So.... my game is in Steam Next Fest RIGHT NOW. Here's how it's goin

okay so I wanted to just give you guys an update on TW the Twisted Tower demo um next Fest is today by the way so please click the link below and play the Twisted Tower demo it would mean a lot to me cuz Hey more traffic that we can get going to the demo hopefully it'll rise to the top of the charts and hey we'll have a popular demo but the cool thing is is while the demo is already popular in fact uh the demo I think it's at let's see here it's currently at 6 68 reviews 92% very positive so I'd say it did pretty good it did pretty good and I'm I'm really proud of of what's been accomplished here and honestly I think that uh I I think I think I've learned a ton and I just wanted to share with you in sort of a really candid chill video how to how to launch a demo with nextfest um and how to see it pop off

like this um I think these are really good numbers and everyone I've talked to has said these are really good numbers I can't pull up Steamworks right now but I will I guess let's say this I I'll save to the end how many wish lists or additional wish list we got because of launching a demo but um and I'll tell you that it's been very positive and you should definitely do a demo and you should definitely do it during one of the next fests but I want to give you um I guess just uh how I how I did this and and how you can potentially do it too so there's a lot of steps and there there's a honestly it was a grueling process getting the the demo prepared ready to launch and then a whole marketing strategy behind getting eyes on the demo now I launched my Brave boy game demo today and I launched it without any real

marketing at all and the sole purpose was to honestly get feedback on the game because I don't even know if this is a good game um we made this on the side we'll see if it's good I don't care if it sucks honestly and hey but with Twisted Tower alternatively and this was launched last week with the Twisted Tower demo completely different approach a hyper uh OCD um exhaustive approach to marketing this demo and so I want to go through the the marketing process with you and give you an idea of maybe how you can try and drum up some eyes for your demo as well when you decide to do next Fest or do a demo so kind of a long it's going to be a long-winded video it's going to be very um candid and I'm just sort of riffing here based on this I feel like I just I finished a a marathon and I'm catching my breath but I I can sort of give you an idea of of what I've done here

okay first things first when it comes to the Twisted Tower demo I had a a brutal demo testing uh season last year it was like basically all summer um I was just sending out keys and and then I would send this form here and people would answer this form and they would basically just score it one out of 10 um and then offer any other thoughts or anything like that or or sort of mock Steam Reviews and here's the interesting thing um and this was this is sort of the first step I'll say um the interesting thing is is the first time I did this which was early summer it may have even been April uh it was brutal I got some really bad feedback it was good in the sense that it helped me it was bad in the sense that people did not like it they did not like the demo and they didn't understand it they didn't understand where they were they didn't understand the setting of the game um I hope Gavin who's the Chuchu Charles doesn't mind he

gave the game a seven out of 10 which I did not like that I thought that with with as much effort and time we've spent on this demo and as much money it's been three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on this game you'd expect to get something a little bit better than that right but yeah multiple people did this um Jason Smith the creative of cultic seven out of 10 uh my publisher they didn't really like it they thought it was kind of a well you you wish that someone would just say it's bad but they don't say it's bad they say I don't get it that that is the hardest that is the hardest thing to hear when someone doesn't get it now a lot of you and including myself will immediately get the sense of I need to just throw in the freaking towel this is not worth my time sunk cost fallacy you hear that sunk cost fallacy which is you think you the idea is don't be fooled into thinking that you should spend more money and time on your game

or your project just because you're deep in it just quit it while you're ahead that sunk cost fallacy but I resisted the temptation to quit and I kept going and so I addressed all of these issues and I found ironically enough we'll talk all about Ken LaVine in a second um because there's something that's really cool and I'll mention it towards the end of this video about Ken Lavine But Ken LaVine the creator of Bioshock and by the way Twisted Tower is inspired by Bioshock uh Ken LaVine said that um it was very similar for his demo or his his his testing and this was actually two months before they launched the game people didn't like the game because well the first 5 to 10 minutes of the game didn't make sense and players were getting lost and they didn't quite understand what to do so yes the sunk cost fallacy is generally A good rule of thumb which is

