Announcing my new game - Solus - Survival/Exploration - Unreal Engine 4

    Congrats, just to get to the end of a project like this is a great achievement. I hope the sales eventually reflect that effort, I'll be purchasing a copy!

    I bought it before but was just sitting on it to be done because I don't like going through early stuff, cause I know I won't play it again when it's done. Glad to see it completed, will check it out soon :)

    Quote from Hourences

    13 hours ago, Hourences said: Sales are still low so any help you can give with spreading the word would be much appreciated!

    I offered to ask Eurogamer Benelux if I could review it. You can see my original post above. Wouldn't guarantee additional sales, but we have a very large user-base so the game would have definitively gotten more exposure. A bit late for that now I suppose.

    Quote from Hourences

    14 hours ago, Hourences said: Sales are still low so any help you can give with spreading the word would be much appreciated!

    Congrats on the final release!

    Don't lose hope, you might just have a slow-burner project in your hands :) flappy bird was on the App Store for 4-6 months before becoming what it became.

    I'll share this where I can, is not much but hopefully.

    I guess a good thing would get it in Humble Bundle as well.

    Thanks guys!

    Sprongy sorry it has been super hectic trying to manage it all. I wouldn't say it is too late however, we just released? Best time for a review is now actually?

    Humble Bundle you can only do after about a year, and you must first make the investment of adding in Mac and Linux then, and then after that you can make a limited return. It was huge when it started but the market is incredibly saturated nowadays.

    If you look at what we did for marketing:

    • Present with playable game at our booth at E3, Gamescom, GDC, CES, Paris Games week, and others
    • Marketing agency plus 2 part time people for months
    • Partnership with tech firms such as Tobii or Ultra-D who in turn sent it on to press and took the game to conferences
    • When EA came out, coverage on all major sites including exclusive reveals on Gamespot, 4 page articles in Edge magazine and so on
    • Short intense EA phase with multiple massive content updates, which in turn we contacted the press for time after time
    • Multi platform plus support from Microsoft, plus VR support.
    • We manufactured survival kits sent these boxes worth of cool stuff like USB chargers to the biggest streamers in the world to try and impress them
    • And a huge game, 12-16 hours long, high end graphics, very visually focused (easier to sell). Ratings on Steam at 86% and VR problems aside, pretty much entirely positive one after another. Rock Paper Shotgun was super happy with it last week in their review too.

    But in the year 2016 this is not enough anymore for an indie game, even of our size. You drop off the Steam page within 24 hours, and that is it. If this doesn't work out then I really don't know how to go on making games. You can't base such a huge investment on nothing more than luck.

    Sounds crazy how much effort you guys put in and that you still have yet to make a dent. Is actually slightly off-putting as am working on my own little project in my own time. What does it take to get it noticed by sites like IGN and Eurogamer? Surely if they take notice your prospective audience will shoot up? Do you think you should have bought on a publisher to help out?

    We had some coverage on places like IGN but now when the full game is out, or when we released episodes, it became old news it seems for them. With a game this size and this visual you'd say they would jump on top of it, but while we do get a bit more attention and sell more than your average indie title on Steam, it is nowhere near enough to fund a game this size. If you would have done this game "properly" with an office and full time devs you probably would have had to have say 2 years 6-8 people full time to pull this off. That means you'd burn something like 40 000 USD a month, and that is without paying anyone well or having much reserve. You look at a 1 million dollar budget, which I think is still little for a game like this.

    That scares me the most. We will make some money now because we worked for nothing for years, but if you'd want to grow the business and have an office etc, it is just plain impossible. We've had the exact same situation with the past 2 games too. The only reason we make money is because we barely spend any, but from a business point of view we have no way forward making indie games (even of this complexity). There is just not enough return to be able to properly the company.

    We also noticed that even when press picks it up, the impact on sales is absolutely minimal. A lot of people simply wait for the sales, but then when the sales happen so much other stuff also happen they simply forget.

    I am not sure how as an industry we can move forward. We compete with all forms of entertainment, and we get ever more of that. 5 Years ago not only were there this many indie games, you didn't had Netflix. We compete even with Netflix for example. And none of that is going to get better.

    We also have ever more existing games we can play. 5 years ago a game from 2006 might look terrible, but in 2016 a game from 2011 is still perfectly playable and acceptable for many. As our graphic and gameplay standard begins to settle, that also means we get an ever growing library of existing games we can spend our money and time on.

    So yeah...


    And a publisher only works if you find the exact right partner. Otherwise you will just end up in a situation where they do the minimal work, they send a few emails, and otherwise they move on one of their many other titles. If your game breaks and fails, they won't care. They got 10 other titles. But you on the other hand got only this 1 title. That is the biggest risk to a publisher by far for me. It doesn't really matter to them, unless you give them a huge cut, but then it doesn't in turn matter for you.

