Growing an Internet Cult: 'Cult of the Lamb's' Social Strategy

Are you ready for a sermon? In the beginning there was a place, a place of life, of laughter, of love. Where the word said, "Thou shalt not worry about trivial things like non-believers and Steam reviews." But there is another place. And it's a dark place. I think you're all pretty familiar with it. It's a place where people go when they're very unhappy with their lives. An endless stream of shouting and arguing and noise, faceless advertisers yelling at you for no reason, but it's also somehow the best place for networking in the industry. I'm talking ABOUT TWITTER. CAN I GET AN AMEN?

THANK YOU. NOW, NOW CHILDREN. CHILDREN. If you're here in this house of all the places in the world you could be you're listening to this sermon, you're part of this congregation then I just have one question for you. Security, these people are trying to start a cult. I think we got to round them up. Let the authorities know. Don't worry, that's just a joke. Here we accept all belief systems and if you are here then I know that you want to help grow our cult. You ready? So, step one, we need to tell people about our cult. Let's try to think of a few different ways. So, hmm, maybe if we could get involved with a really big event, one that lots of people are watching, that lots of people are anticipating. Anyone here have Geoff Keighley's phone number? Maybe we could uh get into the Game

Awards or hmm, you know, I think our cults would be good, you know, helping a lot of people's lives. So, if they look up on Google how to be happy, we want our cult to be top of the search results, we're going to have to pay for some ads, you know. And maybe we pull out I'll pull all our money together, we could get that. Um, hmm, what if our what if we try to sponsor someone really famous? Like we could reach out to influencers. You know, a lot of celebrities have a big history with cults. So, I think it's a good fit. You know, there's uh there's definitely some press outlets with cult followings. I'm not going to name any names. Or we could go to live events. You know, people pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to go to these live events and they'll probably want to get their money's worth by listening to whoever's speaking at on on the front of the stage. So, I think that's a good idea. Some of you some of you here, you probably work for big companies and maybe you could help us get in with those. Yeah, there's a lot of cult followings in there. Or how

about we try something that's free that can grow exponentially and certainly has no downsides whatsoever. I can't think of a single one. I'm talking about social media. So, thank you for coming. My name is Jared J. Tan. I'm the community strategist here at Devolver Digital and I'm also a chartered professional CPA accountant. I've only been working in games for at and in community and marketing for only two years. Uh this is my first GDC talk. So, if you don't feel that an accountant is qualified to talk about games, that's not very nice and I think Um, yeah, before joining Devolver, I was a community manager for Cult of the Lamb's launch last year. And I got to work with Massive Monster. They're a very small dev team that at the time of launch they had only five full-time employees and things have been pretty good for all of us who worked on the game since then. And if you haven't heard of Cult of the Lamb firstly, congratulations. That means

you're in a healthy mental state and are not on gaming Twitter. But it's a game where you start your own cult of cute woodland animals. As the last lamb in the world, you're tasked with growing a cult. You'll slay heretics and sometimes even convince them to join your cult. Where there you'll have to feed them, give them sermons and most importantly clean up their In gameplay, it's a crossover between rogue-like and dungeon crawler a rogue-like dungeon crawler and a farm management sim. It's kind of like a messed up Animal Crossing, but more realistic because you can't buy a house. We launched on PC, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox last August and I started working with the team 1 month before launch. Uh the game is published by Devolver Digital. And I guess you're probably asking, how big is our cult? Well this is our Twitter followers and if you look at this, I think we might be the

biggest cult in the world. Here are some stats from the first 3 months from when I started working on Cult of the Lamb. Twitter followers passed 150,000, TikTok over 200,000 and Discord over 60,000 and that pink blob is the game's revenue in that time. Uh I took out the the left axis labels so you don't exactly know how much it is, but yes, the social numbers they sound very big, but really they're just a small impact on the game's success. In 10 days after launch, we sold 1 million copies and by the end of 2022 reached gold status on Steam for new releases alongside the PC versions of games like Persona 4, God of War, Spider-Man, Final Fantasy 7 Remake. But really all of that that did not come from nowhere. Massive Monster has been making games for over a decade starting

with Flash and then moving to PC and consoles and in that time they really struggled hard to eventually reach this big success that they've reached now. Um after so many years of working and making games, they finally hit something big. And right now I'd just like to take a moment to congratulate the art director of Massive Monster, James Pearmain, who's here with us. It's such an amazing achievement to work all those years with a small team to reach this point to and and giving me the chance to speak on behalf of the team here. Thank you, James. Thank you. Before we get into the weeds of the talk, I'm going to give you the big takeaway right at the start. So, if you remember one thing from this talk, this is it. It's the next slide. Pay attention right now and you don't have to pay attention for the rest. Games go viral. And what I mean by that is that the biggest factor to selling your game is your game. Ooh, take a photo. Nice.

We're not talking about if your game is good because there's really so many good games out there and good is subjective and like who who really knows what's good. You're And really, you're even competing with every other thing that someone could do in their life. As Nick said earlier this week touching grass is better than most games and I wholeheartedly agree. So, you really got to ask yourself, is your game truly outstanding? And by that I mean, does your game stand out? How does it compare to not just every other game out there, which is already so many things, but every other thing that someone could be doing in their lives. That's literally what you're competing with when we're talking about trying to get someone to play whatever little game that you're working on. Ooh. The biggest factor behind Cult of the Lamb's success is the work of these guys. They weren't And and they weren't thinking at the start, "How can our game go viral?" They were thinking, "How can our game be fun and memorable?" And along the way they made something that I think did all of that.

