Indie Game Marketing Tips With Failbetter's Hannah Flynn - GDC Podcast Ep. 5

on GDC podcast episode 5 we got a special guest Hana Flynn Hana Flynn with sunless skies developer failed better games and she will talk about marketing your indie game so people might actually buy it maybe also stay tuned for the latest GDC 20/20 news and hear opinions about 29 teens of best games back in a sec [Music] [Music] hey everybody we're back this is Chris Kraft editor-in-chief of Gamasutra and I'm here with my co-host Alisa McAleer hey Alisa hi I'm Melissa Macklin I am neither an associate producer producer no what is my job your publisher no you got it just add it

add it to your title so yeah let's let's go right into some GDC news real quick before we bring on our very special guest so GDC 2020 is coming up in March still right we haven't shifted the dates near months away yeah mere months I can't take it this is like it's like three podcasts away don't care I've changed yeah my perception of time into podcasts so I hope that's a acceptable unit of measurement yeah it's coming up March 16th through 20th 2020 get that year right 2020 registration is open at Gd can't calm and we would love to see you there but we would would be nice wouldn't it no we actually have it is a lovely atmosphere I mean it has been for the past 131 years like that yeah yeah a

hundred century this is the yeah we have some honestly really exciting what we're finally starting to talk about the talks that are gonna be there so have a listen have you heard of this game called deaf stranding the walking simulator yes I'm familiar is it I thought it was a stepping and falling simulator dropping your packages all over the place simulator but there's going to be a talk deconstructing the AI of deaf stranding that's gonna be there it's gonna be great there's also a little little app called apex legends known around Gamasutra so always as a plagues but more formally as respawns apex legends so yeah there's a post-mortem on that come on down for that and last one I'm gonna mention although

there are so many others that are live on the site right now on G DC's web site right now there is going to be one on the ashtray a maze in control what do you think of that Elissa control yeah but that I watch someone play that part and it is visually stunning so I can only imagine the making of that has to be wild yeah I mean watching watching games nowadays it counts as playing I think so you have played the ashtray maze so dang day yeah yeah and then lastly there are a bunch of alt control GDC this is these are these are games that have these really wacky alternative controls this includes a this year there's gonna be a cow milking competitive cow milking simulator there I've seen I've seen it in pictures and it's exactly what you would think it would look like kind of

like rubbery utters there and you go up against your friend anymore we go ELISA and I are actually we were raised in the Midwest so I think we would be pretty good it'll be a nice little sense of home I think in the middle of credit convention floor is just some utters on the pale yeah yeah absolutely and then what last of all you can for our our potential GDC guests you need some financial help we also have a what we call a low income pass lottery which you can apply for so check that out on the GD conf comm website so onto our guest she is director of comms that is short for communications I think at fail better games where she used worked on fallen London sunless sea that is

singular not sunless seas sunless sea as well sunless skies plural she also came up with a really cool campaign last year the hashtag love Indies campaign which we'll talk about she is a marketing guru in the game industry and in the pet and her past life in a past life she worked in book publishing art and charitable causes she is a past and future GDC speaker and she's spoken at a bunch of other places sharing her knowledge it is Hannah Flynn hey Hannah hello thank you that was the warmest introduction I've ever had on a podcast I know that I feel like it was the warmest one that I've given an extremely accurate we pride ourselves in the facts here research was worth it and it's funny to think I am previously a speaker at GDC as well because I spoke at GDC next you did yeah I watched it

I'm really thinking of this was my first go I don't yeah this is yeah yeah what one of my favorite parts about your GDC next talk back in 2014 I think was that you were a little under the weather and every time you coughed you asked the audience to applaud it was the most applause that I've seen during the entirety of a GDC talk oh it was the last talk at GDC next maybe ever yeah I think I closed it out with a lot of applause but yeah I was quite sick and I'd been in the industry for a total of five weeks or something at the time yeah oh wow yeah and you already knew so much that you had to tell everybody I came in on a high I had a baby in the middle and now I'm back you're back all right so give us a little bit of your background you actually came to fail better games

from a non games background yeah I am I don't even have game based qualifications I don't either yeah I'm doing what I'm doing it I worked previously in film the in publishing for one of the biggest publishers in the world if not the biggest and then for museums and galleries digital team making games and interactivities for children and young people and that's the biggest gallery in the UK and then the biggest children's charity in the UK and after a while of not really knowing any of my colleagues names I thought I quite like to work somewhere very very small and I joined fell better I think I was employee number eight rude yeah at the time there were only eight of us and that was much more my tempo much more comfortable for me and no longer having to try and Korea with people than a different continent who you sort of have to guess it their