just because you're you know neck deep in development and you've been doing it for years it doesn't mean somehow you have to finish it right it's a it's okay to quit a game no matter how deep you are into it if you know for certain it sucks right however the alternative to that argument is something like well just because you got a ton of feedback that's negative doesn't mean you can't address that stuff pretty quick and actually make an incredible game and another metaphor people like to use is putting lipstick on a pig they think that okay why should I move forward with creating my game if the demo or the Alpha Testing sucks and I'm just getting really bad feedback clearly I have a pig there's no reason to put lipstick on a pig right the problem with that way of thinking is you assume you know you have a pig right you assume that what you have is not very good based on the feedback you've gotten

but the problem is is that feedback from players does not necessarily uh give you a good idea of whether you actually have something good or not that's the trouble and and yes I've given advice all the time about look if if PE if players aren't responding to your game you should probably quit the game however here's here's what I've learned in in in preparing for nextfest and launching on nextfest give yourself two weeks to a month to try and resolve the issues and then that's sort of the ultimate test and so that's what I sorry I'm burping here that's what I did with Twisted Tower I said okay look I'm getting negative feedback and people don't seem to quote unquote get get it right and so I went in and I didn't necessarily fix the or I didn't necessarily do everything players asked for but but I did address their

problem and there's there's a key difference there players will often ask for something and your job as a developer is to look at the underlying root problem that they're perhaps not even able to communicate themselves in fact most players can't they don't typically know what the problem is so they'll give you a solution and and your the your job is to to ignore the solution and figure out what the problem is and so that's what I did um with the a tower demo and frankly guys side note here if you're fixing issues for your demo you're actually F fixing issues for the game itself because the truth is the first 10 15 minutes of your game are insanely crucial you can actually kind of get the player to grind through the middle give them a really solid ending as well if you can if especially if it's Story game but they'll grind if you give them a really good intro so it's very important okay all right the next thing I did the next thing I did I got the demo solid based on a ton of testing

sessions I think we did three different testing sessions throughout the summer last year I got it prepared for October's nextfest and we had some issues uh the game wasn't the demo really wasn't Rock Solid um I thought it was at the time at for the October nextfest but I got feedback from 3D Realms again and we kind of went back to the drawing board um and had discussions around schedule and budget and all that stuff and so I had to sort of pump the brakes and then it gave me time to prepare for today's next Fest so guys it's like April 2024 all the way to now uh preparing this demo now that doesn't mean we weren't also working on the the rest of the game so got it tested multiple times got it approved by the publisher everyone's happy everyone's good to go well hang on you don't just launch a demo you launch marketing

material you launch marketing material alongside it including the trailer okay so let's jump into really quick the trailer and also you know what you can do to launch a really great trailer um I I don't know I don't know what what I would call this what the framework is for making a great game trailer but I definitely learned it from chooo Charles uh developer Gavin um so I'm going to shout out Gavin a lot in this video cuz he's he's like 10 years younger than me or more but I would consider him a mentor uh to a degree he's very very very helpful to me and he's a marketing genius um so basically his trailer uh for Chucho Chu Charles the way that it works is um you start with a intense action and then you drop down and then do story and puzzles and maybe you know 30 seconds of quiet and then jump back into the action and then Crescendo and

then end after a minute okay and so that's really what I've done here I'm not going to show you the whole trailer but that's really what I've done here with this start with big action drop down story build up build up build up build up did she reject and then go to more action action puzzles cool stuff wao it's so fun it's so exciting wish list now why really quick I just want to mention this and then we'll move on to the next aspect of marketing your demo um and then also we're going to talk about when you do all this um why do I drop down and why does choo choo Charles why does the trailer for Choo Cho Charles why does it drop down and give breathing room to the to the viewer if number one if this this whole thing was action it would get nauseating

and boring so if everything's action nothing's action okay um the second thing though is um the reason we drop down is because well we want action at the beginning it's it's kind of like it's hard to explain but basically I I've seen this happen with with some like movie trailers it's like it starts with intense action and it says movie trailer starting now I can't remember exactly what happens but they start with like 10 seconds of just chaos and then it drops down the reason I'm doing this is because attention is limited in 2025 you've got the Tik Tock generation you've got people who just want to get to the point right and so the goal is to give them something something salty or sugary or sweet at the beginning of a trailer and then cut down like any other trailer so it's not that we're dropping down for no reason we're dropping down as if we're

