Ruin of the Reckless #6 – What just happened on Steam Greenlight?Hey again friends,
As I am sure most of you know (well I hope you noticed) we launched a Steam Greenlight campaign on May 12th. The campaign has been a big success so far, we broke in to the top 100 games on Steam Greenlight at around 24 hours. Since then, we have climbed higher. At the time of this writing… I’d say we’re doing pretty well for day 3.
Greenlight is notorious for stonewalling developers, so we’ll have to see what *actually* happens after this but I wanted to take some time to talk about the plan we had to make this work, what went right, what went wrong, and where it looks like things are going. The campaign is, of course, still going on, so please vote for us on Greenlight and tell your friends.
GreenlightPage:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683031395Our Greenlight Trailer:
The Setup(Well the first thing we did was build the game, and then we made what I think is a really kickass trailer, but let’s skip that part.)
We always knew that we had to go to steam Greenlight eventually, but to do that you need at least some following. Steam Greenlight is about generating traffic in the first two or three days. From there, (where we are now), organic greenlight traffic drops significantly and it becomes very hard to drum up page views without press!
We knew we only had a set amount of attention we could devote to social media, and that we needed as many eyes on our project as possible in the lead up to the greenlight launch. We decided (A bit too late, perhaps) on pursuing the following communities.
Twitter -> We began posting tweets on our feed about the game. The most effective thing for garnering attention by FAR has been animated GIFs of cool moments in the game. GIFs that show off beautiful artwork or action packed ‘game feel’ moments seem to perform best.
reddit.com/r/gamemaker -> This one was easy to focus on because I was already an active member of the community (under my personal reddit account.) I transitioned to posts on r/gamemaker on my ‘corporate’ reddit account that focused mainly on Ruin of the Reckless. We made sure that every thing we posted was useful to gamemaker developers and we worked closely with the mods to make sure that we weren’t breaking any rules
Our Blog/ruinofthereckless.com -> We started updates on this blog. I really tried my best to make the posts high quality and useful, and shared them wherever I could. Several people have told me that they were following along quite a while on this blog before they every commented on any thing, so don’t despair if you’re not getting comments. People may be watching in the wings!
This dev blog(Tigsource) -> We started a devblog on tigsource, which was easy because we crossposted our blog posts from our website to the tigsource thread here.
Fantasystrike.com -> I am a longtime member of fantasystrike.com, which is a smaller forum focused on game design. I already had a presence there, so it was natural to be posting updates to my friends on there.
Crap, that’s a lot of communities. Working on the game was already a full time job, but trying to be active on all of these channels in the lead up to the Greenlight (while we were still working on the trailer) was intense. Nobodys said this was supposed to be easy.
Our first blog post was on Marth 28th, so we had about 42 days of ‘social media preparation’ for the Greenlight. When we launched, we had about 130 twitter followers (now closer to 200) and an established presence in each of the listed sites, a mailing list, with 40 some-odd subscribers and a website. I wish we had started earlier and gotten more momentum first. but all things considered, it worked well.
We did not spend a dollar on advertising, we would have certainly been willing to, but we couldn’t find a deal/service that made sense to us… and we didn’t really know whether to believe the saying among indie devs that a small amount of advertising has little to no effect.
I also took some time to research other greenlight campaigns and thoughts from other developers, the most useful of which was a post-morrtem by Unfold Games for a successful Greenlight pitch called DARQ
As recommended by Unfold Games, we made a snappy animated GIF for our Greenlight header.
The PlanBased on talking to other developers, we decided to launch on Thursday; supposedly that is the day where most people come home from work and want to relax at home. It was the best lead we had, so we went with it.
We would wait until Monday and send out press releases to every indie gaming news resource we could find, letting them know that our Greenlight was launching on Thursday and giving them the trailer. I have seen other indies say they sent out upwards of 400 e-mails. I don’t know where they’re finding all of these people, I was scarcely able to find 100 news sources that were willing to cover a Greenlight launch, but we would contact every single one. In retrospect, I wish I had started compiling a list of sources MUCH earlier.
Once the press releases were sent, it would be time to go to our mailing list subscribers, our twitter followers, the forums we were part of and reddit to let people know. Hopefully they would respond, because we knew we would need their help for it to work.
I also had a feeling a few of my more high profile indy-dev friends might lend our campaign a hand by retweeting us to their massive fanbases.
One of the GIFs we sent out on twitter to promote the launch.
What Went Right— Launching on Thursday -> Launching on Thursday seems to have been a very smart decision. Only one title that launched on Wednesday is still above us, and several very high performing titles also launched on Thursday, leading me to believe that it probably gave us a natural advantage.
— Our Animated GIF came out really well, and our organic traffic numbers were high, I believe that our cool animated GIF brought extra views to the page.
— Our trailer killed it. We had worked very carefully to make our trailer as engaging as possible,we demoed it to dozens of industry insiders to get feedback before launch. I think it paid off. The trailer was quick, snappy, had only 5 seconds of title screen time (DO NOT PUT A 13 second intro in your Greenlight video people.) And the average user actually stayed to watch almost the whole thing (which is quite abnormal.)
— Developer support! Two of my favorite indy developers graciously decided to retweet our Greenlight campaign to their twitters. I won’t put their accounts here since I don’t want people to spam them, but you guys know who you are. Thanks to them, our Greenlight teaser was tweeted out to an extra 80,000 people! That kind of exposure is hard to come by.
— Reddit Response: Well, we actually were told we couldn’t post to certain places on reddit because more than 10% of our posts are about Ruin of the Reckless but in the communities where we were put up we did very well We were the top post on r/indiegames, r/gamemaker and a few other subreddits for almost the full first two days of launch. I think that really helped us.
