I just clicked "LAUNCH" for my game on Steam...

hey guys how's it going so my name is Thomas brush I'm about to launch a game in one hour actually this video is posting right at 8 a.m. Pacific time so as you're watching this I have just launched never song I'm recording this an hour before when you're actually watching that so I'm speaking you to you from the past obviously so I wanted to record a quick video diary about what launch has been like for never song I can't calculate exactly how long it's been I think it's been to 2.5 to 3 years of production for this game I think I don't even know anymore it's been a long time and I wanted to give you a quick rundown of what launch has been like for never song and if you guys want to check out the game please click the link below it's 15% off on

Steam for a limited time it would really help me in that would be awesome I think you'll really like it by the way I really like that game I'm proud of it I'm proud of it and actually twin finit really liked it and also a game spew they gave it really good scores so so far things are looking good let's talk about launch so how do you guys launch your indie game well let's use never songs as maybe a template for you to launch a game so basically two weeks ago I told my publisher I said you know what we need a launch on Steam I think that we need to just make it happen for a variety of reasons and so they were like are you sure Thomas I said yeah let's do it so we scrambled to do the marketing plan and get it done in a couple days so that we had essentially two weeks to let everybody know that the game was coming out so here's what we did I can't speak to what my publisher did but if you guys

ever get a publisher the first thing you need to tell them is hey I'm going to pretend you don't exist during launch and I'm gonna do my own marketing plan and if they tell you they don't like that I would recommend not working with them because a lot of publishers especially ones that are smaller they they think that what they can do is just hire a PR company to sell your game and they all have to do anything so they'll spend ten grand on a PR company and then you're good to go but I don't I don't agree with this at all now if you're working with someone like Double Fine let them handle it but if you're working with a smaller publisher or somebody that maybe is more of a partner with you and less of just a massive publisher like again Double Fine or even like Microsoft or something like that you're really gonna want to pretend they don't exist during the marketing plan and just do your own thing so

here's what I did two weeks ago I immediately got a press list together and Hector my producer was he actually put together a massive press list of about 200 individuals and what I told him to do and this was he actually put this together last year and so we had it ready to go now the problem is some of the email addresses were actually you know not really valid anymore because what happens is a lot of these writers for press outlets a lot of them their email addresses are no longer valid because they work at companies for like three months and then jump to another one another one another one or they start freelancing or something so the journalism field of employment is very fluid so anyway he had a list of like 200 members of the press or a hundred members of the press 100 youtubers and we actually were able to

find members of the press who had written about Pinstripe my previous game and we were able to reach out to them because we knew they would like this next game now for those of you who don't have a game it's totally fine what I would do is I don't have a previous release that was covered by various press outlets what I would do is go find press reviewers and Metacritic is a great place to start just search for a game that's similar to yours so I don't know if your game is like timesplitters i'm just think of a random game I can't think of a game right now if your games like timesplitters - I don't know why I'm thinking about that game I love that game that's I'm a little bit tired so let's say your games like time splitters to go find reviews of time splitters to find the raht the reviewers of that game on all of the different websites it doesn't even matter if they're not in your country find them all over the world get their personal email addresses

and you can usually find those on their Twitter page get their personal email addresses and put a huge list together of all of these people in the press then just start shooting them keys send them keys send them keys press list and also this is really important send them a link to your youtube trailer because that will actually pop up in their email so they don't have to click anything it'll just show up in the email at the bottom of the email especially if they're using like Gmail so send them everything they need immediately do not ask them if they want to play your game that's stupid because what are they gonna say nothing cuz they don't have time for you they're all they're all very very busy right so that's what I did I just sent keys I sent the press kit and if you guys want to see my press kit I'll put a link in the description it's at most Gamescom and you can just click on never song and click on the press kit at the top of the page so send the press kit and then send their steam key for God's sakes send the steam key do not hesitate to send the

steam key make sure you guys are putting everything that is important right at the top of your email okay you really want to make sure that you understand that all of these people in the press all of these youtubers they get a ton of emails every day so you need to catch their attention quick before they even open the email and I think a lot of these people aren't gonna be on their phones so there's gonna be scrolling through a phone and they're gonna see it the first sentence of your email that's all they're gonna see what do you want it to say so make sure your subject line and that first sentence is huge usually I'll include your key in in the description somewhere or the I'm sorry the subject line so that they know that hey I'm getting a free pre key and also if you've had any reviews from any other websites slam that in the subject line as well so something like for me Kotaku what that was amazing but they actually wrote about never song and I said game featured by Kotaku and jacksepticeye