email and you need them to do something for you in short order just has very stressful very stressful yeah I had my day gaming was less stressful than that weirdly enough I joined in 2014 right on the tail end of the first bit of gamergate it was less stressful than working for a children's charity good lord okay I guess counting my blessings there yeah so it's I always like stories where people come into the game industry after not being in it because I know that a lot of people kind of are on the outside looking in and maybe think that they can't get in or that their background won't benefit or is not transferable to a career in the games industry so what what informed how did your your non games work inform your current work in marketing and communications and games well I've always worked across marketing and comms

so the beautiful part of that discipline is it's completely transferable I could go and market kitchen cleaner if I felt strongly enough about it do you feel strongly enough okay no I'm looking at my kitchen right now and it is not clean so I don't think I'd be a good ambassador for that industry at all a good show yeah because comms and marketing is basically about the audience and platform it's about finding the one through the other so when I arrived in in games I didn't really understand say live streaming and I hadn't used tools like that before but because I'd built audiences before and I understood a bit about human behavior and what people are looking for out of community it's something that you can really apply so because getting into games is extremely competitive and because roles like mine are really very rare even

within the small industry that we're in it is slightly heartening I think for people to think I could do this for another business and learn and then take those skills plus my personal knowledge of games which I had and turn that into a role for myself somewhere you know working on something that I love which is what I did yeah kind of like accessibility has changed from like 2014 ish when you got started to like the currents maybe the industry or is that about kind of the same I think it is getting better partially because I've done a number of talks where I just had big letters on that said hire a marketer marketer Jesus how come can I curse us okay Jesus Christ is a it's a curse well I stopped myself halfway through Jesus Christ because I was thinking of something else because people I think marketing is becoming something more and more studios need in order to get any

traction and people are really having to consider what is possible within what they have in terms of resources and money obviously but also there are ambition and how they can make something happen that matches the ambition they have for their games that's very much changing the need for what I do is definitely increased but as fell better have been ahead of the curve on a few things and lucked out on a few things and one of them I think was hiring him a fully-fledged full-time marketer in 2014 yeah can you before we go on more about the marketing details can you tell us a little bit about what fail better does and the kinds of games that that you all make there yeah we we make really beautifully exquisitely written story driven narrative RPGs that are heavily text-based the most recent has

more than eight hundred thousand words in it but primarily about giving extremely memorable strange oblique stories that you don't get anywhere else in games through a setting that we've been developing for ten years that's called fall in London and all of our major games that so far take place in this alternate history Victorian Gothic universe that we created ourselves and is now absolutely massive and in these games they've been quite successful too because of you well yeah because they're really good which which helps you sort of have to have both you have to have an exquisite product then you have to sell the crap out of it there's no sort of getting away from you needing to do both of those things the part of the reason that we were able to maintain and sustain our success is fall in London the original game is a browser game that

they're still going it's going to be ten in January and has a subscription model that supports it it's free to play and we have you know X thousand subscribers still that enables us to take a few more chances and to have something to fall back on if one of the premium games that would make a long side fall in London doesn't go so well so that is the bedrock of our business is this ongoing sort of games gamers service which enabled us to do a Kickstarter for summer C which succeeded brilliantly in a different age on Steam when we launched some mercy we were on the front page of steam for all Steam users for about four days which which is a big piece of pie and you don't get pie that big these days and certainly not a game of our size and then that in turn enabled us to keep

going do another Kickstarter create another early access title which we launched this year sunless skies and which for the glory of everything has been even more wonderfully warmly received and I would say has sold sustainably well and we're very happy but at the time the difference between when we launched on the scene when we launched on the skies is quite marked in terms of what you are the audience you're able to reach yeah how about we just cut to the chase and I just asked you I'll just ask you how do you market an indie game like work where do you even start forming a marketing plan some people don't have one at all and don't know where to begin with conviction Chris you have to you have to believe that marketing the your game is something that you need to do you have to start there and I guess the answer to this this question comes differently if you are a person or two people or three people in a micro studio versus a team of 10 15 you know 25

people if you have 25 people you don't have a marketer I'm afraid you've already made a few errors but if you're marketing something by yourself the way that you start is with a really good store page with a really good Twitter and with a press list and a press information you commit to doing those things you nurture them and you what's the word where you grow something and you cultivate it you cultivate those things start making a press list start day one by looking up a game that is a bit like what you want to make googling the reviews of that game looking at the journalists who wrote those reviews finding the journalists on Twitter and saying hey I saw you liked X I'm making why can I put you on the press list could I send you a key and do that until you have a list of