— Greenlight Page Reception: The reception was good. Like… insanely good. We quickly shot up to rank 100 in only one day, the comments on our steam page were almost all extremely positive, check it out yourself. and we are oscillating between a 68% – 79% approval rating, starting to stabiliize just below 70% which is quite high. For reference, the 5th highest rated game on Greenlight has a 70% upvote rate.)
— Press: We got our first write up late on Day 1 by ind13.com. They featured us prominently on their front page and wrote a really neat article about the campaign. We also got a write up by oneangrygamer.com. We were also contacted by a few more press sources, but you can see those when they are released. Feels good to know at least some of those e-mails we sent out were read.
I like to imagine the slimes are the people that voted ‘no, thanks’ What Went WrongWhen I went down to to see my mom for mothers day, I told her our plan to launch on May 12th and she said “arent you worried about launching while mercury is in retrograde” (astrology people claim that the phenomena makes communication, planning, and clear thinking more difficult), I laughed and laughed and laughed…
Is it possible that the misalignment of this planet cursed us? Probably not. But we could have planned a bit better! (Love you mom!) To be honest, the launch was riddled with huge mistakes. I really wish I had seen these issues coming, who knows how much momentum we lost due to these FUBAR moments.
— After sending out more than 100 press releases I had a painful realization. I had built, but not actually published the presskit page on to our website. By the time I realized I had forgotten to press ‘publish’, it was day 2 already. We got 120 hits to our website on day 1, who knows how many of those were journalists looking for our presskit. Almost all of the information was sent via e-mail any way, but this could not have helped us.
— Then… I had another painful realization. I had personalized every presskit e-mail to its receiver… but I had used the ‘forward’ button to send. Cue that horrible moment of realization… a good 50 of the e-mails I sent had a big fat “FORWARD:” at the front of their subject lines. I’m sure some promising leads went in to the trash bin.
— Then… I had another painful realization.. and this one was the
worst of all. In an attempt to be responsible, I created our Steam Greenlight page over a month in advance. As we worked on the project, I updated the page with all of the information it would need, leaving it ‘published’ but still ‘hidden’ until it was ready. When the day came that we launched, I flipped it to ‘published’, went on over to the ‘recent submissions’ page and… nothing! We weren’t listed. It hit me like a ton of bricks, all the day 1 and 2 organic traffic that we had been preparing for was… not coming because our game wasn't technically a 'recent submission.' Worse yet, I had already given the link out to about 60 people who had started sharing it with their friends. OH NO!
It was awful, we had to take down the steam page and place it back up, quickly filling in the respective fields. The problem was solved in about 5 minutes, but the damage was already done. Dozens of people had clicked on those links and they were very unlikely to come back and check out the new fixed link. This also destroyed my google analytics links, which means we got no analytics data on day 1 of our campaign! What a missed opportunity. So, my takeaway from this is DO NOT PUBLISH YOUR GREENLIGHT UNTIL THE EXACT DAY THAT YOU LAUNCH!
— Remember when I mentioned that an indy dev friend of mine re-tweeted our Greenlight out? I remember the moment well. As I was sitting at my computer a little box flashed up in the corner ‘retweeted by REDACTED famous indy guy’ to SEVENTY ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE! Amazing. Within about ten seconds the retweet already had 16 likes, that’s REALLY fast! And then… about five seconds later… the comments asking what was wrong… why wasn’t the link working? OH CRAP! The first Tweet I sent had a broken link. I watched in horror as the likes and retweets climbed (indicating people were looking at it and sharing it), and the confused comments started flowing in. To my friends credit, he quickly took it down and offered to retweet a fixed version, which was really niceof him. The damage was done though. The second tweet only got 26 likes total. Who knows how much exposure we lost out on there. Maybe it was really no big deal, but it was a ‘feels bad, man’ moment for sure.
Greenlight is something like an orb... you can consume it to level up or use it as a weapon. Other Stuff:I learned some cool stuff about Greenlight during this process, and also some not so cool stuff.
Steam Greenlight Abuse: One thing I learned is that shovelware games give away thousands of beta keys to shady spammers who then turn around and give the beta keys back out in exchange for upvotes on Greenlight. Expect to see some preposterously highly rated shovelware games in the top #100 due to this extremely regrettable practice. If you’re on Greenlight, please don’t do this kind of thing… it is the reason Greenlight will probably be shut down sometime soon.
Upvote percentage: Since Greenlight games seem to be hurt by downvotes… it’s a priority to limit downvotes while maximizing upvotes. This is also just an efficiency thing, If you can drive the same number of eyes to your page, and get more upvotes out of them… why wouldn’t you? I noticed that some of the campaigns with very high upvote percentages had lazer targeted marketing. Say, a horror game where many of the comments on the page are like “I found you on horrorgamewatch.com! So cool!” For that reason, it’s a good idea to engage with communities that you know will have an interest in your game/genre. I wish I had thought about that more in the lead up to the campaign, I think our upvote percentage could have been even higher.
See… he’s learning too! Learning to kill…
What’s nextWell, it looks like Ruin of the Reckless will be Greenlit. Steam is very secretive about how exactly games are chosen, but we have an upvote percentage that is competitive with the top 10 games on Greenlight. Based on our research we expect that we will be Greenlit before the end of the month. Now, we have heard horror stories of developers getting caught in ‘Greenlight Limbo’, but all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that our performance in the coming days speaks for itself.
I want to thank every one for getting involved.
Twenty seven hundred people came to the Ruin of the Reckless Greenlight page in the last two days and if upvotes are to be believed, the Ruin of the Reckless community grew by 1200 people. Thanks to every one for helping us get this far.
And as always, please hashweb your twitter channel and facetag your instagrams! Please share our Greenlight with people and communities that you think will dig it.
Here's that steam Greenlight page one more time:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683031395Thanks Again,
Faux-Operative