good I am gonna plead total ignorance here I think not an anime fan so and always everything in anime that I see is like oh there's this one forum and we went big and we went crazy there so I am totally I have no clue I I just don't know and it seems like a real subculture that if you don't hit the right channels and the right notes you're totally like an outsider and they just are like who are you coming in here get out of here so I don't know I honestly don't my advice maybe is to uh maybe uh talk to people who have already found you and like hey where do you hang out where where are these um forums or channels that you populate which uh Discord channels but here's my thought here's my general thought is um the strategy that we lay out in the in the master class is to get your game scene as hardcore in the beginning as possible to find out who picks you up because usually if you're

doing right and you're connecting the dots and you're saying the right thing and you're showing the right Graphics the community will start to see you some there's there's always somebody out there looking and finding something and then they might bring it back to the community and so you look for those early signs of the people who put out the feelers and kind of find you first and then the the thing that I recommend is figure out who those people are and then ask them and be like hey where else do you hang out where else should I show my message and then they'll they'll tell you that stuff um the only other thing and this is a blog post I'm kind of working on based on a lot of people um sharing their stuff is Japanese Twitter is like a real thing like I have seen no joke like in the last month like six people six different games that have done well have been like yeah we were just kind of coasting along and then Japanese Twitter found us and we just blew up so I'm still doing the research on that blog post but it's a thing so maybe be that I don't know any thoughts that's that's really funny as someone who does follow some Japanese artists and game

developers I never thought to just I guess translate what they're I mean sometimes I do translate what they say but I never thought to like just plug whatever I'm working on or try to talk to them that's interesting I'll try that out I think what here's my theory is that and I haven't done the the absolute research I keep asking for like oh who was it there's a couple like magazines and stuff that have a Twitter account and if that Twitter account mentions you you go viral on Twitter for Japanese Twitter and so my advice I haven't identified what these channels are yet so don't ask me and it'll be in the blog post but um basically what you do is You' make a pitch to whoever runs that Twitter account maybe you DM them or you found out find out if it is a magazine submit your game through there it's like hey can you mention me on the here's my game I think you'll like it this is it um can you mention me on your Twitter account or something or they might just mention it that's how you get into there that's my thought that's my theory anyway okay that's that's a really good start thank you so much yeah sorry I just don't know I don't know anime I watched

Voltron that's like the extent of my anime knowledge so I'm just totally clueless on this stuff all right um Chago welcome Chago you're you're up in the hot seat here Daniel Son what is going on hey how's it going uh thanks for having me um so I've been working on a tower defense FPS game uh zombie game for the last couple years and this was before I saw kind of what you had to say about you know Tower Defense games and how they're just it's kind of not the ideal genre to go into um and I'm trying to figure out uh because we started marketing about two months ago so I'm trying to figure out should I lean more towards the FPS zombie aspect of the game or should I really hammer in like the tower defense aspect and really try to get that Community involved or should I try to get like a good balance of

both yeah yeah great question and this is a people this is a common question that people have is like mixing genres which one do I specialize in um there's a couple ways to do this one this is this is general I'm not talking to you specifically but in general I say mixing genres is risky I actually think mixing genres is risky and you can search my blogs just search mixing I'm not saying you specifically I actually think the first person shooter and um first person shooter Tower Defense actually is is not that risky of a genre mix because it's kind of like third U 3D Tower Defense like you know there's a long Legacy with um uh what's that goblins game or whatever but it's a it's a third person I know but 3D tower defense is not as risky as a lot of people think so so that side note um here's what thing is you don't actually get to pick like in other words the community in the greater outside world picks and that's the thing is everybody in general has to learn about marketing is you

don't get to pick what your message is um the community kind of picks it for you and so what I recommend is you Market this is what I always say is Market it hard One Direction for like a month or two and see who picks up and then Market it really hard the other direction for the next two months and see how that picks up and see which one gets a better response because okay again it's kind of like horror games I can't tell you you can't hold up a thing say Chris is this scary enough for a horror game I don't know you just have to kind of like let the internet do its thing and figure out which one resonates there's some magic magic that happens when a game is attractive to people and you can't predict it um so um my advice is to pick one of the other but usually what I find is the core of the genre usually when people say this kind of stuff it's like oh there's a core genre and then there's an outer ring which is the mixed in gen gen is in the gameplay loop it's usually the core genre that picks up on people my theory is it's going to be my theory

for you is it's probably going to be the Tower Defense people to pick up on it because I think shooter fans want the typical shooter either uh you know wave based or exploring corridors type of firsters shooter so I think it's going to be the tire defense people but try both sides make sense okay yeah no absolutely absolutely I appreciate that and I'll move you to one other thing that I often see in Indie devs do this your game is your game that's what it is and this is what I find all the time and sometimes people they like they're making a match three or something and then they read that I said match three is awful and it is awful Match 3 is like the worst genre on Steam luckily most Indies don't make Match 3 but somebody's like invested a year or two and they've made a match three game and they're like Chris how do I cover up the fact that I made a M M Street and you can't your game is your game you can't hide the fact and this is the thing is product is marketing it is 90% the product you make

and so my typical response is like well just Market the game on its merits like what is it if it's if you made a match three game Market the hell out of it being a match stre you can't fool people you can't be like oh it's this genre and then somebody's like oh I bought it oh you tricked me it's actually match three okay I'm I'll play it no they don't they're like what the hell this is a match stre game why'd you tell me this was a first person shooter match three game this is a match three game and they're like then they refund it or leave you a better view the the moment you pick the game is the moment you've started marketing and so you can't cover up it and you can't mix in other genres and this is part of the thing with the missing middle I see a lot of Indie devs do is they spend years and years because they're like Chris we made this match Tre game and we heard that match Tre is terrible so we added in open world survival craft on the side of it to kind of mask the fact that we made a match three and it's like oh God why did you do that you just it's still a match three at its core so it's like ship the match three if you're if you're maybe