people who are warmly interested in the sort of stuff that you make and do a little bit of that every day the big mistake is feeling like marketing is a big homogenous single activity thing that you can spend lots of money on and if you don't have any money you can't do marketing you can you just need to account for marketing time within your development time it is part of development it starts at the beginning of development it's people who ignore it because it is daunting that will miss out how so you say it starts at like it starts day one with development how do like a developer who's like here's my project here's my idea here's the game we're gonna make we're starting today what is what would be the actionable things that a marketer would do in that situation I would ask them who it's for that gives you almost everything you need to know about what to do next we

know our audience super well because a lot of the core people who are with us now have been with us for ten years eight years since for the London was launched so we know where they live not in a creepy way we know we know that they love to read they love to feel clever they love mystery they love representative characters diversity we we as far as we know were the first commercial RPG to have a third gender option at all so we know that a lot of people are with us for that stuff and we do quite deep research with them we we sort of exist alongside them in our discord and in our various community forum spaces but if you don't have that then the first thing you need is to figure out if that audience exists doing research on similar titles establishing what you think the ambition for sales could reasonably be and pitching

yourself a sort of sufficient level of activity of marketing activity to grow a community that could support that type of sales level and being realistic about that stuff finding a niche and being happy to be niche is kind of the modern way even find an audience who will love it ten people who will love it is better than 50 people who think so like York I mean your talk about market research here and you mentioned discord how do you collect this information how do you quantify it how do you use all that data and information and apply it to development and marketing of a game cunningly this is kind of what I'm

covering in my GDC talk yes so I'm doing a talk the next level Indigo marketing which goes into things like how do you use player data research and understanding a knowledge of your audience to inspire ideas that will work for your specific game a big deal is being specific to your thing people often time will look around and see these kind of big flashy splashy marketing ideas or they think the first things that come to mind when you think of videogame marketing is like massive announcements attached a big award ceremonies or huge side of busts or side of building advertising but being very specific to the tone of your thing and the the information that you know about your audience is what enables you to narrow down and then you sort of put that through your mill and what comes out the other end is the idea that will meet those those wants and limitations

that you have a good example is the launch campaign for sunless guys we had minimal advertising budget and we don't do a lot of advertising so we wanted to use that money in as a constructive way as we possibly could and we knew all these different things about what we want to achieve we knew that the launch window was extremely short in which we could get enough public conversational and algorithmic interest in the game in order to really when they say launch they mean you know punched through the atmosphere launch the thing and get that attention so we kind of narrowed absolutely everything into a 24 hour period we also knew from our understanding of our community that they are very charitably minded and we knew about our games from having already made

so mercy that we weren't probably going to get a lot of Attraction with streamers we get some streamers but it's it's about specificity again the people who really want to stream it are very very few but they will really go for it they want to read all the words they want to wear a top hat and and have a little train whistle and just go completely hard for it which is amazing but we wanted to combine all of these things and kind of bake them and construct them into something that would give us that launch velocity so we did the summer skies 10k challenge for which in the first 24 hours after we launched we gave a pound per minute of streamed content to the game and charity special effect aiming to get 10,000 minutes hence the 10k challenge and because it was charitable original it convinced people to stream it who might not

otherwise have done so and we actually ended up with about 28,000 minutes of stream content in the first 24 hours which was fantastic and was a big part of the reason why we we were able to chart on steam in that initial period stuff like that's so creative do you feel like some developers who are kind of due to this are you know maybe they're you know they can come up with a good idea but our standoffish about trying something new like that I think it's really intimidating to do something like yeah and I also think like if you can't afford to hire a marketer then absolutely don't because it will cost but if you can afford consultancy talking about your game in great depth with someone who doesn't understand it very well is a great way to find the points at which you can like convey

exactly what it is and a good marketer will be able to reflect back to you like oh you have something there you know what do you mean people don't really want to stream your game oh well it's a load of setup and you get really breathless they get people get tired of streaming it or what if you know it is really intimidating but this is not to say that everybody should go away and do exactly what I did because it won't be more necessarily work for another type of game but it is about mashing those things together and getting something new or even like involving creative idea generation tools at rolling a dice or something to throw in some random elements until you get something that you think might work yeah and you also last year formulated the hashtag love Indies campaign can you explain what that was all about that was a success yes it's been great we've done it twice now love Indies is a campaign that goes