I think the keyword there is memorable. There's an old marketing rule of thumb called the seven touch points. It where it takes an average of seven touch points for a potential buyer to make a purchasing decision. And what is a touch point? Well, here's some examples, but basically it's anytime someone encounters your thing. In this case, uh your game or in our case today, our cults. Whenever it's anytime they see anything related to it. So, whether that's on a store shelf for a physical product or on a billboard or on a radio ad for the old boomers or or on social media or someone is telling you about it or your friend is telling you about it. All of those are possible touch points. And each time they see your thing, whether that's through a streamer or an article or on social media, they're one step closer to potentially buying your thing. That's why at Devolver we try to push all of these channels as much as possible so that we get as many touch points into people's eyes and eventually

maybe they will buy something. There are so many channels to pursue and whether you're a small indie or you're from a big publisher or a big company I'm pretty sure you're probably thinking how do we find which of these channels is the best ones to aim for? Which ones is the best ones to allocate our limited time, money and budget? So, I'm going to tell you a bit about my little corner, which is social media. There's definitely certain benefits to using it as one of your primary channels. Number one, it's low cost compared to some of the other ones because anyone can post something for free. Number two, it has exponential potential. It's built upon people interacting and resharing and those things are inherently built into these platforms. And number three, since it's built on those connections, it's kind of like a pseudo word of mouth. When you see your friend retweet something, then that's a pseudo endorsement from them about whatever they've just retweeted and you have a bit of that trust and if any marketing people here will know, word of mouth is by far the strongest touch point that you can have.

So, you're probably also wondering, does social media actually convert to anything? For example, if I somehow win the lottery with a viral post, will it actually lead to tangible sales or wish list or whatever kind of metric you're looking at? Well, the answer is sometimes. Not definitely not always. The secret to big sales is making an outstanding game, like I said before, but that doesn't always mean having a very unique art style or the best game or awards or anything like that. Um here's an example that I love, Vampire Survivors. It's It It is outstandingly fun to play. It keeps people in Steam and spending money on Steam, so then Steam keeps pushing it to more people. Sales platforms, they make money when things are sold on their platform, so then their algorithms promote things that are more likely to sell. It's really that simple. So, then if they're pushing you, then you uh you get a sale,

you get your portion, they get their cut, and people are happy, except for the people who didn't get sales. Sorry. So, and what another question, how can I be outstanding? Outstanding doesn't have to be entirely new. Um we I think we can all think of lots of games that release very similar versions every single year, and they may not even be the best of their genre. But, what they can provide is something outstanding, whether that's the brand name, whether it's the community of players, whether it's their friends that play with that specific game, whether it's familiarity cuz things do actually don't change. And all of these are ways that you can stand out. So, back to the question, does social media convert? I love this meme. Posting on social media can definitely feel like this, especially if you're an indie dev, where you your tweets or anything you're posting, even if it can get some traction, it's just within the space of other people who are developers. And like they don't have If you're a developer, you don't have time to play

games, so they probably won't sell anyways. And there are studios that have sizable social media followings that don't really translate to sales. Uh like I can say at Devolver, we have over 300,000 Twitter followers, 200,000 YouTube subscribers, and I can also tell you that we do not sell hundreds of thousands of units with every release. But, there are examples of games getting significant boost from social media. This is from ExoOne. It's a really, really cool solo developed game where you play as a disc flying through these crazy planets in space. And with the help of Future Friends, they had some pretty big TikToks that converted to wish list spikes. And some of those spikes were comparable to the numbers they got from like things like going to Gamescom or having like announcing their release date. Thomas and Grace from Future Friends are giving talks this afternoon, so you can learn from them and their strategies for marketing and TikTok in particular. This is another example. This is like one of one that's really big. This is

Tiny Glade, which if you've seen if you are on Twitter or on TikTok, you've almost definitely seen this game. It's a graph Uh this is a graph of Tiny Glade's newsletter subscribers. And you can see there are huge spikes correlating with viral uh TikTok videos and viral tweets. And they've only had their Steam page online for just a few months, but in that time they've earned over 250,000 wish lists and entered Steam's top 100 upcoming wish list games, which is like a few months for a tiny developed game. I think it's developed by two people. That's That's ridiculous. And finally, this is from Hypercharge, a 2-year-old game that got a bunch of new life after they went viral on Twitter last summer. And there's other examples, too. We can think of something like Choo Choo Charles or Trombone Champ, all that have released very recently and are relatively small games, and they got most of their buzz through social media. So, there are examples of social media playing a big role in game success. But, social media is just one of these

channels. At Devolver, we try to leverage all of the channels as best as we can. Cult of the Lamb had an an like a truly astounding reception from influencers through strategy from our senior influencer strategist, Clara Sia, as well as a truly awesome Twitch integration made by Streaming Toolsmith, who has been around at GDC if you want to work with him to implement Twitch integration. It was also at things like Summer Games Fest. We bring it to We brought it to PAX East last year. It's at PAX East this year right now. It was in Steam Next Fest. But, all of these contribute contributed to what the game's marketing was. And all of them came together to support, most importantly, an outstanding game made by Massive Monster. And yes, my little corner of that big equation is just social media. So, that's what I'm going to talk about. We're talking here about attention. Attention is marketing currency. And like I said before, people have limited time and attention in their lives.