as if we're starting a trailer from the 90s or the early 2000s so these first 10 seconds are here's something tasty for Gen Z and then cut down to story okay now why do we need to cut down to story this is something I learned from ziver um ziver Nelson Jr he's the uh creator of Click holding is the best game I can think of um and also I am your beast and I I sent the original trailer to Olivier and ziv was like um hey and and it didn't have this this middle part that's story and he said hey you know action's a lot of fun looks really really cool but just remember uh action needs to be justified um or there needs to be a a motive behind the action and he didn't say those exact words but that's essentially what he said and what I thought to myself was I was like what no it's not this isn't the full game so so the players don't care or the viewers don't

care now if they're playing a game then they need action Justified but not in the trailer and then I thought to myself well why would that be True Entertainment is entertainment regardless if it's a minute long trailer or a full demo an hourong demo and so what I learned was this was thanks to ziver uh is action is 10 times more effective and exciting and fun to watch if you have a motive behind it right so if I if I spend 20 seconds in this trailer giving this motive to the to the viewer hey get the girl right super simple not unique at all very tropy which by the way I'm a huge fan of I love classic 90s tropes 80s tropes it's my favorite and I will do them probably till the day I die with my games but give the player motive give them a reason oh win treasure beyond measure impress the girl get the

girl and back to chaos right so that's that's why we start with action then drop down to to to motive and then back to action um I think it's a great it's a great formula for trailers um one f one one quick note here about this trailer is what what Gavin uh again the creative cho cho Charles what he also advised me on and just tra giving you guys this this delicious information um so so take this as a gift from Gavin um you should always tell a story in a trailer uh even if the trailer is silly and tropy and you know cheesy and action and blood and guts who cares tell a story and it doesn't necessarily have to be the game story it can also just be and I also learned this from Jason Smith the creator of cultic it can also be a story in the sense that you're saying

here are the five weapons of the game weapon one weapon two weapon three weapon four weapon five here are the abilities right and that's kind of what I've been trying to do here it's like hey there's blood and guts and there's these cool enemies and I the reason I held on this right here I think it was uh someone someone said I won't say who someone said why are we holding on the reload animation and the reason I hold on it is is because I think the reload animation says a lot about the game it's a marble blasting gun you know it's a it's a game where the guns are toys and I think that's a really solid hook for a game and so the goal is to not only tell the story like the actual story of the game but to also say here are the hooks and here are the tropes here are the things that make this game special and I'm going to put them out in sequence and deliver them in a solid uh a solid edit with with

transitional sounds to present an idea what I mean by that side note is I swell cut to something and it's a totally different vibe and there's Thunder and maybe the sound effects drop down maybe the music crescendos when you do an edit like that you're saying here's one point here's another Point here's another Point here's another point so in editing a trailer you can create bullet points of different ideas the way you do those bullet points is by using crescendos cutting the music dropping down the audio adding voice over and creating these beats these moments where there's bullets between each idea so when did I drop this trailer I dropped this I dropped this trailer when the demo launched however I didn't launch the demo at nextfest which is today I launched the demo a week ago I believe it was a week

ago and this is the next big Point okay the next big point I want to talk about is when exactly do you do this stuff when do you launch a nextfest demo after all the discussions I've had with Publishers my publisher but also other Publishers with friends included Davey D including including David wayy who made the first tree and also we Harvest Shadows including I believe I had this conversation with Gavin nobody really knows do you launch on a next Fest the day of well I've heard that I've heard that that's the new way to do things but I also have heard from other people that you should do it a week or two in advance of nextfest and I even received an email from Steam that says launch your demo before nextfest starts a couple weeks prior and it doesn't say like a couple weeks but that's the

Assumption so point being I don't know I i' I've had conversations with Chris zakowski even on Discord where he said certain things certain strategies with next nextfest are a mystery and anyone who says they know exactly what to do here is lying especially when it comes to timing your launch um so I don't know I don't know but for me it worked out really well where I mean we'll see what the numbers are with Twisted Tower um throughout next Fest today's day one but leading up to it I feel like it's a pretty good thing that we have 668 positive scores excuse me okay so the question becomes how did we get so many reviews well clearly clearly it helps to have a social media presence okay um that's that's a really big deal you want to H you want to have social media presence