across players developers and platforms to basically encourage everyone to rate recommend and review indie games because we all play games and we all sort of failed to review them even if we really liked them it's a chore so we turned that that part of you know you can't just keep tweeting please review our games please leave me a review I really like it it would be really nice if you liked if you just keep saying the same thing over and over again it doesn't get you anywhere mm-hm so I chewed on that for a little while and it came to me that every developer has this problem so we reached out to a load of developers who we knew and we put together a participation guide that was extremely low freq really easy for people to pick up it had all the little social media things that people needed all the links example tweets to do and just sent it out into the world and then we had you know

thousands of thousands of uses of the the hashtag during the love indies campaign period which was a week the first year two weeks the second year and it had some really amazing effects like a permanent change to itch where leaf from itch had seen the campaign and created a tool which surfaced any games the in your library that you'd interacted with but never left a review with so it made it really really simple for people and just everybody got a glut of these reviews and all that developers was so happy to see the people reviewing their stuff it just gives you such a boost honestly we just reached a thousand reviews on sunny skies and we practically had a party that's yeah those are great numbers and can you can you explain for listeners who might not understand like why is the number of reviews so significant for game developers it's more it's significant for morale we slave away I just want to know what

you think but it feeds into what I would call the Health metrics of your store page I say when you start marketing your game you should start with the store page no amount of stuff that you do to drive people to your store page will sell your game if your store page sucks so when you put it up go back to it every two weeks review it change things tweak stuff we were named a game of the year recently by a couple of wonderful outlets so I've put that on a bit of artwork and slapped it on the store page your store page has to look healthy and alive and a contributing thing to that is his review numbers on Steam particularly it's the sort of I don't know what they would call it the review descriptor like overwhelmingly positive or or very positive or mixed heaven forbid mixed no magic kiss of death mixed and just give me a negative but maybe mix makes people read the page

a bit more like oh maybe but what you really want is overwhelmingly positive um which is extremely hard to get you have to have something like a hundred recent 100 reviews in the last three months and there has to be 95% or more positive which we have at the moment which is really nice is on sunny skies at least but the rest of the health of your page is like can people understand your capsule image when they look at it do they understand the vibe of what they're getting do they get the genre of your game from what you're putting on their genre is so important to convey is it's not people but you think about what oh I want to put something on telly I want to watch something I wanna watch a comedy or on or what's a thriller or something a crime drama and you can tell from the pictures of these TV shows on Netflix what they are what type of show they are you know but people I don't think recognize that when it comes to pitching their games on platforms so selling the genre and getting like the actual verbs that the

player is doing and using every bit of the page like I do steam store page reviews or store page reviews every Wednesday when I'm on the train to London and I do looking at other peoples pages and just going through all these things and so many times people have not been specific enough to describe their own game in their own tone of voice they haven't given enough imagery they haven't given enough sense of genre and just a few changes of word brings the like the health rating of the page up and it just raises people's confidence to by people look at your page every day and they decide right then is this something I want to buy or not and if you're like oh I haven't updated my page in like a month then people are going to look at it and think that it's crap hard truths with Flynn today but you have to kind of give yourself a recurring task to look at that and treat it as like it's the shop front it's the book jacket

for your game it's so important how often do you update pages for fail better games yeah the skies I do every couple of weeks or every time I have a new bit of news like any game of the year placements or stuff like that the Sun to see a little bit less now because it's five years old but I will definitely be reviewing that for the fifth birthday which is coming up in February Wow four steam page and light kind of see what works and what graphics you want up there and stuff like that is that somewhere we're having in established community or like a discord you have regular interactions with kind of comes into play where you can bounce ideas off of them or solicit feedback directly from the community a little it's a bit of a curse of knowledge type thing double-edged sword they're closer they are to you them more they want to be kind to you so they probably would not tell you if there were lots of problems with your page but we have done for example we use Survey Monkey we make surveys we had some capture alert for

sunny skies that really wasn't doing the job for us so we made a survey where we put together four different variants and we sent that out both to people who knew what we were doing and people who never heard of our stuff and it really helped us figure out that the what we had was too complicated and we had some options that were like a lamppost in space a Victorian lamppost in space and all the people who knew our work was like yeah fall in London I get nice and all the people who didn't know what we did we had way too much percentage of those people say I don't know what I would be doing in this game I don't know what it is so now it's literally a whacking great train in space it's a steam train in space and it's flying it's coming right at you and it's got a beautiful serif font it says some of the skies and it says literary and it says space train and it's the best-looking space trader on the steam I made

