Grow Your Game Dev Success Gradually

We are seeing from game to game an increase in commercial success. So we're sitting at 1,750 reviews [music] which is obviously our best game so far. A little bit of foreshadowing. The biggest mistakes we made in HRO happened in the first 6 months. This is a conversation with Steven Huang, founder of Is to Inc. a threeman indie gamedev team that has been on a crazy growth trajectory. So far every game they made has been more successful than the last. Every time you finish [music] a project, you add something to your arsenal. And if you only take on one really big thing every single time, it minimizes scope while also pushing your boundaries. I [music] would be remiss. I think I'd be in a really bad spot if our first two games had done super well. Steven came very [music] prepared. This is almost Steven doing the podcast solo cuz he came so [music] prepared. I found it extremely extremely insightful and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did. I [music] had graduated university in 2014 with a computer science degree. And in my last year, I had actually taken a game design course, but I had gotten a job at

Microsoft. [music] So, in Canada, you finished school in April, and then I got the job starting September. So, I thought, you know what? Hey, it'd be kind of fun to make a game over the course of the summer. So, Kyle, who uh I started Copper Brain with, we decided, hey, let's do it. Just like any new game dev, we were like, let's pick a game that's smaller scoped that we can do in four months. And guess what? Over the course of four months, we got it done.
Oh, really? I'm totally kidding. It took us three years. [laughter] So over the course of the summer, I was like, "Oh my god, this is so big. Oh well, whatever. I guess we'll just keep working on it." So over the my tenure at Microsoft, which is about 2 and a half years, just over. Uh evenings and weekends, I worked on the game and totally fell in love. Uh you know, the job at Microsoft was awesome. I really liked it and um it was obviously great for my financial future to be making, you know, Fortune 500 company kind of money down in the States while also honing my skills as a game dev. Obviously, you have less time to be

social uh if you're working on evenings and weekends, but it was it was really fun. Uh there were three of us. One of them was my best friend who knows nothing about computers, but he's an amazing puzzle designer. Um, and
because it was meant to be just this fourmonth summer project, he was like, "Yeah, sure. Why not?" Uh, at this point, he had a job at a bank. He was working his way up. Uh, Kyle was Kyle was coaching the Australian women's national freestyle team in Norway all the way across the earth. I was in Seattle. And so, uh, it was definitely a challenge to work with everybody. U, but we made it work. And
so, were you remote from the beginning or
We were Yeah. No, we were we were all in Calgary. uh in the beginning thinking that we were going to be working on it for 4 months and then we all went our separate ways and then ended up you know working on it across the world which is definitely a challenge.
That first project was uh disjoint or was it archery already?
That was disjoint. You're right. I skipped a step. So we had this cool idea. It was called disjoint. And the

idea was you roll triangles around to create shapes. And the cool mechanic was if you created a hexagon, if you look at it from like this right angle, it actually looks like a cube. And so if you add shadows and lighting, you can turn it into a cube. And that way you can transform from 2D to 3D space. And if you roll those triangles around with a specific perspective, you can actually hide shape uh like hide sides behind each other and then create and destroy triangles,
which is pretty cool. You know, the issue is uh this was our first time making a game. we weren't really thinking about the commercial aspect of things. And so over the course of three years, we built this massive project. It was a lot of fun. Obviously, there wasn't that much pressure because we were all working. Um, and then we launched the game. And a couple things happened, and this is where we dive into the insights. The first thing that happened is we just before launch, we went viral on Reddit. I posted on r/gaming this little gif saying, "Hey, we've been working on this mindbending puzzle for 3 years." And it went super

viral. You can see it has 52,000 upvotes. I think the gif in itself had 1.5 million views in the first day and then it got deleted. If you know anything about Reddit, the mods are very particular. Their self-promotion rules are extremely stringent. And so we were on this super high. This was total luck, by the way. It wasn't part of the plan. We weren't really thinking about marketing at the time. It just went viral and then it got deleted. Mhm.
Um, which is kind of sad, but it gave us confidence thinking like, oh, hey, like this game has some juice to it, which is really exciting. And so, we launched the game with all this momentum. We released another GIF, and it didn't do as well, but it still got a lot of up votes on Reddit. And we released it to the Apple App Store and the Android App Store as well.
It was a paid puzzle game on the App Store in 2017, and it did terribly, if you can imagine. Yeah, that's probably to be expected. [laughter]
To be expected.
Yeah,

it's probably been taken down. We haven't updated it. And I'll talk about that cuz there was one really big mistake we made with the game [clears throat]
and that's why it's not on the app store anymore.
Oh, okay.
Yeah. I I if I find time, I'd like to bring it back. But one of the biggest biggest mistakes is we used a third party plugin built by a single dude. I had this idea of like, oh, you know, resolution keeps increasing over and over and like screens are getting bigger and better. So, this is a very like vector-based game. Why don't we use vector art like SVGs? Uh, and at the time, Unity did not have SVG support. It still doesn't support animations. So, we used this plugin u from this guy. He was just like on GitHub. It was free. And we basically built our entire art system around that. And then he stopped updating it. And the iOS store is very um it forces you to continually release new versions, keep up with its like standards, unlike Steam where you can release the app and leave it up for a couple years. Apple is not like that. I

think it's part of how they make money, but it's also how they keep updates and stuff. So, when it went out, um you cannot build for iOS and older versions of Unity. You have to keep up to date. And so the plugin broke
with a newer update and the guy stopped working on it.
So we either had to build the entire art system back from scratch or abandoned it. And so you can kind of tell what that was. But
uh let's talk about the launch because you know with all this with all this marketing momentum we were excited. This was our first commercial game. People were you know the people we showed we went to a couple conventions. We showed the game. We play tested with people and they said yeah this is cool. you know, this is a cool game. And so we were thinking, oh, this is this is hot This is gonna go really well, you know, and in my credit, I I am obviously the cheerleader of this, you know, group. I thought the game is cool. And I'm still extremely proud of the game. I think it's really fun. I think it's really cool, but no one really played the game. I think in total, uh, this one I could

share numbers, one I could share numbers about. The other ones I can't, but I think we sold in total $30,000 Canadian. Um, which if you think about three people working on the game, it comes out to about seven cents an hour in terms of an hourly wage.
That's how I [laughter] like to think about it. That was the one thing that was sort of my maturity into a game developer uh like from a passion project into a commercial was thinking about it from like a minimum wage standpoint. Like if you aren't making minimum wage,
this is not a professional job. Like you can't switch to that.
The initial release was on Steam, Android, and iOS like all three platforms. So, was the initial release just Steam?
It was just iOS and Android.
Okay. And Steam was later then. Okay.
Steam was later. We were like, "Ah, it might be kind of fun. U maybe maybe we'll get some more sales." If you look at Steam now, there's only four user reviews. So, I think that's pretty telling of of where the project stands. After releasing the project, we'd obviously been working on it for 3 years. It was a massive deal for us evenings and weekends. We did a big

post-mortem and we looked at the project. We looked at the sales and we were like, obviously this is not going to set us up for life. Uh the sales are, you know, not great. And it did a couple things. These are what I wrote down. It really humbled me. You know, you have this idea of like, oh, I'm working on an idea that's so cool. It's going to sell a million dollars. Obviously, we're going to make it big. Like, Xbox is going to reach out to us. They're going to want to buy our IP. Like, it's just, you know, you can get lost in the sauce really easily when you're working in a project for 3 years. And I think it's a balance of caring about the project, which is really important. If you don't really care about the project, you're not going to work on it for 3 years, while also finding a way to be humble and be like, "Okay, well, I'm not the greatest programmer, the greatest game developer." And finding that balance of believing in yourself while also still staying humble. I think that was a great learning experience.
The second thing that we [clears throat] learned is how to build a big project. working on a project for three years is often if you see people talking about online is often like not advised. Um but

I actually thought it was a huge boon for us because you you can't build out systems in a really short amount of time. You can't really think deeply about how to structure a project and optimization and like how to manage like hundreds of assets. You just don't get forced into thinking about that in a smaller project. That being said, context is extremely important. We were all working full-time jobs. There was no pressure. Uh we had the capacity to fail and we we failed. Right? So, um the other thing that I want to mention is one of my strengths is I don't burn out. I am really good at being consistent. I wake up every single day. I'm excited to work on the project. That's just kind of who I am as a person. And so, for me, taking on big projects has never been an issue. I know that if I start something that I'm excited about, I'll I'll finish it. And I typically don't start things without thinking about them, um, that's just kind of who I am. I have lots of pitfalls. I'm sloppy in other areas for sure, but those are the things I'm good

at. So, big projects don't scare me.
Mhm.
And then the last thing was genre matters. And I'm sure a lot of people who have worked on games for a little bit of time know this. Um, but as a total beginner, I never really thought about genre. We were like, "Oh, if it's really cool, people are going to play it." But you start to realize that, you know, industries or trends in the industry change and no one's really playing puzzle games anymore in the paid space, especially paid mobile. Um, especially paid mobile. I mean, mobile paid is crazy. I don't think we'll ever do a mobile game ever again, especially paid.
Um, you know, Steam a little bit different, but really like you're not seeing
trends of top charts going crazy with puzzle games. And so going into the next project, we were really thinking, okay,
we need to do our market research because genre matters. Why aren't we picking, you know, genres that are really popular? And that leads us into Atrio. So, a couple good things happened with Disjoint that I didn't mention. The reviews were really good. And I know you

can't see them cuz it's been taken down on the store. I might have some screenshots I can send to you, but we had a nearly perfect five-star rating. The people who did play it really liked the game, and that was very encouraging, even though it didn't convert to units. And I this is a symptom that a lot of new devs
who this is something you see all the time. My game has so many positive reviews. Why isn't it doing better, right? Exactly. This
Yeah.
Clearly, it's just the marketing. Clearly, it's just that I'm not getting enough visibility from the store because I have the proof right here. The game's good. People think it's good.
Definitely.
Yeah.
But it does say you can create uh an appealing project, right? I think if you release a game that gets 50 reviews and they're all bad, that's like concerning. But uh we were I think we were number two on the paid side of the app store for a day which is kind of exciting. So we did have a big spike and people were excited about it. We had articles written about us. The general reception was positive and I think the big thing is we learned so much that I was excited to really try it again knowing

everything about Unity. We had, you know, we had really thought about how to architect a solution for, you know, bigger projects at this point. And I think all of that learning had me pretty motivated going into 2018. Uh, I started ISTO Inc. So that's why it's like a bit of a different company. Kyle was working as at the time, but he didn't have the runway to quit his job. And so I started the company on my own and hired him as, you know, the only basically employee. That way he could quit his job and we could both work full-time. And I took market research seriously this time. So I I mapped out uh Steam puts out the top selling you know gold, platinum, silver, whatever list of games every single year. And so I took a look at them and built this massive chart. So we were like this time around we are going to find the genres that actually work and we're not going to build a puzzle game for the app store for like iOS and Android. So I've sent you some images. We were kind of taking a look and there were some general trends uh that we were seeing strategy and simulation base

building. You could see them are really at the top end. They were really crushing it 2016 2017. And so we we went to this brainstorming process really thinking about picking the right market and that's how we landed on an automation survival game. Those were the two like big categories we were seeing and we were like why don't we mix the two together? I mean what could go wrong with mixing the two? They're like really two of the most popular. Don't Starve Meets Factorio seems like a really cool idea and a little bit of foreshadowing. The biggest mistakes we made in Atro happened in the first six months. A lot of stuff went right including like the project management, the scope, everything that all went really really well. It was this cascading effect of mistakes mostly from inexperience in the first six months that basically ran all the way through the entire project. So let's get into it.
Both projects failed in the same stage. The first ones stailed and failed when you decided what to make and so did Artio.
That's right.
Just just in a different way. [laughter]

