How To Sell 1 Million Copies Of Your Game (In A Week)

in this video me and my buddy Jay one of the creators of cult of the Lamb discuss exactly how he made a game that sold over 1 million copies in less than a week and if you stick around through the entire video you're going to walk away with top tier advice from well in my opinion a developer responsible for one of the greatest indie game success stories I'll be honest man I'm super duper jealous because you guys have figured out verality and that is an amazing achievement for any game developer you've got eyes now and I don't see ever ending we got an awesome social media and Community um manager who joined team Josie and Lor they're both just amazing and uh Josie particularly has a very like an evil sense of humor and I think she enjoys kind of winding people up but also is really good at and I think this is key is like knowing how far you can take it and then like going okay don't worry it was a joke yeah so it's been really good I mean the key learning with sins of the flesh is that yeah sex cells um news

news to everyone shocking um but that's been the that's been the key I think what's really core to what we've learned is definitely you know we're making the game we're game designers so we want fun core systems but really you need to have some kind of hook that you're tying it all together on so like at the moment we're talking about our next what what update we're going to do next and we've got all these cool ideas but we're sort of like how do we tie that together into a coherent package and that's really crucial and I think a lot of indie game developers don't like that sort of thinking where it's like well it shouldn't be about the marketing it should be about the brilliant idea but it's like yeah it should be about both and they're both really important I pulled my audience on Twitter I said would you rather make half a million dollars every year for four years making a game you hate or would you rather just make a game you love with barely scratching by and the majority of game developers said I just want to scratch by and make something that I love and I'm not saying there's a right answer here but if you want to be a full-time game developer and do what you and I are

doing you've got to be willing to suffer a little bit The Suffering that I'm doing lately for our next game is I'm secretly pulling my audience to figure out like what's actually a good hook here for our next game yeah and so it's it's a painful process of like looking for the ideas that people really latch on to because the ideas that I think I'm going to latch on to aren't necessarily the ideas that are going to sell and make us money because at the end of the day when you're making decent money for your game there's this sort of as long as you're not Addicted to Money there is a freedom that comes with that you know and you can you can make anything you want and I I think that that all starts with a really really great hook yeah you know what I mean absolutely it's not so much that I would say you know we definitely didn't sell out we made something kind of edgy and that we really wanted to make but it's more about it's more about like how do you present your ideas so it's not like it's not selling out because I don't feel that that's what C for Lam is I think it's like it's a very to to me it's a

very cool game that I'm really proud that we've made but it's more about we were just kind of we conscious about how do you present those ideas in a way that like people can consume immediately I kind of tell the story a lot about when we started the game we the core of the game was the the loop so it's like you've got your base and then you go out and you Dungeon Crawl and you find resources to come back to build up your base so that you can go get upgrade your character and go further and you know that that's the that was the core but the cult thing didn't come in till much much later because we spent about N9 months kind of arguing about what the game should be about we had all these crazy ideas one of them was like you know you're a lost God on the back of a flying whale and we would go to conventions and talk to people like yeah we're working on this game you're this lost God and and people's eyes would just like glaze over and they just be like I so we we knew it wasn't right we just kept going when we found like you start a cult there's like three three words four words four words and um and people would get it straight away and it's just that power communication so

it's again like it's not it's not like choosing to sell out at all it's it's just like take your great idea but you know think about how you're communicating it how you showing people and getting people interested how you getting people interested because again like I've done both and it's a lot more fun when more people play your game let me let me tell you that straight up it's it's not fun when you poured four years into a game and you the next day you've got to go right I need to bring in the next deal because there's no money you told me this um you were helping me sort of do some ideation with Twisted Tower which is our current game and you helped me so much with that and you formulated for me something that I a lot of my audien has heard me say this but I call it the big butt principle and the the big butt B okay not B all right um yeah my mind is not as much in the gutter as yours not you get right um but it's called the big butt principal and you were sort of the impetus of this the big butt principle

is blank but blank okay so for hollow KN it's Metroid Vania but with bugs yeah right with portal it's firstperson shooter but with portals um with your game it's Binding of Isaac but cult management St Valley or Rim world you know that's yeah exactly I mean that's how that's how we came up with it that it was like yeah yeah you know you so much of it was like looking at what didn't work with our previous game and responding to what didn't work you know there'd be no cause of lamb if we hadn't had our our our other games because we saw you know that you know people would see our previous games and think things like oh it's a kids game and write it off so we're like oh God we got to go and we saw Hollow night which came out SLE time we got to go darker and things like single use content and it's like okay well you know you have 120 levels but once you played it once that's it and it's gone and and that's incredibly timec consuming expensive to make and um

and in like you know with streaming it's like you don't even need to play it yourself you can watch someone else play it and then you've consumed it you don't need to buy it so like it's just so you know looking at what are the things that what are the games that aren't single use and and they were like Colony Sim Farm Sim games you know Star Valley Rim world and the other one that was bigger at the time was the Rogue lights and you could play into the gungeon over and over and over again and you know the content just kept getting used and used and used and like okay so let's let's take yeah like your idea stue Valley but into the gungeon and I think you're absolutely right it's like seeing what works and giving it a unique hook and and the other point about why I think that's such a good idea is that it's that level of newness but familiarity so you're saying like it's this game but this and people like oh I get that I know portal or like sorry I know first person shooters and I love puzzles okay it's a first person puzzles I get it but