    When it comes to publishers a very interesting case is Adrift. That was a reasonably big publisher (you won't get a bigger one as an indie) with good coverage, and that sold less than 20k copies on Steam. It sold like 5k I think in the first week, which is nothing for a game that likely costed them at least 1 mil or so. So even they could not do anything about it. And sure, maybe the game wasn't great, but with their coverage even a bad game I'd say would get at least more than a few thousand sales the first few days...

    Viral marketing is the hardest form of marketing of all. When it works it is superb but it is about as hard to predict as figuring out which pop song is going to be number 1. You can try to work the system, but you need significant resources to try and do so. As an indie you can only fall back on luck, and luck is never a strategy.

    So when it comes to marketing you can try a couple of times, like we did, but if it doesn't go viral then you can't do much more other than to keep spamming the picture or thing online forever until 1 day it might ignite... At that point your energy might be better on spent with traditional marketing.

    Is pretty interesting to read about your experiences. Did you guys consider the Kickstarter route? I know you said you hardly spent any money developing it and didn't pay yourselves but maybe it would have allowed you to? As well as building up sizable interest in the project should people have chosen to back it.

    I don't really believe in Kickstarter. Kickstarter takes a huge amount of time to do well and is a job in itself, full time probably for about a month. I know quite a few people who tried, and even when they succeeded it took them so much time and money to do that a good portion of the money they got from KS would have to go to simply paying for the effort it took to do the KS in the first place. That is a big commitment and time you take away from the game, and you need to make sure the payback you get is worth it.

    If KS fails you also fail publicly. You can then not go a publisher and say "we got this cool game" because they will say "yeah but the public isn't into it, look at your KS".

    If you compare the amount of money you would possible make after covering for the effort it took to do, to the risk involved that if you fail you also immidiately potentially lose other opportunities, then the investment is pretty big, the risk is pretty big, but unless you make hundreds of thousands (you won't) the payback is too small.

    Look at it this way. If you see how much trouble we have getting traction with a full and finished released game, then imagine how hard it is to get anyone to care about some KS.

    Well @Hourences, sounds like you need to get featured in House Of Cards…!

    Jokes aside (sort of) I would point out that there are games with pixelated graphics that make loads of money… graphics doesn't seem to be the most important tick on the list nowadays.

    I understand how you feeling and that this is painful, I worked on two mobile games that didn't get me any money as well, for almost two years, by the end of it. Of course we didn't invest as much as you, but when I moved to UK most of my "savings" after the conversion were 600£.

    Anyway, what I want to get to, is that no matter how technically good a title is, sometime it just doesn't strike with the audience.

    It was greatly "explained" by one of the guys I worked with on those games. When he tried a little and fun game I was testing for another friend, he reacted saying: "oh beautiful, beautiful… but is not my kind of game".

    I haven't tried yours, so I can only speculate, but I'm afraid Solus falls in this "category". Doesn't matter that the color palette is bold, because is not as bold as a two-three color combination as other more stylised games, sci-fi theme is not the most trendy setting at the moment… you name it. There are so many reasons why people might not be reacting to it :(

    wonder if at least being featured by Epic would help, have you contacted them, have they talked about it in a stream about UE or something? I've got interested in many games after seeing them in the reels Unity/Epic release after a conference.

    Sorry, I hope this post doesn't come across wrong, I hope I really hope it will pick up and start rewarding your efforts. I'll post it in the Italian forum I moderate and try to contact the editors of the network/site the forum is attached to, which is the biggest in Italy. I'm not close friend but maybe they'll cover it.

    All the best!

    What i notice is, you just released the full version on steam but there is no discount, not even 10%. In my book this is super important tho. The collective mind of steam users is always looking for a deal, even if it's minuscle or just an illusion. And with every deal you have a chance to be on the front page. With every front page you have a chance to appear in the top sellers. Everytime you're in top sellers thers a ripple effect because of others hopping on the bandwagon. From that follows more reviews, word of mouth, youtubers.

    There's no discount because when we were EA we had 15 Euro. After EA we went to 20 Euro as planned, but due to financial laws in the US you cannot change price and then discount it at the same time for logical reasons. So that was not an option.

    We are going to be in the summer sales though. And we are discounted on GOG right now.

    Also a fun thing is that last time around we tried the Steam visibility banners. This gives you one of those smaller banners on Steam front page. 500 000 impressions timed with the European and then the American evenings, yet we sold like 150 copies out of those 500 000 impressions. It is ridiculous.

    What is even weirder is that when we launched originally, we got well over 1 million visits (not impressions, actual page visits), yet our exposure then was equal to what it is now on Steam. On top of that 10% out of those 1 million either bought the game or in the majority of cases put it on their wishlist. So that 10% conversion rate (or at a minimum sign of interest) was good statistically. Yet it doesn't happen again.

