Excluding the game name from the title will surely help the developer
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Sadly, clickbait > actual information
Game is Arco.
I haven't ever heard of it; maybe they should focus more on 'How do we market this'...
Not to diminish the dev, but I did see this promoted in a Steam sale, and with 200+ reviews, that's not exactly chump change. Also it was released only a week ago. From watching the trailer, that's more or less the numbers I expect that kind of game to be pulling.
Its definitely a hard thing for most indie devs to do on their own. Its a totally separate skillset that most of us don't have but can definitely be learned.
That's what a publisher is for, and in this case they failed them completely.
In this case yeah, but it's still always a good idea to do your own marketing as well
I’m convinced it’s unnecessary if your game is good. Word of mouth is so strong with gamers
You need to advertise enough to get people playing and talking first. There's about 50 games pet day released on steam. It's easy to get Los in the noise.
You 1000% will not get lost in the noise if you put out a helldivers like quality game. There’s nerds everyday combing through steam store looking for the next great games. Helldivers with zero marketing would have made significantly less but still been a resounding commercial success
Relying on luck isn't a great strategy, even if it sometimes works.
There’s no hidden gems in steam. Games sell as well as they should for their quality. There’s margin of error of course like a low quality game sells on the higher end due to good marketing or a high quality game sells low end due to poor marketing.
Most games are just not great
There’s no hidden gems in steam
high quality game sells low end due to poor marketing
Self contradiction
Words are hard. This is what I mean
Yeah but there are definitely games that are terrible with extreme marketing budgets that sell really well, that's a lot of triple A games in a nutshell
Splattercat covered this game. For those who want to see what the game is about and how it plays.
Edit: The game is called Arco.
To go with what a lot of people in here are saying about marketing being a very important aspect, and also point out for Indies it's continual marketing that's important. Indies don't always sell well right away you kind of got to keep pushing at it. Heck the game came out what a week and a half ago? They're already thrown in the towel?
Although, after watching the trailer I'm not sure how unique this game really was. Certainly looks like a couple dozen other games I've seen come out in the last few years.
If memory serves, it took hollow knights a few weeks too
You'd think that Panic as a publisher would help them with marketing
I had actually heard about this game but didn’t pay much attention to it. It’s the first game ever published by Panic. This is a company previously known for exclusively publishing Mac software (mainly general utilities such as text editors, FTP clients, etc). I’m not surprised that the game is selling poorly given their lack of experience with game publishing.
The game looks very pretty but tactical RPGs are a niche genre. To market this game they need to get out there and get it in front of people who like these sorts of games. That means getting on forums and talking to people as well as sponsoring Twitch streamers who normally play these sorts of games.
Ever so, it’s a tough gig. I’ve seen streamers and YouTubers cover a lot of these sponsored games and many of them still flop because they just don’t interest the audience very much.
I'll be honest here, the theme/vibe put me off enough that I never bothered to download the demo. I'll give it a shot to see if it is as good as the steam reviews are making it out to be, but the devs need to consider than a couple hundred very positive reviews on a platform with many tens of millions of players doesn't necessarily mean you'll get financial success. It could be that the unconventional theme/graphics and novel/unfamiliar gameplay can be a tough sell.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here already, is that the game is only on Steam. Which limits the customer base to Steam, yes it's a massive audience but they're missing out on free sales by not listing it on places like GOG, Itch.io, Gamejolt, etc
The reality is those other platforms won't make much difference on sales at all, and with a limited indie dev team they've made a wise decision to focus on the largest PC storefront.
It's the same reason a lot of indies don't target Linux, the effort vs reward simply doesn't make sense for small teams. Anyone who says "But Unity and Unreal Engine support Linux! It's literally two clicks!" has no idea what they're talking about and hasn't actually been through the process of releasing a game for multiple platforms.
There's a pretty big difference between "Selling the exact same binaries on different stores" and "Supporting a whole different OS with it's own alien ecosystem" =P
In the case of store fronts, we're talking about more sales (even if it's extremely low) that literally take 0 effort to do.
No, see you've fallen into the exact trap I just described. The "exact same binaries" is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won't. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you've still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).
For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.
Edit: btw I'm not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I've been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.
Probably close-to-zero direct sales on any platform but Steam. It would at least get there name out there more, which it absolutely not nothing.
The article stated that the game is also on Nintendo Switch.
Well, this is the PC Gaming lemmy community, so I'm just talking about PC