when you're like you know oh it's a it's a game where we do this and this and that and I'm sorry I can't think of a good example of the top of my head but people I think the idea the original idea you had is a great example of that where you're a God on the back of a whale it's like it's hard to explain yeah you know it's really hard to explain and I I you helped me so much because I I that that call we had a year and a half ago because I realized that the shorter the description of your game the more likely it is that it's going to be a good idea it's like sales it's like a Salesman needs to be able to get his point across he needs to knock on someone's door and be able to sell someone something in 15 seconds or they're out you know and the same is true with games and and and it you know people might be hearing this and be thinking like the light bulbs going off they're like oh it's that easy no it's not easy at all like to be able to make a three word description of your game that is actually creates an itch in somebody is so difficult and our

previous guest Gavin who created Choo Chu Charles spider train he actually beat you in terms of the shortness spider train like like that's all you need love it y that's all you need so well can I ask you you know do you feel like your previous projects had a hook not not to the same extent no definitely not and it was never something that we thought about I mean so our two commercial games were the adventure powers and never give up never give up was a sort of more of a sort of work for higher project where we we collaborated with a publisher the adventure pal was kind of our baby and it was kind of the game that we kind of imagined you know the the in the game Dream were like this is the game we're throwing our hearts and souls into it for like three four years this is the one that's going to going to take off and of course it didn't but you know uh we needed that to get to Cult of the Lamb you know so um it its Hook was really like jimmied in at the end and it was sort of like you know it was 2016 so the hook was really

like L random you know it's like h l random back then that was kind of still interesting now not so much now but it was kind of like we learned like by going to Convention after convention after convention talking to thousands of people trying to pitch it looking at their faces when we talked about it and seeing when they would smile and so you're a young boy with a magical giraffe in your backpack and you're on a quest to rescue your dad before he's turned into a hot dog and you would kind of see the sort of like smirk with the giraffe and then the hot dog thing You' sort of see the like oh smile kind of thing so there was definitely that maybe that's where we learned it I I would probably wouldn't take so much of the credit Julian who's um so Julian myself and jimp founded massive monster and he Julian was definitely the one who's like marketing first is kind of drilled it into us I sort of came to them and I was like hey look at my cool loop you know the the the base building in the D and he's like that's great but it sucks because what's your Loop like what's your what's your what's your's the hook sign so I had the lopet he insisted on

the hook so the the adventure Pal's hook wasn't it wasn't a hook it was it was silly it wasn't a hook silly as a hook which isn't great I think there was no like you know you had the giraffe in the backpack who would have cool abilities and things but it was you know it was just um not strong enough a player fantasy you can have a great hook but if you don't fulfill the promises of the hook you're going to get mostly negative reviews or or even mixed you know sometimes I would prefer to get mostly negative over mixed just because at least there's some some polarization going on there the point is is that I wouldn't even know where to begin with a a creating a cult management Sim or you know it's it's so so so difficult to fulfill that promise of that hook yeah I mean absolutely it it was very hard it was very very hard and we didn't know for the longest time and we knew we had to do it it got to the point where we wrote a list of like we went on these websites like what makes a cult kind of

thing and we come up with a list and we went through it like do we have this do we have indoctrination do we have like um you know uh belief systems do we have um rituals do we have all of these things that we would like had to like tick off and we had to make it meaningful in the loop of the game which was really hard so I think the sacrifice is quite a good example where we put it in quite early because we knew we needed it right so did you plan all this out in a GD oh God no and the reason being tell me about that cuz you know a lot of game developers right now are probably listening thinking you know how did how what's his design process here because the professional quote unquote way to do things yeah is to write all this out before you even start your game what was your process like I think um well I it would sum up in one word um iteration it was just brutal iteration and being brutal with each other and so making stuff you're making the game and then you spend all this time and money money making something and then you scrap it

and then do something else exactly we we got to the point where we were like a AB testing system so we would just have a Boolean and we just say like you know is are you you know another good example is the sermons hooking them up to leveling up your character again came very late which is crazy right because the whole Loop of the game is the followers make you better in the dungeon and the dungeon makes you better for the followers because you've got resources kind of thing and we just didn't see that till till right at the end so we had like for example we we just would have Boolean that you know uh is it like is a sermon mode player level up true or false or is it you know or you getting gold or you know something whatever yeah and we would just get so into that process where we would just be like right we argued so much that we would just be like rather than arguing let's try both that's that's where we got to where it was just like okay you got that idea you got I I don't have the time or energy to argue put them both in and let's try them and we got to we started

saying let the game tell us what it wants to be I'm just fascinated because are you opposed to a gdd like what are your thoughts on a gdd cuz like I feel so guilty when I do what you're saying and I do it all the time which is it's it's it's quote unquote wasteful I I feel guilty because I'm like I should have been able to plan this better I should have been able to plan this game design better and then I sort of slap myself on the wrist and and think I wasted my team's time what you're saying is no this is a necessary process of any great game to to build it out as opposed to write it out because we were doing something that we were doing a lot of things that we hadn't come across before so again going to that like Metroid Vania it's like yeah write it out fine that's I don't I'm not opposed to gdds but we were moving so fast that we didn't have time to write and maintain a gdd because there just wasn't right so we had to write stuff for Publishers to get funding and things but from that point on we would like I I do I do a lot

of slideshows or I use a tool called Miro uh where I'll like plan it all out and stuff and just but then like that's what we're doing now this week that's what we're doing and then that's like scrapped and then next week it's like right this we're going to move this around and this is going to go here so no I'm not against udds um at all but they've just never they didn't work in this case because we just couldn't we just didn't have a time or Manpower or energy or needs because we was we were such a small team as well and so kind of moving so quickly that you know ideas would be scrapped before people had even heard of them you know I'm encouraged to hear you say this yeah because I think for my next game I just want to sort of just feel it out you know as opposed to try and type it all out definitely and you need that and you need to be responsive to what how the game is feeling and and coming together