your key that's what I would do in the subject line and we got pretty good response for that no here's the thing I'm looking at my press list well actually where to go hmm well if if the press list was open and I was looking at it I could tell you that probably 10 to 20 percent I'm not sure the exact number 10 to 20 percent of members of the press actually responded now 10 percent or less actually said they would do some kind of coverage so that's the the the I guess depressing news it's not really depressing because honestly 10 percent is actually pretty good before press coverage on launch day so that is the first step just send out your press keys to youtubers and in writers of various blogs and outlets and don't be depressed if you're not getting you know responses the second thing you want to do for your marketing plan is go ahead and push for

wish lists all across your social media for me thankfully my youtube channel did really well last year it grew a lot thanks to PewDiePie and thanks to you guys for for helping promote my channel and because of that Twitter's been growing and instagrams been growing and my email list has been growing so I'm able to send out a ton of tweets and and videos during these last two weeks and I know you guys have been annoyed asking for wish lists and that's really really important wish lists are gonna help push your game up to the top of the front top of the list on the new and upcoming on the front of the steam page me I can't talk today and that's really great because that's just gonna drive more wish lists so now we're getting about 740 wish lists a day for the last week on Steam now the conversion rate for

wish lists is a little bit different than it used to be I'm not sure what it is now but it still is important to get wish list basically Pinstripe I can disclose this Pinstripe made about fifty thousand dollars gross in the first like month and a half or let's just say month of its launched on Steam and that was with eight thousand wish lists and in a pretty a pretty basic marketing plan so with 20,000 wish lists or actually right now we're like a 24 or 25 thousand I'm pretty sure we'll get a lot more attraction than we did with pinstripe so wish lists are obviously huge again it's because people are seeing your game they're being notified by steam pay Thomas's game is out and it's 15 percent off so that's a lot of people

getting notified if those wish lists convert well that means you're basically going to sort of create a spiral of exponential growth for your game on Steam the more wish lists you get the more purchases you get the more purchases you get the more wish lists you get and hopefully you get plastered on the front page of steam and you're pretty much in the atmosphere ready to go now the third thing that I do is all about launch day I won't get too technical here but there's a lot that gets posted immediately on launch hour and my stomach is in knots right now because I'm looking at the clock and this video along with several other things need to be done by exactly 11:00 a.m. AM a.m. et Eastern Time and also 8 a.m. Pacific Time so there's a couple things that I need to do I need to post on reddit I also need to post this video

I need to post on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook I need to do an email blast and I need to post on imager and also oh man there's a lot to do I don't know if I'm gonna have time to do all this yeah it's basically just a bunch of social media posts right at 11:00 a.m. my time 8:00 a.m. Pacific time so all those things need to be posted immediately at the exact same time and then I also need to distribute Kickstarter keys so all that stuff happens immediately at launch now the fourth thing that I'm gonna be doing is not just relaxing after we launch because it's not all about just prepping for launch and then saying okay there's nothing else I can do you've definitely want launch to be huge a huge splash for you but the fourth thing I do is I continue to do what I did in the first step second step third step over and

over and over again for the next week and that is because if you hit the front page on Steam if your game is performing well you want to continue to feed it fuel so that it stays on the steam front page and keeps getting more and more wish lists those wish lists will be helpful in the future for when you actually put the game on sale again but it also just continues to drive sales and Steam likes that obviously the steam algorithm is going to like that and so they're going to keep your game in the limelight as long as you feed it fuel so it's a long process it's like a month of work of just pushing your game as much as you can because if you can make a really good tidal wave on your game to launch steam sees that the algorithm sees that and it's going to propel your game for the next year and a half or two years maybe even three years it's going

to propel your game so it's a lot of steams launch is a lot like a launch of a rocket if you can propel that rocket into the atmosphere you really want to hit the atmosphere so that you can actually stay up there and once you're there you're just good to go you're in orbit but the truth is is if you don't hit the atmosphere your sales are going to be significantly lower and you know I think I think pinstripe probably didn't hit the atmosphere I'll be honest I don't think it did it certainly performed well got a lot of reviews we had Humble Bundle it provided for my family gave me a decent salary for a couple years including some other revenue sources but it did well I just don't think it hit the atmosphere the atmosphere is when that exponential growth just explodes and you really

don't have to do much to keep the game up there so I'm hoping fingers crossed that we hit the atmosphere for an m4 song if you guys want to check out never song it would really mean a lot to me it's 15% off click the link below that would really be awesome I'll talk to you guys later fingers crossed