Message Quest: Passing Greenlight
The experience of passing Greenlight in the official blog of the Message Quest game was shared by its author and developer Maria Kravtsova. With the kind permission of Maria, we have published the material on our pages.
So, we passed the Greenlight. I have a whole complex of feelings about this, and far from joyful.
On the one hand, this is in kind like a routine check-up with a doctor or a handover for a license, we will all be there. Well, that is, not a big deal, because yes, everyone passes, many literally fly by. And you can’t get away from this experience, you have to go through it. Close your eyes and think about England. We put another tick in the same list, showed that we are not a camel.
On the other hand, I understand that it was a saying, not a fairy tale, a fairy tale will be ahead. We realized here that we need to get closer in October. Oh, Mom. The greenlight was a light warm-up before the upcoming bossfight with the market. So the sweet aftertaste is overshadowed by the bitter notes of the rolled-up emergency.
On the third hand, very, very low numbers. Compared to the kotans that took place even a couple of months before us, not to mention those who took place a year ago, this is just a hat. You cannot rely on these figures, they cannot support financial expectations. To tell the truth, I have no idea at all how Greenlight indicators correlate with subsequent sales. It is possible that there is no way. We probably don’t have anything for sure. I’ll explain why I think so.
On the fourth hand, so that you, friends, do not think that we are here in a minor, Greenlight gave another not just curious and useful, but very pleasant, soul-warming conclusion. I’ll save it for the end of the post, like a ray of hope in the dark realm of the indie apocalypse.
But, in order.
Preparation
Why did we go to Greenlight at the end of development? Because we didn’t have a trailer. We were too busy with production, trying not to get distracted from it. And there was no money for production from the word at all. So for us, the preparation was primarily related to the trailer, updating the site and the text of the description, which had to be not only done, but also subtracted.
The trailer was made by ourselves – my script, the recording of the passage and approximate cutting boundaries, Slavin editing, the voice of Arvid Brazdeikis, the voice of Sasha Ahura. Music and art are in-game.
The site was redesigned by Nikolai Voyloshnikov, again collected everything from in-game art and animations.
I had to tinker with the description. It didn’t work for me in any way. During my time as a full-time screenwriter, I have earned an acute idiosyncrasy for marketing texts, so I try to get into them wherever possible and impossible. In the end, I really spat and went into a dressing down. A game about laziness? Then here’s to you – “We couldn’t make a normal description, we’re too lazy. Well, in short, it’s about…”. I must say thank you to our editor Carol Miko, she managed to soften my screwing up and even add jokes that I hadn’t thought of – an extra argument in favor of the editor with a live screenwriter/copywriter. Two heads are better than one. Yes, I wrote immediately in English. Indie life hack: editing is cheaper than localization.
We also paid some attention to the preparation of the page itself. We were busy with the registration for probably three days. Yes, I see that many projects just write the text with sheets, well, at most they make subheadings. But I myself like the Kickstarter-style design more, with pictures-inscriptions and all that. We didn’t insert GIFs, like Punch Club (ex. VHS Story), but we still played with fonts and Message Quest interface elements to make decent plates and a list of awards.
Here are the pages that were for me an example of a beautiful – to my taste – design:
I was looking for them, to be honest, by a random poke and by familiar names.
How did we prepare in the marketing plan? No way. And this is not a reason for pride. We’re just as dumb turkeys as many of our colleagues. Marketing? What kind of marketing? I just want to make games, don’t tell me about the press and YouTubers – it scares me and makes me cry in the corner for another half a day.
But on the other hand, we read all the articles of colleagues that we found – read, not write, cho. Here’s a list for you too, it will come in handy:
Osteya – I convey to Akim, the game developer, my heartfelt thanks. This article was one of the most useful for me, because here, unlike others, there is a stat! Almost all the time of the Greenlight, this article was open in my tabs, and I checked our indicators with it. And the Akim himself was on the wire, in a personal account, helped with advice and generally supported. Thanks!
Promoting the game on Steam Greenlight is also an equally useful post from TurnOn developers, but with a different focus. The guys did their best, and gave 1) a detailed list of groups and media for promotion, 2) made a cool sign with other domestic games and their indicators at the time of passing. Thank you, Kotans, great job!
Tips for Getting Greenlit on Steam Greenlight – in English. In general, a very useful blog with cool indie marketing materials for noobs.
STEAM GREENLIGHT CAMPAIGN POST MORTEM – and here, too, there is a stat, however, the conclusions of the dude seemed doubtful to me.