I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and tell you that having uh 23,000 um followers on Twitter didn't help it helped a lot okay in fact somehow 109,000 views on the trailer on Twitter and this was a dedicated upload to Twitter so that helps a lot right um the trailer I have 410,000 subscribers this helps a lot 40,000 views is not a lot of views for a trailer so it's not like my channel is perfectly fine-tuned to release a trailer it's not because I make educational content so truthfully I shouldn't even be launching this demo trailer on my trailer on my Channel DE demo trailer on my channel because this channel is a podcast and it's also a game development channel it's not an entertainment gaming channel right so yes it helps to have a bunch of followers okay um um the reason why is

not because all these people showed up and gave a very positive score that's not what happened what happened is probably a handful maybe I don't know 2,000 to 10,000 people um showed up and maybe downloaded or wish listed or something I don't know but point being is it's not like my whole Channel showed up to play this game I know that's not true and the reason why is because well this is really where the traffic came from was other YouTubers playing the game okay so you might be wondering well how do I do that that's probably what you're thinking obviously it's a great idea to have a little initial impulse or I I I call it like the kindling um it's like a spark if you have a big in if you have a big audience on Twitter or YouTube or something you can spark the fire but to keep it going

the Bellows the Bellows of the fire is standing on the shoulders of giants that's really what you can do as well if you don't have an audience and so that's what this was here so you know we've got 114,000 views from TCH um I believe Tex has played some of my other games as well super horror bro 101,000 views uh splatter cat gaming thank you so much to Splatter cat almost 100 ,000 views alpab beta gamer almost 100,000 views horror game movie 60,000 views interestingly enough even if you don't search Twisted Tower and you search something like staying overnight in an abandoned theme park this one has I think the most um but uh it should show up hang on there we go staying there it is that one has 158,000 that's from Fusion um so the question is this how do you

get people to play your game how do you get streamers to play your game how did Thomas do it it's a it's kind of like a a morphous everchanging process and some things lead to other things and it's this it's sort of like this hierarchy of things that happen number one it's important to have good reviews and it's important to have that IAL impulse of people playing your game that's why I always always always recommend building an audience now while you make your game so that you can send that audience to play your game when it's ready and you guys watched me do it in real time you watched me do it in real time um when I launched the demo last week you saw how aggressive I was perhaps it annoyed some of you why is Thomas so freaking annoying about his stupid stuff he's always pushing something well that's what I did with the demo push push push push push push push and I

went so hard with every single Channel I've got whether that's email Twitter Instagram uh YouTube so that I could get that initial impulse the spark once the Fire gets going and those of you whove made a fire you know exactly what I'm talking about here you get it going and then that's the oh crap moment where we go I got to get going and you start blowing on it as fast as you can right and throwing on logs throwing on logs keep it going keep it going keep it going keep it going that is what this is throwing on the big logs that's these streamers they only get thrown they only let themselves be thrown under the fire because they see that it's something somewhat decent people are showing up and they go huh and they're a little curious so my initial impulse I believe it's it got us to like move onto the trending tab for fre fre games or free demos and so number one some streamers

like Fusion Z gamer will show up because they found that game on the tab on the trending tab on on on Steam and that's because of that initial impulse that I created other streamers and I got to be honest with you I don't know which ones they are um but other streamers showed up because I sent a key to them okay so let's talk about that really quick um this streamer here is an example where is she she did a great job uh not her although one of my one of my followers actually tweeted at her so sometimes your followers will do the work for you so that's awesome she did incredible by the way she's a really good streamer um this one I watched this one last night where is it not a ton of views on on the one I'm about to show you but the point is is that we sent her a key okay so we sent out and I say we and I'll talk about that in a sec we sent out I think 200

different emails to various streamers um where is she she was here and now she's not YouTube come on oh she did so good too um I believe we sent one to him and then also she's she's down here I swear but anyway we sent out emails uh to all of these uh oh look and we'll talk oh we need to talk about we need to talk about Lang languages as well different languages um we sent out 200 Keys okay and we have this huge spreadsheet it's called um Atmos games uh influencers or something and it's all these influencers that are SI that like games that are similar to Twisted Tower it's like mascot horror or Bioshock that's really what we limited ourselves to then we also limited ourselves to um any G any streamers that have played my

games in the past because maybe they like my games and they want to play a 3D game right even though my previous games are 2D games maybe they want to play a 3D game right so we sent to them as well so we sent out 200 keys and I don't know if they're they're going to play even now but we've got 200 streamers that were sent and they're in this category of games and they were sent these keys I have heard people say oh oh streamers don't check their email oh they don't respond or it's not worth it you realize that if one streamer picks this game up that is how it spreads like wildfire now I'm not saying Twisted Towers demo has spread like wildfire right it's just a demo and I don't think it will but it's done pretty freaking good for a demo and that's because multiple things number one we have a great demo and it's getting traction on Steam but number two