you're thinking this maybe one of you is joined and you heard me do the genre thing where I'm like genre matters and this is it and you're making that genre that I said sucks and you're like oh God okay um let's spend another year mixing this stuff up don't do that let's let's add this other thing that's Chris said is good and mix it in and then it's not bad no ship the thing that I told you was a bad genre sometimes they don't do bad just ship it as it was and then your second game can be the genre that you actually like or the genre that's actually popular you can't it's not like um you know like oh man this food tastes bad if I just mix enough food in with it it won't taste as bad no games are like if you got one bad tasting thing in there it ruins the whole soup and I don't mean bad it just means genre tastes genre tastes so that's my general theory on I I see this all the time with Indies they like oh well I added this other thing to cover up the fact that this genre sucks don't do that don't do that just ship the game that supposedly sucks see if it actually sucks and when I mean sucks I mean sales wise not not

all games are a Marvel of artistry whether they sell well or not so I don't want to sound like I'm against the art all right I'm going to switch to one more question I'll do two more because I see elfwood the tray Brothers one of my my favorite of the brothers um we'll be I'll do the last of the tray brothers and then I'll switch to um text written questions but anyway um itur how do I say your name from hor games probably it's Old North okay um can you hear me I can hear you just great excellent um so I'm working on an arpg I'm about half done but uh I'm starting to plan for advertising and publicity and I don't really know how I can advertise a USB that is more mechanical that's more about game feel rather than something that immediately jumps out at you um like it's

significantly different to play compared to a Diablo for instance but how do you communicate that in two seconds versus something like crab souls or that Survival game where you're a duck that takes 0.1 seconds to communicate to people what it's about perfect question this is excellent so here's in general um how it works there's two types of games and you just nailed it exactly there's some games two seconds you see the image you see it in a tweet and it's awesome and people like I love this game and it goes viral and trailers and everything the life of the party everything does well that's actually a very small portion of successful games on Steam I'd say it's like one to two% it's a magic thing when it happens but it's very rare okay it's actually very rare people always love those stories but they're very rare the more common thing is the game is just fun and like you said hey it's actually once you get your hands on it you love it that is a great thing and most games

that do well on Steam are in your case and this is also the thing that people don't realize when they first start marketing is social media most of the time doesn't work very well most of the time it helps a little bit here and there but it's not where most of visibility comes and this is why some of the things that we've been talking in this in the basic strategy that I talked about in the master class is it really the thing that moves the kns nowadays is getting the hand getting your game in the hands of content creators I like to call them streamers but those people that play the games online or entering these festivals that's where most of your visibility comes from and the way you do that is you make a demo and you hand it out to them and then they play it and they just like you said oh this is so fun once I get it my hands on it it feels so good this is so great and it's so deep and so fun and so that is the core of it for most games is get that demo out get into the hands of streamers get in the hands of festivals apply for festivals and then the rest happens and then there's like Word of Mouth that grows where people are like

oh they tell their friends to go play it and you keep that demo up and sometimes you take it down but you put it up take it down that sort of thing that's where most games happen so my recommendation to you um get the demo out reach out to streamers apply to festivals and then just follow the thread there see what happens after that that's where most of visability will actually come from make sense yep thank you very much good good luck move to the audience and I know the next question is well how do I make a good demo without spoiling things I don't know I'm not a game designer and that's not my thing but that's why game marketing ideas I am now doing these Let's Plays some of them are quick they're like 15 minutes I can get through the whole demo and I'm like oh look what they did here look how they blocked off this look at how much content they put in here look at how much content they took out um I'm doing those demo plays if you get game marketing ideas you'll see that and again just a reminder for folks if you joined late if you buy either Master Class the um uh wishlist invisibility master class or the pitching master class I will throw in that ideas with

the demo let's plays in for free I just have to after the meeting go in filter who bought it during this hour this hour two hours hour long we're here um if you bought it during those two hours I'll give that to you for free and again remember 30-day no questions asked give back if you're like God Chris this stuff sucks and here's the thing is even if you say God I don't like this class um um I will let you keep the ideas class I'm not gonna take that away you get to keep the game marking ideas forever for free even though you just refunded my class and I don't care I want you to be happy um and uh so I'm gonna switch and as you've heard the people with the gold uh text they're still here they they are still uh they didn't hate me they don't hate that course they still bought the course and they're still in the community it's not like this class is so crap that people are like God Chris is such a scamster I'm quitting this Discord they're here they're part of the Discord so so um I really respect um people who support me and I support the the people who buy my courses these this

isn't like a Fly by Night operation where I'm just trying to get your money and go I really support the courses you buy it once I update the content all the time with what the new trends are what's working what's not I'm here with you as a partner all right sorry tray brother elfwood what's going on what's the story hey Chris uh I have a discount marketing question that I think you might find interesting so the specific context for us is that we've been offering discounts at a steady 34% off for most of our Early Access for cyber Knights which brings it just underneath $20 we're thinking that sometime before launch we'll do 135% sale specifically to trigger services and people watching for that deepest discount Mark at the same time we'll also have a lot of messaging around that sale uh that we are going to be scaling back discounts at we approach full launch that this is the last chance to get a great early deal on the game Etc so I kind of have two questions for

you um one just what kind of experience you know based on your experience on discounting and those deepest discounts and anything you know about these different services like any deals or GG deals or steam DB um what are the things that you think that we should keep in mind around hitting those deepest discount marks to make sure we make most of those opportunities great question just to clarify you mentioned we're getting offered discounts is that um is valve doing that is valve saying hey we if you do a daily deal we want this percentage off is that what what you mean no no this is this is all discounts that we're setting for Custom Sales and during seasonal sales or other steam events great okay so this is my advice in general to everybody um you do want to be very careful with your discount U I know you know this because you you've released several games but this to to the audience in general um you have to

be very careful with your discount you don't want to Discount too deeply too fast I say um I mean cyber Knights has been out for a little while so I would I would keep it I would do for that um you know one one question before we get too too much further on this have you talked to valve about doing any daily deals or anything have they told you one way or the other because you you have several hit games on Steam we haven't yet our feeling is probably that it's the opportunity better saved for full launch um rather than during Early Access but I mean if you think it's worth the I guess my concern would be that to do a daily deal we would need to deeply discount more than kind of the 34% that we've been at and then that sets a new deepest discount Mark that we won't catch up to for a long time I would we wouldn't want to catch up to rather yeah no I would definitely reach out to steam for a daily deal first I here's the thing is if so folks in general um my my theory is like if you

