The festival strategy of marketing, as explained at GDC (and bonus talk on giving your game away for free during development)

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Hello it is I, your local marketing-obsessed gremlin! :troll: I pilfered this really helpful GDC talk from a putrid marketing dungeon and brought it here for you today! (Don’t worry, I tried to clean it off first!)

The talk is about using festivals to market your game.

If you’re unfamiliar with this strategy, the talk lays it out really clearly. I recommend watching it.

I was already aware of the festivals strat, and I still had some insightful takeaways:

  • the best way to get into a festival is to time it with a big beat for your game such as:
    • the game announcement (this is the biggest, most exciting one according to them)
    • release date announcement
    • and launch

I also know that these are beats where you would benefit from having a new trailer if possible.

If you don’t have any of these beats available, sometimes you could get into a festival with a new trailer (maybe revealing gameplay or another exciting part of the game) depending on your game and how anticipated it is.

I didn’t agree with everything, however. The speakers made a throwaway comment about wanting your steam page to be up from 6-18 months for your marketing activities. The implication was that having your marketing period too drawn out would be bad for conversions. However, the second talk in this video (and Chris Zukowski in his blog) directly disproves that old wish lists are bad, so definitely stick around for both talks.

I hope you folks find this helpful! I’m curious if anyone has any experience with this strat?

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Festivals, amounted maybe for half the wishlists I received, and ultimately allowed my game Dice’n Goblins to reach Popular Upcoming/Most Wishlisted before launch which gave me a bit more wishlists. They are definitely very important, in my experience, to get more wishlists.

A couple weeks ago, my game was in the Thursday Turn Based Fest, and it gave me a couple more wishlists and sales.

However,

  • You don’t get accepted in festivals if you don’t have a game that look promising or you get existing wishlists or you get a publisher. You need to be successful already.
  • Wishlists conversion really varies between games.

The following is my subjective opinion based on my experience and looking at game marketing discourse:

  • There has been a “Wishlist Meta Game”, for a couple years on Steam. It was succesful
  • The game has changed.
  • You need way bigger number of wishlists to be succesful or another strategy to sell the games.
  • Wishlist are a bad metric. They are very derivative of a game success. You don’t even know if the player exist.
  • You can “buy” wishlists with ads. Don’t mean they will buy the game.
  • You’re not competing on the Store page anymore, you’re competing amongst the dozen or hundred games on a player wishlist page.

(I am not dissing Chris works, he put disclaimer in all his articles.)

tl;dr:
You get wishlists as a result of success, but getting more wishlists wont necessarily make you successful or sell the game.

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First, congrats on your game’s making it into Popular Upcoming/Most Wishlisted! :tada:

And also thank you for sharing your specific experience. I always find hearing people’s actual stories to be extremely interesting.

It makes sense to me that wishlists are a bit of a faulty tool to judge how successful a game will be. It’s such a wide range for potential conversions, the only thing I think you can say with certainty is that a game with 100 wishlists will sell less than a game with 100,000 wishlists.

The game has changed.

I’m very interested in this. I’d love to hear more about how you feel the game has changed. (What was it before, what is it now?)

For myself, my current plan is to gauge the interest in my game by watching: 1. festival acceptance, 2. general wishlist activity, and 3. content creator reactions. Then I can compare my estimation to my actual performance and see how right or wrong I was.

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Yeah it makes sense that if you have a lot of wishlists, you have a lot of potential buyers.

Assumptions:

  • You have limited marketing resources (time and money)
  • Your aim is to maximize the amount of money you want to earn
  • Wishlists are not sales
  • Demographics of people that wishlists and demographics that buy intersect, but are different.
  • I assume that visibility given by Steam, is different that visibility given by Streamers or Press.
  • My advice is for small indie and hobbyists. Above should have the means to seek advice from marketing experts and services with real data, rather than randos online.

The aim of getting a lot of wishlist is to have a strong launch, where you can trigger News and Trending. People that buy from this are impulse buyers. They see a hot new things going hot, they buy.

A popular game, from a known company or played by streamers, will be bought a lot, and will be there. It’s not because it had a lot of wishlists. The steam impulse buyer will then buy, regardless of any prior wishlist numbers.