You're competing with any other thing that someone could do. So, how are you going to make the most of whatever tiny bit of attention they might give you? And these are my three steps of content design. Number one, grab attention for discovery. Number two, convert attention into interest. And number three, reward attention with an emotional response. I'm going to go into detail about each of these, as well as talking about how the original design by the Massive Monster guys played into this, and then how I try to implement these on Twitter, TikTok, and then how it applies to even the Steam store page. So, anywhere they can see your thing, these are things that you should be thinking about. So, number one, grab attention for discovery. Start your own cult. I think that is pretty attention-grabbing for a game. Before they click on your thing, before they watch your thing, when someone is just scrolling down their timeline, what actually grabs their attention? What grabs your attention when you're scrolling down the timeline? How do What makes you stop and read or or watch? Uh

some things that usually work are things like eye-catching visuals or surprising messages. Here's a one of my examples, Cult of the Lamb does not support #NationalBoyfriendDay. We have Why have one boyfriend when you can have several spouses? So, I try to get into what I call a noob mindset. What does it look like to someone who doesn't know anything about your game? Cuz if they already know about your game, then you probably don't You do kind of need to sell to them cuz maybe they haven't bought it yet, but more importantly, how do you make it visible to people who have no idea what it is? So, Massive Monster, they thought about this idea of a four-word pitch. Their previous two games were 2D platformers where you play as a little guy. Uh They weren't bad games, but you can probably tell that that concept doesn't really stand out. Uh they came up instead They came up with an idea of merging two popular genres, roguelike and base building. And with that in

mind, they tried to build a player fantasy around that core gameplay loop. The fantasy had to be unique, appealing, and easy to explain. And uh they actually had originally had a pitch in 2019, which had a very complex a much more complex um player fantasy. Uh and instead, eventually they got to this point where they thought about how easy to explain could it be? Can Could it even fit within four words? Yes. What about start your own hell or start a witches coven or and then finally landing on start your own cult? Can you explain what you're working on in just four words? So, here are some examples. We're going to watch some TikToks. Have you ever considered joining a cult? It's a great place to make friends, have fun, and eat some tasty food. There's a few folks who don't really agree with how we do things, but that's why we show them love to change their

minds. Or else. You can play Cult of the Lamb right now on all consoles and PC. Yeah, nice. Uh let's watch this other one. Sometimes you got to deal with followers who are trying to trick your cultists. Talk to them, put them in jail, or maybe use them as a ritual sacrifice. And here on TikTok, watch out, there's a scammer. They're messaging people telling them they won the giveaway and asking them to click the link. Don't click the link. We aren't sending anything like that. Yeah, if anyone has done a giveaway on TikTok, you know about those uh those scammers. Okay. Sometimes you got to deal with Okay. That That is uh that is what I feel like when I'm browsing TikTok. So, when you're thinking about discovery on TikTok, the first and and really discovery anywhere, the first question is, who might see your thing on this platform? In this case, it's people who uh trend younger. And it might sound stupid, but it's people who already use TikTok. But,

what I mean by that is that they have certain contextual expectations for what they come across on the app. And then next, how will they see your content? TikTok videos automatically show up in your For You page, and people don't really browse or watch based on who they're already following. And then finally, what will they actually see? The video will just start playing, and now your job is to keep them from swiping away. So, yeah, think about these three things on any kind of platform that you're trying to post anything. Another here Oh, sorry. Before we move on, you can see on that retention rate, that was from the second video we watched. Um more than 25 About 25% of people stopped watching after 2 seconds. So, that's That's how much time that you have to convince someone to keep watching your video. And 2 seconds is already pretty long. Um Steam discovery. So once again, we're thinking who is on this platform? On Steam, you know it's someone who already plays games. They're playing on

PC and they are looking for more games to play. Most people on Steam are not looking for more new games to play. So you're already you don't really need to think about them. So these are the people you're thinking about. And then how can they see your content? There's algorithmic recommendations, things that say games you might like or try these like Steam has stuff that that like that. And then also on the front page if you're lucky enough to get there or right at your launch time. And then what will they actually see when they get there? So let's take a look. This is from the fall when Little Gator Game had just released. Um Before so on the left side, that is what you would see on your Steam page without even scrolling over anything. So look what we have to work with. We have the capsule art, we have the title, we have the platform, we have four four tabs tags and then we have the price and the sale. So like that rectangle is all you have to try to convince someone to even hover over your

game to consider it at all. And then if you do manage to convince someone to hover, then that's where you get the thing on the right where now we get to see the over the number of reviews, the overall rating, we have one extra tag now and three screenshot or a few screenshots. So that is the kind of stuff that we're talking about of how can you grab someone's attention with just that? It's almost nothing and that is how hard it is to get yourself seen and discovered. Next, convert attention into interest. So at this point, you've grabbed their attention. How do you keep them looking and what are you trying to do with the attention? What are you going to What kind of memory are you going to leave them with? And that's something that the Massive Monster guys really thought about in what they called trailer moments. These are moments that they animated and put in the game that look very very impressive. Moments that people will remember, moments that show something interesting about the game. This is probably the one of the more iconic ones that people remember. If you've played Cult of the Lamb, this is

the sacrifice ritual. There's a part of the game where the the game actually makes you do at least one of these so you can see it and you can see it's like less than 10 seconds and how much time do you think you worked on it, James? A lot of time, right? Um I think you said years. Um but yeah, it just looks so memorable. Also it kind of plays with expectations where if you think of a cult sacrifice, you might think of someone at an altar in a robe and like with a dagger. But now let's take this up several levels. We've got this tentacle monster coming out of the ground. That is a trailer moment. And a trailer moment is good because well they were thinking how can we put this in a trailer so then it would look good there. And then that also applies to social media. It's something that within just a few seconds it catches attention and teaches something about this game. Also you can see that there's a cute animal which everyone loves cute animals. Next, we have support the fantasy. So this is another thing that the guys thought about. They started brainstorming different mechanics to add on top of the gameplay