made it's generally like $125,000 and and it can be from of your other games you can reach out to valve and say Hey you are in what I call real Steam and you can reach out to valve to do some promotions and they will promote your game for you here's what I would do uh tray Brothers I would make a tray Brothers like say because again it it really helps if you have previous games that have sold well on Ste too and you bundle it all together and you say Ste whatever your next anniversary is or if you've got a major content update coming to cyber Knights I would pitch Steam on to say hey we got a big update you're you're making a package deal for them and so you have you say hey we've got a big uh we're planning a discount it's the tray Brothers uh anniversary of us forming our company and we want to put all our games on sale can we make a deal steam because there rolling out a a tool where they do it automatically where they just say oh you've you're eligible for a daily deal but valve will give you

special things if you make a deal for them like here's all these things and you might be on the border for whether they'd approve you or not but by building all this stuff together saying uh it's a tray Brothers 10 year anniversary and we're doing a big content update for Early Access they will let you do that stuff and and you do a sale a bundle sale for the whole TR Brothers catalog they might do something if you're close to that that limit I would not a new deepest discount until you get something out from valve so if valve says to you oh yeah we'll give you a daily deal that's the only time I do a new deepest low but if valve says no you're not eligible for a de a daily deal then I would just the most minable the next 5% down you can go and don't wait on the Early Access because I don't know how long you're going to be in early access you can do one a year of these um daily deals I have a I I I know I've worked with a client I mean I do some Consulting don't tell anybody else sometimes I do for some Consulting um I

have a client and we um they got two daily deals and they did the same thing pretty close to each other for their upcoming game and the new one and and valve let them have it two of them two of them and they they're not like huge mega sellers they're pretty they're like good middle inome real steam so I would try it before Early Access now while you're in early axis and then I'd go pitch them again after you do your 1.0 launch and you make a lot of money I do both so don't ever say to yourself like oh I don't think we're eligible just ask and they'll let valve tell you you're not eligible for it um now to those to those listening who all of a sudden you're going to give a flood of daily deal applications to valve don't apply until you kind of like a 100,00 generally the theory is $100,000 gross revenue from your game so if you've made like $10,000 on your game don't message valin like can I have a daily deal they you're just wasting their time but we're generally talking in 100,000 and the tray Brothers if you haven't looked them

up on Steam they've long history of releasing games on Steam so I would do that and then the other thing to consider um for your for your Early Access game is um a price increase are you GNA increase your price before you go to 1.0 no I think that's an area that we kind of messed up with it we should have priced lower for Early Access and then raised the price for 1.0 uh and so it kind of in instead uh what we've learned is that we need to with our current price discount 2 34% more often during Early Access okay yeah no I would I would try and grow my base in Early Access keep the discounts and and you don't app apply but I'm going to tell everybody else I did some analysis if you just search early access on my blog I looked at what did price what do people do with a price change and I found a majority of games will increase their price by $5 before they go to 1.0 and so but you do have to if you are going to do that and I I I you've done more research in this section for your game and what you're state is um so I

don't I'm not saying you you individually should do this but I'm talking to the general audience now um if you increase your price watch out because you are in a 30-day lockout if you raise your price you can't discount for 30 days so what a lot of Indies who are doing their 1.0 launch will get themselves stuck in is they do the increase for $5 which I totally think is a legit thing because you've increased the amount of content TR Brothers excluded because I trust you on that but if you did increase the price by $5 during development and then you immediately try and release you cannot discount your game for your launch of 1.0 which I also recommend I think you should discount your game for 1.0 launch so sometimes Indies get themselves stuck in this thing because they forgot about that 30-day lockout so what I recommend for games in Early Access is you discount if you're going to increase your price increase your price like two months before your 1.0 launch so increase your price wait for that

timeout to end and then do a discount when you launch your game to 1.0 any other questions yes just one more while I've got and a lot the times while I'm asking questions Chris I'm uh kind of you know looking forward to whatever answer you have but in the long term hoping that maybe it will uh get some ideas brewing for a blog post so just so you know the spirit that this is intended in um I know that obviously the answer is it depends but uh kind of broadly gut feeling do you think it's better to hit a deepest discount during a big seasonal sale when there are a lot more press roundups and other people who are kind of hunting for and highlighting best deals but there's also a lot of them and a lot of very deep discounts to compete with or do you think it's better to do it as a custom sale with less competition but only these kind of deal tracking sites and subreddits that you post to to highlight it in I don't know I could see an argument for either side and I think I could only figure this out like you said a blog post this might be a blog post because this is going to

take some analysis to figure out because I I could see the argument for both sides okay like you said you get drowned out by all the competition also doing deep discounts or um the alternative is people get um buyer fever during a steam summer sale and they're like oh everything's discounted I'm just G to buy it all I wouldn't normally buy this and so they kind of get a little crazy and they get the fear of missing out and so they buy not because they absolutely want to buy your game but they just know like oh no if I don't do this it's going to be deest discount I could see the argument from both sides and so the only answer to that is I just have to do some sort of I got to do some deeper analysis to figure that out so I can't give you an easy answer but again I I could see you could argue for me both ways and I would say that's a great Point thanks so much Chris yeah it was great talking to you but ultimately I'm gonna I'm gonna move you back to the to everybody in general the one thing that he didn't ask was new deepest discount I always recommend if you are eligible