    I have tons of numbers we can't make sense of. For example the first week our Steam community group grew from 0 to 20 000 people in like 3 days time. After those 3 days, from Day 3 to day 120 or so where we are now, it grew by just 8000 people. So there is this massive peak in the start, and then that is it. No matter what content we released, what kind of trailer we did, how much press or streamer coverage we got, it never showed anything like the first 3 days again. People always say that if you keep updating the game you will gradually attract an audience, but we do not see this whatsoever. When we released 3 hours of new content we'd sell 100 copies extra because of that, which is about 1000 USD income.

    So perhaps it is as Blackdog says, but since there's so many types of gamers out there, and so many people who would enjoy this kind of game it feels more of a "no one knows it exists" kind of thing. The visibility is super hard.

    I would love for indie developers to work together more. We all have an audience. We could all beat the visibility problem together if we'd work together in small groups of similar games. As singleplayer games you don't compete with each other. I'd love to find other small studios willing to work with us on something like that.

    Blackdog makes a good point about Epic - as far as I know you have been quite involved with them in the past, in terms of providing tutorials and such (not sure if you've ever worked with them directly?) - would they not be willing to help you promote the game? It certainly promotes their engine well due to the visual fidelity

    Oh yeah Epic will help and it will be good, but it doesn't make a huge difference in the long run. It doesn't replace the existing lack of traction...

    Quote from Hourences

    3 hours ago, Hourences said: Thanks guys!

    Sprongy sorry it has been super hectic trying to manage it all. I wouldn't say it is too late however, we just released? Best time for a review is now actually?

    Humble Bundle you can only do after about a year, and you must first make the investment of adding in Mac and Linux then, and then after that you can make a limited return. It was huge when it started but the market is incredibly saturated nowadays.

    If you look at what we did for marketing:

    • Present with playable game at our booth at E3, Gamescom, GDC, CES, Paris Games week, and others
    • Marketing agency plus 2 part time people for months
    • Partnership with tech firms such as Tobii or Ultra-D who in turn sent it on to press and took the game to conferences
    • When EA came out, coverage on all major sites including exclusive reveals on Gamespot, 4 page articles in Edge magazine and so on
    • Short intense EA phase with multiple massive content updates, which in turn we contacted the press for time after time
    • Multi platform plus support from Microsoft, plus VR support.
    • We manufactured survival kits sent these boxes worth of cool stuff like USB chargers to the biggest streamers in the world to try and impress them
    • And a huge game, 12-16 hours long, high end graphics, very visually focused (easier to sell). Ratings on Steam at 86% and VR problems aside, pretty much entirely positive one after another. Rock Paper Shotgun was super happy with it last week in their review too.

    But in the year 2016 this is not enough anymore for an indie game, even of our size. You drop off the Steam page within 24 hours, and that is it. If this doesn't work out then I really don't know how to go on making games. You can't base such a huge investment on nothing more than luck.

    It seems like you're identifying a marketing need. I hope you aren't too disillusioned.

    Let me share some experiences with you @Hourences in regards to game journalism and audience reception. This has nothing to do with your game per se, but just some simple on point observations in general (that are in fact, very relevant to this discussion).

    EA is your release. I haven't seen a single game that managed to overcome this issue. That's why it's important to go all out in your first build. That's something that Darkest Dungeon excelled in, but even that game's official release was overshadowed by the EA launch. It seems as though you only have one window to make an impact, use it wisely.

    The majority don't seem to care about the little ones and audiences are highly unpredictable. I can't use official numbers (confidential) but let me give you an example. I wrote about Bethesda probably announcing Wolfenstein: TNO 2, Prey 2, The Evil Within 2 and Dishonored 2 (already announced). All sequels to established brands that were well received and exceeded commercial expectations. Little to no audience response. I write about Fifa 17 switching to the Frostbite engine and it blows up.

    The above is our region (Benelux), if you look at our sister site (UK) you can clearly see the change in demographic. The Bethesda rumor blows up and Fifa/Frostbite only gets a quarter of that traction. Like I said, it's unpredictable and complicated. COD, The Division, Destiny, Battlefield and GTA are all guaranteed traffic magnets though, the rest don't even come close.

    In regard to your review comment, no, it doesn't work that way. Review copies/keys are (usually) send before release. The review can then go up on release or a few days after. This is vital for every publication. The sooner you get it up, the more traffic it gets. That's why you sometimes see reviews based on beta builds and what not. It's all about the clicks. If you wait too long, people have read a review somewhere else and they are not going to bother, because they've already made up their mind.

    Timing is everything. Let's take Solus as an example. You are releasing the full version a couple of days before the biggest gaming event in the world. It's impossible for the press to report on everything that's going on. The big titles are fighting for coverage and the little ones are praying to be noticed. Releasing the full game now, especially a game that's been in EA already, will get little to no coverage. Just to make sure I know what I'm talking about, I've checked the following sites: IGN, Gamespot, Polygon, Eurogamer.net, Destructoid and even Kotaku. Sadly, not a single word on the full release of your game.

    I wish you all the sales in the world man, I really do. But if it hasn't happened yet, I don't think it will. Your best bet would probably be a good deal during the Steam sale.

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