It hasn't even been two weeks and no one has heard of it, so maybe advertising might help.
I think we're the advertising
This game touched my balls as i slept
If imma be an advertisement i do it my way.
See, now I'm interested!
Made by 3 of the guys behind 9/11!
Well their last project was a success
I’m Commander Shepard, and and this is my favorite game on the Citadel!
Ding correct answer. And the article itself of course.
What's the name of the game?
We're not the advertising. Streamers are the advertising. If the publisher didn't spend money on trying to promote this on Twitch and/or Youtube, they aren't doing their job.
There must be some sort of first-week spike they expected to see?
You can usually calculate that from wishlists.
Well part of the problem might be that I have never heard of this game in my life.
And it released 11 days ago...
Not even. This article was published 7 days after release.
These guys are seriously crying no fair and calling it quits after one week? Oof
Or they understand free marketing tactics.
This game very well could go viral now, given their "claim" of being ignored...
I'm kinda torn because of this. I like for good games to get recognition and be successful. Part of me wants to buy the game and give it a shot because it's been well received and I'm happy to support an indie dev... But I really do not want to help establish a trend of indies sleeping on advertising/spreading word, then crying "woe is me" after a single week when barely anybody was aware of it, as a way of guerilla marketing their game. I also need to watch a bit more gameplay to see if it's even in my wheelhouse before I decide to spend $20 on it.
There are trends that game releases tend to follow, and while it might have a nice long tail, you're usually making most of your money right at release.
That applies to games people know about. If nobody knows about your game then it doesn't count. For example Vampire survivors barely made any money on the first few weeks of its early access release. In fact it didn't really start making money until youtubers/streamers essentially advertised it for free.
But that's an anomaly compared to most game releases. It would be foolish to assume that this game has a Vampire Survivors or Among Us esque curve ahead of it.
It's an anomaly in terms of success. It's not an anomaly in terms of how a good game becomes a success. There's no successful game that people haven't heard of. Nobody knew about vampire survivors when it came out so it didn't get sales. It got sales when people started to hear about it. Same with among us. In fact letting people know a game exists and making it appealing is probably more important than having a good game. The day before is a great example of that.
It doesn't matter how good reviews the genre gets if nobody knows it exists it's not going to sell. I guarantee 99% of the people reading that article had no idea this game even existed and if this article made waves on reddit this game would definitely see a spike in sales. So far it hasn't really made waves so most people are still unaware of this game. In light of that it shouldn't come as any surprise that the game is not selling.
Also sidenote, holy fuck this game has an unmemorable name. I had to open the article again so I could find the steam player numbers. That name is definitely not helping the sales.
Exactly, also making good games consistently gets you fans. I’ve been a fan of the company that made Hades since I got their first game in a humble bundle. A lot of people got into their second game. Their third was fine. But if they hadn’t had a reputation for making great games (and I don’t think Bastion or Transistor was the most marketable game) I don’t think Hades would’ve blown up like it did.
So yeah the dev needs to learn to better market, keep marketing, and keep making games that build loyal customer bases.
It's an anomaly for a game's prospects to get better after the first week than how it does right when it launches. If you want to say it's a failure of marketing, sure, but the time to correct that marketing problem, in more than 99% of cases, was before it launched. There's another comment here that says that looking at it after reading the article, they still don't want to buy it. And for some reason I can't put my finger on, I'm right there with them.
They should have advertised the game before it was released, plain amd simple. Personally I don't like how they're whining about it, that turns me off of the game.
Man I remember dropping shittyflash games on new ground and going FUCKING WILD when one person had played it.
Likewise. Downloading demo now.
But also, like, I'm at least 100 hours into pixel dungeon. Idk what to tell indie game developers. Like, its not guaranteed to be a hit.
Well yeah, the question is, why didn't you hear of it. It might certainly be that the game or type of game has something to do with it, not only the marketing. It's kinda hard to know from the outside.
Well the game is ARCO and only available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Looking at the Steam store page of this game doesn't make me want to play this at all. This is just a gut reaction and I don't know why I feel like this, and I don't want to spend the time to try and figure it out. But there must be something wrong with the game or the presentation of it.