you're in the range to get promotion from valve and again that's like your game has to make at least 100,000 gross before you're even barely eligible I always recommend don't go a new deepest low without first checking in with valve to say can I get a daily deal because valve when they do a daily deal they want a lowest price they want they like to pair new lowest price with a daily deal so when you're making your pitch to the daily deal when you apply for one of these what you always say should say in your pitch is we're ready to go for a new no new low which is and then you put your per percentage don't just give away a newest low if you're if you could possibly get a daily deal out of it okay so um I'm G to go to text questions I'm gonna keep going because again I don't know it's lunchtime here but I'm going to power through for you to get these out while I'm doing that be sure to check out how to marketed game.com courses I'm going to post it in the chat here just so that you don't miss it I'm going to post in the QA chat again if

you buy one of the two master classes wish list visibility or um pitching master class I will go in after the fact maybe after I get my car worked on or tested I will give you for free access to game marketing ideas a $37 value right now during the sale um and that's my special thank you for showing up asking great questions and again this is how I make my living this is why I'm able to do this 247 and give away so much free stuff this from support from all of you this is how I do it this is how I make my living um I wouldn't be able I'd have to go get a real job if people didn't buy my courses and I do this for you know like for fun but it's also like I got I got a I got a kid so I just gonna be honest but I really appreciate everybody who um who does support me because that's how I'm able to do it I'm switching over to Q Anda questions um that channel so thank you so much I'm just going to go through and your most recent pickling the right genre I like pickling the right genre

that's like when the genre gets old it's pickling um Morpheus uh you have men oh you already answered this one please folks it's fine Morpheus but uh you talk about knowing yeah so if if I answer your question and text please go back and remove your question I saw somebody did a strike through I like that effect I'm making a small VR game as a first game a good idea is it still under ser Market VR is not underserved I'm sorry but VR games on Steam just do not sell they're not underserved they're way over served um nobody on Steam really likes VR I don't know why they just don't like VR games um VR games sell on Quest VR but not on Steam I don't know why it just doesn't they just they just do not sell well on Steam now if you're making a small VR game bracket that's fine if you already started publish it learn how Steam Works learn how to publish it set of definite time stops say like Hey we're going to release it by Christmas

good on you that's great to just practice releasing games but I'm I'm I'm serious folks VR games and people are going to mention oh gorilla tag there's always some small exception but for the most part VR games just do not sell well on Steam all right the next one from refracto I made the mistake of over scoping my first game and putting my steam page up before the game was polished enough to showas page has been around for 9 months it's passively picked up a little over 100 wish list with no promotion I reliz this now but it is essentially a game over where I uh over it's game over where I should polish it up enough to release over the next couple months move on the next thing or can getting a good demo and driving a lot of traffic conversions overcome a slow start like this essentially where should I set my expectations okay here's what I would do there is no black mark on Steam so in other words like if you have a terrible announce to your steam page and it hasn't been doing anything and you've done no marketing it doesn't matter like it's not a black mark here's what I would do you're at this juncture you're

like I've I've overs scoped my game just put out the demo okay put out the demo make a trailer do the typical thing that I talk about in wish list invisibility Master Class you can announce your game you can just say announcing whatever this broadsword announcing broadsword nobody knows and cares that you only got 100 wish lists and it happened 5 years ago because you only have wish list nobody has heard about you so you can just announce your game today be like announcing broadword and you announce it with a trailer and and Tik Tok do all that stuff try really hard see if anybody picks up if nobody does Polish up a demo really fast it seems like you've been working on this for a while cut out all the content enough to make a demo again game marketing ideas teaches you how to make that demo or we're looking at it I can't teach you but I can show you what typical demos look like publish a demo see if that gets pick up if it doesn't it's your first game you over scoped it that's what everybody does Polish it up get it out there and then make your second game that's just what you do you

just you learn from your first game everybody always makes your dream game for the first game and then it doesn't sell and then you work on your real game and that's what I would recommend so first see if it turns out you're try that announce your game do a Tik Tok run if that doesn't work make the demo if that doesn't work release it and then try your next game it's folks nobody makes money on their first game just I'll just tell you and you just got to this is a game about getting as many games out there as possible it really is I there's so few developers that have a hit for game everybody loves to talk about them they're like oh what about stard Valley yes but there's so that's survivorship bias because there's so many games that succeed in this developer secretly has been working for decades on games and just nobody noticed them anyway next question um hosi colorful I'm working on an action hacking Devil May Cry Style game but I'm aiming to mesh it with another genes Stand Out specifically parkour platforming vertical movement questions how do you mesh two genres and avoid the danger of only appealing to the intersection of the two markets become too

Niche how do you mash up games in general I don't like it I don't I don't recommend it in general so I did some analysis of like well what are the top selling games and I looked at what the top selling games of steam the ones and I found that only about 11% of the top selling games were mashups in general the games that sell well are new takes on themes in other words like oh this game was hot but it was set in the world of medieval times ah I'm going to make it set in sci-fi world you know I'm set that was more typical in other words they just adapted the same game and they just changed not the they didn't add a second genre that had a theming change so if you're looking to spice something up I say move not with a new genre but you move you change the theme you change some mechanics not too much in general I don't I just don't I don't think mashing a new genre in actually impresses most people for the most part um I just don't so I I don't know and at this point it

sounds like a design question and I am not a designer like I I've designed games but I am not that's not my expertise so I don't want to give you recommendations to Toshi I am sorry but I don't know I just don't I don't the the big risk with I keep referencing it just search mix mixing genres on my blog in general I find it usually causes more harm than good it's kind of like taking a secondary drug it usually causes a a drug interaction where these two drugs just don't mix and it causes you know heart palpitations or something that's more common than it helping you I think and so in general I don't recommend fixing a game by mixing in a genre I just don't think that works okay second question down generative AI is controversial to use among artistic Community but how do steam customers actually react to it content if it's used lazily example supermarket used it but is doing well yeah I think okay I mean whether personal thoughts on AI excluded whatever I think about it it doesn't

matter what does the market say yeah Supermarket simulator used it for their capsule I don't know if they used it for otherw in the things um it's like you said the capsule didn't turn people off I again most of your visibility comes because you have a good game in a good genre I don't think if it's a good game I my theory whether this I'm not making a moral judgment about this don't yell at me I'm not saying whether this is good or bad my theory is that if a game is fun to play but it turns out the art assets were AI generated and they don't look total garbage I I my theory is the game will still sell well that's my theory whether that's should happen moralistically whether it's good for the Arts or whatnot that's a separate question but I my theory is that that there will be a game that's like heavily AI generated textures 3D models and stuff and it will do well I I just predict that that will happen again this is not a moral judgment don't yell at me I'm just the messenger I'm just saying that will