sure of it so that's that was the the answer was oh I know what I'd be doing in that game I'd be driving a train around it space that's cool because trains are cool trains are cool I imagine it's kind of a similar issue for like when you're writing something you're too close to the topic and you hand this to someone who's never interacted with games before maybe they're like I don't know what any of these words mean yeah there is there a similar trap for like game development and game marketing where you have to kind of have these fresh eyes or make sure you're not using terminology too much to have a wider appeal oh yeah there's I mean I this is something that kind of comes to me often because of my past doing marketing for other stuff the we have quite an insular situation certainly with PC gaming and and the the way that we put together our pages for these games where you can say things like can you just say this game is a turn-based RTS and people who already play that kind of game and like it will go cool I'll have that looks

great but if there are people out there who would enjoy playing whatever that is but would not know what that meant at all and that that jargon wall is so hard in games and I'm never sure where my job ends is my job gonna be to sell these games to people who right now don't even have a steam account is that it or am i selling to the steam user and I think part of that conflict comes from the fact that fall in London is the most accessible game possible that you play it in a web browser you can play it with a screen reader so the the makeup of people who play fall in London is extremely broad ages you know 10 to 80 all manner of gender types all manner of everything and that is not the Steam audience so I'm always pulled one way in the other because we have these people who really love what we do but they've never played a real-time game where you have to control something using was sad

and they don't want to really play that but they really want to get more of our stories so that's just like yeah that's a point of challenge for me all the time kind of similar conflict where you have your when you've been working in a the same IP for like a decade now trying to make things and Mark it in a way that appeals to the people you already have in your ecosystem versus the people who are out there and trying to get new players in yeah thought that it's hard and sunless guys is a sequel you know I'm saying like it's a sequel we did a lot of work to make sunless guys much easier to get into than sunless sea which was extraordinarily punishing to the point of being compared rustic ated in the first couple of hours to a lot of players it was too difficult just immediate nope so sunless guys has a way better onboarding and we've definitely done a lot of work then that translates to more sales obstinacy after people have tried skies they're ready to go get more of the stories and kind of

put up with the fact that skies the sea is harder but I'm looking forward to doing stuff there is not a sequel for the in the in the near future in the future that's gonna be pretty cool the way that you talk about you know your your career at fail better and just talking to us right now so much of it is injected with this knowledge of your community it just makes me feel like you are so in tune with the kind of audience that you want to reach so my question is you know how do you even begin to build a community around a game and how do you nurture that community and and help it grow as time goes on I think with this with a strong perspective and what you might call a super objective so it comes back again to being specific like we've

recently launched our own discord having kind of crouched on the shoulder of a community discord for a while and we we invited people over and we had set it up in a way that was very surprising to them in a lot of ways because that's our specific way of doing things and that's the vibe that you get when you come to us and a couple of examples we have a channel where you can self assign pronoun roles really important to how community that they are able to be recognized for the gender that they are so you can assign roles that are sort of placed loosely on the ones you get in fall in London and it's cute we also banned memes feel like really good about it but the people were aghast people I mean it took about 24 hours for people to sort of go okay you know whatever but the fact that we've banned memes which sets us apart I

think from literally every other discord I've ever looked at and I did lots of research it that is a statement of intent and it is specific to fail better it encourages people to have conversations about other stuff without pulling on you know just the latest mean that it might be something that half of the other people and the channel get and you get to feel smart by sharing it but not that smart really because you're sort of alienating people it's brought people back in from the community who'd left other spaces because they felt just excluded that they didn't understand what was happening because they weren't like deep into meme culture and instead we've been talking about about web comics and about Russian literature and all these things that are so idiosyncratic and true to what fell better offer people who have literary interests people who have a huge amount of interests outside of games and they're still happy to be in our discord

what was it the thing I said specificity and something else I was very clever when I said it I'm sure yeah well just you know our listeners can just rewind it and yeah the other thing it's but yeah I mean I'm just talking about the you know cultivating your community and you know how do you feel people end up entering your community like why does somebody come to your discord channel or why does somebody want to be a part of it that's a really good question I think because it is safe and because it is different you can be yourself there in a way that a lot of other not high toxicity necessarily but really highly online meme literature fast velocity kind of communities can be quite off-putting

to the extent where I think a lot of people just feel like discord as a general thing isn't for them all the way I feel when I'm watching like a live stream with a lot of people just going cake cake face face face face face on Twitch like oh my god this isn't this is not for me and in terms of people how people find us though there's a really interesting phenomenon with phone in London that a sunless sea obviously brought in a lot of players to fall under as a persisting game but we still have people being referred in from TV Tropes or people discover it via browsing TV Tropes or really once every six months they'll be like oh free games you can play on your lunch break thread on reddit and full of London will get voted to the top and we'll get a few thousand people join from that this is just extraordinary when I think of the longevity of fall in London but it's formed like a huge part of people's lives it's for a small