In any case, almost every article has links to predecessors, a kind of hypertext. Probably soon someone will get together and make a complete selection of relevant materials, but these cross-links from colleagues were enough for me. So I continue their glorious tradition.
So, again, we messed up on the preparation of the page, but in fact we fucked up marketing. And the fact that this did not prevent us from getting the green light is rather a sad consequence of lowering the Greenlight threshold, rather than our luck.
Yes, by the way, the screenshots that I give are made at the end of each of the days. Such a peculiar result of efforts.
The first day
So, the first day. The button is pressed, and the first thing we do is write about it in social networks – Twitter, Vkontakte, Facebook. A few words about social networks, because talking about Greenlight is still a conversation about marketing and promotion.
Our first group started on Facebook. I’m teaching her in English, and she’s not very cheerful. Because pure marketing, not my native language, and in general I don’t like Facebook usability in groups. Nevertheless, she is there and quietly collects her likes. Still, my repostings from the group are more often liked, and not native records.
Then I started a group in VK – about six months ago – to somehow start forming a community. We want to further develop the setting, that’s why we need a place of deployment. Of course, at first most of my friends were there, but gradually people from the outside began to be added. I’ve been experimenting with the format of notes all this time – keeping diaries, posting Laura. I must say that people there react best to achievements, and not to related materials. Posts with messages that we had finished the next pool of work pleased people more than even funny pictures. This is understandable, while there is no game, everyone wants it to already be. Plus, most people are still in it, so they were more interested in diaries than Laura, for example.
Finally, the Twitter of the game appeared only on the eve of the Greenlight. I resisted the idea of his establishment for a long time. But then she gave up. It’s just that I already have two Twitter accounts – my own and Narratorics. And if I have 1000+ subscribers in my own (I’ve been sitting in tvi for two years and am quite active, at times this is my main social network), then the Narrative is strained. I was afraid of the same fate for Message Quest. But everything went quite cheerfully.
We also conduct Twitter in English, post news, participate in #screenshots Saturday, and repost other indie projects. We quickly gained the first hundred subscribers and, thanks to English, reposts, as well as DevGAMM Hamburg, we have quite a lot of foreign indie developers there in our friends. So at least on Twitter, we are slowly becoming part of the global indie community, which is what we were striving for.
So, we posted a message about the Greenlight in the social networks of the game and we got the whole team on our own. The result was deafening – the shaft of reposts and likes quickly brought the vote ratio to 70/30. I think it was thanks to friends and the support of the indie community (primarily the domestic one) that we gained a foothold on the positive side of the scale, and downvotes never outweighed it.
Special thanks to our cozy indie bubble – the kotans, each literally, not only got excited, but also wrote their own tweets in support. It was incredibly pleasant. Thank you!
The second day
The first day I couldn’t do anything else, the tapes were torn, and I had to press F5 every five minutes, you know. On the second day, I already went to register us on IndieDB and Gamejolt.
For some reason, I had high hopes for these bases. Going to them was for me like the first ball for a debutante – they say, finally I will present my game to the world indie community. Yeah, right now. In general, the Greenlight sites did not help much, and the two YouTubers who made letsplays on Gamejolt, rather, we made the traffic a repost :))))
But help came from where they did not expect, did not expect. Slava has been a well-deserved resident of Leprosy for many years, and he wrote a post about the game there. Admittedly, we were afraid that they would throw armfuls. Still, the game looks nice, but everyone probably burns out on the Stalker. In general, Leprosy has once again proved that there is not much difference in Stalker and nyash-myash lovers, and the main thing is solidarity. The Kotans voted a lot and “for”. Thank you, Leprosy!
Already during the first night of Greenlight organics, the vote ratio dropped to 60/40. Many people say that the Greenlight community is negative and is more likely to downvote that it likes. I think this is a reaction of the immune system to the oversaturation of the market. In addition, it is not necessary to perceive the downvote only as a refusal – it is also “not interested”, that is, the voice of not your target audience. And that’s fine, you won’t be nice to everyone. Especially in niche indie, where we are.
In addition to these social networks, I published a post on the forum Gamedev.ru and she asked me to make a post in their VK group. Be careful, there are still rules for registration. I didn’t follow them at first, and a negative came to me.
Another good source of traffic was the banner and the GamesJam page. We have a long and tender friendship with this platform in general. After all, our project started on the first GamesJamKanobu in 2014, so this site is our fairy godmother.