loop and they were trying to support the fantasy of start your own cult of cute animals. So always going back to that fantasy and that forward pitch. And anything that didn't support that fantasy it was cut as soon as they realized that it didn't. So James was watching John Wick one day and he realized in John Wick that everything in that world is around assassins. Keanu Reeves is an assassin, all the people he fights are assassins. Like the whole world building is all around assassins and that's where they started to build a world around cults. The bosses are bishops, the enemies are other cultists. The there's religious imagery like everywhere in the game. Even something like the lamb is a religious connotation to connect to this world of cults. And I love this animation that James made. This is for one of the bosses, this boss transformation where you get to see a bishop is someone who you might expect to be kind of as conservative dressed in these robes and then it becomes this

huge crazy scary monster and each of the bishop bosses do this. So on Twitter, if you grab their attention at least enough to stop scrolling, then now can you convert it to information to teach someone about something about your game? So once again, we fall back to this National Boyfriend Day tweet. But I think it's pretty interesting because it doesn't just it's not just funny and it's not just provocative, but also shows something about the game. Cult of the Lamb is one of the few games where you can marry a bunch of cultists. So once again, we're going back to supporting that fantasy and then the visuals I quickly go like only show like half a second of a bunch of different animals that you can marry. So both of these things we're now not just provoking someone, we're not just instigating a funny initial reaction, but we're also trying to teach someone about this unique mechanic that our game has that makes it stand out to other games. And on TikTok,

so when we're thinking about converting someone's attention, sometimes it might be the end goal might be different depending on whatever platform you're on. On a discovery platform like TikTok, so a place where your primary goal is to tell new people about the game, then my goal is to get that content into as many people's eyes as possible. So how does TikTok work? How does it show new content to people? Videos show up in your for you page. You can do and when let's say I'm watching something shows up, I can do a positive or a negative engagement. Positive engagements are things like likes, favorites, shares, comments or just watching the whole thing through. And then negative engagements are swiping away before the video is done and you can also like hold tap and say that you don't like videos like this. And then the for you page will populate with videos that match your positive engagements. So let's say I really want to I'm really into dogs and I really want to watch only dog videos. So any I'll open TikTok, a video will show up. Is it a

dog video? No, I swipe away. Is it a dog video? No, I swipe away. Is it a dog Oh yes, then now I watch the whole thing. I like, I comment, I do all these things. I do the positive engagements and even just by watching the whole thing, that's a very good positive engagement which we'll see soon. And now my feed will slowly add more and more videos about dogs and less and less videos that aren't about dogs. But I I will also give you videos that the algorithm thinks that people who like dogs also like this kind of video. So that's how TikTok works and now we're trying to design content for the platform's goal. What animal should we put in our game? There's so many different ones to add to your cult. Cats, pigs, frogs, buffalo, Cthulhu. But now we need your help. Should we add a badger or a lion? Drop a comment if you're a badger baddie or if you're a simpin for Simba. So yeah, you can see here where what you might call engagement farming,

giving them two options, very easy choice that you can put a comment. And also in this case, trying to engage someone to be involved with our creative process in the game. So I probably did this incorrectly where I actually put two animals that weren't already in the game, but then from the comments we saw many comments asking for things like axolotls or capybaras which are very popular among young people. And it turns out that James and the team had already made those characters and they were already in the game. So then I could make another video saying like reply to this comment that's asked for axolotls. Here is your axolotl, we are listening. And then by doing that basically many times, every single video would get hundreds of comments ask of people asking to add a certain a specific animal. And even if I was talking about some other topic like the combat or about the farming, then I would start the video by replying to someone's comment asking for a deer. I'd say like hello Flame Master 69, you can be the deer in our cult and I put him in and

then I um and then I would talk about the farming. I would like make him do farming and then now we're teaching about the game. We start from this thing that farms engagement and then we teach about the game from there. What animal So I also did a study last year to try to find which positive engagements were the most valuable in TikTok's algorithm. I got data from 1500 1500 videos from game studios who were promoting their games on TikTok organically. So that's without ad spend. The videos from these channels had a sum of over 70 million views and they ranged from accounts with just a few thousand followers to over 1 million followers. And what did I find? Firstly, I looked at the active engagements that I mentioned before. So the likes, comments, shares and favorites and I I tried to correlate that with the number of views. From there we found that likes and favorites had the highest correlation, whereas comments had like a moderate correlation and shares had the fewest. But

really is that like correlation or causation? So then I looked at another metric, watch time. And what I found was videos with more views had higher watch time and higher full watch percentage. And there's a bit of a stratification where where I tried to separate the videos that had at least 250,000 or 100,000 views and then see you can see there that there's a big difference between the like the smaller videos in the sample versus the bigger videos in the sample that have much higher average watch time and much higher average full watch percentage. Another thing I found was in that right graph that um almost all videos with over 100,000 views had at least 10 seconds average watch time. So, now I try to make videos that have at least 10 seconds that are at least 10 seconds long. So, if they watch the whole thing, they're positively helping in the algorithm. But, there's a big caveat that no one really knows Tik Tok what Tik Tok's

algorithm actually does and it always changes. They also have revealed that they have more ability to like manually boost certain kinds of videos versus other kinds of videos. So, who knows? Tik Tok barely even knows themself, actually. And now, on Steam. So, Steam obviously is the platform where someone can actually do that final conversion that you're looking for, whether that's a sale or a wish list. So, in this case, now we're we're at the final part of the funnel and we're trying to teach someone about the game enough so that to convince them to actually make that purchase. So, what do you have to work with? By default, now Steam broadcast show up at the top, then there's a trailer that would play if you scroll down, the key art, descriptions, screenshots, the actual body of your description. And I when I look at a new Steam page, I literally just like scroll down and I see what kind of impression do I get from a very quick glance. So, and that's that is the attention that you're trying to convince someone to buy your game with. So, what unique elements, what is