number of people like they check in every day you spend you spend actions in the game to read stories and there's some people are planning a year ahead of what they're going to play they are grinding out a vial of hesperidin cider which is sort of immortality juice which people that it with something you spend every action on for a year so they join the community for something to do well they're doing that yeah yeah that's and that's one of the obviously one of the big challenges today is you know there's so many games out there and people are talking about discoverability so you know what's what's your view on today's marketplace and how do you you know you've talked to it you've talked some ways that you've done it but what's your view on discoverability and and being effective at getting your game in front of potential customers yeah it's much

harder than it used to be and yeah I think that's the the entry-level thing to say about it isn't it really but it bears repeating choosing the space that you want to be in is probably the toughest decision like making sure you have the product that will succeed in the place you know and and then being lucky or fortunate or timely enough to get an exclusive somewhere that someone will pay you for that can set you up for a long time I Apple arcade this year has secured the next year's development for tons of studios you're out of nowhere or an epic exclusive or I think the tightening up of discoverability means that people just need to have commensurate ambition for what they're trying to do being able

to sustain what you're doing making it sustainable as as like your first point of business is much more important than it used to be and it all ties into these ideas of of crunch and one big hit and being like a one big hit you you can't look at one big hits and then do anything to to make another one so you have to kind of look at your life like it's really serious stuff look at your life and what do you want it to be like and can you work another job and make your indie game and in you know in two evenings a week around caring for your children and is that what you want to do and does it really make you happy I think that's that's the questioning that the democratization of the tools and platforms has led to you're not that I want to put anyone off doing it but just to be real be real with yourself and

don't hurt yourself like we are so we won the best places to work it will work award this year and in 2017 and we that we are sort of more proud of that than we are even of our games we want people who are healthy and happy to come in and they don't dread work on a Sunday night and the work works for their life that's what we've really won and to keep doing it that's the that's the key yeah absolutely do something that make you makes you happy seems like this weird novel idea when you frame it that way but there's a lot of just kind of chugging away and like making yourself miserable for this thing that you think is gonna get this hit and make you happy or whatever but you have to think day to day rather than like the grand picture kind of yeah basically you've grown you got so many hours on the planet what do you want to spend them doing I love her podcast get kind of existentialism yeah it's about the 40-minute mark every time we've cleared

all the chaff NACA and here's the wheat well we are starting to get get to the end of our time here I do want to ask because I think this is kind of a practical question what have you found that you have been some of the most effective tools for you as a marketer of games is it like email is that you know trying to get featured on a store front discounting games so that people see it like what are what are some of the things that that really work that people should pay attention to collaboration and strategic discounting I would say the the biggest things this year that have moved the needle on selling sunny skies since it came out have all been big sales targeted sales and digital collaboration slash events with other

developers as an example the publisher fellow-traveller put together an event on steam within steam called Ludo and Eric on didn't narrative game-con and it was a bunch of their games that they publish and a handful of other people who applied for it I saw it on Twitter and I applied for another put important reason to be on Twitter because you find these things and that was like a three day sale where we committed to streaming a live stream of our game on our page and that was on the front page of steam in the carousel with with other stuff but it had live features it had live streaming features and it had discounts and we were I think one of like 16 featured games but we were giving something to get that really fantastic placement and really like targeted specific niche and we also have

done like similar things that with a slightly more altruistic bent like we were part of a steam sail around the charity war child who helped children in conflict near a big thing around Armistice Day in November so we created contact within summer skies of an urchin a young person who had lost her parents in conflict and was the star warned urging had seen too much of the skies I just wanted to hide away on your ship and she could become your ship's mascot and because we generated that and came up with that again in line with the kind of stuff I'm talking about charitable and despite having a game set in Victorian times we do not just let children get tortured and messed around in our games it's one of the content tenets that we had so she's a really optimistic character she's not in a workhouse or something which you would often get in these slightly more bleak Victorian based games and that enabled us to get some visibility around that sale and then we also raise money for charity so yeah and then I realize I'm

saying all these things and it's contingent on having someone it's team who listens to you know not everyone has that collaborating with other people who are at a similar level to you or a slightly more aspirational level than you is a really good way to reach new audiences we're in a couple of bundles now across different publishers which makes our game appear on the the steam pages of other games in a way that we control and not just algorithmically which is pretty cool so those are the big those are the big successes for us yeah well I mean you talk about I mean you just mentioned of course like you have these relationships but I mean feel better was at one point you know you said you were employee number eight and you got to start somewhere so yeah it's it's not like it's unattainable to gain these important relationships with platform holders and and whatnot no and