we're sending out these keys and if one streamer picks it up just one streamer then another picks it up and another picks it up and another picks it up and I call this climbing the ladder so what we ended up doing and I say we I'll finally clarify here me and Hector Hector is sort of my personal assistant and my wingman and helps manage the community and stuff like that for my social media accounts Hector worked full-time all and I only I only sort of hired him for you know or I told him hey typically you're part-time and you help me with email stuff but this week I need you fulltime buddy work full-time sending out emails and so that's what he did um so he just sent out emails and when it comes to the ladder climbing I told him I said once you get the F done with the first initial phase of sending out email addresses what I want you to do is then look at who's played the game and use that person as a name drop in your next set of emails so here's what we

did we saw the biggest streamer the biggest streamer was Fusion gamer Fusion Z gamer so what we did was we said okay let's send out 100 email addresses or S let's send out another batch of emails let's send out 100 and the subject line is what do you think Fusion Z gamer played my game because the chances of these YouTubers knowing Fusion Z gamer are pretty high because they're all in the same Niche mascot horror games okay 5 million subscribers very well known so that's ladder climbing once you get one then you use that one to climb and say well this person played you should play then once they play you say this one played you should play now eventually the clock runs out of time and and streamers aren't gonna aren't going to play because your game has been out too long but those first two

weeks when your Demo's out when your game's out that's the time to hit every streamer you could think of with an email and use ladder climbing now here's an example let's say let's say that um let's say that the biggest streamer we could find who played our game was horror movie game game movie well 7.64 th000 subscribers but really good views right oh wow this is really good proof actually side note here 60,000 views is one of their best performing videos so Twisted Tower clearly grabbed people's attention for this Channel and that's good news because hopefully other streamers will see that so this is not a good example um we're looking for a channel that has like a normal amount of views and a small subscriber count but it's like or a reasonable subscriber

count so let's say this streamer here so 34,000 views not a ton of subscribers pretty good 638,000 so what we're going to do is we're going to use this channel here we're going to use her clout to reach out to other streamers right and you say hey veres ganu I'm trying my best here I promise I'm an American but vers beus ganu played my my game you should too and you find streamers who are in her Niche and at her size and that's what I call ladder climbing it's not particularly profound um but that's that's what you do and if you ever find a streamer who doesn't have if you ever find a streamer who who doesn't have let me turn this off quick here um if you ever find a streamer who doesn't have your game in the description you do what I do which is you obnoxiously email them and send them or a Twitter message and say bro put my

link in the description um I think I did that with alphab beta gamer yeah yeah yeah I did it with alpab beta gamer I said possible to put Steam Link in description of my game and he said sure no worries love the game so it might seem annoying but you need to reach out to them and say look like if you're going to play my game put it put it in the description okay and it's not like Alpha Beta gamer was trying to be mean or anything right they just they forget I've done that before too when I when I play people's games um okay so that's that's that's that's the process of leading up to launch and then that launch Day trailer okay um uh send out emails and we sent out emails by the way we sent out emails you know a week before the demo dropped and said it's What's called the Embargo you say hey by the way Demo's dropping on this date here's a key that's early use the key to play it so that when so that you can stream edit your video and launch your video when the demo comes out so you do it

before the demo launches and then you just keep going for weeks after okay so so I'm trying to think of any of the things that I did to drive traffic to the steam page oh I also drove traffic to the steam page using my email list my email list is like 75,000 strong it is not Gamers necessarily it is game developers so it's not super duper effective but I felt like might as well just hit my list at least once or twice so I hit that list um the the problem with hitting an email list is that you're going to get some people who hate your guts that's the nature of email lists because email lists tend to be used to not only you know provide valuable content newsletters but every once in a while you hit them with a a promotion of some kind you're selling something well PE lots of people hate being sold to so you're going to get a couple people who are disgruntled and they'll play the game and then they'll they'll crap on you crap on you in the the Steam Reviews and that's just the way it goes so just know that if you're