the art style, what's the premise, what type of game it is. But, everyone has a different kind of way that they are looking at what is valuable to them. Like one of my friends, he told me that when he looks at a Steam page, the first thing he looks at are the tags. If he doesn't see multiplayer or co-op, then he automatically just doesn't even look at it because that's the kind of gamer he is that he only wants to play new games that he can play with his friends. So, but at the same time, he still needs to get that information as quickly as possible. If it's hard to find that information, then he probably wouldn't even go past that point it gets to that point to try to consider to buy the game. So, once again, like that is what you're trying to convey. And I definitely see a lot of Steam pages that don't really tell me what makes this game stand out. So, finally, we're at reward attention with an emotional response. And we want to do this because if you have a touch point, you they this person has given you their attention and time. Now, if you can reward them with something that makes them feel good or feel something, then it's going to be a

more meaningful touch point. They've actually looked at your thing. What do you want them to remember? How do you want them to feel? So, we're talking about what do people expect with cults? Once again, we started at start your own cult of cute animals. And the cute animals, that already doesn't go with cults, so that's a nice surprise. That gets us to this interesting place of juxtaposition. And it also fit with Julian and James's art style, so it worked out really well. They also chose a lamb as their main character to to subvert religious connotations. And throughout the game, there's these surprises and things that take what you expect of a cult and sometimes use it maybe extending it, extrapolating it to the logical conclusion like that big tentacle monster, but also sometimes subverting it with the the fact that everything is cute animals. And delight, you can delight through surprise. You can make someone laugh by being surprising. Surprise is when unexpected things come together and like

that's literally what a meme is. When it's when you connect unexpected context together. But, if firstly, that someone actually has to have context. They need to have some sort of pre-existing connotation about whatever you're talking about. So, it's way easier if people already have context. Big Yoshi. We know that Yoshi doesn't typically look like this, so it's funny because now Yoshi is in a funny situation. But, if people don't know what your thing is, link it to a context that people will know. And I'm going to talk about a few ways that you can do that. There's concepts, there's trends, there's personal stories, there's many ways. Oh, sorry. I think I see pictures. I see pictures. If you want to want to look at that a meme, that does I love that one. Okay. Okay, here we go. Yeah, everyone admire. You can see those I I I checked today, now that bookmarks are visible, there's like 4,000 bookmarks on that right image.

Yeah, so on the left one, you can see that we've taken this like celebratory post where we have 100,000 followers, like that's pretty normal, right? But then what if we kind of juxtapose that with the context that someone understands? We're now comparing ourselves to Scientology, something that lots of people know about and there were even people who had like no they don't really care about our game at all, but they care about Scientology or like the stories behind it and they were retweeting because it's a funny thing. And on the right, yeah. This is actually a fan art after we started some Twitter beef with Angry Birds and Duolingo. And we reposted the fan art, credited them in the first reply, but obviously that's something that you don't typically see on a on your timeline. So, you can also link it to a concept that people do have an understanding about. This is when I worked on a game called Card Shark. It's a game about card cheating, which Yeah, well, let's give it a shot. Three

ways to cheat without slight of hand. Peek at cards while they're being dealt, make use of something shiny, or distract them with a cool drink. Do all these tricks and more in our new game, Card Shark. Ooh, okay. Yeah, so this is an example like the game is quite hard to explain. The gameplay is really not like anything like many other games out there. It's like WarioWare, but then you're also gambling and you're also in 18th century France. So, it's a very complex game to explain. But, I think everyone understands what cheating is. So, you can by referencing it to this concept that people do have that people do understand, then now there's a link in to to making it relevant to someone. And here's another Three ways to cheat. I don't know why this keeps on happening. I didn't play this. Okay, here we go. Okay, here we go. This is this is the my my my work of art. thing about food. You got to clean it up or your followers get sick and they can vomit. Collect it and put it on the crops so they can grow more. Then you make your meals your animals don't starve and so they don't die. But,

if they do, you can turn them into meat. Now you got more meat. Okay, you don't have to do that. Another option is to link to a trend. So, this lamb movie poster, we dropped it like hour or two after the Mario movie first trailer was posted. And of course, it has Chris Pratt in it because every big animated movie needs to have Chris Pratt. And then the next day, I made this fake lamb movie trailer using audio. Okay, well, you just watch it first. What is this place? Here we come. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, you can see both of these tweets have over 100,000 likes on Twitter, which is

pretty good. And both of these are actually repurposed assets. The poster on the left is a re-edited version of the illustrated art that was made for the vinyl of the game's soundtrack. And on the right, that animation is from the first animated trailer for of the game from 2021. So, it's repurpose in a new way to participate in a trend. This is an example of how one asset can be used in many, many different ways. Yeah, so if you start with something like that cutscene asset, sorry, it's a little small, but yeah, you start with something like that cutscene asset and then it can be a screenshot for a meme or in thumbnails or for your Steam news cover images cuz those are always really annoying to go find. It could be a short clip as a GIF for reactions or for social posts or you can put short clips together for Tik Toks. Or you can take the full version of the trailer and that can go you can go to a partner with that. So, you can be on

like the Nintendo's YouTube channel. Or you can one thing we did was we put all of the animated trailers together, but just the animation part, so no gameplay, and we put them into one video, put that on YouTube and that also has like hundreds of thousands of views. So, just many, many different ways that you can repurpose the same thing in different contexts. And did you know that you can anticipate trends? You if you aren't super on social media or even if you are, you might be like, oh, how do I participate in trends? Like do I have to be watching Twitter all day? Like I do that anyways, but so you are your own target market. If you're making a game, that means you're probably interested in what the game is and you're a potential you would be a potential fan if you weren't the person making the game. So, your fans will be excited about what you're excited about. And that means that they will also be excited about the things like that you are anticipating, things like announcements or presentations or new releases or whatever news that might come across your feed, it's probably