The first time we didn't even know we should even be trying to look in that category. The second time we didn't know how to do it correctly. Uh and and this is this is why I want to share this journey just to explain how hard it is to get a good idea because it's such a nebulous thing to measure.
Yeah.
Like the the analogy I use is basketball. If you think you're hot at basketball, all you have to do is go to the basketball court and play against some players. And if you get dunked on, you get this immediate feedback of like, oh, maybe I'm not the greatest in the world.
You know what I'm saying? And like this is a guy who just plays random street basketball, not LeBron James.
Whereas in game development, you have to work on a game for three years and then release it. And that's like the pool. That's the time you get compared against other games. That's a long time
to take one single shot at a basketball court. That's like pretty scary. And there's ways to get around it. We'll talk about it sort of at the end of this journey that I've been thinking about. But at this point in time, we didn't even know to think about it. It's just

it's not it's not written anywhere. It's just so intangible. So, we got started. We thought about the project. We thought about, you know, the market. We were really gung-ho. Things went really well in terms of production. I'd say the code base that we built is the code base we're using now. like a lot of our architectural decisions have carried through all of our other projects. So, we really thought about that. The thing that we use and I'm not super familiar with this, but have you heard of Zenject?
No. What's that?
It's like code injection. So, instead of having to like in in disjoint, if we wanted to uh call a function from another um like script, we would manually drag and drop the prefab. Like you would link them manually that way.
Yeah. or single but with Zen you can just inject the actual script like the name of the script and then you can call their different functions that's the high level of it
our entire architecture is based on that and it's amazing
is that like a Unity plugin or what's

where can you look into that
I don't know all of everybody else knows everything about Zenject except for me I just kind of use it [laughter]
I don't want to say
I'll do some digging
yeah do some digging
but um yeah we we I love it it's it's amazing we started building and for the first year I think the big challenge when I talk about the the mistakes from the first 6 months the big challenge was you're building such a complex project especially automation it requires so many pieces to be in place before you can have any sort of like simulation of fun.
Yeah. And so, uh, on top of that, like if we had just focused on the factory building game, I think we got got there pretty quickly. But the fact that we were trying to mix survival with automation, we couldn't get anybody to finish our like 30-minute demo without getting fully stuck, it took us like honest to god 10 months. And at that point, they weren't even having fun. They were just trying to get through it. And so we had to build these like really

detailed tutorial systems, these like really detailed instructions. We had to prep them and like I had to be there to walk them through it just to kind of get through and then at the end of all of it, a lot of it wasn't fun. We managed to figure it out. We had this idea. I I had suspicions that this might be a challenge and so going into the project, we were like, if one of the genres isn't fun, we'll pivot towards the other one. So, for example, if the survival aspect is not that fun, we have factorial to base everything off of. Like that's a working formula. We can transition that way. Or if the survival is really fun, we can go that way.
Mhm.
Unfortunately, any mix of the two
without any experience made it very challenging. We just kept having to the just just the run time in such a complex system was pretty challenging for us to kind of create a fun in, you know, experience. On top of that, obviously building these massive systems took a long time.
Fast forward three years, it's now 2020

and the pandemic hits and everybody's stuck inside. We have nothing to do. So, I decided to start a YouTube channel. And at this point, we'd shared the game a little bit, but really we have no following. Nobody knows about us. Nobody knows about the game. No one cares about the game. And our local game developer group, a guy had started a devlog series kind of over co and I was like, you know what? I got nothing going on. Why don't I try it? M
I had I had been watching devlogs. I think a couple of the big ones was Danny was still just kind of popping off. I think you were making devlogs. Um Bargie had kind of kicked off and I thought to myself, "Yeah, this seems both interesting and I had definitely started to notice a trend at that point that normal traditional media was definitely losing its power. You know, website articles, people weren't reading anymore. People were really starting to care about streamers and content creators. And I figured why not? Why not a learn how to edit and b like try to build a fan base of our own? I think I

had been percolating this idea of carrying like carrying our fan base across multiple projects rather than um just having one game build as fans and then that's it. In Disjoint, we had like a Twitter account just for the game. You if you look at our social media, there's none of that. Like there's no Atrio game. And there's no get to work game. It's literally just ISTO Inc. And there's a reason for that is we really care about bringing our fans along this journey. I think that's like a huge power. So fast forward another year and we enter early access launch. So at this point we had kind of figured out all the stuff we had, you know, gone through sort of the painful process of finding the fun building these complex systems and it's now been about 3 years. the 3 years and 6 months it took us to get to early access launch which is a little bit more than we had expected but kind of in the similar vein of what we were kind of hoping for. Um we knew this was going to be a big project. So
um we had done a lot of work to build a

lot of wish lists and so I was obviously both nervous and excited um because I had now quit my job but I had done it strategically. I quit my job, but my parents were very supportive of me doing this. And they were like, "You can come live with us. You don't have to pay for rent. We're you you're starting your own business. We want to support you and see you succeed." So, they were paying for groceries and rent. Um, and that way I could take on all this risk, which is obviously super exciting. Um, and I'm super grateful. But I just want to mention that just in case someone else is in a different situation. Uh, I think context is extremely important on, you know, why I'm making these decisions. There's a lot of factors that go into
into this, you know, and especially in Canada, you know, we have free healthcare. It's a little bit of a different ballgame than if you're, you know, on in a different country. We launched the game in early access and it didn't go well. The sales figures we were seeing were not great. They definitely weren't good enough to break even or to support the studio going forward.

How were the reviews at launch? were like overwhelmingly positive or was it mostly positive or
I don't remember. I don't remember. I think they were pretty good.
Okay.
Uh 1.0 was definitely a different ballgame. I think the expectations were much slower for early access.
Mhm.
I think I think people had been burned by other early access games and so the bar was pretty low um in 2021. But the reviews I remember the reviews being pretty positive, but I definitely remember the momentum was not there in our favor. I had to I remember I don't often get stressed. Um I'm a pretty relaxed kind of guy. I remember I had to take like the afternoon off and just go lay down.
Uh because I was like, "Oh my god, like we just spent all this time. I quit my job. Don't know if we're going to make it. This is like rough." And that's never happened.
Even though you had a lot of wish lists.
We had quite a few wish lists. Definitely. Yeah. Building momentum into that. But they weren't converting.
And so I was I was like, "What is going on? Maybe it's just cuz the game isn't done. Maybe it's just, you know,

momentum. Not really sure. But we had a lucky break. A couple things happened. A streamer named Atriok, which I'll get into. I I'll I have way more to talk about from that side of things.
Streamer named Atriok, I engaged with him over his Reddit and he played the game and that was a big boost for us. That actually helped quite a lot. Um, and during the course of right around early access, we got an Xbox exclusive deal and that was pretty significant amount of money. I don't think they do it anymore. Uh, if you look at Xbox's change in campaign, I think they're really not caring about exclusives at all. But that was a lucky break for us. That really gave us the runway to finish the project. And so with that Xbox deal, uh, despite the poor sales, we were like, we need to finish the game. Obviously, if we want to ever exist as a brand or as a company, you have to finish what you start, no matter what. We were committed to finishing the game no matter what. And I had like I had planned financially to be able to survive this even just for myself. Even if it didn't work out, you know, I'd be

able to find another job. But obviously my goal is to make games forever.
Y obviously super passionate about that. So we launched the game. We got the Xbox deal and I brought in Falsa who had a lot of experience porting to Xbox. Obviously with the, you know, that exclusive deal that was a high priority for us and we spent basically a year and a half finishing the project and launching into 1.0. Now, at this time, the YouTube channel actually started pulling its weight in and around up up to development. We had a couple of videos that really kind of popped off. This was pre early access that was really building a lot of wish lists. So, we were really hoping like, oh, some people just don't buy early access games. Maybe 1.0 will be okay. Um, we had some flops and I'll we get into YouTube because I know you and I disagree about the importance of YouTube.
Awesome.
We'll dive into some figures. I can we can tie that in. Um, but we had some that really contributed to wish lists, but they weren't converting. Um, there's a couple things that converted, but not a lot during early access was converting. So,

we finished the game and we launched in 1.0. Now, I know the trend is early access launches are usually a lot bigger than 1.0. So, we were obviously super nervous about that cuz the sales weren't that great. But, in our case, you can see here there was a massive spike. A lot more people were receptive to HBO on 1.0 0 launch and I don't really know why honestly.
Uh I thought early access was pretty solid. Um but a lot more people picked it up. We had some really big uh YouTubers pick it up and we had obviously in our ball court who was who played the game again. So that was great. But again, not a smash hit. If you look at the Steam page today, uh we're sitting at about 545 reviews, which is good to be clear. I think if you are a small studio and trying to survive, that pays the bills. Um, it depends on how much you spend obviously, but this was enough plus the Xbox deal to keep us going. So, I was after 1.0 launch, we weren't sure if we were going to break even, but it was definitely

enough for a big runway for another game. So, I was obviously very excited about that.
Nice.
Now, let's talk about the insights because we did a big postmortem after this. This was the big one. We had spent nearly 5 years building this game and obviously it was not the smash hit that we wanted. This was our second time around. We had learned from disjoint what went wrong. So the first thing is I think the hook was too abstract. And again the whole premise of the game was decided in the first 6 months. The game was about capturing creatures and adding them to your assembly line. And it turns out no one gives a about capturing creatures and adding them to your assembly line. [laughter] And if that's the basis of the game, you're going to be in trouble.
Oh no. I've had a lot of developers recently talking about how how they made the mistake of basically choosing a look for their game that makes it difficult for their target audience to identify with it. So I'm kind of feeling this a little bit maybe as well for Artio that if you're an automation game player and

you see Arto, it's not like you you don't instantly understand that this is for you, right? It's kind of a little bit of that as well.
I definitely I completely agree. I think there was the survival aspect. If you can if you've played Atri, you know that it is definitely more on the automation side of things. That's where we started leaning based on the feedback. Um, less survival for sure. It was going to be spooky. It's really not spooky at all anymore. It's a cleaner, more artsy art style. And the people who typically play automation games favor more utilitarianism. They want to like know what's going on immediately and be able to quickly work around the controls and actually build uh items. I don't think it was a huge detriment. I think the isometric art style is very crisp and clear and you can tell what's going on at all times.
Mhm.
Um and a lot of people did like the art style, but I think it's survivorship bias. I think people who were like turned off by it just didn't buy the game. But at least the people who did like the art style in the reviews, you know, said so. Uh, but again, if you

look at certain automation games that are out there with like 60,000 reviews and our 500, I think it's safe to assume that like we made some big mistakes and we didn't capture a lot of players and so we didn't get that feedback of what they wanted. They just didn't buy the game.
Um, sure. I mean, we can agree it's not the quality of the arts, right? like the quality of the art is extremely high and also the execution is really
well done. It's more like the if anything it's the choice of the direction you went with.
Yeah. Yeah.
And again it comes down to not knowing what to measure.
It's so hard to like how do you ask people oh hey like is this an art style you would play? You got to find the person who plays automation games. Well first you got to know like oh this is an automation game. We were we were already bogged down by the idea of a survival meets automation game plus the fact that you know we didn't know what to measure plus the fact that we didn't even know how to contact the people to measure this data. So lots lots of layers of

this abstract concept of like how do we find people who want to play this game. Um and that was the second point that we came to is we need to validate that people want us to play this game early. We did not do that. we were just in our little COVID bubble and we just said we looked at the market research. We know these two genres work and let's do it. Uh and then we started measuring after the YouTube channel. We started to get this data. Um but it wasn't it wasn't before. Let me tell you the mixing of genres. Let's talk about that because I think that's something that I have learned is a double-edged sword. If you want to create a very unique game, it's a great way to do so, but it provides just such an enormous challenge because it mixes people's familiarities and then muddies and distorts what they're looking for. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously, I spent 5 years building a game that does this. And I'm very proud of HO. Even more proud of Ho than Disjoint, obviously. I think, you

know, this was our bread and butter for a very long time. But it does muddy the water for sure. And I think we could have made it work if we had another five years experience. I think if I had to do it now, we could make it work no problem.
Well, maybe not no problem, but like better than we did before certainly now that I know what to do. And a big part of that, and I don't know if this is helpful for a lot of people,
is we learned how to get answers quickly.
And this is a particularly big challenge in Atrio because there's so many complex systems. But in that first year where we're building out these massive tutorials, it turns out that if you get in a call and you're just like, if you know there are pain points and you're in a call with a one-on-one tester and you're like, just do this or you put up a big ugly text box and you're like, just do this. Extra information may pull them out of the immersion, but it's like you either do that or you build a tutorial system for six weeks. Which one is going to be better? And so a lot of that like nuanced

experience on how to get to answers quickly that can literally save you months and months of work. That was something that I learned.
And the humility of knowing that you need answers and that you don't know it all already.
Yes, it has been like eight at this point it's been like eight years of constant humbling.
Um and the screenshots I sent you of the YouTube are the big ones. There was there was a period of time where I was just getting dunked on. My videos were not being watched. I was putting in like 40 hours per video, really trying hard, and no one was watching them. And so it was this constant this constant feedback loop of like you obviously don't know everything, and you really need to pay attention to the data. Um, and like really stay humble the whole time because you don't ever really know for sure. Like nothing is guaranteed. Uh, you're you're going to get dunked on at some point and you just got to stay humble. You just got to stay sharp and you got to stay hungry the whole way through.
You got to be vigilant. like there's just no no way around it. So that was definitely been ingrained in me the