Fairly jarring for the trailer to go from fully rendered animation to potato pixel gameplay and back
Like if the gameplay is any good, maybe let it speak for itself
Also the music was reminiscent of those terrible idle game adverts on YouTube or Facebook
The environments even look pretty decent. But the characters don't.
Just beat the game.
God damn it's good. The only way I knew about it was because I was checking Steam new releases. Please god understand that this would have sold with better advertising.
they should fire their publisher then
it feels like indies are making the same three genres, and AAA are just remastering the same three games over and over
Says dev making an indie pixel game with hand-drawn character portraits. The reviews are glowing he should at least give it some time to breath before going for the, “woe is me” approach.
Never heard of it.
There are so many games being made, it's hard to tell what's good and what's trash. Review sites can't review everything. User reviews are suspect. I don't know what the solution is.
User reviews are suspect.
This is one of the reasons I'm glad that Steam started cracking down on reviews that were just some stupid ASCII art and reviews that were just one big joke -- neither of them help people understand whether a game is good and there's just so much of that trash in the reviews. It's a small change but so far it's been positive.
Marketing has been rough lately. I stopped using reviews sites for the most part. A lot of the time I could not tell if there was any integrity in the reviews posted or if it was just a paid Ad. I rely a lot more on word of mouth and watching my favorite streamers play a game before even considering it. I get the devs struggle. How do you grab my attention when the market is full of these types of games and it’s hard to differentiate at a glance.
Also, this game from the article is the type of game I wait until a steam sale before buying.
Looks like a nice game. Will try the demo at least. Demos being a thing again is so good.
We hadn't heard of the game. It's not that it won't sell, it's that it wasn't advertised before now.
I'm so fucking tired of pixel art games. And I've noticed recently that going back and playing actual 16 bit games with real pixels feels so much better. It's hard to say for sure what it is, but I have a few theories.
First, in old games that actually use pixels, everything has to snap to the grid. For these pixel art games running at 1080p or maybe higher, what is supposed to look like a pixel is actually a square made up of multiple pixels. In 16-bit games, a sprite can only move distances the same size as a pixel, but in these modern ones the "pixels" can move by fractions of their own size. It loses all the neat, discreet, visual appeal and becomes messy looking in my opinion.
Second, the color pallet is too large. Old games had a limited selection of colors, and often in order to make the most of them the colors used would be significantly different from each other, while still all being part of a cohesive pallet. We are used to millions of colors, but consoles like the GameBoy Color and SNES only had ~32,000 to pick from total. The GameBoy Color also has a software limitation to only have 56 colors on-screen at once. Using a full, modern color pallet without those limitations allows for colors that are close to each other to be used. That's great for 3D models where we are thing to mimic reality, but for pixel art it just makes everything look messy and sloppy. There needs to be a sharp, distinct contrast for pixels to be satisfying.
Third, there's just too much stuff happening. This I could probably adapt to, but I just have this expectation that pixel games should just be a few moving sprites and maybe a couple of background layers.
The name "Arco" tells me absolutely nothing. It's not memorable. It's a complete blank slate that gets washed away. I'm not even certain if that's just a proper noun from the game or if that's just a different language word.
A hybrid turn-based/real time strategy game? My instinct is that sounds like the worst of both worlds. It has been successful before- Transistor and Paper Mario come to mind. But in general, if in playing a turn-based game it's because I want the chill, low-pressure experience. I probably want to be less than sober. And introducing real-time elements means that those games get pushed into the real-time category when I choose what I want to play and when. And if in playing a tacts game, 99% of the time in going to choose a turn-based one and get lit.
As many others here have said, I've never heard of this game. I think this is a legitimate problem facing a lot industries, especially digital products. Doing some quick searching I found someone estimating that Spotify sees about 55 days worth of new audio uploaded every day. Everyone is creating and we don't have enough to line to consume.
Personally, I suspect that if I went through the exercise of looking at my Steam library and trying to project when I would be able to play through all of the games I currently own, it would probably exceed my life expectancy. Definitely if you add in all of my console game collection.
There's not a great solution. Corporations try to punch through the noise with marketing. One of the most important pieces of Steam as a platform is their ability to promote games. There are whole networks of influencers- streamers, video creators, podcasters, bloggers, magazine writers, etc all trying to help sort out the games worth playing.