happen I promise you it will happen because here's the thing is we kind of already know AI art is basically just asset store art it's just you have more fine tuning control about it and there are games like some of vampire survivors that were hits and they used asset store art there's lots of games that use asset store art we know that and they have head hits AI generated images are basically just asset store art that doesn't benefit an artist that's essentially what it is again moral uh moral arguments aside that's I'm just I'm just stating the facts don't yell at me I'm not endorsing or condoning or saying anything but I'm just gonna be Pro fully honest I I think if the game's fun people won't care that it's AI okay James Wong question I've been developing a linear narrative game and released a demo up up to episode one which is a median play time of 1 hour and 4 minutes congratulations of 5,400 unique players would you say updating the demo up to

episode two for free for increase in the wish list velocity direct before opting into steam nextfest which makes a marketing beat and a reason for me to reach out to streamers press um if releasing it just depends on how long you can make content and how fast you can get it out I would add just a little bit more like I don't know how long it I I can't tell because what if you're planning on making 45 episodes I don't know how long an episode is I don't know how long it takes you to make an episode but I would say minimal work I don't want you to give away too like you only want to a demo should only be like 30% of your game again game marketing ideas I'm trying to figure out how much of a demo to give away I feel like it's at most 30% of your total final game is your demo at most and this is a very hand wavy M figure that I'm pulling out so if adding episode 2 to your thing turns out to be like 50 or 75% of your game don't do that only add about 30% content Max

but I do think it is wise to update your demo before steam nextfest so you can get extra steam coverage I do think that's a good thing I just don't want you to give away too much content and because I don't know your game and I can't tell you how much adding an extra episode is I can't tell you whether that's good or not but the good thing is adding content but how much that is up to you to figure out okay I've been working okay wait how about this your first episode took an hour I would say an hour add an hour and 20 minutes worth of add 20 minutes of content I think you should add 20% more content to your demo so whether that's whatever that distance is 20 extra minutes of content I would do that okay that's my answer um all right Chago you already answered that I'm gonna RAR question any help on how to Market anime theme I already that one um what the when's best to do a full release for a horror game that's aiming at streamers for Halloween Fest how soon before the best date how would you time

the Big Marketing push forth are you talking release full release for a horror game um I actually don't I don't think it matters as much I think you can release a hit horror game any time of the year people just want horror games horror games they are so the audience for horror games is never ending they want them all the time I don't think timing a release for Halloween Fest is that critical this is just my thought I think you're more likely to get crowded out because sometimes Halloween Fest takes over the whole steam page and then you go new and trending probp up I don't know what your exact moment I think ind's overanalyzed their release date I don't think it matters as much as people think it does so I would just wait I mean I would just I wouldn't wait I would just release it whenever you think is best when it's done I wouldn't try and do some second order Halloween Fest thing you would definitely do a discount save your discount like let's say You released it two months ahead and then you do a discount to time with your

first big discount to time with Halloween Fest that could be good but um Halloween Fest doesn't have trending as much as like steam nextfest I don't think they do so I I wouldn't over analyze that I I would just I relas when it's ready and you you feel confident about it because again horror fans want a horror game all the time every day they want a new horror game okay all right I'm going to go back to the questions um all right um so I'm just looking at who requested I'm going to go to delin invite you to speak delin come on up what is the story thank you very much for having me and thanks for your time actually to making this event you can hear me yes oh yes yes you're great go for it what's your question nice uh my question is actually I'm developing a horror game with a small Studio it's a co-op and I I really need to see what are your thoughts about

focusing on the game experience more than the game uniqueness and how much does that impact on marketing as a whole um uniqueness and those I just don't I can't quantify those terms can you maybe give me a little bit more context of um what you're thinking like the like the uniqueness in yeah yeah the uniqueness in technology and features and what does the game stands out and focuses on the game experience as people just have fun in it more than just making Technologies and features and make uniqueness to this game should we focus more on the marketing on the game experience yeah yeah I don't here's the thing with with with marketing a game and whether it has the magic uh it just comes down to a mix of of things and we just I I honestly can't tell you because I I don't know you just you just try and put out your

message as best as possible and you but because okay and this is why I'm struggling because okay what is a feature like coop is a huge seller for horror games because people love to hang out with their friends and get scared with their friends now is horror that you're marketing yes so I if I say oh the the technology features yes saying oh it's Co-op yes that matters and then features well what is features I don't know I making like developing Here's my thought Here's my thought is to answer your question we're going to debate the semantics of what a feature is versus a technology versus whatever this is all I can say is what to answer your question is I think it's it has to hit people on a gut level where they're like oh that sounds so fun and sometimes that's a combination of Technology features sometimes it's a mixture of of um of what the monster is and what the setting is so I just I can't analyze it and I can't tell you like I can't like

again this comes back to the thing where somebody comes up to me and they knock on my door and they say Chris this is my game will this succeed I don't know I just have no clue if I did I don't know what I would do I I wouldn't be selling courses anymore I would just I say you answered you answered more perfectly than I wanted actually thank you very much I'm really sorry that I made you a stroke just uh uh explaining my question but you answered very perfectly thank you very much no problem not I'm not trying to get too semantic and I I I appreciate your question it's just that I honestly folks I don't know I honestly can't tell you if a game will do well all I know is horror fans love horror games and they want them all the time and some of the games that I see are horror games that succeed I would have never guessed and some of the games I would have said this is a sure bit don't exist and the only thing that the way you kind of have to figure this out is go in lightly don't

overinvestment I just don't I honestly don't know if a game can succeed like just based on looking at it or hearing the pitch all right ignas welcome come on in ignas uh hello grais uh so yeah uh my question is uh do you have data on what wish list velocity is required to get uh uh to get in the top 10 of uh popular upcoming uh let's say I have like around 8,000 wish list before the next festival and yeah what wish list Velo is needed to get there yeah what's your uh do you