whole time. So that is the end of Atriel the Dark Wild. Now we get to get to work. One more follow-up question. You said you would be able to probably do a lot better if you tried making a game like Artio. Now is that mostly based on the fact that you know how to get answers faster? So what you would do differently is you would not spend 5 months building uh all of the systems out and building a tutorial and then testing. You would build a quick and dirty version and test with that.
Yeah, definitely. A couple things. The first thing is how to test quickly. Absolutely. I think the second thing is understanding having a better understanding of what people want. Just experience based now that I've done so much play testing with people, you start to get a general feel of where you want to head. And obviously you still test but when you test you end up landing closer to the mark most of the time based on you know putting out features and seeing how people react because a lot of the process of atrial beers is like okay this is going to work and they would do the exact opposite or hate the

thing that you thought we were they were going to love the thing you thought they were going to hate and you're like I don't know anything man I've been doing this for so long like eight years is a long time if I was if I was like a plumber for eight years I'd probably be pretty good but now it's like what am I even So, uh, yeah, after a long enough period of time, you just kind of build up this Spidey sense of like where to head.
Oh, yeah. on top of how to like produce a game more efficiently, communication skills more efficiently, how to structure um like your asks with other team members, what to look for like where and the other team members as well like really level up um when they implement features instead of going all the way to the end of building like such a beautiful piece of code, you're communicating to them like this needs to be fast and then when you're ready to transition effectively communicating, hey, we're done with the experimentation, now you got to build it, right? And like finding that balance

cuz it's it's really hard
um
if you've if you've just gotten out of school, you think you can do it and then you kind of go off the deep end and build something either too sloppy or too too rigid. Um and finding that balance of how to build, you know, effect effectively is is extremely challenging.
But and also I think a lot of people don't really think about whether they're currently building fast or if they're currently building good. they just kind of build it. So I think thinking about the distinction is I think definitely good advice.
Yeah, we [clears throat] have we have like a very specific process. I have like uh
like illustrations. I use I use Illustrator a lot. All of Hrio was built in illustrator so I'm very comfortable with it. So I build like a flowchart if it's like a really important thing that has burned us before. So there's like a clear track of like you're building an experimental feature and these are the things that you're going to be doing that involves the whole team. like there needs to be a proposal and a conversation and a signoff, an architectural proposal, uh that sort of

thing. If it's like a full feature, does it work with the rest of our systems? Is it in line with our code? Does it make sense? Does the whole team understand it? Um or if it's experimental, like you know, you do a really quick proposal to make sure that it's at least you at least understand what I'm asking and then you go and build it. So those sorts of things are they make a huge difference. They're very subtle. It's like that subtle, you know, uh, program manager skills that you kind of build over time, but they make a big difference when you're working with a team of three, even even smaller than team of two. Just that communication between two people. So, you ready to transition?
Yes. Let's go. I'm I'm enjoy I'm enjoying your talk here. Let's go.
This was the big transition. I think us as a studio once we finished Atrio and especially in the last two years with the YouTube channel, I was really starting to realize that the idea matters a lot and we were hankering to kind of move on and and like it was it was percolating in my head like ah if we had done this differently, if we had chosen this differently and we' done

this differently, especially those first six months, like I said, I'm very proud of how we produced the game. I think it went really well, but those first six months you can't take back and we were kind of stuck with Atrio.
In all fairness, there were a lot of positives about it. We now, because we built the game for 5 years, we had this massive code base.
Massive code base. Uh the one thing I didn't mention, I'm going to go on tangent here, is we got burned in the most unusual way. When we released in 1.0, we had like a an avalanche of negative reviews because we didn't have key mapping. like you couldn't assign keys which who would have thought like when we talk about where to put your time we were like okay like we're a small indie team adding key mapping would be a ton of work and like do people care yes it turns out [laughter] they do it turns out they do a lot
so our system again we weren't really thinking about it our system basically we had to build on top of it was a whole mess um we were kind of in rush of trying to get it out it took us like 5

months to build key
mapping Like we had one person on it for literally 5 months cuz the way we had built our key mapping system or like our control system just didn't work for key mapping
especially in such a UI heavy game like there's all sorts of different
key controls if you're you know in a settings menu or another settings menu or a UI menu blah blah blah. Anyway, the point is I think I don't think I don't think there'll ever be a time where I know for sure [laughter] in my entire game do career. There's never going to be a time where I'm going to be like, "Yes, 100% this is going to work. I'll hopefully get closer, but you never know." And so now we have key remapping in all of our games. It's just like standard across the board. Um,
so you have built a bunch of reusable systems with Artu. If you say we we have such a large code base, that means you have a lot of lot of parts that you can reuse also including the key mapping. That's very well well said because yes, one of the biggest learnings we had from Atrio

is I was really now starting to think long term about the the company and how we would succeed. And I was starting to realize with the YouTube channel like, hey, building a fan base, even if these games are totally different, if some people are paying attention, there's getting a little bit of momentum from project to project so we don't have to start from scratch is a massive advantage. And then, oh, hey, we have this codebase. We just spent the last five goddamn months building key remapping. I don't want to do this again. This sucks. Let's think about reusable code.
And so from 1.0 0 launch which was in 2023 to the start of get to work which was 8 months later. We spent that time building a reusable codebase. We looked at all of our systems, the settings menu, the audio, the localization, key remapping, um how like how we flow from title screen and we load into games, how we load that sort of stuff like we have credits, we have um you know a whole bunch of architectural stuff that is shared. We started looking at that and

we built what we call now isto core which is this subm module that every single project has access to and it's shared all the way across. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to best do this. This worked for us and so if we update it for one project it gets shared for other projects.
Do you use the Unity package manager? Like do you have a repository for your core package or how do you you know how you handle that?
Yeah, it's all in git. So there we don't use Unity at all. Yeah.
Yeah. So it's all in git and I didn't again I didn't set it up. Um so I know if it's a surface level
if it's in git then you're probably using the package manager and adding it via the git repository. That's
no package manager. It's it's the code. So the only thing we share is code and that's all
okay
via git using a subm module. I can't sh I don't know anything beyond that.
It's okay. Somebody else on the team did that. Got it.
Yeah. But we we I know we had a conversation about package managers and we very explicitly decided not to use a package manager.
Got it. Cuz I recently did some research

into reusable co code. I'm starting to dip my toes into that and I think nowadays if you do it I think package manager is the way to go cuz you can just you can also just put it in a separate repository and simple like that.
But there's [laughter] too late now. So going into Atrio or going out of Hrio and into the next project, I think the one thing we really wanted to do is work on a smaller project.
Um, we had this reusable code and I had this idea like, okay, now that we have a title screen and all this extra stuff that we built, why don't we why don't we not try and break the mold? Why don't we not try and like come up with the most unique mechanic, let's just execute. Let's not pick something that's going to push us out of our boundaries um and do multiplayer or like an MMO. Let's do the simplest game we possibly can at the highest level of execution with a certain amount of time. And when I say highest level execution, if you look to get to work, it's not it is not a masterpiece in any way, shape, or form. I mean like what players want in the

most efficient way possible while also delivering a great product to be clear. Like we don't we don't I try not to make slop games.
Well, focusing on the things players want is making a great product, right?
Definitely. Definitely. So um I had known at track now for about 2 years and he at the po at this point had reached out to me uh interested in a project and so I was like oh you know this is kind of interesting and so we met and this is the presentation I shared with him. I wanted to share this because it's the authentic onetoone presentation and it really kind of illustrates what I had learned at this point.
So
you're really making the video for me at this point. I love it.
We stay organized. I'm a YouTuber, [laughter] you know. I know how this works.
Yeah.
So, this is Hrio's wish list data. Now, this box is everything leading up to 1.0 launch. I think 1.0 launch throws out the data. It like the the spikes are too high, so I've kind of clipped it out for you.
Yeah. Can we um can we roughly describe

what we're seeing for audio only users?
Uh oh, I forgot you're a podcast. Uh we'll see. We'll see. Maybe maybe I can talk about it as I go on. So, in early access, you can see some data here. There's some spikes, and I have labeled them. These are the traditional ways that you gain wish lists. Steam NextFest, there's the launch, which was obviously our biggest contribution to wish lists. Uh there was we got onto the new and trending on Steam, and we got on the Steam winter sale. So, there's four major points in which we gained wish lists. Now, keep in mind the scale of wish lists is obviously much lower than a lot of the guests you had. you have had some very successful guests on this show, so take it with a grain of salt. This is really like mid-level developer success. Um, but I think the trends still apply. Um, and this is important to me because I compare what we do in comparison to the other like ways to gain wish lists.
So, if I had released, for example, an

Imager post, you will see it's not on here. It got like 10 wish lists and we spent a bunch of time releasing imager posts and no one gave a and it's like okay like in comparison to being a part of Steam NextFest. Is this worth my time? And you can see that some stuff clearly was. For example, our YouTube our YouTube put in so much work.
If we didn't have the YouTube, I genuinely think the game would not have sold at all. like we just there was a huge period of time where no one cared about the game at all and it was just numbers, right?
Yes. These are Hrio numbers. Yeah.
Got it.
Yep. Um so in 2020, my first vlog uh that did well, the one year you can see that blip. Um that really that really like did some numbers. Had a bunch of flop videos that you can slowly see kind of trickle in the wish lists. And then my two-year vlog, which I think did at the end of all of this got like 600,000 views, um, contributed a ton of wish

lists.
And again, keep in mind that this is a game that already is handicapped because it's confusing. It's mixing two genres. It's not clear on what people want. So, I am literally dragging this game across the finish line by my bare hands. Right? If it was a game that I think people were really excited about, it'd be playing on easy mode. But so much of the marketing was playing on hard mode. The vlogs were hard to make, like it's a complicated game. I had to make it exciting and sexy. And so it's both bad cuz I wanted the game to do well, but it's also good because if you are learning under these conditions, the only way to succeed is to be really good or to try to be really good. And so playing on constant hard mode like constantly kept me uh humbled and hungry. And so I was putting a ton of time into thinking about how to edit videos, really focusing on like how to be engaging um and funny and interesting to make people watch these videos and convert them. So yeah, like a lot of

the video uh the YouTube channel did work. And you notice here you played our game right before it spiked. I thought I put that in there.
Oh, nice.
Yeah. Uh because you reviewed the game eons ago, which is kind of fun. So, there was one other factor that made a huge difference in our sales. Those other spikes, those anomalous spikes were Atriarch exclusively. Now, what's so cool about Atrio? Uh, and maybe cool is the wrong word, but we had literally no traffic at all. No one cared about the game. So, this data is literally one for one. There are no other factors muddying up this data to to make it like unclear of like, oh, I don't know what this was. Like, no one cared about the game. So, these spikes are literally from one source, which is kind of cool.
From one live streamer.
Yeah. So, uh these Reddit videos that I posted for him when he reacted, uh he had a pretty big audience. Uh contributed a lot. The second video that he put out, you can see it was like next

to our 1.0 release. It was our biggest contribution uh to wish list.
And what kind of what kind of content was this? Like reaction videos or what was it? So, Atriox is at the time was pretty unique where he has this very involved community. Uh, and every week he would do a Reddit recap where you could post to his Reddit and he would react to them.
So, he'd have videos and he'd have memes and stuff like that. He doesn't do it anymore. He's I think he's really kind of pivoted his content,
but um I had been a fan of his content for quite a long time and so I thought it'd be funny because his name is Atriarch and the game was Atrio. I posted a video about how he had stole our game. Um, it was a whole bit. I had my lawyer involved in the video. It was pretty funny. And just over the series of like reacting to these videos, we'd sort of built a rapport in the community. So, it didn't feel like self-promotion cuz it wasn't cuz I I genuinely was a fan of his content and I was just making it for fun, but also kind of egging him along to get him to play the game. And he
uh it was good for his channel, it was

good for my channel. Uh, so it was a mutual relationship in which, you know,
he kind of started engaging with that.
Mhm. uh because the videos were high quality. At this point, I kind of knew what I was doing when it comes to video production. So, by the time he played the game, which was in November 4th, 2021, we had built a relationship. And so, people were kind of excited to see him play this game. And that really really helped. at the meta story of this entire thing is this presentation that you're currently sharing with me. You then later shared with him to as for example this slide is to show hey look your reactions really contributed to our wish lists.
Yes. This is the presentation I gave him right before I pitched get to work.
Got it.
So zooming out uh these are the spikes of Atriarch. So you can see they're fairly significant and this is where we get into my pitch.
So I was thinking about volume of games and there's a lot of like weekend projects and small slop that you never see and those I think those can like

those contribute to most of the volume of games that come out. You don't see many of them. Uh obviously Steam just like washes them away. Um but then there's indie games AA and AAA and like as the production costs go up there's less competition. And so my thought process is let's say you're creating a rage game. It's a lot easier to make a rage game than it is to make an automation game. You could in theory make a rage game in one year and two months. Feshadowing. [laughter]
Um but if you're making a game that's easy to make, how do you stand out? Because the competition is so much higher. It's not like automation games where people are just, you know, at the end of the year they're like, I need more automation games. There's only like one big one that comes out every couple years. I am just like ready to try something else.
And my idea is marketing. Marketing gets the game out, especially in this context. And in this context, streamers for rage games, it's streamers. When they play the game and put it out on