But the problem persists - there are too many games being made. And I don't want to just say to put up more barriers to entry, because indie development is important for getting fresh new talent and ideas into the industry. Some of the best experiences I've had have been indie games, and some of the worst offenders for cranking out banal, mediocre time sucks have been huge corporations with giant marketing budgets.
The only solution I can think of is more "platforms" rather than games. Minecraft, GTA V, Skyrim. Especially with mods, you can get a unique and interesting experience without having to invest into learning and understanding a whole new game.
Steam never showed me this game. It said I have never played a game like it.
I've played arpgs, tactical RPGs, and crpgs,
What more do you need steam?
Pixel RPGs? Western RPGs?
I guess steam thinks the target audience is people that played Red Dead Redemption on steam.
Maybe it's just too expensive? I don't see myself pay 18 bucks for a little indie game with quick repetitiv gameplay. Of course it was work to create the game, but I can't tell how long it is or how long I'd play it, before I get bored by the gameplay. Should've gone with 10 bucks.
It hasn't even been two weeks and no one has heard of it, so maybe advertising might help.
I think we're the advertising
If imma be an advertisement i do it my way.
See, now I'm interested!
Well their last project was a success
Ding correct answer. And the article itself of course.
What's the name of the game?
We're not the advertising. Streamers are the advertising. If the publisher didn't spend money on trying to promote this on Twitch and/or Youtube, they aren't doing their job.
Splattercatgaming just released a video a day ago, so these guys are impatient.
There must be some sort of first-week spike they expected to see?
You can usually calculate that from wishlists.
Well part of the problem might be that I have never heard of this game in my life.
And it released 11 days ago...
Not even. This article was published 7 days after release.
These guys are seriously crying no fair and calling it quits after one week? Oof
Or they understand free marketing tactics.
This game very well could go viral now, given their "claim" of being ignored...
I'm kinda torn because of this. I like for good games to get recognition and be successful. Part of me wants to buy the game and give it a shot because it's been well received and I'm happy to support an indie dev... But I really do not want to help establish a trend of indies sleeping on advertising/spreading word, then crying "woe is me" after a single week when barely anybody was aware of it, as a way of guerilla marketing their game. I also need to watch a bit more gameplay to see if it's even in my wheelhouse before I decide to spend $20 on it.
There are trends that game releases tend to follow, and while it might have a nice long tail, you're usually making most of your money right at release.
That applies to games people know about. If nobody knows about your game then it doesn't count. For example Vampire survivors barely made any money on the first few weeks of its early access release. In fact it didn't really start making money until youtubers/streamers essentially advertised it for free.
But that's an anomaly compared to most game releases. It would be foolish to assume that this game has a Vampire Survivors or Among Us esque curve ahead of it.
It's an anomaly in terms of success. It's not an anomaly in terms of how a good game becomes a success. There's no successful game that people haven't heard of. Nobody knew about vampire survivors when it came out so it didn't get sales. It got sales when people started to hear about it. Same with among us. In fact letting people know a game exists and making it appealing is probably more important than having a good game. The day before is a great example of that.
It doesn't matter how good reviews the genre gets if nobody knows it exists it's not going to sell. I guarantee 99% of the people reading that article had no idea this game even existed and if this article made waves on reddit this game would definitely see a spike in sales. So far it hasn't really made waves so most people are still unaware of this game. In light of that it shouldn't come as any surprise that the game is not selling.
Also sidenote, holy fuck this game has an unmemorable name. I had to open the article again so I could find the steam player numbers. That name is definitely not helping the sales.
Exactly, also making good games consistently gets you fans. I’ve been a fan of the company that made Hades since I got their first game in a humble bundle. A lot of people got into their second game. Their third was fine. But if they hadn’t had a reputation for making great games (and I don’t think Bastion or Transistor was the most marketable game) I don’t think Hades would’ve blown up like it did.
So yeah the dev needs to learn to better market, keep marketing, and keep making games that build loyal customer bases.
It's an anomaly for a game's prospects to get better after the first week than how it does right when it launches. If you want to say it's a failure of marketing, sure, but the time to correct that marketing problem, in more than 99% of cases, was before it launched. There's another comment here that says that looking at it after reading the article, they still don't want to buy it. And for some reason I can't put my finger on, I'm right there with them.