mind sharing what your Game's name is I can look it up right now uh graier Gunslingers Gunslingers yeah gra Gunslingers graveyard Gunslingers right yes okay I'm gonna click it let's take a look here so what I do is I just go to steamdb and um it isn't so much velocity it's a weird it's a weird number this popular upcoming thing in general I see that you're ranked number 2979 in wish lists I think you are likely to show unpopular upcoming I think all I do is I look at steamdb I look your game up and then there's a number it says 339 followers number 2979 in wish lists typically we find if you've got that number next to in wish lists you're ranked you are technically eligible for popular upcoming now it comes down to If You release let's say tomorrow or let's say next because it's like a seven-day rolling if you set your date to in eight

days it depends on how many other games are releasing around you and so if there's 10 games releasing on the same day it is now ranked based off the exact day and second that you are launching and so if there are 10 games ahead of you on the same day you will not show up in popular upcoming if you are the third game that day based on the time that you set you will appear on popular upcoming again it depends on how long you spent on popular upcoming depending on how many other games are launching at your time does that make sense yes makes completely sense yeah thank you great I'm I I feel like you're eligible because you've got that number in wish list that typically happens typically but if you get a few more like if you got into the top 1,000 and that at that rank 2,979 it goes real fast cuz there's a lot of games and you're all probably competing for that number so I think if you just got a few more wish lists you'd be even a more thing but typically on steamdb if you have a number listed if

you're rank you're probably gonna show all right K Danier I don't know if it's French pronunciation on there uh Hey welcome I hear you question yeah okay cool uh yeah I just have a simple question uh I'm trying to make my first announ trailer and I was wondering how long should it be on what what must be included in the first announc trailer okay um check I am not a trailer expert I've never edited a trailer but check Derek L uh just I think he says like minimum trailer just search his blog from just drik Lou trailer uh announce trailer or thing basically my recommendation is you should show off three this is me who's never made a trailer but I watch a lot and stuff like that I would say three environments because you want to show that your game isn't just like in one room and again it

doesn't have to be fully mocked up you could just have the character like running around or you know something in an environment doesn't have to be fully functional but it has to look convincing enough um so you should have enough variety so there's like three environments you should have gameplay where you can actually see gameplay and I recommend you hit that within the first five seconds somewhere in there you show that that gameplay those are the minimal things um that you would do but again I'm not a trailer expert look up Derrick Lou's thing uh blog post on that but that in general is what I'd say just you just have to have some gameplay please put gameplay in there you can do some title cards and like some still maybe images that are like Parallax so it looks like a still image but you had a little flavor like some smoke rising or something that's okay for your announced trailer but you do need gameplay and you need some variety within that gameplay and also when you have monsters also tied into that three environments those biomes so basically like three different enemies you shouldn't have in your trailer I shouldn't see the same enemy over and over again because that gives the people the hint like I don't think this game

has a lot of content I don't think this is a very deep game because the steam audience loves deep games it should have hours and hours and hours of about content and all this replayability except if you're a horror game then you can kind of get away with some smaller stuff oh and if you're making a horror game this is just because I'm on a horror kick right now where I'm begging people to make horror games the best trailer is open been with you running down a hallway looking over your shoulder seeing the monster the the main Beast yell at you and then you turn back around and you keep running and then it goes to Black and then it says your Game's name that is how you kick off a horror trailer works like a charm I see that all the time it's not cliche but that's what you should definitely do in your announced trailer all right thank you thank you so much and I did not mention thank you I just want to thank you personally for buying my course you got the gold tag so I really appreciate you buying the course um your um oh actually on the trailer so in my section so on my steam because you're a master class member um there's a thing called your announce there's a whole

section just about how to announce your game and I'm 99% sure that that uh there's one called Trailer there's a lesson in there called trailer and I talk about how to do the announce trailer and in there I link to the blog post that I mentioned the Derek Lou one so check that in the master class again folks um thank you again um cardier about um for buying my course I'm going to move you to the audience um but yeah uh I I do the course is laid out sequentially based on how all the steps in the marketing process that you have to do and I do it so that you can jump into wherever you are and have your questions so in general that's how we do okay I got through all the oh I got the other questions I have two more okay um I'm gonna do a couple I'm gonna pick a couple I do I do have to wrap this up I've been going for an hour and a half now I do need a little bit of a break and I got to get that car checked out make sure I'm not polluting the environment um so I will answer oh boy there's a lot of text questions I'll do three more text questions rapid fire tip

and then somebody already asked about the the reveal trailer I kind of answered that barely um okay how to make a trailer for a Rog likee deck builder where the gameplay isn't visually impressive nor action-packed I don't know look up Rog likee deck builder trailers see what they do copy them but the thing is Rog like deck builders mostly make their wish lists from being played not by it being shared but again just look up other games to get inspiration play more games look up More Trailers the answers are there this is not school you are allowed to copy now put your own spin on it but just look at what everybody else does really you get that's one thing I don't like about the education system they're always don't copy don't cheat you can copy in the real world okay um the VR question made me want to ask if VR supported where the game is fully played with it without VR makes a difference I think think as soon as you add that VR tag because the game design it's kind of that thing that I was saying the core of the game is the game and so if you're like there's a whole gameplay employed experience by it

being a VR game so that's the game just saying well you can also play it on flat screen it just doesn't people are like well it plays like a VR game and you just put on thing the game is the game and I just think if you say Well it also supports flat scream it just doesn't I don't know I think there's just the gameplay of VR I don't know what it is but I just don't think it'll work it's the game it's the game we did marketing for our steam page but seems that nobody is interested even when we did beta test we only had three players do you think that we should release the demo and polish it yes some most games just sharing the game and saying hey here's our game most games that way do not work most games it takes a demo streamers and festivals to really take off I see it over and over again you got to get that demo out that game that I was just talking about that my new favorite game super fantasy Kingdom look at their Steam chart if you're if you rewatch this on YouTube I'm pulling up their steam page right now you'll see the graph is flat for how many months um for