YouTube, that's how you discover the game. And if you partic if you happen to have a streamer who's pretty big and influential, the risk of getting discovered by a streamer basically drops to zero. That was the pitch anyway. Uh there's a lot more nuance to it. Obviously, it's not guaranteed and I'll explain it later, but that was kind of the idea. And so we were like, you know, there's lots of games that we can make that are good streamer games, but in terms of scope, in terms of execution, Rage games seem like they'd be the simplest and easiest to execute. So, if we want to have like a working relationship and do multiple games, let's start with the simplest one now. And if it goes well, maybe we'll consider doing something else. Multiplayer, horror, whatever.
Mhm. So, that was the pitch. Oh, yeah. I thought it'd be kind of funny to show this. This is the original pitch. This is what I had. I literally went to Unity, downloaded some free assets, and slapped this on top. I was like, "Oh, hey, let's let's build like an only app Super Monkey Ball game where we kit

bash." These are the proposal pitches that I put together. Like you can tell that quality is not a focus for this pitch. And this was literally my description of how the game would be. You start in your parents' basement and work up to the board of directors. That was it. That was the whole pitch and we went from there, which is kind of fun. So it just goes to show you like you don't need to make a beautiful pitch deck. It all is dependent on context,
right? And obviously for the for the people who don't know get to work, the the premise is that you have this ridiculous roller blade suit where you uh basically pour an obstacle course up this tower through various levels of management and so on.
Yeah. The way I would describe it is like super monkey ball meets get to work or getting over it.
And so it's very flowy but very sort of rageinducing. A lot of the focus is really on the flow. If you learn the mechanics there, and this is like for

every rage game, I think the core thesis is it's actually very beatable if you're really good at controlling the character.
Mhm.
Um there's no obstacle to stop you from beating the game really quickly if you are good enough or practiced enough.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah, that that is a pitch of get to work.
So now we need conclusion to the story. How did it go? So, you know how I told you about validating with players early? That was like one of my number one learnings from the first from Hrio and Disjoint.
Mhm.
We didn't do that. We completely ignored it.
A damn [laughter] following your own advice.
Following my own advice, but this was a little different. This was way lower risk. It was a much shorter game. So, I actually split the team into two. One team was working on ISTO core, this like shared reusable codebase. And then the other half of the team was working on get to work. So because of the sharable code, we had the title screen. We had a playable game within three weeks. I'm talking like the full flow. Obviously, it was ugly and disgusting, but like all

the infrastructure that you as a beginner that I spent building at the end, we spent like, you know, 10 months building the menu and the flow and all that that was just like out of the box ready to go. And then you built the game in 3 weeks. So it was already fully playable after 3 weeks or like
uh like very jankily. But yes,
we we had like a a dirty ugly play playable prototype in 3 weeks. Yeah, you can you can see it on my YouTube channel. I think I have labeled everything. If you want to pull up a clip, you can show what it looked like at 3 weeks.
Got it. I will grab that clip from your channel.
Yeah. The other really cool thing about choosing a very small project is projecting scope is significantly easier. And so in my pitch, I said from start to finish, we can build this game in one year from start to finish. So October 1st to October 1st, we can have this game done except for one thing. So there was some bonus stuff that we were like if our play testers like the game

we will add a much deeper story and some voice lines uh and maybe do some extra stuff and so um but in general I think like one year on the dot we can do it if we don't do the extra bonus stuff. So we started
we built in total secret from the public um which is crazy and I wouldn't do it again to be clear. This was a very, you know, strange case where we had all this marketing firepower and the game was simple. Um, we had a prototype that was fun like pretty quickly and we were like, okay, like we'll make an exception this time, especially because we cared about marketing momentum, which
in most cases I would not care about. Um, but this was a particularly weird case where, you know, we didn't we didn't tell anybody. So coming up to October, the play tests were going exceptionally well. Exceptionally well. There was such a big difference in reception between Atrio and Get to Work. And this is one of the things that I'm

so excited about having worked on two projects that haven't done so well. It gives you perspective of the difference in this subtle language that people use when they're excited. And like when people played Disjoint, they were like, "This is cool." Okay, yeah, this is cool. When they when they saw Atrio, they was like, "Yeah, this is cool. I would play this." Yeah. In Get to Work, the people who wanted to play the game were like, I I need to play the game. And and when they got the demo, they would play it. Like, we wouldn't have to ask them. They would play multiple times. They would share with their friends. They would be like, I be like, "Oh, it's so fun. Like, when are you building more? Like, I want to be a part of the play test." There was just that like extra effort that they would go to to be involved in the project,
right?
And that was The problem is that you c cannot really feel the difference if you don't have any reference points. Right. That's always I think the problem with that a lot of new developers have this like the people people act said it's cool. So I think it's cool. [laughter]
Exactly. And like that's what I mean by

nebulous is like I don't know how else I would do it without that reference point of like there's no data. There's no you can't measure like maybe you can measure play time but this general excitement is just like fairy dust. Like you can't just grab it and be like yes I have something. So, I mean, gamedev up until this point has felt very risky.
I I think now that we have more reference points, it feels safer. And I I do think that we can minimize the risk from experience, but in general, I don't think we'll ever be immune. Like, there's definitely a future possibility where we release an absolute stinker of a game.
Oh, yeah. [laughter]
Sure.
It just is what it is. But we try our best and we do everything we can to learn and adapt. So, the biggest thing was being able to see that reception. That was very exciting for me because now I had a reference point. The second thing that happened is um Atra obviously managed to pull in some bigger streamers. So, the game was going really well and we were like, "Okay, it is time to add on more features. I'm going to

extend this project. I'm going to spend more money." Like, I feel pretty confident already. The budget was relatively low in comparison to Hrio. I feel confident enough to spend more money. Let's add a story. Was the game in early access or was it still in play testing or how did it pull in additional streamers at this point or was it out already?
Nobody knew about the game. It was just internal play testers. We had people privately playing the game.
Uh we hadn't announced it.
Internal tests were going so well that we were like okay let's
That's right.
increase our stakes. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. People People were actively playing the game without being asked which is like something that had never happened. [laughter]
Okay. Yep. So the one big advantage of working with Atro is we had access to all these streamers u not to play the game but to voice act. And so I had written uh the story and a little bit of context here is when we had done the sentiment analysis for disjoint and for one of the highest scoring parts of the game was the story. People liked how we

had written the comedy of each story, which is very surprising because in my mind, like gameplay has always been a huge and number one focus for us. Obviously, it's we're making games, not writing stories or novels. So, like you got to get the gameplay, but we just happen to write stories that people liked. Uh they find it funny that he scores really well positively in all of our games. So, um I was like, you know what? Let's do it.
Mhm. And so we wrote this massive massive script um and got COVVA to be the narrator. He was our number one choice. I said, "Atra, like if I could get anybody, I'd get COVID VA." And he didn't know him very well. He he reached out be a friend. Um and he was awesome. He was like a lot of streamers are a little bit degenerate. It's just kind of in the nature of how how they operate. They have to be spontaneous and funny. And I think a lot of that mindset comes from being a little bit degenerate and

it's not a bad thing. Um, obviously we're working with Atriarch, so we obviously like streamers quite a bit. Um, C Dog VA on the other hand was a total professional. It was it was like a stark contrast. He showed up on time. He was like super organized, super prepared. He responded instantly. It was crazy. It was awesome. He was more organized than some of the professionals that I work with in the industry. [laughter] And I was like, "Okay,
sold." And also, you did a great job, right? The the voice acting turned out really well.
Awesome. It was it was amazing. Like truly, when it comes to voice acting, I know he's a big YouTuber and streamer, but he is genuinely like a professional voice actor. And so that was that was one of the highlights of the game for me, the project, was working with him and just kind of seeing what a professional can do, especially of his caliber and of his YouTube size. I think there's an interesting power dynamic where you get in a call with somebody who is obviously like you're not naive to how big you are, right? Across his channels like his main channel has 3

million subscribers, his other channel has like four or something crazy. You can't just like pretend that doesn't exist. But when you go into a call and you're and you still treat someone at the same level of respect even if they aren't as big as you and there's like a subtle obviously understanding that if he contributes to the game it's going to greatly increase the sales. He obviously didn't say that and I don't know if he was thinking about it but I certainly was.
Yeah.
Um and it's like this guy's being super nice and humble. That's like all you could ask for. So that's great. That's super awesome. Now, I don't think he'd do it out like the big thing is like I don't think he would do it if we weren't associated with HR. Like he just probably doesn't take random calls. He's a massive streamer and so having him involved in that capacity was amazing.
So you need contacts to get to contacts.
Yeah. Yeah. There these guys are so busy. I mean he's he runs a podcast. He has three different YouTube channels. He's traveling all over the world. And

so to get their time, you just can't like how do you even access that? It just doesn't it doesn't really make any sense.
Because I I I was meaning to ask, do you think it's a reproducible strategy to involve streamers in voice acting or other things
unless you know them? I don't think so.
Got it.
Yeah. I don't think so. Yeah. It just kind of happened. It was very like spur of the moment. And to be honest, we would have been okay by just hiring professional voice actors. The story in its own again scored really well. In fact, it was one of the highest scoring things when it came to the game was the story. People absolutely loved the writing. Um, [laughter]
and obviously super biased, but I'm really trying to focus on like the data of like the comments following what people are saying on stream and in the Steam reviews.
What about the writing did they like here? And why why do you think why do you doing a good job with writing in general in your games? What what's your process there? I think I'm trying to describe it with someone braggadocious.

Don't worry, you have permission to break. Voila.
Okay. Yeah. I think like I think we know how to write funny stuff. Honestly, that's just kind of it. Like our bread and butter is like a certain type of comedy that involves gameplay um that you don't get in like story like traditional media. Taking advantage of the actual gameplay systems to subvert expectations because I've been making games for so long. when we write it just kind of works together nicely cuz I can think about the sequences of where people will be at. I've done so much play testing as a gameplay designer. You can know where people's heads are at with the game play. So they'll be thinking about one thing and then you can like rip the cord from them in another way and like subvert expectations. And I think that really works well. I think as well the story was extremely relatable. It's about climbing the corporate ladder and really a satire on today's like marketplace. Like getting ghosted and having to fill like
submit like an actual physical resume and then when they get the resume they ask you to fill out their online application. Like that's just such a

relatable thing to so many people uh that when you put that in it's almost sad but it's kind of funny and as a way for them to sort of you know relate to real world experiences in in a less negative way. So,
so it relates both to the gameplay as well as to real Verge experiences.
Yeah. And I just think generally I'm naturally a decent writer. [snorts] Uh I work with other people to be clear. I'm I'm not good at working on my own. I'm extremely collaborative. And so what I do is I usually bring in a writer who helps me. I'm usually the primary writer, so I write kind of everything, but they they spitball with me and then they edit my stuff and then,
oh, this doesn't make sense and kind of go back and forth.
Um, so that's kind of my secret sauce is I always work with somebody when I write. I don't work alone typically ever.
Okay. So, you know, with somebody who's skilled at writing and you bounce things back and forth.
Mhm. Cool.
Yeah. Yeah. And I I uh this time, incredible, awesome, super professional.