I think you just have to I think a big part of what makes us look legit in the eyes of these platform holders is how much we care about our presence on their platform for Steam particularly we are sort of steam first you know reporting similar skies next year but we developed it with steam audiences in mind and started there and we play the game you know our page is gorgeous it looks great it's literary it's a quality prestige sort of a game that's what people want to see it matches up with their kind of aspirations for the platform I feel it's something that you could put on each with a really interesting indie aesthetic and like you know some really traditional interactive fiction with no walking or anything like that's perfect for that platform and that will really energized that audience so set it all up

over there and and see how you get on there like tailor what you're doing to the space yeah yeah it seems like a theme there being specific and tailoring it for for the space so is there any any any parting thoughts before before we let you go you're you're in the UK I'm just a parent me too I yeah is there any any parting thoughts you know tips for for Indies who are kind of trying to get their bearings marketing in this really tumultuous Tamil to us in difficult marketplace just do something now do something now because is the same thing as prototyping you don't you don't know what the finished product will look like and how it will behave until you've tried something and then there's a lot of paralysis in the

oh god I don't even know you know what should i what should I tweet what did you work on today that would make a funny or interesting gif that is in reasonable shape that you don't mind showing to people tweet it target indeed EV our show it to someone you know begin by doing begin by doing and don't sit on your laurels because you need that you need that cultivation time ahead of you alright that sounds like a great place of stuff and thank you so much for joining us hi and thank you for having me yeah of course and best of luck with all your future endeavors thank you [Music] [Music] and we're back that was a great conversation no yeah that was

marketing's wild yeah I know it's just difficult just the attention span of people you know and it's I mean it's me too I'm not criticizing people for having the attention span of a butterfly these days I'm the same way it's just where we all get pulled in so many directions now even when I'm playing a game I noticed that I gets distracted by other games yeah and then I go and start playing another game do you do that yeah especially the last like month of the year when I'm like oh I want to do my Kodi list stuff oh but this game looks really cool Oh what if I play Red Dead online 4 or 5 hours every day instead and like it's yeah yeah I know I keep getting distracted by these these older games and you know like destiny - I'm randomly decided to get back into destiny - when I need to be catching yeah well it was good before but like they did a lot of good changes recently so you're gonna be hooked yeah

I know I like it yeah but that's not a 20-19 game shadow came out I guess I guess that you can kind of that's why I like it's it's difficult with these end of year lists like you know press outlets we kind of I think we should keep on doing it to recognize you know the new things that come out every year but we do it as a kind of tradition and a tradition that you know I as an editor I sometimes question the value of it because people do play you know we there are so many live games now like what's a 2019 game and is a game disqualified for this reason or that or the other well I always found like and I think every year I've written a game of the year list forgot my future I've gotten hit man on there I don't think it's gonna be on there this year but I'll figure it out because of like live games and like oh well there's just

like ya games are they aren't this like one time event anymore the entire landscape has changed yeah yeah in a game that might have launched this year that stinks might be good next year you know it might be great next year and what they just missed the boat on you know the accomplishments that you know that thing Ubisoft Rainbow six siege was like it when it launched like in 2014 and don't call him bad with yours wouldn't launch several years ago it was like a shadow of what it is now it wasn't that great and now like that game is doing really well it's got a solid community it was up for a certain award at the Game Awards because they recognized in that way that games are kind of like this process that evolved beyond a launch especially when you take as good care of it it's like Ubisoft has in there I really do that yeah and to segue this back into marketing discussion with huh marketing yeah I mean that is marking live games like it's like there's so much marketing involved with these games that are

updated constantly and you know feel better they also update their games regularly their living if you will and oh and while the games are living the steam pages for them are kind of like evolving in a similar way as well where that process never really stops it just changes yeah yeah and you know it's been like this for ever I feel like with indie games in particular people don't you know they just don't market their their games enough or they don't you know do it with the same kind of intention that Hannah does I mean she clearly does her research like deep research on the audience on what they want how to better serve them how to expand your audience she talks about you know that the store page which seems