The third day
The third day began with entering the TOP 100. How, why? Don’t ask. Just so we know. Sometimes we had 20 downvotes, and the rating grew. Sometimes we added 10 comments and the rating grew. Sometimes, apparently, someone from the top left, and we were carried higher. In general, we reached the TOP 100.
It was Saturday, and in addition to the usual #screenshotsaturday in tvi, I dared to post on Reddit. This was my second Reddit experience, and I’m still a little afraid of it. There, if you don’t know, there is a very nasty kind of ban that you won’t even know about. You write posts to yourself, but no one sees them. Br-r-r-r. In general, it is very scary to break any rule. But I still wrote to the section Screenshots Saturday on /r/gamedev/. There is not much profit, but there was some traffic from there. See more in the statistics below.
Fourth day
At the weekend, Slava sat down to execute another insidious plan. Slava does tutorials on Dota 2 editor periodically. So he decided to ask for help from a large and active community of doters who watch his videos with great pleasure. The recording was not without excesses, but in the end the video appeared. However, we cannot track the traffic from it, because the people did not follow a direct link, but according to the instructions given by Slava in the video, that is, through a search on the Greenlight itself.
Fifth day
On the fifth day, I went to groups in Vkontakte, asking for reposts. I used the lists in the indie-bro posts, and just walked through my own band feed.
These groups have been reposting or writing about us themselves in the early days – I’ve known their orgies for a long time, the guys supported us out of friendship:
- INDIE GAMES | INDIE GAMES
- NextCastle Party: Indie and Retro Games Festival
- Narratorika – school of computer game screenwriters
- Nrjwolf & Co # Gamedev
- Geek Me
- Game indie industry
These groups became restless after the request:
- Unity3D & CG / Unity 3D
- Russian Official Unity User Group
- GameDev.ru — game development
- INDIE GAMES CHANNEL
- Indiego and All-All-All
- INDIEMAKER
I was added as friends to orgas and politely asked to help with a repost, no one refused. Such good Kotans. And most importantly, I had about a dozen mutual friends with almost everyone – this, I think, increases the degree of trust between strangers at the first contact on the social network.
And yes, I must say that I had been in most of these groups for a long time by the time of the Greenlight. So for me it was a native ecosystem.
And we were also welcomed by groups of indie developers themselves – and it was especially nice!
Sixth day
On the sixth day, I finally got to the Kanobu Pub. I wanted to write there in the first days, but I couldn’t get my hands on the blockage. The Kanobu Pub is generally a very convenient platform for gaming and near-gaming news. I got enough to do posts there during GamesJamKanobu, I got a taste, you might say. One minus is that almost all the likes are from friends again, who have already seen our Greenlight in social networks. Nevertheless, there was some traffic from there. I’ll show you the statue below.
Seventh day
By the seventh day, my marketing had broken down. I’m just tired. It seemed strange to write to the press – it’s just a Greenlight. Yes, and it’s scary, and it would be necessary through the editor, but it’s expensive. In general, while I was being stupid, the team persuaded me to post a footcloth-a picture about the game on the Picaboo. This also gave a small boost of votes.
Eighth Day and Greenlight
On the eighth day, I gave up and didn’t move a finger. It seems like I just made the news that we broke into the TOP 50 – because it’s nice. What was our surprise when at 8 pm we received a letter of happiness!
And then the strange thing began. After the Greenlight, our number of votes for some reason continued to grow. about ____About
The jump in views is after the news about the passage of the Greenlight, if anything.
Perhaps, by the way, it’s the bundle that we fit into in the early days. Yes, as soon as we came out and thundered on social networks, comrades began knocking on us and calling for bundles. I agreed to the first offer, out of interest – what is it all about + from the faint hope that suddenly the bundle will help Greenlight with traffic. However, the bundle came out when we already got the green light. But in any case, we decided that there would be no silver lining – we’ll try, we’ll see, then we’ll tell you.
Traffic
Like the other guys, the most views are from the states. But the vast majority of comments on the game page are in Russian, so the USA is the silent majority here. There are somehow very few Europeans. This makes us worry about the feasibility of localization, but we have already decided to do it, so…
And here’s the traffic. Steam and social networks are in the first place. Then GamesJam, then your own website. Gamedev and Reddit gave about the same, Kanobu and Pikabu – too. And then from the world by a thread.
Conclusions and revelations
1 – Lost faith in miracles – in the organics of Steam in particular
For some reason it seemed to me that Greenlight has its own large audience, who goes there every day as if to work, to look at projects. No, maybe it is. But that means she passed us by. 2 thousand votes, 3 thousand views. This is very, very little. Enough for a Greenlight, but not enough for people to know about your game.