She she doesn't work in tech at all. She's a teacher. She just happened to be an excellent writer as well. So nice.
I provide the context on like video game stuff and I'm thinking about like the extra context of a game and she's focused on the writing, the grammar, the hits, how it all kind of comes together. So, it's a good combination. I really liked working with her. It was awesome. Let's talk about Let's talk about launch. Let's talk about marketing. That's what we really got into because this is an this is a an experiment in marketing cuz I remember reaching out to you about Steam Nextfest. We had intentionally chosen not to participate in Steam NextFest, which is crazy.
It's so unconventional. It's so crazy.
But we had a good reason. We had all this momentum from streamers. My thought process was streamers, and this is a largely from what Atrock is telling me. He's obviously got a lot of context on what streamers do, what they care about, how to get them interested in the game, what they want. And I'll share some of that with you. Um, it surprised me to be

clear. Um, but he was like, "Momentum matters." Like, if you think about what is most important, would you rather have wish lists or would you rather have sales? And obviously, you'd rather have sales. And how do you get sales? Well, wish lists is one way you convert, but it's also discoverability. It's also from the Steam Page Store. It's also from watching streamers. And so, we basically decided to sacrifice the wish lists for the streamers. If they care about momentum, they discover the game like close to launch and people are excited. It's on their minds. They're thinking about, oh, what games should I play? There's a much higher chance that they will kind of get this snowball effect. Now, normally I would never do this ever in a million years. That's insane. But we had a massive streamer who was for sure going to play the game. He was involved in the project. He was excited about it. He had played the game a ton. And he was like, "This is this is going to be a good stream game." like if nothing else, I am your fall back. If it goes total I'm going to play the

game and really promote the out of it. So that's why we decided to not announce the game or launch the Steam page until 3 weeks before. And that is the earliest you could put out a game. I looked it up. We tried to go the earliest. You can't hot drop it. Uh Steam does not let you do that, but you have to go about 3 weeks before. And so
for for the Steam page. Yeah,
for the Steam page and this was a primarily Steam Steam release
plus Xbox. We had experience with Xbox, but
um you know, primarily Steam. So,
3 weeks up until launch, I had four videos ready cuz I had been recording the whole time. So, I had basically been making videos. I had uh the trailer ready. Uh the game was, you know, pretty close. And so, we were ready to go out the door. We announced 3 weeks right before launch. And I'll send you the graph. This is the difference between atrio and get to work. And Chris Zukowski has talked about wishlist momentum. And I think I think there's some validity to this is that

um sure you can have 50,000 wish lists, which is what Atri had on launch, but that momentum of like people it's that excitement. It's like I'd play this maybe. You think about how many people add stuff to wish lists and never buy it. And I'll get into this. It's like what I call the gap. is that level of excitement that pushes people to buy the game. That getting slowly trickling wish lists doesn't necessarily guarantee conversion because people are just like, "Ah, maybe, yeah, maybe I'll wishlist it." As opposed to like, "Oh my god, I need to play this." And I think this trend that you're seeing in this chart in 3 weeks, we've got 16,000 wish lists, which is obviously like tiny numbers compared to some of the games that are top tier your people are launching with like a million wish lists. But the momentum for three weeks was pretty high. High enough for me to be excited. And again, we were not baking on wish lists. We were really like when launch comes, that's when things hit. And I mean, that was the strategy. The strategy was not we we're going to build wish lists over a couple of years. It

was we're going to have a lot of momentum.
Yes.
You said something along the lines of what streamers care about? What what do streamers care about? Now this is really interesting. So there is obviously social dynamic between different groups of people and this is people's jobs. I think the biggest thing you have to recognize when working with streamers is this is their job. They care about what they do and authenticity is extremely important. Even you know even if you disagree with some streamers a lot of streamers and authenticity is is dependent on what their ch on their channel specifically. Um but it's like what is true to them. There is a huge difference in reception when they are paid to play a game and they have to advertise that it's an ad versus a game that everybody's excited to see them play. And that is the huge difference. You cannot manufacture that excitement on an organic playrough.

Right?
And this is what Atriarch expressed to me is he's like honestly our marketing strategy is I am actually not going to ask anybody to play it. Not a single person. The only person you can guarantee to play is me cuz I'm part of this project. It's my project. But when I play this game, it's going to be slightly inauthentic because I am biased. I'm super super biased to this game.
Mhm.
So the only way to find success is to actually build a really good game for stream. There's no shortcut to this. There's no getting around it. You work with the streamer, it's not going to guarantee you success. And we've seen this actually. There's been some really big streamers who have put out games that have absolutely flopped. In fact, there's been streamers who are five times bigger than Huck, six times bigger, like massive streamers, and our games have absolutely flopped. I don't know if you can show it. I don't know if I want to show it. I don't want to cause drama.
That's okay. I'll show you. I'll show you after. And then you can you can see it was expressed to me that it's all dependent on the game. He is a backup.
Um he got us this the voice actors and

the big thing that he did was sort of the subconscious bringing the game to the forefront of people's subconscious minds. streamers, big subconscious minds. Oh, Atriarch made this game. I'll check it out. That's all you get. You get the opportunity for them to look at the Steam page for them to properly evaluate and choose on their own whether or not this game is for them. That's extremely important. You only get step one.
Yeah.
But most people never get step one. And that is a massive advantage. We had enough experience. This is like our third commercial game. We had enough experience plus Atriarch telling us like, you know, thinking about your streamable stuff. We had enough experience and confidence building that game to know that if we got to step one, we could carry our way through. But I just want to express that is not a free ticket. If you could get the biggest streamer in the world, maybe that's a big difference cuz Kaisenad is like 100 times thousand million times bigger than everybody else. But like anybody in the normal category, if you don't build a good streamable game, it's not going to

work. Like just straight up, there's no cheat code to this. You got to do it right. You got to understand what makes a good streamable game. And that's very challenging. It it it has a lot to do with emotions and storytelling and beats. A lot of the way I approach this was thinking about a good YouTube video. Obviously, my experience in YouTube is what I wanted to rely on because it's what I know. Um, and I think about a good hook, how people would introduce the story and like the twists and turns along the way of like drama and reaction that they could have to make a good experience, a watchable experience. So, we thought about a lot of that. There was a lot of discussion, theory crafting on like how do we structure this game to be great for both stream and YouTube. And obviously also the star page has to be very optimized for that, right? Cuz you said step one is that you get them to click on your store page. What what do streamers want to see on your store page? What do you think?
Uh that that might be a mis misnomer. I don't know if they care about the store page. They might watch someone else play it.

They might watch a YouTube video about it. They might hear it from other streamers. Uh or they might click on the on this YouTube page, sure, but they'll watch the video, right? If they if they watch the game play just like any other game and they think it's goofy and fun, if it's relatable to another game they've played that did well on stream, they're thinking about
they're collating their other data of like what videos did really well, what streams did really well and trying to correlate that with what they're seeing with yours.
It's hard because you don't know unless you kind of talked to them or you've done YouTube what works and why it works. But because I had atroc and I'd done a YouTube channel, I have a much sort of keener sense on, oh, this did well because of these reasons. So, it was a good fit for us. I don't know if I could help other people find the same success. Maybe they could. I'm sure they could, but you know, for us, I just want to focus on what we were thinking.
And those like those 100,000 wish lists that you got in 3 weeks, what were
16,000?
16,000.
Yeah.
But with a lot of momentum, right?

Yes.
That's the release. That's the release. Okay. Got it. And then it kept growing after launch. Yeah.
Yes. It's just Yeah. continues to go up after launch.
Got it for sure.
And like where do where did those 16,000 come from?
That was from uh primarily my YouTube channel. Actually, almost exclusively my YouTube channel.
Okay.
No one else was talking about the game uh cuz we hadn't released anything. We didn't do a demo. Atro gave a shout out obviously in his channel and they was, you know, his streamer friends kind of heard about it a little bit, but primarily it was my YouTube channel. And at this point, I had kind of really started to figure out YouTube. And you know, I'm saving this for later about YouTube. So, I've kind of been light on the details, but
you can kind of see that my viewership numbers started to really go up at this point. Um, and it's sort of the same realization that I had with GameDev is the idea really matters. And we were stuck we were stuck with Atrio. And so my my viewership was being handicapped because I was working on hard mode. I

was playing on hard mode making videos about Atrio. Um, but we'll we'll get there. So, let's talk about launch because launch launch was insane. I will share this, but I want to share a couple things across the board. So, launch weekend happens and it goes really well. Atro actually doesn't play the game the first weekend, and that's intentional. Obviously, we don't want the guy who's played the game a shitload to play the game right off the bat. We want people who genuinely are new to the game to play the game on stream because that's what matters. Seeing people's genuine reactions to the game is important. So we we had a plan. Hark was going to hold off for kind of as long as possible. We actually in secret built him a secret version that was way harder without telling him, which is quite funny. A lot of work. I don't know if I do it again. Um cuz I wanted to find a way to have him have an organic playthrough
cuz he play tested the out of the game. So he was much better.
Um that happened. I also ran a speedrun competition. I'll talk about that in a bit. Um so that was that was very

helpful. And so launch went really well. We were very happy with the launch, especially given the timeline was much shorter. The game was much smaller scoped. The polish was obviously a little bit less in terms of art. Um, but the general reception was quite good. And then the weekend hit and people started to play it. Now, I've listed all of the YouTube videos uh that kind of came out and like it kind of gives you an idea of like when people played the game. So, a bunch of streamers played it right off the bat. And again, Atroch hadn't asked anybody to play it. It was really this rolling organic effect of one streamer had a really good time and good viewership with the game. And so other streamers were like, "Okay, this seems like it'd be good for my stream." Um, I think the biggest streamer right off the bat was XQC, who's quite big. Um, I think Forson played it. We just kind of had this like organic momentum where people picked it up the first day, had a good time. Uh, Squeaks played the game. So Squeaks is a bit different. He's he's close friends with Atriarch.

Uh again though, he would not have played as much as he did just because they're friends. That it's not how it works. Again, they're professionals. They care about their channel. If it sucks, they'll play it a little bit and then they'll move on. So, you know, you got to put in the work and it's got to be good. I think the big turning point, so the launch was very successful and I would have been happy with that, but the big turning point was Lewig. Lewig, who again really good friends with Atriarch, but um again was not obligated to play the game. He didn't ask him to play the game. He picked it up and the chat loved it. It was like, it was his biggest video of that month.
People went nuts for a couple of reasons. We put in this sequence called the hat sequence where you can choose to fall down to the bottom.
I saw this Yeah. this this line of like a series of rooms
where C Dobba is basically like,
"Okay, well, there's a hat at the bottom of this, but it takes you all the way to the bottom of the game. You have to start again." And there's literally the hat does nothing. It doesn't help you in any way. It just is funny. And we were

expecting like one big streamer to do it and then no one else to do it. Every streamer. I'm not kidding. Every single streamer did it because it's such a good streamable experience. And it's so much funnier because the precedent had been set by uh Only Up where at the very end they make you fall but they don't tell you which in my opinion is kind of I'm really not a fan of like unfair mechanics. And so we used that that momentum and that context to flip it on its head where we were like, "No, no, like we're telling you in advance. You have to go through seven rooms of like this annoying dialogue to go there. You got to earn the right to fall to the bottom." which makes it so much funnier cuz like you're listening to these voice lines and you're literally sitting in a room that's empty with nothing going on just the narrator's making fun of you and then you choose to fall to the bottom and then you get this stupid hat that says dunce on it uh and then you got to do the whole thing again that's it and like uh you get a song which was

amaz like people really liked the song it was part of Atrox community we had this like uh talented group of musicians who who made like a legitimate banger song like people actually were like, "Put this on Spotify. I will genuinely listen to this." Um, so that was a huge bonus. [music]
Congratulations, you've done it.
So it it took off the edge of them falling and the stream loved it. Like people were having a really good time and then when you got back up there was a second hat. So, you know, it's like, "Oh, they couldn't possibly do this again." You go into the room and it's like, "No, no, there's a second hat, but like are you serious?" Like you like it's it's another hat, but it's like the cheapest possible version of the same hat. So, we tell you in advance that it's like going to be a let down. Cuz if you if you promise something grand, they'll be disappointed. So, if you're like, "No, this is literally going to be the most disappointing thing you've ever done." It lets the streamer be funny. And Lwig skipped the second hat. He was

one of the only streamers who was like, "Ah, I don't think so." and was like joking around and kept going to the point where he couldn't return to get the hat. The stream shirt turned so toxic they were so mad that he actually had to end stream. He came back the next day, played it all over again to get the second hat.
Oh god.
Which is I mean I mean good for you.
Yeah, good for you. It made the stream so much better, right? people people were talking about like uh I think it was like their dead friend Jonah who would have loved to seen the hat and it was just like so many running memes throughout the entire gameplay and the video crushed I think right now
uh it is the biggest get to work video with 2.6 6 million views.
And a big part of that is obviously we were very careful to give people tools to create these streamable fun moments, this narrative sequence all the way through uh to beating the game. And the the genre, the rage game genre really

allows you to do that.
Mhm.
Um so we were playing with an advantage and we we recognize that we had a big advantage when it comes to making videos as opposed to example Thronefall which doesn't give you those same highs and lows. Um, but again, your game has sold, you know, 10 times more than us. So, just to be clear, a lot of people seem focused on YouTube views, but it's not the end all be all. Obviously, look at Thronefall. Like, Lwig didn't play Thronfall. He didn't have a 2.6 million view video, but like people love that game. Uh, so there's so many, and you had mentioned this in all of your podcasts, there's so many different ways to find success. This is just the way that we found it because it plays to our strengths. So, just keep that in mind. Just kind of important.
Now, to be fair, there I think there are kind of two ways to get eyeballs on your game. One is content creators and the other one is Steam.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we'll get into that. I don't know if this is going on too long, but we're we're almost at the end and then we can dive into all the juicy stuff.

