Our First Next Fest Was... Okay

PUBLOG

Our first Next Fest. We went into it thinking we should see a decent bump in wishlists for Feed the Scorchpot, but really, we didn’t.

A few years ago it seems like Next Fest was a more reliable event to gather traction and interest for your game. Today, much like many other platforms, it is a force multiplier. Let me explain.

Kickstarter

We did a bit of a post-mortem about our experience running a Kickstarter campaign, and whilst it was far below what could be considered a ‘hit’, we still hit our funding goal. But that wasn’t without a decent sized budget (for people with no money), and a lot of man hours. The one thing we knew going into Kickstarter though was: they are a crowdfunding platform, not an audience-building one.

If you can bring the audience, and the attention, then those platforms can see you’re going to make money. That’s when they push you to more people. It’s their business and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is a sense that they do help give visibility to your project. We saw it all first hand, and we obviously didn’t reach high enough backers or $ per backer for Kickstarter to really push us out there.

Though that is assuming we had a project worth backing, and that we can’t be sure of. Maybe they did push it out and there wasn’t enough interest. Either way, the onus is still on us: bring the audience.

Next Fest

We had a similar feeling going into Next Fest. That this was going to once again be a force multiplier, not an audience builder.

So, we tried reddit ads. We had success there with wishlists when we tried it for our Kickstarter campaign, so we thought what if we tried directing traffic to the lead-up of Next Fest, and then as much as we can in the first 24 hours. We did not run ads throughout Next Fest. We spent A$500 on the campaign, with a A$500 match from Reddit:

All in all, we started just shy of 7,000 wishlists and ended just under 8,300. We streamed a few times during the festival, and also had a contest for the Demo running as well — anyone who could complete a run and share a screenshot went into the draw for a free Steam Key on release. That saw great engagement, new discord joins, and new reviews.

Here are the stats from Next Fest:

So, what now?

Ha. You tell me.

With a bigger budget or following, Next Fest could have been a lot more rewarding. But we’ll maintain we’re still trying to figure all of this out. And Next Fest is a reminder that whilst Steam is somewhat of a monopoly, it’s still only one marketplace that runs one event.

Apply for other festivals, show your game at conventions, create pages on other marketplaces. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Next Fest was one festival that went “okay”. But we keep our eyes on the horizon.

We announced our release date of August 20th (we’d love a wishlist). So we charge forward and keep going. We have a strong community of people who are ready to support us, and we’ll keep hammering away at press and creator outreach, and putting the Scorchpot onto other marketplaces like Epic Games or Itch.io. And right now, this week, it’s time to make a killer launch trailer that grabs some attention that we can put out in another month or so.

The Scorchpot discord is very active, and we’re all in there happy to answer questions.

Josh & Clem