going to use an email list um that is not necessarily relevant for your game you might get tons of views and plays but you also might get some people who hate your guts that's that's that's the nature of digital marketing okay so th that's how I hit that's how I hit um uh streamers it was through email okay and just Gmail right one email at a time bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang didn't use MailChimp didn't use an email service just Gmail okay um so when the when the demo came out we had a couple streamers post videos almost immediately um and we started getting traction right we started getting players to play the game you're going to get you're going to get people to complain in the comments I'm sorry in the reviews and so um I'm not going to click on this

because I want to maintain my mental health but the negative reviews here are going to tell me all about performance issues bugs how could you not you know think about my screen size and what's wrong with you and you're this and you're that and you suck blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and some of them are actually really valid and some of them aren't and that's just the nature of reviews um but you're going to get a a a handful of bugs almost immediately and feature requests almost immediately and things you didn't even think about even if you beta tested and Alpha tested and went through QA for months people are going to find stuff and it's going to be uh systemic that's just the way it is that's the nature of games I had one comment say recently Thomas How Could You release this you clearly didn't QA um because the mouse movement's weird and my answer to them is every single game developer I've ever talked to they even if they QA for months and believe me we did even if you QA QA for months there's still going to be stuff that glaring issues that

everybody is seeing that you and your team did not see no matter how hard you tried so just know that it's okay you're not a dummy that's just what happens okay all right so that's how I built up and prepared for launch okay couple days after so the weeks after launching the demo I could tell you all the cool things that happened and the things that I did firstly I got this set up um this is this is not my twin this is obviously this is somebody um named Thomas brush I don't know if you know him but it's being played um actually how is this being played I'm trying to remember Jonas Ty Rollo told me about it Jonas Ty roller said I'm looking up the Discord message here uh it is called Robo streamer so Robo streamer is really cool um and it basically for free I'm allowed to just let this thing run I think it runs for like 105 hours or something um

but this just runs and runs and runs and so just having the developer play it gives it this personal feel it also kind of communicates that this game is Indie um and it it I would hate to say this but I think everybody's thinking it deep down it's going to skew reviews because people are going to feel like they're they know you and they're your friend if they like you and you're likable in the Stream they're going to feel like oh I'm gonna I'll be a little bit more forgiving I will say though I am fully fully aware of how bad that can be you don't want skewed reviews you want real reviews and so I was lucky and that I didn't know about this streaming stuff until like 5 days after I launched the demo five days after I launched the demo we were at like I think 400 reviews and they were all very positive so this is just sort of a bonus that just hey you know gets people excited about the game makes them feel like they're aligned with you and your vision and they feel like they're part of the project which is really cool um so it's good to have something like this running

um and also some kind of call to action here I I think so that's just my gut says put a call to action there to play the demo now we need to talk about something we need to talk about wait a second Thomas has a demo page whereas some people don't have demo Pages for example we Harvest Shadows you cannot click on the demo page okay there's no way to click on the demo page um let's see if you can find it this way okay you can find nope nope you can't find it and that's no slight no slight to David wayy that's just what he decided to do for me I decided and this was this was actually terrifying I decided for some reason we decided as a my me and my publisher decided hey let's let's have a separate demo page there's

a little secret box on Steamworks it's in the it's in the basic information of your demo it's a secret box that says create a separate page and it creates a separate page what I didn't know was oh crap you could see the reviews for the demo whereas some people they don't want their demo to have reviews right so the the separate demo page I don't know whether it's valuable or not but I do know this is valuable having very positive scores publicly available I think will incentivize people to play the game more um so that I just wanted to give you a side note there about a separate demo page um okay so what are some some things that happened right what are the results I gave you I gave you what we did now what are the results you know I think it's been a week and a half or something I can't remember a week and a half uh since uh since we launch the demo um well now that it's next Fest

um we have uh I'm just looking here to see what nextfest looks like I've never really participated in it and I'm seeing it happen in real time right now um so uh yeah um what are the results well first off this this article dropped which was super cool this is vice Twisted Tower mixes Bioshock with the carnival attraction and the the demo blew me away thank you Sean thank you very much um really glowing review of Twisted Tower which was really really cool um again Mega stream lots of Mega streamers played the game with millions of subscribers um they played it which was really really cool uh this one was wild excuse me one of my biggest fears with Twisted Tower I can't tell you how many conversations I had with my publisher