This is yours already. Yeah. You're solo podcasting, but I'm really enjoying it. Let's
Something happens after Lewig plays the game.
We go crazy in Korea, which is unexpected. Now, we had obviously localized the game. You know, that's part of our flow. That's part of our advantage of working on multiple games is we now have a localization system. We know what to do. It's like fairly efficient. You know, we have a team that we work with who does some of the localization work with us. We don't have to like build localization systems. Um, so we we localized in a bunch of different languages, especially Korean. Um, it's like the classics. Anyway, the game after Lewig plays it goes absolutely nuts on Korea. And I think for a couple reasons. I think the culture is like a very strong gaming culture. If you look at like League of Legends, they're like the best that them and China are some of the best players by far. And I think their aptitude for taking on difficult games, that culture, they like challenging stuff.
So I think just having that challenge

along with the flow aspect of the game appealed to a lot of players. And so I don't know if it was Lewig because a lot of people were playing the game and so the data is very messy. I did my best to kind of collate what's going on, but I I do think that Lewig probably contributed to the success in Korea because you can see some bigger videos spike in Korea. What's interesting is China, we went big in China, but it fell off pretty hard and the reviews were pretty negative
and I was like, what the hell's going on? And then I I found out later that their version uh I think it was Chinese Tik Tok or Billy Billy. We went viral on there out of our like someone else started posting videos about us.
Um but they were posting about how like funny the game was cuz it does capture your attention. It's a guy it's a bald guy in rollerblades on both his hands and feet.
And they didn't express how hard the game was. Oh,
I don't think, and this is I'm not sure 100%. But I'm assuming they don't have

the same context on rage games. And so when they picked up the game, they were like, "Ah, funny flowy game." And then they got dunked on and we're like, [laughter] "What is this?" Because obviously my channel expresses that a lot more clearly. Like
this is what the game is. Only buy it if you're up for the challenge. Uh because setting expectations is correct. So that's my assumption.
Somebody did incorrect marketing basically and set you up with wrong expectations. But if we're a team of three, what are we going to do? Like market in every region. Like it's not not AAA, so it's fine. I mean, it's fine. Like the vast majority of refunds are in China, but you know, a lot of stuff is out of your control. So I also Yeah, let me share this with you is I I did a Steam analysis again. Um the big thing were bugs and glitches. And I think this is a big focus for us as a studio, really thinking about the production side of things. So when we do a postmortem, there's three categories that we really focus on is how do we make this game more fun? And so that really is like thinking about Steam

reviews, thinking about play time, thinking about engagement.
Actually, let me let me pull this up. I want to watch list.
This was Google. I don't know chat GBT. This was a long time ago. Honestly, I don't remember.
Okay.
Right. So these are the three categories when we run a postmortem. This is what we do. One, we look at how do we sell more copies. That's primarily marketing hooks, appeal, that sort of stuff. And that is largely data focused. That's looking at Steam wish lists. That's looking at market stuff. When we do our postmortem, there's not a ton of discussion. It's really we're just looking at data. The second is how do we ship a higher quality product? Better Steam reviews, better public reception, less bugs, less design mistakes, that sort of thing. That one's usually a little more in-depth. And how do we improve how we make games? So we want to be more efficient. We don't we want to make less technical mistakes during the development process. We want to be more efficient. We want to improve our teamwork. A lot of discussion kind of goes into there. And I think the big area that um we want to improve upon is

shipping with less bugs. Uh and being more technically proficient. Um and we have some thoughts on this. I think with the success of Get to Work, there's less pressure to release kind of on hard deadlines. There's really no reason to launch when, you know, at a specific time. I think we want to give ourselves a lot more leeway between announcing and shipping. Like we want to My thought process is I only really want to announce a launch date when we're feature complete. And that's like giving us a specific amount of time to fix bugs and really ship with a higher quality product. that's going to be my focus for the next game is um once you have that lack of pressure taking advantage of that because there's really no reason I mean there is a reason it's it's really easy to get lost in the sauce and feel the pressure but it it takes that experience to take a step back and look at your production cycle and look at your game and be like okay take a breather you don't need to launch now

you don't need to announce now like you're only adding these like fake pressures they're they're simulated based on how you feel
anyway there's One more big thing,
this list of So, so you analyzed all of your reviews and you found the top 10 worst issues people had in according to Steam reviews and the things that people like most according to Steam reviews.
Yeah, that's it's interesting data. So on the first plates we got bucks and glitches, inconsistent movement, lack of optimization, and on the pro side, smooth, satisfying movement, challenging yet fair gameplay, engaging, well-written narrative. Interesting.
Yeah. So you can see I think uh we got the main like I'm very proud of the things that went positive.
Yeah.
Like we got the things that we had to get right. Right. Like at the very top it was like movement mechanics. That is literally the game. If it was lower or if it was number six or if it was on the other column, I'd be very depressed.

We spent so much. We spent all of our effort building the movement mechanics. And that just reaffirms to me that that we're now understanding where we should be putting our time and effort and it's paying off.
Nice.
And even though the success is not at the levels of some of the other podcasters you've had, we are seeing from game to game an increase in commercial success. And if this keeps going, so long as we survive, which we are, which is great, you know, eventually we'll reach a turning point where we're very successful. So, I'm not too worried about it. And in fact, I'm very pleased to see an upward trajectory.
Mhm.
And then you can see that the dialogue is is number three and four. So, again, people people like the story.
Exactly. The things that you try to make good ended up being good. That's
Yeah,
that's reaffirming for sure. And then the issues people had, as you said, are off a lot of things that with more time would have been probably easy to iron out a bit more.
Yeah. Yeah. Technical experience. Um,

so,
you know, trying to nail that down, I think,
is going to be a big thing for us.
Let's get into the juicy stuff. There's one thing about Get to Work that I had not mentioned yet,
and that was my YouTube channel. because I know you and I had a brief conversation about YouTube channels and whether or not they are effective. And I know with the success of Thronefall, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're sort of the feeling that the Steam algorithm is so powerful that it dwarfs anything you do in comparison to that effort. And I am in a different camp. That's interesting. Yeah, we'll we should argue about that. And um I'm happy to clarify my position a bit more. Should we get into that now? Yes, because there was a good transition.
There was one thing that happened in Get to Work in terms of marketing that was effective.
And so while we were building the game,
people kept saying one thing. The speedrun for this game is going to be insane. And this is like from the first

month, the first play test we had all the way to the end. It was this constant narrative of like, I cannot wait to see the speedrun. The speedrun's going to be nuts. Speedrun's going to be crazy. Everybody kept saying it. [snorts] And so I kept thinking about the speedrun video because Atreo, I had done a speedrun video and it did extremely well. It was my biggest video by far.
Mhm. It has 1.2 million views which is insane. Just a little bit of clarity. Like most of my videos going up to that outside of my outliers sit at about 10 to 15k views with a lot of effort, a lot of time. A lot of other gamedev YouTubers were doing way better than I was. And this video absolutely crushed it. And I started to re I kind of know this before, but I I I definitely made the realization that certain video ideas are just better. They tell a better story. They have this narrative structure that's closer to a movie

that's enticing. It's engaging. It appeals to a lot of people. And a speedrun is very interesting. And it's, you know, it's a great marketing tactic, but it's also super cool. I mean, I just like I just like speedruns in general. Uh, and it just happens to also be a great marketing tool. And so, based on the success of the Atrio speedrun, I knew I wanted to run a speedrun competition. And so, I had I had intentionally done it where there was a prize after 24 hours, after 72 hours, and after a week. That way, there is a clear narrative beat for three different points. And so, not one person just like beats everybody and then it's done. It's like, okay, I'm competing for the first 24 hours. Who is the best at adapting the game quickest? And then after that, like, who can discover new new run techniques, new glitches, new uh strats? And at the end is who's just the best. Now that all the strats are found, who is just the greatest? Um, and so it gives three very distinct beats. I knew it would be good. Um, and when it

happened, those first seven days, it was pure chaos because there were so many people running it. After it happened, I was like, "Holy this is going to be the best video I've ever made." And so, I set aside a literal full month, 30 days, working hours, 8 hours a day, I set aside to do nothing but edit the video. And there was so much content. Like, it was like people streaming for eight hours a day. There was like 50 runners. I had to sift through all of it. It was it was insane. And when it comes to like time invested versus payoff there, I would not have done this for anything else. But because of the other video doing so well and because I've been doing this so long, I can envision how this would play out. I knew this was going to be a banger video. Let me send you the data.
I've seen the video. It is a banger.
The video is an hour long. It's an hour and 10 minutes, which is absurd. To be clear, that's a movie. M
my watch retention rate is an average of

18 minutes.
Even after all this time, people are still like have an average retention rate of that. It usually doesn't look like that. Usually it drops off as it gets exposed to more audience
uh cuz they're less interested in that particular niche or genre. This has just kept the whole way through. It just captures your attention the whole way through. I don't think I'll ever have a video this strong ever again. And that's okay. I just it was exciting to know that I had a big project that would be this good and so I put in the time and investment. The the video is currently sitting at 4.7 million views. It is the biggest video, the biggest piece of content for Get to Work. It's bigger than Lwig. It's bigger than we had the biggest streamer in Spain. I think Spain play the game called Rubious. He has 13 million subscribers just his gaming channel.
And this is this is bigger than that.
I kind of knew it was a banger. I didn't know it would be this big. And the fact that it's an hour and 10 minutes long, 4 million people are watching like close

to an hour is crazy. If you think about the impact of this versus a Tik Tok, you can get 4 million views on a Tik Tok. That's 30 seconds. And the context in which they're absorbing the information is it's like flip flip flip. Okay, that's kind of cool. Flip flip flip. You watch an hour, you're invested. You know what the game is. You see a screenshot, even six months later, get to work. And so the power of having someone watch a video like this is you just can't discount it. So I want to share I want to share this is sales data not wish lists. This is sales. Obviously I I can't share the numbers. Um you can see the first month was was great and then it drops off. We had a great first month and then we had the expected drop off. The peak that is when I released the video
a spike that is comparable to the second week of launch. that that video in itself, there was nothing going on. Uh this was the only kind of real thing going on when I released that video. It was so big that it basically brought in a second spike. Now, I don't expect this to repeat be repeatable. And if devs are

thinking, oh, I might do a speedrun video, like getting a video that does 4.7 million views is absurd and not reproducible. Like, I don't expect to do this again. That's not a thing that's reasonable. I just happen to know that it was a great video. I happened to get lucky on the content and then I put all my effort into it. Um, so it paid off. Now obviously you can get effects smaller than that, but I just want to illustrate that it can be an effective tool and my biggest reasoning for running this YouTube channel and putting in so much effort is we are seeing a trend of people moving to the creator space. Uh, the influencers are having more influence on games. Yes. slowly every single year it's growing in that direction. Yeah, they do. And so my thought process that has kind of evolved over time is I kind of want to take some of that agency back. I don't want to be at the you know behest of a random streamer. Like it's an ecosystem obviously, but if I can have my own chunk of influence, then I, you know, if