five months their steam DB look it up right now look up super fantasy Kingdom on Steam DB do it right now um I bet you can figure out real fast when the demo dropped Hint it happened five months after they launched and you just see the graph is flat and then it just takes off that's when they dro the demo I looked it up knew it because I like this game is so fun when did they take off it was when they launched their demo it just always is the case most games find their footing and get marketing increase with a demo that's just the way it is now you still have to have a good game if you have a boring game that's janky and it's not fun and all that kind of stuff even if you release demo it's not going to do well but if the demo is where most games take off though if it's a good game okay would you consider Doom a horror game I would not because you have a gun um genre expectations are very very slim and I've talked to people they were like

yeah if I have a gun and I'm blown away stuff with a shotgun I'm dominant that is not a horror game because horror is all about being vulnerable and you're escaping with your wits and something's chasing you and they have more power than you um genre expectations this isn't mean making up genre expectations are very thinly defined if you just add one element to one type of game it throws it out of the genre these are called anchors and if you look at my blog post uh for anchors um um just search my blog for anchors you'll see it you'll see what I'm talking about um there are genres where if you just add one tiny element it kicks it out of that genre and not there and you might be like well there's this one horror game usually if a horror game has a gun you only have like one bullet or two bullets or it just temporarily stuns them beast but yes I would not I would not consider Doom a horror game it is scary and it's a horror fi game but it is not a strict horror game all right I just released a demo for my fighting game Stardust ruin last week it's a very small demo with only three Fighters I'm currently

working on the fourth for the next demo should I do a streamer push now and later or just later when I have more Fighters do it now if it doesn't work add more Fighters do it again you can keep pitching streamers and sometimes even if they don't play your game with the first pitch they're like oh this game's interesting I'm going to wait just a little bit to find out if it's there you can just keep pitching them keep pitching them and say hey got new content here it is they might still not even respond all that kind of stuff so all right I'm going to go back to I'm going to do one more uh whoops I'm gonna do one more um question do you oh text question do you think devlogs are a good way to Market your game if so where should we write the devlogs make it for your mailing list uh I think devlogs are very important you should do them every three to four weeks do it every month do what I call instruction book content put it out um on your steam page do an event there do a newsletter you should be doing a newsletter and then um you should be doing it it does not what what these are called midf funnel activities when you do a Blog update a devlog

update a devlog update just um warms people up that already know about your game it does not do Outreach so it tells people this game's still being developed it's still quality it's still got this cool stuff and it makes people more excited than they were before but it does not find new people I just want you to have those expectations about what a Dev log does okay I'm gonna answer these two uh questions um Lucas welcome Lucas do you have a question hi Chris um I know you don't have a lot of time so I'll keep it brief um okay sounds good uh I've been taking your advice and starting out by making small games in quick succession and with this in mind if the main goal at the moment is just to kind of get your page filled out with games and eyeballs on your studio would you consider it beneficial to release a game for free and how much does pricing affect your visibility and conversion rate overall yeah great question and congrats welcome to the world of Rapid development good luck um I don't like

free for these games because um part of the thing also when you're doing this Rapid Release strategy is you're trying to learn um and you're trying to find out why does this game work and this one doesn't and you learn so much once you start releasing games people are like oh this really matters and you're like what I didn't think it would but it does and so when you do a game for free you don't typically get as much feedback because people like if they don't like your game they're like oh it's free I'll just close it and delete it but if it's paid all of a sudden people you have somebody's money and they're like I gave you this money and I hate your game here's why I hate it they're willing to yell at you when and it hurts it hurts to hear that stuff and it's kind of like you got to get a thick skin but a lot of the advice I find on Steam is actually coming from a place of of knowledge a lot of these Gamers play so many games and you'll find out oh I put a gun in my horror game oh it's it's not a real horror game if it has a gun oh I didn't even realize that but you get that feedback when you release a game that's paid so you get better feedback when you pay the game now if you are really rapidly releasing a game hey maybe one

if you are doing like one a month or something or you so rapidly maybe one of them turns out to be free and you just throw it in the in the pile as free um I think that's fine but in general I think you should do paid games because your feedbacks better and here's another reason is you should always be discounting your game every chance that you can't because steam has a cool down for how frequently you can discount your game and when you discount your game you get more visibility when you release a free game you can't discount it so you don't get that monthly boost of visibility okay and so that's why I say you should do paid games because also you never know one of those games could take off and if you don't charge you just lost out on all that money invisibility if one of your quick release games happens to go viral so I always recommend people um charge for their games take pride in your work do it you are worth it Lucas you gonna so how much you gonna charge you gonna do it yes sir well thank you very much I

really appreciate it yeah take charge all right see you I'm gonna move you to the audience all right thanks for doing it okay next one on the list is Marcus welcome Marcus hello so hi Chris hello so um okay great so I've bought then watch your wish list wish list and visibility master class and I was wondering how marketing directly to full release differs from doing Early Access where you basically have two releases would you simply repeat the procedure for full release and Early Access or are different approaches necessary here yeah definitely thank you so much for uh buying the master class and um I don't know if you have there's a form when you fill out you're not gold you didn't have the gold icon on you so okay it's it's at the top of the form there's a form you fill out we have to manually add you uh but make sure you do that if you haven't just message the mods and we'll get you added to the gold

status um but anyway um regarding Early Access so really and this is not to you Marcus you probably already know this when you do your Early Access launch that is your launch uh so this is in general like as soon as your game's available for sale you've launched your game really the the only difference there's a slight difference between Early Access where when you you don't get into new and trending when you do Early Access you know unreleased to Early Access you get into popular upcoming but you do not get into new and trending and an email goes out to everybody who wish listed it and then when you go from Early Access to 1.0 you there's no popular upcoming but you do get into new and trending okay and so um um and another email goes out so you technically get two emails that go out however however I don't think those two emails are enough to do Early Access in other words that alone is not enough of a reason to do Early Access because some people say well you get like a second