like how do we distance ourselves from Bioshock and they would always say they would always say well Thomas you can't you you're in too deep buddy Twisted Tower already looks like Bioshock it plays like Bioshock it's inspired by Bioshock and so Justin uh one of the directors at 3D Realms was like you just need to lean into it and just say look this is a this is a distilled down version of Bioshock it's an homage to Bioshock inspired by Bioshock and everything worked out everything worked out for for this tweet right here from Bioshock Creator Ken LaVine um I just so happened to be able to get Ken LaVine on the podcast and so he knows who I am um and I was surprised to see this it was funny because I I never told him prior to the podcast episode I never never said hey look at my game it's inspired by yours I mentioned it

during the podcast but he didn't know what I was talking about he didn't know he's never seen my games before at the end of the podcast he said hey by the way this was after we stopped recording he said hey by the way what's your game again and so he looked it up and he said W this looks really cool but I didn't really know how he really felt he was just like looks cool and then we ended the call um so for the last ever since that podcast episode I've been worried like I I hope my hero Ken LaVine isn't like offended that I've I've created a game that's clearly inspired by his game and then he tweeted this out which is just amazing um he said Thomas is a great guy the thing is he doesn't know that he doesn't know that I'm a terrible person actually and he said you should check out the the Twisted hour demo and that resulted in some articles covering this as well which was really really cool um and yeah yeah so the final result the

big the big question that I'm sure a lot of you are asking is look is is next Fest worth it um is launching a demo worth it I haven't even I have not seen any of the fruit from nextfest and maybe I'll give you guys an update on how nextfest went um but I can give you an update on how preparing for nextfest went in terms of wish list numbers um by by preparing I mean launching a demo a week or two prior to nextfest I can give you like okay is that valuable I don't know whether this is because it's prior to nextfest or just because I launched a demo and I did a really a good job doing it um but we got what did we had we're almost it I think we're some I can't give you the exact numbers sadly but um we I think we got over 20,000 wish lists in a week from this which is awesome and I'm saying

additional ones so I can't tell you the numbers prior but I just because publisher stuff but the we got 20,000 and like more than 20,000 um from just being a week out there basically a little more than a week out there so we'll see what happens with with nextfest you know nextfest is supposed to I'm I'm I'm hoping it brings in another 20,000 or 30,000 you know um but I don't know you know there's there's there's questions about whether nextfest is valuable or not anymore um so I don't know but those are the results okay those are the results of having a demo out there now I launched Brave boy with none of this no planning no marketing no re Outreach nothing and I like this because number one I'm not I don't know if I'm proud of brave brave boy I really don't even know if I'm proud of it so I'm not even going to put it out there with any marketing arm at

all I'm just going to see what happens you know it's kind of a Hail Mary um and I'm I'm expecting some user views to come in that just say it's crap yeah but this is what happens when you don't do anything okay um Twisted Tower this is what happens when you do something okay big difference huge contrast now this has only been out for a couple hours but still when I launched Twisted Tower it had reviews immediately immediately um so there's a huge difference between the two one had marketing the other one didn't I'll close with this I've I've said I've had conversations with my publisher where I've said I think the demo launch is more important than the launch now that might be a little bit hyperbolic

um but there's there's definitely a ring of truth to it if you can do a solid a rock solid demo launch sure you might cannibalize the future meaning some streamers might not play your game because they already played the first chapter right but what you're doing is you're saying you're creating this like delicious lure that you or net it's a net that you're throwing into the the ocean and you get to leave it there for however long you want you can leave it there for six months you can leave it there for a year you can leave it there for two years and collect fish and when you pull up that net some of them will get through no one's going to buy but you'll eventually pull out something right and it's way more than had you not put the net in to begin with that's what the demo is it's this beautiful fish net okay now some of you might be thinking

you Thomas you said you can leave the demo out there for a year or two years but some people say you should only leave it out there for like four months or six months leading up to the launch AKA launch your demo like four months prior to the game itself I have heard that and I've heard some Publishers say that I've also heard other Publishers and uh even Chris Sakowski say it doesn't matter wish list don't really get cold so it's debated my gut says they get cold but experience shows me with friends and um advisers that it doesn't actually matter so put your demo out there put it out there during a nextfest prepare and plan and do it well don't do it the brave boy way do it the Twisted towerway all right guys play the Twisted Tower demo below it means the world to me if you guys want to play leave a review let me know what you think about the game um I think you'll love it it's

been 3 years in the making it's basically a corrupted Disney World inspired by Bioshock check it out I love you guys Happy next Fest cheers