Do not hope, there will be no miracles. You won’t wake up one morning famous with a million copies sold. It should be built with your own hands. Work with the community, with the press. Nothing will come from nowhere, even on a Greenlight. Not to mention the release. And I’m in a light prostration right now, because I know how bad my marketing is and how little time is left before the release to fix something.
I am seriously thinking about how I will build communication with consumers for the next game. In the meantime, it has not been possible to build a solid base, such as Nerdy Yetis with their 7 thousand subscribers. But, to be honest, we didn’t try. Shame on us.
2 – New platforms vs. old sites, long term relayships
For me, all the sites where we published information about ourselves were divided into well-known old ones (VK, FB, Twitter, Kanobu, Gamesjem …) and unexplored new ones (Reddit, Pikabu, Gamejolt, etc.). It was a pleasure to work with the first ones. The audience is understandable, they already know us there, the laws and unspoken rules are known. With the new ones, both a lot of stress and a small exhaust.
Conclusion – start mastering the sites as early as possible. Use them, communicate, get used to them. Building work with the community is a long-term relationship. That’s how they should be started. Here haste, as in ordinary human relations, is undesirable.
And this is not some kind of calculation, this is normal human ethics. I was pleased with the reposts from indie bands, but after all, I’m not a stranger to them – I also like them and repost them, and when I like the content, and not with any intent (I’ll go to greenlight in three years and then they’ll like me About____Oh, it’s funny).
Accordingly, if we want a profit from some new site, for example from Reddit, we need to start using Reddit like a regular user. And after half a year, you can already ask something from Reddit if you have been a valuable and adequate member of the community all this time.
And about the community.
3 – Indie community support
This is the ray that I saved for last. The indie community’s support and help these days cannot be described in words. We felt like members of one big family, where everyone takes care of and supports each other. Even after all, groups are conducted by the same developers as we are. Yes, I myself lead a thematic group “Narratorika”, again, not only out of interest in the subject, but also for people. This whole ecosystem, where people of similar views and life positions easily become friends and support each other – with information, experience, likes, shares – it is absolutely wonderful.
And it is not only local. The same solidarity, as far as I managed to feel, exists in the global indie.
Perhaps there are still toxic elements that perceive others as competitors, not as colleagues, and pour mud on other projects, but there are no such people in my social circle.
My principle is that I liked the project, support it. I didn’t like it – well, just keep quiet, don’t kick. Life is already kicking be healthy, only your criticism was not enough. And never refuse to support other people if they ask. This is a karmic circle.
The result of its existence is the rise of indie development, which we are currently experiencing. It’s so funny to me while the indie apocalypse is being discussed there in the world, because the Steam is full, how can we be, we have a renaissance here (as always we are late). There are a lot of cool, interesting, unusual projects. Those who can compete worldwide. And it seems to me that this is the result of our mutual support and openness, in the emergence of common platforms and contests like GamesJam, in indie-friendly conferences like DevGAMM.
The fact is that in our, for example, niche – small games about history – we, similar in type projects, are not competitors to each other, but support. We do not conflict for attention and wallet, because we are finite (not 100 hours of MMO grind, but 1-2-3 hours) and cheap (not fritupley, and the price tag is rarely higher than 10 bucks). A player who has played and fallen in love with Message Quest is likely to play with the same pleasure in Die With Glory, and Isles of Umbra, and the Human. By the way, we need to think about our own bundle, dudes, eh?
That is, we already have a common competitive environment – at competitions and in the same Incentive, normal healthy market competition, but, thank God, there is no useless exhausting squabbling and rivalry inside.
And a few words to those who do not feel part of the indie community or have not taken care in advance to become one. This is the same work as with the platforms. This is networking, communication, conferences and meetings, which some recluses despise so much, because you see there is no useful information. It is there, just first you need to find friends and build a friendship with them, and then, when you really need it, these friends will be able to explain which points of activity to choose for the sole proprietor, how much localization costs, and where to quickly make good business cards. This is so, for example.
I think it was thanks to the global indie community that we passed the Greenlight so quickly and easily. And we started the work on attracting him a couple of months before the Greenlight, and a couple of years before the game was even conceived and was born. In short, from the very beginning of our introduction to the world of game dev.
Thank you, indie community! Our game appeared thanks to you, passed the Greenlight thanks to you and, what the hell is not a joke, maybe it will take off, thanks to you!
A low bow. And, that’s it, come if you need something. We will help, advise, explain!
Source: message-quest.com