the game dies, I can still drag its dead corpse across the finish line like I did for Hrio,
right? It's it's an assurance policy in case I need it. It's it's the push that gets the stone rolling to snowball, but it's also the thing that might save us as a studio in case things don't go well. And just for continuity, I'll I'll share where we at with reviews. So, we're sitting at 1,750 reviews, which is obviously our best game so far considering we only put in a year's worth of work for half the team kind of. I mean, the whole team was working on infrastructure, so
yeah. Um,
least amount of time spent, but still best performing game.
Yeah. But keep in mind, we spent five years on Atrio and a lot of that moved over experience and code. So I don't want to say it was a year like we built a massive amount of code, you know, previous to this in preparation for. So I don't want people thinking, oh, you know, get to work was built in a year when really it it wasn't. It's like hard

to
think about. But now for us it is like we do count it as a year because we have that code. So every project now just kind of has it. So we think about those timelines now as you know when we start the project we assume we start with the title screen and all that stuff. So let's talk about YouTube. Have you done the the math on the spike you got from the video? Like what's your what was your monthly salary from working on a YouTube video for a month? Was it was it good time spent from a peru financial perspective when like are you talking about just the YouTube ad revenue or are you talking about sales conversion?
I [clears throat] guess we I guess we can do both. I when I think about YouTube I don't even consider the ad revenue. In my opinion YouTube doesn't pay me anything. I just assume like it's a little bonus money whatever because the money is not significant at all in comparison to the amount of hours. I I like if you look at my videos,

especially the early ones, like they're they're not great, but I put in a ton of effort.
I just kind of how I've always been. And so they don't for the hours spent, they don't bring that money back.
No.
But I run a a business and my business is selling games. I'm not a YouTuber at all. Flat up. The way I think about this is this is for the games. Now, there are a couple videos, the Blender videos, but that that was to introduce Atriarch into uh the gaming space. That was really like a good way for us to like learn about 3D and make videos out of it because I knew they they'd do well and grow the channel. But you won't see me making videos just for the sake of making videos. That's not my goal. And so, I look at it, did this convert to sales? That's all I care about. And this spike is very significant. It's like a massive a massive chunk of our get to work earnings. And so, yes, absolutely, without question, this video was worth it.
Okay.
100%.
Okay. Got it.
All right. So, should I maybe clarify my

position real quick and then we can see what we agree or disagree on.
Definitely. I've been doing all the talking.
Uh I think we have a lot a lot of overlap actually. I think maybe a little bit bit more than expected really. I also agree that um having a YouTube channel is like an insurance policy. So I I think that's exactly the correct way to think about it, right? The only thing that I would say is that if you think about it on paper, what's what's easier? Is it easier to build a YouTube channel with 100,000 subscribers or is it easier to get somebody with 100,000 subscribers to play your game? I think the letter is both easier and more reproducible because you can do it multiple times, you can do it with m multiple channels. So I think if you have a really good game that leans into like that like makes for good content, then getting other people to play it, other big channels to play it is just on paper the far more effective strategy than doing

all of the hard work of building a channel that size yourself. See, that's interesting because I I mean it it assumes that you can get the big people to play
and the other strategy assumes that you uh managed to build a channel that size yourself.
True. True. And you might be right. Maybe it's just cuz I've been doing YouTube for so long that it's like it feels like it's more of a known quantity. It feels like it's less risky to be able to put out a video that you know will do well. It's just it feels less complex than making a game. There's just so much going on when it comes to games that so much more can go wrong. Whereas a video, I feel more confident when I have something really good that it will do well.
Mhm.
U maybe more so now that I've been doing it for 5 years, but yeah, I I just I find it very challenging to find get other people to play the game.
That's a very scary thing for me. I I still not super confident
and it's oftenimes it's not really like you can talk them into it kind kind of

like you said it's like you can maybe if you're lucky you can get them to check it out you can get them to look at your store page or look at the trailer maybe if you do it well but beyond that it's just just the game just has to the game has to convince them to play essentially.
Yeah. And it's also like games that don't stream well and games that don't do well on YouTube those make me even more nervous. But the problem you also have when running your own YouTube channel is if you don't have a game that does well on YouTube, then you're also going to have a more difficult time. So it's kind of same problem. Same problem in in disguise a little bit from Exactly. from my experience.
And if you look at the game like the top games this month, most of the games are not great stream games,
but they're they're like way out selling Get to Work. And so I I don't think my position is correct. I just I feel like this is the best decision for us
based on the skills that we have. That's really all that I that's the stance that

I have. I I like making YouTube videos.
I think I am good enough to be sort of in the top range of gamedev creators on YouTube
to stand out.
And we have a sizable enough audience now and we've put in the work that it benefits us to keep going.
Yeah. And also to be fair, I think the numbers [clears throat] make a big difference, right? So whether you have a YouTube like a gamede YouTube channel where your average de logs gets like 10 10k views or something or getting 4.7 million views on a video, obviously those two things are not not the same, right? So it depends. When I did when I did the data analysis, my conclusion was if you want to see wish list numbers that have any sort of sizable impact in comparison to Steam NextFest or the Steam algorithm, I sort of feel like it has to be a video has to get 100,000 views or more. That's kind of obviously you can do less. uh we were

doing less and still seeing decent data, but like assuming you have a banger game that's really fun. Um 100,000 is my personal cap
of like where I start to see a tangible difference.
And it's not just direct wish list data. I think obviously for us the YouTube channel has like opened up massive opportunities.
Streamers were definitely more interested in working with us because we had a YouTube channel. They saw my content. you know, if they see a game dev studio that has, you know, three videos that have over a million views, it's like, okay, they know how to talk my language. They understand what's going on. There might be less of this weird dynamic of like fanboying over a creator where you kind of know like it just kind of changes the landscape a little bit. I don't think is the end all beall, but it's like subtle enough that I I think it has helped us. The other thing I wanted to mention is being able to work with trailer editors. I mean, if you think about the pieces of marketing

that are so important, your trailer is like really number one. How how people see the trailer is like the most important. And if you've run a YouTube channel and put out like 50 videos and put 40 hours into each video, you're naturally going to have a better sense of like what makes a good video. And I'm not saying my trailers are the best, but I also don't think I think they would be so much worse if I hadn't done all this work. Like having that eye for engagement and storytelling beats at least improves our trailers.
Mhm. So there are some benefits.
Mhm. Yeah. I also think there's not necessarily a right or wrong here. It's more like as always the answer is sort of a little bit it depends, right? It's hard to hard to give general advice. Should you start a YouTube channel? Should you not? It really depends on your skill sets, how much time you're willing to invest,
like sort of the the numbers you can expect. Also, with the kind of game you make, for example, and so on.

Mhm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Like I said, uh, Get to Work was playing on easy mode. That was one of the big things is Hri was playing on hard mode and we [laughter] were like like what would happen if we
played on easy mode? And you can kind of see the results with some of my videos. There's, and I'll send you this, there was a period of time from 2021 to 2022 where I didn't grow at all.
Those atrial videos, it was pretty sad to put on all that effort and literally not grow at all. And that big spike in 2024 is when I started, you know, I released the speedrun video and then I did the Blender videos. I just had the opportunity to pick better ideas with the same level of execution. I had now built all the skills to build good videos. And then you can see the channel just go nuts.
Mhm.
Uh Get to Work is just a streamable YouTubable game. Uh it plays into our strengths and the channel just did better which feels nice.
And the speedrun video you did it it felt like something that was planned almost planned for a long time. Right.

When I when I watched this video I was like
freak that's kind of a big brain move. And I I I got the feeling that this was something you planning for for a long time. This specific video was was not a spontaneous idea.
No, no, no. Like the structure of the competition really laid the groundwork for a good video.
If we had just winged it, it wouldn't have been as strong.
Um like getting getting the word out and like putting in prize so we would get good players and
plus we had a decent player base at the beginning to get people involved I think really helped. Yeah. So
a lot of foresight into what would make a good video in that structure. I think there's something very interesting in that even if we say like not everybody every game not every game is speedr runn speed runnable enough that you can do this very well right but I think the idea of planning specific videos a lot of time in advance and uh spending a lot of time and effort building up to them

could potentially be worth it for other games with somewhat different ideas for example and I'm not you've probably seen those YouTube videos where somebody's like, "I took a picture of me every day for 10 years or something." And these
totally
these always do relatively well, I feel like, because it was so much time invested into something that you can just consume in 2 minutes. So, it's
Mhm.
often times feels just worth it to watch it. I wonder there are probably a lot of ideas similar to this or like this that you can do with video games. Maybe also somewhat depending on uh what game you're making. But I I really wonder how well something like I I took a screenshot of my game every day for 10 years or something, how how that would do. And for for me, the big thing is the type of game.
I I definitely am very cognizant that if we choose a specific type of game, it will impact the quality of videos greatly.
Yeah.
Um and I'm not against doing a, you

know, in the future doing a game that's just not good for YouTube. U because clearly that you can find success. Just the strategies to be successful are totally different.
Yeah,
I think it would be fun to work on a game that's purely gameplay focused.
Uh I think Thronefall is one of those examples. I mean to be fair, your your devlogs were my favorite and so I hope you do more. I was like I watched all of them. I'm also like a rabid consumer of devlogs. I watch a lot just because I like them. Um, and I I really liked yours a lot. So,
yeah, thank you.
Even if they aren't like the same level of viral potential, they don't have the same level of viral potential as like, you know, get work get to work speedrun, I I still love them personally. So,
yeah, I also like making them. So, there there will probably be more.
Y
sweet. That's awesome.
But now that I'm starting to dive into a new project, right, we've just just started development on a new project. I think this is a good idea to maybe scout

or think about a couple of video ideas very early on that I'm confident would do well. And if you
like this is something I'll have to think about. I don't have any super spontaneous ideas on this, but
this could be worth investing, right? Cuz YouTube nowadays is kind of like every video kind of stands on its own anyway. It's not like there's a lot of momentum with YouTube channels. Maybe maybe you disagree. That's what it feels like to me. It's like one video can do very well, the other one can do very poorly. It's like they're not really that connected. So,
no, [snorts] not anymore. They definitely have done a severant uh like a severance of the subscriber count and the video virality.
Um like when I released the Hrio speedrun video, if if it was tied to my subscriber count, I would get nowhere near 1.2 million views.
I was at like 55,000. And so that clearly there's a huge disconnect there where you can go viral with the right video. Um and and the biggest creators are saying it doesn't

matter at all. I like to think it matters because I've been doing it long enough where it's bigger. [laughter]
Yep.
But you know, generally I do think that if Mr. Beast started a new channel with his level of production, he could he could get similar views very soon.
Yeah.
I mean, just based on how the algorithm works. But there's definitely a shift. and I want to kind of change topics to short form content. Now, I personally have not done much short form content because like we're only a small team and I don't have infinite time and so we've really invested in long form content. But with the changing of attention spans and how people are consuming media, especially in the younger generation, I am starting to think about short form content more seriously. If you look at Venad, who I don't want to start any rumors, but like come on. I'm pretty sure it's Danny. Like, let's be real. Um, you can see an obvious pivot. He released a devlog and I don't think it

did that well in comparison to what this person was, you know, expecting and then immediately pivot to short form content. Uh, and it has done crazy well.
It has done Yeah, the the shorts are really good. They have done really well. Mhm. Yeah.
I also think it's an interesting case study.
Yeah, for sure. Um, just I don't know if it's all I want to do. It's pretty It's just not the media I consume. I don't really like consuming short form media. Kind of makes me feel sad. I don't know why. It's just like so tailored to be
like brain rotted almost.
Then I'm like, uh, I kind of feel bad. I should be doing something more productive. So I I tend not to consume that much short form media, but I I do think it's extremely important in the future. It's something I'm going to explore for sure.
Yeah. Same. Same. I want to look into that. sort of trying to find the the correct angle. I feel like if [clears throat] you want to do it well, it's it's also not not really best done. It's in hindsight, it's probably best done during development and with some planning and with some some care and

attention that you pick the correct ideas, right? I am of the firm believer that those those cascading decisions happen in the first six months and you got to that first those first six months are absolutely critical.
Like picking the idea really really matters a lot.
I I think it obviously changes. It's like I'm probably I'm probably might do a video about that. But as you build your experience where we are right now as a studio now, now that we're in our 11th year, I feel less concerned about the technical execution. And so for us, the impact of a really good idea greatly outscales everything else because we have the ability to execute. And so now when I'm thinking about how to find commercial success,
it's really like if the idea sucks, I think we're screwed. I I I genuinely think that ideas are so so important.
And I'm not just talking about like thinking about it in the shower. I'm thinking about like
finding an idea and measuring it and