similar to your potential markets. So, the for that Mario trailer, Nintendo had announced like two days before that that they were going to drop the first Mario trailer on the Thursday. So, I put it in my calendar, this Mario trailer time. This is going to be like all over Twitter for sure. And then right after we like watching it and then we were trying to think of what we can put that can relate to it. And then make sure that in both of our tweets, we use the word movie, so it's participating in the trend. We don't we're not referencing the Mario movie like exactly, but like yeah, we're we're participating in the trend. We get in with that keyword and and we knew that it was going to happen because the announcement was made earlier. So, a lot of the time the most important thing is framing. If you you remember when GTA 6 leaked and the dev and the and all sorts of devs on Twitter were quoting this guy who said graphics are the first things finished in a video game. Yes, let's watch this.

Ooh, yeah, nice. I love I love that video. So, yeah, if there is some guy who said graphics are the first thing finished in a video game. So, we hopped on that trend and this asset is once again a repurposed asset. Uh it was originally um a much longer video posted by the like the person who was working on on the the social media before I started working on it. I changed that into this version where we had the split screen, so it's much more visually appealing and you can like directly see the comparison. I used I that this video this exact video was

first used before the game launched and then a month later when this trend was happening, we just participate. I'm like, oh, I know this video is good. I'm just going to use it again, frame it in a different way. Um and you may have heard earlier this week that building your own brand or like selling yourself, your your story, that that can be a really good way to gain visibility. And and that's true. Um and that's because people can connect to personal stories. It's another way that you can link something you can give someone context without them having to know about what your game is. Um the the converse example of that is I think of let's say we're working on a game about giant mechs. And uh we we we make our mech do this funny TikTok dance. And to us, because we know that the mechs are very serious, they're always in combat, that this mech is not supposed to do that. But then to someone else who doesn't know who this mech is, it's not funny just like see a robot dancing. Like it's kind of whatever. But then if let's say it's a Gundam or let's say you reference Gundam in in the in the caption in somehow,

then now it becomes a context that someone does that could recognize. So, um yeah, people can connect to personal stories and it's a way that you can link to something that someone actually does feel something about. So, I suggest that you can do both of these at the same time. You can frame your messaging to both tell your own story and teach something about your game. And that's something that we tried to do here by going into the history, showing development, and and at the same time connecting to some wider context. Oh, this keeps on happening. Okay, recap time. Let's do it. So, number one, games go viral. And what I mean by that is the biggest factor to sell your game is your game. And I know that everyone already took photos of this before cuz I asked you to. And next, seven touchpoints. So, there are many different channels that people could see your thing. Uh each of them each time you that they see it, they're becoming one step closer to potentially

buying it. So, our goal is to get it in front of them in as many different ways as possible and as many times as possible. Can social media convert? Yes. It doesn't always and there's definitely many examples of it not converting, but there are are also many examples of it converting. And when it comes to content design, the three things I think about are grabbing attention for discovery, thinking about on the specific platform that you're posting on or or whatever place that the your content is, how can they see it or who can see it, how can they see it, and what kind of uh um area, space, attention are you actually working with to try to grab their attention and make them pay attention for more than a second? And then, converting attention into interest. Once you have at least grabbed some form of attention, how can you keep them watching for a bit longer? Uh how can you then teach them something so that the touchpoint becomes more meaningful? And finally, if you really want to get

to a meaningful meaningful touchpoint, then you can reward attention with an emotional response. If someone feels something, then that touchpoint is just so much more important to them. So, my name is Jared J. Tan. Uh my website and you can find my writing at jaredtan j.com. That is not very good branding. And I'm on Twitter at @AJaredJ. Uh this is uh one of the things I wrote about for the social strategy of Cult of the Lamb. Uh just like a little diagram from it and you can read that at my website. And you can follow me on Twitter. That would be very nice of you. But most importantly, the lamb stands out. Cult of the Lamb is a game that is truly outstanding. It's a game where you start your own cult of cute animals and mixes two genres in a new way that there wasn't really any big game who had done that before. And it visually doesn't look like anything else out there on the market. And all of these things make it stand out. Does your game stand out? Hopefully it does. Other otherwise, you might want to go back to

the drawing board a little bit. But Cult of the Lamb, I think the most important thing that that let it do well is that it had multiple ways for it to stand out. And yes, sales numbers it don't always correlate with social media. This is an just a graph of our Twitter followers. I also graphed on some of the big posts that let us to gain traction. So, yeah, if you look carefully, you'll see that a number of the big bumps in interest and followers were when we were doing a giveaway. So, I will give away a free lamb merch to someone who gives me a good rating for this talk. That's called a call to action. Okay, but serious times now. Since I left my accounting career to work in games, what I enjoy the most is that I get to work with people like you, people who love games. I think we all know that games is definitely not the easiest place to work in and you're probably sacrificing something in your life because you love and you want to work on games. But whatever specific job

you do in the games industry, you are here because you want to be part of that creative process. You want to be part of making games to bring a little bit of joy to someone's life in this big medium that we love and care about. And because you're a creator, you want to make something original, something that's really that's really your own. And that is the core of it. I think that's the encouraging thing. That of all the marketing things that I talked about, if you make something that is truly original, that's your own, that's new, then you're already on the right track. So, make something new. Make something your own. Make something that stands out and that game will have a fighting chance. Thank you. Thank you.