Wishlist “Meta” is shifting quickly

In recent years, there has been a lot of “wishlist hacking”, Valve to counter that, is constantly changing the rules of how you obtain wishlist and how much they impact the visibility. As a result of this constant shift, developers that can produce games fasts, can leverage it. A few publisher/dev are putting dozen of Steam Pages per month, just to see what stick and then abandon the game, if it doesn’t get wishlists.

Games that lose money are a strategy

Now, everyone is on the Steam, reading Chris Blog, seeing the same videos. So everyone is aiming for impulse buyers that buy for cheap. As a result, Steam is being swarmed by quick to produce games, being discounted heavily. Most of those games lose money, but this is not a problem because if you have been producing enough, you just need one to succeed to make money.

Competition is bigger than ever

It’s relatively cheap to land in popular upcoming with ads. I’ll assume everyone with a budget does it. As a result, number of wishlists required to have a strong launch is higher than some years prior. I say this comparing my numbers, and Chris numbers.

My own opinion

You should get enough wishlist to “look big” to be accepted in festival, press and other stuff, but once it’s done, I don’t think it matters too much if you have 5, 10 or 20k wishlists, it’s roughly the same ballpark. Probably building a community and get friendly with streamers, is a better use of your time, money and skills.

(Also sorry if the post sounds vindicative, it’s not my intent. In the end my advice is “Follow only advice that applies to your game and your target audience”)

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The aim of getting a lot of wishlist is to have a strong launch, where you can trigger News and Trending. People that buy from this are impulse buyers. They see a hot new things going hot, they buy.

I think this is a really important part of what you are saying that deserves to be highlighted. For anyone unfamiliar with “sales” as a topic:

  • Someone who purchases something can have a range of purchase motivations
  • Impulse buyers are one type of purchase motivation and they can cover a range of types of purchases, but often it’s within the person’s means, presented right to them where they already are, and low risk (that’s why they often have gum, candy, and magazines next to the checkouts in the grocery stores). I would say video games are low risk purchases, you aren’t going to damage your health or social status for having a game in your steam library. (Though you might damage your financial well-being if it’s GTA VI at $110.)
  • There are many other types of purchase motivations, some examples include financial gain, a need, for health, for pleasure, out of fear, etc.

@ColdEmber, when I read between the lines of your opinion section, I get the impression you’re arguing in favor of aiming for people whose purchase motivation would be pleasure, or maybe fomo/group participation. I’m so fascinated by this. The idea of intentionally building community around people who authentically enjoy your game is so ethical. And considering your players by their purchase motivation is an extension of that imo. (Though sales, marketing, and psychology concepts can be used for good or evil.)

So here are some random thoughts I had in relation to this:

  • Pleasure purchase motivation: You can probably group most entertainment media under this category, but I usually see sales people/marketers listing it as distinct from the impulse purchase motivation. For impulse purchases, seeing the product and buying the product are where the dopamine comes from. But with the pleasure motivation the person likely derives pleasure from the actual product they are buying.
    • This makes me wonder if anyone has broken pleasure purchasing motivation down further for gamers/game purchasing behaviors.
    • I myself notice that looking at my wishlist, some capsules trigger memories of what I’m excited about with that game, and some capsules are completely forgettable. This might relate to why a good capsule matters.
  • Fomo/group participation purchase motivation: I kind of made this one up. I’m iffy on calling it “fomo”. But this is something I notice in myself. I enjoy watching certain Lets Play YouTubers and Twitch streamers, and when many of them are playing and enjoying a specific game, I think it prompts me to want to also own/play that game. I think the motivation stems from a desire to be a part of that group experience. I don’t really think it’s a fear motivation so much as a type of actualization motivation.

@ColdEmber I’ve gone and had a mini deep dive, forgive me! :rofl: I wanted to say I didn’t take anything in your previous post as being vindictive. I’m enjoying learning about your thoughts on the topic and I’m super glad you shared them in so much depth!

I will definitely be thinking about purchasing motivation as I watch myself buy games. And when the Steam summer impulse sale :money_with_wings: starts, I will probably be looking at it with new eyes.

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