Issue #84
PUBLOG
Our first game
What a wild time it’s been. We launched Feed the Scorchpot on August 20th with a whole lot of hope. As our first game, we think we did everything right, but this was the moment we’d find out.
As of writing, we've sold 17.2k copies and have 31k wishlists sitting there. The title of this post was written at day 7, when sales caught up to wishlists. 14k and 14k.
Everything we'd read said to expect a fraction of that.
It has been an incredible ride, and we’re ultra-excited to be able to pay Jakub & Daniela a big first paycheck which sets them up for at least the next 12 months. Our goal from day one, on any game we sign, is:
Make sure our developers can continue to create games.
Feed the Scorchpot ✅
“Only” 20,000 units
The last email used this exact headline in the same position. And now I get to actually say: we might do it. Not in launch month, but definitely before the end of the year. Which is still wild.
Jakub wrote up his own little postmortem on reddit, so I won’t repeat everything he said, but I will go over the few things that I thought made a difference in our campaign over the last 12 months.
But quickly on the other stuff: we paid an agency to do the launch press release. We ran reddit ads. The ads didn't amount to much for us. Not nothing, but nothing we'd do again at that price. Ok, moving on.
The game changer
12 months ago we all took a leap of faith. Moravian (Jakub & Daniela), a fresh new studio making their first game, and Indieformer, a fresh new publisher entering the scene. We shook hands and said let’s do it. We messed up a lot along the way (the Kickstarter, mostly), but overall we’ve come out on what we’d consider to be the top. Aside from all of the man hours we put into this ourselves, it was one decision that I believe we can attribute a lot of our success to:
WhisperGames, our Asia regional publisher.
Yes, you need a good game. Yes, you need to grab the attention of interested parties. There’s negotiations, percentage talks, expectations - the lot. But we signed with them just after our Kickstarter launch, and it was one of the best decisions we made. We had no chance of breaking into the Asia territory on our own. Sure you can localize, but that’s not marketing or advertising. Whisper covered the localization and the marketing, and right now Asia is our biggest sales region, at least 10% ahead of the next one.
So, yep - a win! But it doesn’t stop there. Whisper have better connections than we did, more resources to attend events, and most importantly - more industry contacts. They had a contact at Playstack (the Balatro publisher), they met up and there were nice things exchanged about Feed the Scorchpot. This made its way up management to the marketing team, and before we knew it, they were happy to support us by bundling with Balatro for launch day.
The game that inspired Feed the Scorchpot.
A bundle on launch day.
We never imagined we’d be mentioned in the same breath let alone sit right next to each other on Steam. This whole scenario dragged over a couple of weeks and we were dying a little more each time we got an update. It was exactly how you’d imagine.
Looking at the bundle sales alone it’s enough to say that without that we’d have made a lot less sales.
Now what?
I don't want to discourage anyone. A lot of this went our way. But the bit that's repeatable: talk to a regional partner early. Earlier than feels reasonable. We signed Whisper just after the Kickstarter, and everything after that ran through them. Jakub built a game good enough to get Playstack's attention. Whisper got it in front of them.
Wishlists converted nicely, but they didn't outperform what Whisper did in Asia or what the Balatro bundle did on the day. The good news is the list refilled. Everyone who bought came off it, and there are still more on there now than when we launched. That's what the next six months of discounts are for.
And now that we have a game to sell, we're in the product business. There's a sale to be made every day - we just need to be smart about it.
All in all this means Indieformer can keep doing this for more games. After Steam, Whisper, Jakub and everything else, we keep about $1.50 of every sale. That won't pay us full-time off one title, but a few more and things start to look different.
If you haven't picked it up yet, Feed the Scorchpot is on Steam. Reviews still matter more than you'd think.
Keep developing out there folks, we’re rooting for you.
Josh & Clem