Did you have fun? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Great. Yeah, we I think we have Do we have time for questions? Yeah? We can do a few questions and after yeah, after we're done, I think James will also be available for questions. So, if you want to talk about the development stuff that I don't know, ask him. But uh yeah. Oh, we have one here. Thank you. Hey there. Uh Dennis marketing manager for Get to the Orange Door. We're a uh parkour roguelike FPS and I was really fascinated about the animations cuz it allowed you to repurpose in-game assets for really engaging content essentially. So, how would you prioritize or maybe even what types of animations would you suggest to your dev team to focus on when you're nearing completion of the game, right? We could do finishers, we could do, you know, boss animations like you guys have as well. Um what would you say if we had maybe,

you know, as an indie project limited resources, uh where would you focus more of that budget in the animation aspect for content? I would think about um I guess what kind of the player fantasy and then what the core pillars of your game that make your game unique compared to other games. So, if you can think about those and which like visual assets will support those fantasies, will will support um those ideas, then that's what I would want to focus on. So, like going back to the sacrifice ritual, um yeah, sacrificing someone like that's very connected to cults and and it's yeah, so that it goes in that way. Now, as soon as we have we see a sacrifice, we see something twisted, it's it's cult related, so it all fits together within this general message that you are trying to portray. Okay, um side. Amazing presentation. I actually have a question because it will mostly also maybe depend on like kind of like the style of the game. For

example, this is a very like Cthulhu kind of game and if you think of like that genre as on its own, it's pretty hard to engage with people. But maybe because like of the style and everything, how would you actually, if you have a more realistic game, how would you keep that constant engagement if there's like not anything like sacrificing cute animals? Um People that like there there is a big market for realistic games. Like I think the vast majority of game sales are are realistic games. So, then you're looking at a different kind of market. Who are you appealing to? Um, and once again, um, thinking about like what specific small things can you take from that that are appealing. And and Oh, yeah, I didn't One thing I forgot to mention is that I always look for references. So, uh, if there's another game that, uh, did very well and has like a similar style, then go look at that and look at like what kind of content they're making. What do they show in their trailers? And

obviously don't do like the exact same thing, but think about like what in that small shot, like what is appealing and uh, figure out how you can find things in your in in your game that are similar. Um, yeah, and then like if it's realistic, there's all sorts of different things you could do. You could then maybe play with like body humor or just like like like ragdoll physics and stuff, which people do enjoy. Um, and yeah, those are things that we can't do, but you can do. So, that's something that sets you apart from someone like us. All right, awesome. Thank you. Okay. Uh, on this side. Hi. Um, I'm Justine. I work on Skullgirls. Oh, hello. You know what? Hi from Twitter. Oh, hi from Twitter. Yeah, it's weird seeing you in flesh space. Uh, really weird. Anyways, um, I helped grow our TikTok to, uh, 180k followers in 4 months, but like I'm not a marketer, I'm a product manager. I just did it in my like side time and I've been trying to convince leadership to like invest more time into it. And I noticed I love the data and

your sides and you know how revenue doesn't always like correlate with uh, virality. Um, but sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. I guess Do you have any advice for someone who's like trying to make a business case to leadership? Like, "Hey, we should invest more in our TikTok." Um, and someone else should do it, not just me. Well, firstly, congratulations. And that's like a huge That's a huge achievement. That's bigger than than like the vast majority of games. I appreciate it. Um, I So, the way that I think of it is let's say you pay one person to do TikTok, uh, for a year, for example. Uh, w- Let's say it's somewhere between like 50 and 75 or like 80, depending on where they're from or whatever. But like how many sales does that actually need? Um, if the game is like $10 or $20. If it's $20, like like most indie games, uh, then that is like a few thousand sales, which really isn't that many to, like, you to to to reach.

So, that is kind of the numbers that I think about. Uh, like, if you can say that you have We've We've got like millions of views over these months and like you can't confirm that it will translate to a few thousand sales to to make that justified, but I think it's pretty likely that it would. Like, it's only a few thousand out of like the millions of people who have seen the thing. Um, yeah. So, that If you want to use numbers, that's what I would go with. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, we can talk about them more after. That's a tough I I know I know that's a tough thing that people go through. Great talk. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry. Oh, that's quite tall. I'm very small. That's okay. Hi, I'm Samantha. I am also a social media marketing manager and I'd love to hear how your team navigated through internal stakeholders and assessing risk when featuring things like Scientology or using the parody IP from Rovio. What I'd love to know what that process looked like for you personally. Yeah, well, if you're familiar with the Devolver brand, um,

um, yeah, that's kind of what we do. So, um, I do like when when an idea comes up, uh, yeah, I'll ask uh, the chief marketing officer Nigel Lowrie at Devolver if if it's something kind of risky like the Scientology one. But even from the Devolver channel, he posted like He's posted things that are worse than that. Um, yeah, like there was one where we got an uh, we got a email to the Devolver customer service that was, um, someone saying that like, you know, you're promoting Satanism or like paganism, stuff like that. And then he like screenshotted the email. But my favorite part was like, "You are a You are a company based in Austin, Texas. How could you do this?" That was my favorite part. So, yeah, we And also even the the Angry Birds like the kissing one, um, we have a new social media manager who's doing a fantastic job. If you've seen Cult of the Lamb on Twitter, uh, this like in 2023, that is pretty much all her. Um, she was the one who suggested to do