like an obvious thing people know that they should have a store page and they're gonna have a store page but what makes a good store page you know when you google the game's name its title that's what you come across the you know the steam steam page or the the the main page not just a placeholder it is an advertisement for the product you're trying to release and yeah it's easy to forget that yeah and what I'm like they were good no I'm just gonna say the people who are googling you know the game in particular the they're already aware of it you know or else they wouldn't be googling the name of the game so they're they're finding that they're already close you know to being part of your community to being converted into a customer they're that close and then they get to the page and then you know they might just be like yeah as we said during the broadcast there were there were like a lot of a lot of takeaways that I didn't write down fast enough because my keywords

loud but uh what it like the the fact that like marketing should be a day one part of the development process is something that like I think I it's not the easiest thing to wrap your head around because what am I gonna do day one but she had some very good advice for what you should do in those early stages but otherwise it can be too easy to kind of be like okay well I'm going to work on my game and then now that I have something shippable I'm going to start now that it's ready to go I'm gonna start getting attention on it and like you can't segment the process like that no she had a lot of really good advice on how to kind of bring that process together and weave marketing throughout every step of the development process which is nice yeah and I hear similar stuff from other people who market games particularly indie games you know it's funny because you know I keep an eye on the steam charts and sometimes it'll be like this number one game just came out of nowhere it was like then you google it it's like oh it didn't come out of nowhere they've been doing like they've they've been

cultivating this community on reddit for the past two years three years so there is like this perception among some developers that oh this game just came out of nowhere like they must have you know gotten link somewhere got like a good idea that took off on its own yeah it took off on its own which I can't think of a case I guess if I thought hard enough I could think of like an exception but it's usually like you know when you see that quote-unquote out of nowhere hit on Steam number one do yourself a favor and google the name and then find the red page like that's been there for like three years that has crap loads of followers and then you'll see that and learn from that yeah yeah absolutely so yeah let's talk about like the end of end of your stuff real quick and diffused uh yeah we're planning

things earlier than we did last year yeah without the teams yeah yeah yeah free gamasutra we do our end of year lists and yeah we I'm also pushing back a little bit when we're gonna publish these we're gonna do it some of the big ones properly we're gonna wait until the end of the year just in case something comes right before the stroke of midnight One Hundred Years Eve the game comes out and it's just like mind-blowing and then we can laugh at everybody who published their list too early someone did that last year where everyone was like alright I got my list ready to go and then the next day if some really cool indie dev folder some really cool game and I'm like ah yeah that'd be yeah that's what I would do if I was an indie developer this is really telling gave me a loose yeah just like release my amazing game right before the stroke of midnight I'm New Year's Eve yeah that would really get those journalists got best

trends coming up and comma future best events best doves yeah of the year and then best games that all of the categories man yeah we're all gonna do games Apple arcade game arcade yeah yeah I don't really like a lot of Apple arcade games this year there's some good stuff it's my grindstone subscription but sometimes I remember to branch out a little bit mmm I like having narrative games on my phone so that's really nice yeah grindstone is great bleak sword is incredible I will say neo Cavs praises it's so good yeah dear reader is another one that is very good that doesn't have a lot of like cool like characters or attention anything on it I think that it's just a really cool like literary puzzles yeah that's really great it's a lot of fun yeah I seen up until 4:00 a.m. play yeah it's been interesting seeing the kinds of games that are like being recognized some of them are like kind of what you would expect on other publications top

10 list like you got outer wilds you know that's being really talked about that's a great game yeah the first 10 minutes are great I don't have any free time yeah you got plenty of time yeah no I'll get it to it after my list is written before the end of the year unfortunately but yeah just make sure to play it before the stroke of midnight yours even I can make make your list so yeah I think that that's all for this week for the GDC podcast two more podcasts away from GPS we are officially two podcasts away from UTC which I don't know what her podcast plans are exactly but might get a torrent of like a torrential downpour of podcasts out of GDC during GDC week but that's not a promise oh that could captain they'll be good content matter what yeah there'll be some kind of hash tag content yeah

so check us out on iTunes Google Play Spotify and we're at YouTube where you can stare at a static picture and listen to us or just change tabs on us and just listen to us out of your computer speakers will never know either way yeah you could play it you could play a video game that we are talking about on the podcast on your computer while listening to it I'm not sure I think my brain is melting it's it's the last month of the year it's the last couple weeks of the year yeah it's just melted it's gone so alright everyone thanks again and if you enjoy us if you love us leave us a good review give us a thumbs up on YouTube give us a five star review on nights I mean that this is what we have to do right that's what Hannah was talking about reviews are important for podcast

- yeah that's right there please please like yeah please like because all right thanks everyone and we'll see you next time bye [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]