like having some sort of substantial context and evidence to suggest that it's commercially viable to suggest that it's going to make people go, "Oh my god, I want to play this. I have this here. Here's the gap." You can pull this up uh in your video. the gap. I'm constantly thinking about uh the gap where it's like this kind of looks cool and oh my oh my god I need to play this. I actually think the gap is even bigger than that but I couldn't fit it into a page.
There's a jump in the graph where the reaction from play testers goes from this kind of cool to oh my gosh I got to play this.
Yeah. And this this next game I am definitely more focused on finding out how we can measure that. And I don't know if we can, but I'm going to try.
Mhm.
Do I remember correctly that your next game is sort of another automation game on a wall or was that
uh not anymore? We pivoted. So with the

success of Get to Work,
we we saw this momentum
obviously with streamers and having the insights of how to build a good streamer game. Um, we have noticed a trend where streamers are starting to work with studios. The big ones at least, the big streamers are starting to work with studios because there's that natural symbiotic relationship where if they promote the game, you know, they have enough influence and then the game makes a lot of money. It's just it's that natural transition. And I think that we will see more of that over time. Do you think the the way this relationship works is typically that streamers just get a cut from the games revenue or how how does this relationship work typically?
I think so. Uh obviously there's been different ways it's done. Some streamers are starting publishing studios. So off-brand games is Lewigs and Stanzes. Um, and then OTK is Asmin Gold and all

of OTK's Mad Mushroom is the publishing for OTK, which has a bunch of different streamers in it. They run their own game show, and to be honest, I don't know if that works, and I'll tell you why. And I don't mean to on them. They they are huge, and they're clearly they understand games. But if you want to be associated with a project, I do think that personal investment is what gets people to care. Like an entity and a corporation has less of a chance to get people invested on a personal level than the actual individual. So for example, if you know one of the streamers, his name is Esvand and I don't want you I don't know much about them. I don't really watch that space. I'd watch more Lwig and Atriarch. But when the conference happens and like Sven goes like, "Oh, check out this game from our publishing studio." It's it's clear that they weren't involved in the production, it's clear that they're not as personally invested in the game. And so there that

extra gap is is bigger than you think. I think it goes back to the gap where, you know, they're thinking, "Oh, it's probably just a small thing where it's really like this massive gap between like, oh, I actually care about this project and it's like, oh, he just invested in it. That's kind of cool. I will I will look at it for a tiny bit, but realistically I'm not going to put much credence into it. Um, as opposed to like what Co Carnage is doing. He's going to all the he's building a game. He's a big streamer and he is attending all the meetings. He's like super invested in the game. He talks about it. He knows about the systems. He's designed a bunch of stuff. He's genuinely trying to learn about game design. I think that will see more success than these publishing studios because there's not that gap which is why streamers are effective. People go for the personalities. They find this connection with that person and if you abstract that it reduces the effectiveness on maybe an exponential scale. I mean, I could be wrong, but I

like, in my opinion, it feels like they're just starting a publishing company, which means they have to compete with the best publishers who have figured out all their Like, Deolver runs like a welloiled machine. And if you don't have an advantage on them, like I don't see what why would you be more successful than them if your main advantage is not an advantage anymore. So,
but I do think that the individual streamers are going to start to figure this out at some point and then the marketplace will be more saturated. So,
long-winded story, we're thinking about doing another streamer game. I have more I have two more slides. This is all I have. So, we were thinking about the perfect stream game. And this is really also YouTube. This is also like content focused. So, I was thinking really four categories. There's online co-op, there's horror, there's AAA multiplayer, and there's rage games. Those are the four that I've identified. I'm sure there's some nuance to this and I'm

wrong about, but this is what I'm thinking about. Obviously, AAA multiplayer, like Valerant, there is a massive section of viewership on Valerant. It's endless. People watch it for years and years. It's like truly the king of content.
Like, I'm not going to make a first-person multiplayer shooter. That's insane. I don't have a staff of 400 people. Like, that's not even a question. I I don't think we'll ever do that. We're not going to do esports. Like, that's that's a whole another ball game. That's like trying to go into the mobile space.
You know, you know what? I think I think there'll be a time where it'll be doable for indie devs, but I think we're not there yet.
No, I don't think we're there yet. And it certainly like I love shooters. That's like AAA shooters is what I play on my free time. Um, but I have no desire to
spend five years on a game and then watch the player count go to zero in the first week.
Yeah,
that sounds scary. Horror games, it's really interesting. So, uh, I reached out to Gavin.

Um, Cole, you know what's interesting? I've reached out to a couple of YouTube devs just like cold DM'd them
and a lot of them have just responded and met with me. When I was first starting out, I think I had like 30,000 subscribers. I reached out to Danny
and I had a big video at the time, the one year and two year had done like 500,000 views. So, I thought he knew who I was. So, we got in this call and I was asking him about all sorts of YouTube gamedev stuff. And then at the end, he was like I was talking about one of my videos and he's like, "Oh, I don't really know what that is." And I was like, "Wait, do you know who I am?" And he was like, "No, I have no idea." I was like, "You took this call not knowing who I am." And he's like, "Yeah." I was like, "This is crazy." Um, but anyway, Gavin was really nice and he was talking about horror games. And horror games comes with definitely a specific challenge where people like watching, but not as many people like playing.
And I think rage games are the same.

Yeah.
Because we had massive viewership on YouTube, but if you look at our numbers compared to like Thronfall example, um, not the same. the conversion rate was much much lower compared to the views, which which is fine. You just have to scope appropriately and understand the limitations. Not go in thinking you're going to make a billion dollars, but like spend a year, spend less money, and then you will end up net positive. So
the other one, and I know you're looking at this, is online co-op. Just
there is something so subconsciously engaging about watching two people interact in funny ways. It's interesting. It's tapped into our brains in a positive, fun way so long as the systems are there. And you can really see how lenient people can be with some janky systems, so long as it's a playground to have fun. Um, and I'm not saying that you should. In fact, I I sort of feel like if the bar is low, if you can subvert expectations and build

build above that, you will do well,
which is which is great for us. Um because if you can't tell, I'm definitely alluding that we're making an online co-op game.
Um but yeah, I think definitely more challenging. We kind of knew multiplayer was going to be way way harder. Um but now that we have this foundational experience, I I feel like it's an appropriate time to take on that challenge.
Yeah.
So we will see how that pans out.
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. We're in a similar boat then, right? We I think we recently also exchanged some ideas for for options for multiplayer frameworks that are out there.
Yeah, it's definitely a little scary because we know nothing about multiplayer. It's just the nature of of taking on a new, you know, project. You got to kind of just dive in and hope for the best,
but we're excited.
I think we'll be quiet about it for a little bit until we're ready. But
this time around, we're not going to build in complete silence like get to work. It's not going to be the same. I think if you have something that's replayable

um and can show lots of content, then there's no reason to hide it.
Yeah. So, I really like these four streamable, contentable genres you have identified there. There's so much truth in this and also interesting point that both rage games and horror games are things people like to watch but not to play.
Yeah. But the bar is low. You can do jank and do well. So like
there's a there's a really
clear tradeoff and you just have to play within those rules understanding like what that is. Interestingly this is true for all of the categories except for AAA multiplayer of course like all of them like horror games, rage games and even online co-op games. the like the quality standards you have to meet are not that high as long as you as long as the correct things are polished, right? For example, in
Get to work, the movement has to be

polished. There's like no way around that.
But all of the rest like all of the the visuals and I think you even did a second map where you did like mostly
prototype prototype textures. It was crazy.
I was not text I was not retexturing another map. That took me like 5 months. I was like, "Uhuh, no way." But
that's kind of fine in these games.
Yeah. People didn't care. It's it's it's amazing what people care about and what they don't care about. Like, uh, one example is the settings menu. It's literally verbatim the same settings menu as Hrio. The same colors, the same button sounds, copied and pasted. We didn't bother to change anything. And guess what? No one gave two shits. Sure. Not a single complaint cuz like it's a rage game. You're there to play like the actual game. It's if you were doing like a beautiful artistic game and then you slapped in Hrio settings menu, people would be mad for sure. But it's like jank is the name of the game, people expect that in that genre. And so you can take advantage of expectations and

focus on what really matters.
Yeah. Yeah. Focusing on what matters is such a core skill. I think it's one of the core skills you develop uh as you get better in game development. Just
Yeah. focusing your attention more on the important things. Yeah,
it's not easy, but it but you can you can learn it. A lot of testing, a lot of data focus, you know, doing surveys and and getting humbled. I I think
I would be remiss. I think I'd be in a really bad spot if our first two games had done super well. I think I'd be overconfident and going kind of blind, thinking like I know what I'm doing
rather than being not on edge. I'm not stressed about it, but I'm definitely extremely aware of our shortcomings and always trying to be vigilant,
which I want to build games for a long time. And so, you know, 5 years of sucking and like 20 years of being successful is a good trade-off as

opposed to the other way around. [laughter]
That's that's my philosophy. And maybe that's just copium because,
you know, I wanted to be successful and wasn't in the beginning, but you know, you got to look at the positives all the way through. I think that's key to having a happy and healthy relationship with GameDev.
Yeah. Yeah. But I guess it's also important to point out that this content creator strategy, as you've mentioned a couple of fans, is also not the only way to go, right? Cuz
definitely
sometimes when people listen to these podcasts, they're like, "Oh my god, does this mean everybody has to make co-op and rage games now?" That's probably not the case, right? Yeah. And that's why I've tried to really emphasize that like the numbers of Get to Work are not as big as like Bellatro and uh Thronefall. Like there's a million ways to be successful. And I'm just trying to share what's worked for us, but we might pivot at some point to, you know, follow the Steam algorithm and just bank on that. But
not today.
You know, [clears throat] we have this momentum and we're going to try it and see how far we can But the good thing I think with co-op games is that co-op

games are the genre where you can do both. You can do well on the Steam algorithm and you can do well with streamers cuz it's the only one of the four genres that you've identified here that people like to watch and they like to play.
Yes.
Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean fingers crossed. Fingers crossed that's the [laughter] case. But that's the running theory. Just I know the technical side of things it's way more complicated. is definitely way more challenging. Uh I'm just really glad we didn't do this as our first game. I'm glad this is what we're tackling on our fourth game.
Yeah.
So, I know we've been chatting for a while, so why don't I close out with one last piece of advice, not advice, but insight that I've had, and that is I know we've built this. So, like we're doing an online co-op game. So, we've built a puzzle game, an automation game, a rage game, and now an online co-op game, which seems insane. Like, in terms of brand strategy, there's no clear path linking all of them, you know, to each

of us from project to project. And yet, people people seem to be excited about what we're doing. And I think one of the biggest learnings that I have had across this entire gamedev journey is every time you finish a project, you add something to your arsenal. And if you only take on one really big thing every single time, it minimizes scope while also pushing your boundaries. So disjoint, we learned how to big build a big project. Atrio, we built a massive codebase. Get to work, we learned how to build 3D and we learned more about streamers. And now with all of that combined, you know, we're gonna take on multiplayer. And so rather than starting with that and getting absolutely on,
you know, building that slowly is, you know, internally in the studio, there's a clear throughine of the progression of the studio of like systems and processes and learning new skills progressively. And that's the one thing that if you were to take away something is thinking outside of just a single game, think

long term. Like if you if you're really passionate about gamedev and you try it and you think that your skills suit the industry and you think you can survive, I would encourage you to think longer term than just one game, how do you survive long term because the advantages you get from game one to game two is so big from game two to game three is massive. and from three to four. I mean, we'll see if the game flops, you know, I'll be I'll be biting my tongue, but like I do think that every single game we've released, we add advantages onto our plate and reduce the risk and increase the chance of success. So, you know, try and think long term. That's my advice. There are probably more questions I could ask, but um I I don't want to ruin your closing words, and I think they were quite awesome. Think long term. I think it's great advice.
Definitely. Um, yeah. I just I saw that we've been recording for like two hours. I was like, [laughter] that's a long podcast.
Uh,
most yours are like an hour, right?
Uh, they've been more like two. Most of them have more like two. So, this is

this is about average time that we've reached here.
And I think I'll just I'll I'll just bring you back another time because I feel like there's
there's probably more knowledge to extract from you. But this was a this was great start. Really really appreciate it. Thanks so much, man. This was like every I think everybody who watched this to the end
will agree that this was like getting this kind of advice and insight for free is is kind of insane. So I really do appreciate it. Was really
glad you liked it. All right, stops the recording.