it and I was like, "I'm not sure." And then I asked the guys I say, "Are you okay with this?" And they're like, "Yeah, do whatever." Uh, so uh, Yeah, uh, yeah, we don't have that problem really. Sorry, I don't want to I don't know how to help. I'm I'm lucky to not have that problem. Uh, hey Jared. Uh, I'm Jordan Pelquin. I'm a designer for First Playable Productions. In my free time, I work on indie games and there's this turn-based RPG about mental health that I've been working on for the past 3 years that I would really like to get off the ground, get like bigger social media following, maybe a publisher. I've been pitching this to people lately. I might be pitching it to Devolver soon, so you know, look out for it. Um, but something that's really I feel is kind of awkward about my game is that it's very obviously inspired by a lot of other like surreal indie RPGs. Like people compare it to Undertale a lot and it's very obvious that I really like Undertale and that I gotten a lot of inspiration from that game when I made mine. Um, and I always struggle with marketing it to either publishers or to social media because I I feel awkward about relating it back to the games that

people are familiar with. I want to do that because I want to grab people's attention with things that they already like and that they know, but at the same time I don't want people to predicate their expectations for my game off of something that it isn't and I do want it to stand on its own two legs. And particular with particularly with publishers, I want to be careful about that because I want them to be invested in my game and I don't want it to seem like I'm peddling a copy of another game that already exists. Yeah, yeah. thing. I I don't know, maybe you have some advice or perspective on that. Um, so we don't I like obviously Cult of the Lamb with the the art style being like 2D in a 3D space, uh, we get a lot of comparisons to stuff like Don't Starve or with the the theming of the game it connects to like The Binding of Isaac as well. It's a roguelike. And we don't um, yeah, we don't directly really reference except for that like very silly things we'll be referenced and very quickly, uh, for Don't Starve or Binding of Isaac. Um, yeah, I'd say that other people will make that connection for you and you don't need to. So, another thing you can do on TikTok is in particular is don't give them all the

answers. You don't have to say everything about your game at once. Sometimes often times they don't even say the name of the game or like where you can buy it cuz then it'll like people will just leave a bunch of comments asking even if the like like your the name of your account is whatever your game is. They'll still They'll still ask. Um, and then that's uh, yeah, so people will make that connection without you, so you don't need to make it. Uh, although i- if it's more like a personal story, like I was very inspired by Undertale. Like that's another way you could do it. And in general, um, just like all of these possible ways of linking things together or or even just sharing things about your game and what makes it stand out, um, it's all different framing to use the similar kind of content. Um, yeah, so try different things and and see what happens. Um, yeah. Hi, uh, I'm Julian. Uh, that was pretty much my question exactly. So, praise the lamb. Thank you. All right, um, hi, my name's Louie. Um,

my question is, uh, to what extent do you use, uh, SEO tools and like focus groups to determine the content of your messaging? Uh, we don't. Uh, I I actually would like to. Like I I do know the power of data, um, but I guess we don't have a big enough team to do that very much and, um, we've found I I I think like the best social media managers kind of don't need it. Um, that they can figure out what works without using the tools and, um, i- like to me, the most powerful thing is being able to get into the new mindset. I- to really understand what's like a casual observer is is, uh, seeing and what they could feel and how how they would react to whatever they're seeing. Yeah. So, sorry, we don't We do not do that. Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. Hello. Hey.

Uh, you mentioned the unique visual art of the game, but I also thought the soundtrack was really unique. I still listen to it on Spotify. Yes. Um, I was curious, did any of your marketing involve the music? Did you collaborate with Riverboy to advertise? And going further, does music have the same impact as visuals within like TikTok videos and that sort of thing? So, yeah, music is tough because, uh, one of the things you do on TikTok is you use music from trending sounds on TikTok. So, like almost most of the things we post don't have music from the game. Um, uh, on on Twitter, yes, uh, but even then, uh, like I when I browse Twitter, I I don't have my sound on and like if I'm I I'm usually in a public space when I'm doing it cuz it's something I'm doing to kill time and like I don't want sound to be on. Um, yeah, so as much as music is really good, uh, it definitely doesn't convert uh, it doesn't work so well on social media. Um, but there are ways. Like I know people who like they're composers and they have put their like their music their sounds

have become like viral sounds on on TikTok, for example. Um, whether that actually will end up to people connecting back to your game, I think that's even like another step farther, so it's even harder. Uh, yeah, but that doesn't mean that you can't not talk about the music, um, but it's just like not very conducive to this platform. Yeah. Okay. Uh, we'll go over here first and then Oh, oh, sorry. One one more, one more. Okay. Um, sorry. Uh, my name is Reshma. I work for YouTube Gaming, like on their Twitter specifically. So, I was wondering if you guys utilize content creators to promote your game at all or if that was useful. Uh, yes. Vtubers as content creators. Yeah. Okay. Um, 100% uh, the the push from content creators and and like Twitch streamers in particular was very very big for Cult of the Lamb success both I for sales and

for social media. So, content creators are um, they are big portion of the people on Twitter. They have followings. They're trying to build their followings. Um, so often times you'll see a game um, even if it's a game that not many people know about, uh, one of their big tweets that they've ever had is one saying like, "Hey, we're looking for content creators." cuz they just want to like join in um, and get things for free. Um, yeah, so yes, it definitely helps. It's a good way to like boost engagement especially on a place like Twitter. Um, and then for Cult of the Lamb in particular with this really good Twitch integration, uh, the stats showed that uh, at launch time and I'm pretty sure like for a good time after um, people who streamed Cult of the Lamb, their average viewership was higher when streaming Cult of the Cult of the Lamb than their normal average viewership which is like ridiculous for like a new IP for a game made by a small company. That's basically completely unheard of.

Um, yeah, so like the investment to build a Twitch integration to like really push and create We also had a influencer embargo so influencers could play the game like uh, week and a half two weeks before the game launched and then we had influent like we had influencers coming to us saying like, "Hey, I want to participate in this. Like I want to be one of these exclusive people to get the game first." and they were like tweeting about it as well. So, yes, big big impacts. Cool. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, I will be around. James will be around and thank you for coming to our talk.