visibility boost it really help and so they people get kind of smart they like oh well I'll just release my game Early Access and then I'll just month later do 1.0 I'll trick the system it doesn't actually work because when you do early access the fans who buy on Early Access expect to be brought into the development process so you can't just like F hack it to do that and get into 1.0 um the fans will realize your game they're like oh you just did a fake Early Access you didn't listen to any of our feedback you didn't do development builds you didn't push updates you didn't do all the stuff that is required that is expected of an early access so that alone those mechanics yeah you get slight increase in visibility because you get that second email at your launch but that doesn't matter the main thing is well oh go ahead what's your follow do you have a clarify yeah I have kind of followup question because I'm wondering um I'm currently in early exess for my game that's why I'm asking um and I wonder how you know usually you look for wish lists uh if you're not

released and um if you're in O access I I already have sales and I wonder how is this changing um how I kind of you know when I when I go into full release and I still have wish lists how do wish lists um the value of wish list change if your game is in early and you can kind of sell your game but you know you still have wish lists I hope you understand what I mean yeah so well steam now looks at your dollars earned and so most of so once you go on sale um steam can use your Revenue as the calculator for how how much they want to promote your game because they use wish list to kind of figure out where they should kind of Market you know how much visibility they should give you because wish lists are the next best thing other than dollars once you go to sale the wishes don't matter as much as the money you've earned does that matter does that make sense does that answer your question yeah that but that basically means just any kind of marketing I do is beneficial

for release no matter if I get wish list or sales or whatever correct correct okay trending it is based I'm pretty sure off of like the the the dollars earned right up to like when you push the release button so in other words I I I don't know this number I don't have enough data for it but my general gut feel says $8,000 within the first 24 hours is enough to trigger new and trending I think don't don't quote that super hard I'm just trying to give you the the ballpark number but in general that is my thought but it doesn't matter if hey I made a million dollars in Early Access and now when I went to 1.0 I didn't make that 8,000 I don't think you'll show up a new and trending it only the new and trending is a very big visibility thing and that only only happens based off the initial um once you push the 1.0 button make sense okay maybe one short question one last question um would you say the

marketing before Early Access launch is more important than the marketing you do from Early Access to full release it is and here's why okay here why is um I did analysis um I looked at all the Steam games that I've released that did both early access to the 1.0 transition and I looked at the month after they went um when they first launched early access to the when they first went one. out month on both sides and it is very just search Early Access you'll find the chart and it is very very very hard to correct if you didn't do well at your early acces I found at best even if you get 250 reviews within your first month you have a 30% chance of then getting a thousand reviews when you bu your 1.0 it's just that um the reason the pre-order the pre EA matters so so so so much there a lot of factors it's both cultural and algorithmic the algorithm really once like I said the

sales they they test you in like um Discovery que and if you don't sell well in the discovery que they kind of start hiding you and if they you got popular up coming and you get a bunch of wish list and if you get enough wish list you can ask steam to get in the popup so there's all this stuff queued up for the Early Access launch and if you don't hit your numbers you don't do it it's really hard to make that up there's no other like levers that you can really pull after the fact it's like that's your game now steam will say and any questions you know they'll do in those videos that they were talk we have no black marks yeah but there's no tools left there's no black mark so everybody always quotes Among Us oh Among Us sold well later true and there's no black mark where steam says oh well you didn't sell enough so we're going to hide you forever it's just that there's no tools left to get you out of that port sales hole okay so that's why I say you have to do well at Early Access otherwise everything else is really really really really hard yeah make makes sense yeah thanks for for answering all my

questions no worries thank you marus I'm gonna finish we're gonna close out the thing okay with the fox Knox longtime listener many time caller the fox KNX knocking again to knock out the call Fox knocks knock it out of the park okay on the subject of freeto play do you think there's any value in releasing a game for free to get more eyes on your brain than your other paid games or do you think all the people you get looking for free games are just looking for more free games and And to clarify I'm not talking about a prologue or a prequel but a game that is its own thing do you think there's any value in this at all or no I don't think so I in general and here's why I say no is in general fans don't really cross-promote like we're not like musicians musicians are like oh I love his early stuff or that kind of thing they follow musicians they even follow actors as much as we wish this were true and a lot of people

think I don't think people become fans of developers they just they I think our art form is so hidden behind code and art you they just don't see us as developers they just do not see us for the most part and so I don't think a free game would cross promote as well now if you you might get a bit of a boost like if the free game went viral and you had a nice call to action like a big box that said go wish list our next game maybe but I really don't think um fans follow developers as much as we'd hope so I don't think it would work okay no I appreciate it thank you great question thanks everybody I gotta go I gotta run um so again this is your last call like you got to do it now so if you are if you do want that free deal where I going to give you the um free um game marketing ideas you got to buy it now the the uh uh the either the master class for wish list invisibility or the uh pitching Master Class where we talk

about how to get Publishers how to pitch them how to get that deal signed if you buy either one of those I will go into the system later today it's going to take me a little while and add in your um your class add in that um um game marketing ideas I'm going to do that afterwards give me a break uh just give me some time give me a break but give me a break uh just give me some time to work on that and then also the recording of this will go up later I thank you so much for showing up this is great I love all of you showing up um the recording for this will go up on YouTube hopefully later today also so thank you so much this will be posted I appreciate all of you hanging out here and I really super appreciate everybody who bought the courses this is how I make my living so by buying a course anything from me any dollar amount that's how you support me that's the way do it so I thank you so much um one other last call to action I know you're on the Discord you're Discord people Discord sucks um join my mailing list that's really where you

find the good stuff the kind of good stuffs in the Discord the really good stuffs on how to Market a game.com free we all saw just at the beginning of this call Discord sucks the real way to do it how to Market a game.com slf free that's the real stuff that's the good stuff right there so thank you so much everybody for showing up I am going to end this call as soon as I figure out we're going to push the right button thank you so much everybody thank you so many questions I'm just going through all the questions I was just doing that so thank you so much have a good day bye bye bye bye bye there it is there it is it's right down here