They should have advertised the game before it was released, plain amd simple. Personally I don't like how they're whining about it, that turns me off of the game.
Man I remember dropping shittyflash games on new ground and going FUCKING WILD when one person had played it.
Likewise. Downloading demo now.
But also, like, I'm at least 100 hours into pixel dungeon. Idk what to tell indie game developers. Like, its not guaranteed to be a hit.
Well yeah, the question is, why didn't you hear of it. It might certainly be that the game or type of game has something to do with it, not only the marketing. It's kinda hard to know from the outside.
Well the game is ARCO and only available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Also have not heard of it but might look it up.
Love that it’s not in the title…
It's called a 'clickbait'.
Website
Direct link to steam page is here.
Looking at the Steam store page of this game doesn't make me want to play this at all. This is just a gut reaction and I don't know why I feel like this, and I don't want to spend the time to try and figure it out. But there must be something wrong with the game or the presentation of it.
Fairly jarring for the trailer to go from fully rendered animation to potato pixel gameplay and back
Like if the gameplay is any good, maybe let it speak for itself
Also the music was reminiscent of those terrible idle game adverts on YouTube or Facebook
The environments even look pretty decent. But the characters don't.
Just beat the game.
God damn it's good. The only way I knew about it was because I was checking Steam new releases. Please god understand that this would have sold with better advertising.
they should fire their publisher then
Says dev making an indie pixel game with hand-drawn character portraits. The reviews are glowing he should at least give it some time to breath before going for the, “woe is me” approach.
Never heard of it.
There are so many games being made, it's hard to tell what's good and what's trash. Review sites can't review everything. User reviews are suspect. I don't know what the solution is.
This is one of the reasons I'm glad that Steam started cracking down on reviews that were just some stupid ASCII art and reviews that were just one big joke -- neither of them help people understand whether a game is good and there's just so much of that trash in the reviews. It's a small change but so far it's been positive.
Marketing has been rough lately. I stopped using reviews sites for the most part. A lot of the time I could not tell if there was any integrity in the reviews posted or if it was just a paid Ad. I rely a lot more on word of mouth and watching my favorite streamers play a game before even considering it. I get the devs struggle. How do you grab my attention when the market is full of these types of games and it’s hard to differentiate at a glance.
Also, this game from the article is the type of game I wait until a steam sale before buying.
Looks like a nice game. Will try the demo at least. Demos being a thing again is so good.
We hadn't heard of the game. It's not that it won't sell, it's that it wasn't advertised before now.
First, in old games that actually use pixels, everything has to snap to the grid. For these pixel art games running at 1080p or maybe higher, what is supposed to look like a pixel is actually a square made up of multiple pixels. In 16-bit games, a sprite can only move distances the same size as a pixel, but in these modern ones the "pixels" can move by fractions of their own size. It loses all the neat, discreet, visual appeal and becomes messy looking in my opinion.
Second, the color pallet is too large. Old games had a limited selection of colors, and often in order to make the most of them the colors used would be significantly different from each other, while still all being part of a cohesive pallet. We are used to millions of colors, but consoles like the GameBoy Color and SNES only had ~32,000 to pick from total. The GameBoy Color also has a software limitation to only have 56 colors on-screen at once. Using a full, modern color pallet without those limitations allows for colors that are close to each other to be used. That's great for 3D models where we are thing to mimic reality, but for pixel art it just makes everything look messy and sloppy. There needs to be a sharp, distinct contrast for pixels to be satisfying.
Third, there's just too much stuff happening. This I could probably adapt to, but I just have this expectation that pixel games should just be a few moving sprites and maybe a couple of background layers.
The name "Arco" tells me absolutely nothing. It's not memorable. It's a complete blank slate that gets washed away. I'm not even certain if that's just a proper noun from the game or if that's just a different language word.
A hybrid turn-based/real time strategy game? My instinct is that sounds like the worst of both worlds. It has been successful before- Transistor and Paper Mario come to mind. But in general, if in playing a turn-based game it's because I want the chill, low-pressure experience. I probably want to be less than sober. And introducing real-time elements means that those games get pushed into the real-time category when I choose what I want to play and when. And if in playing a tacts game, 99% of the time in going to choose a turn-based one and get lit.
As many others here have said, I've never heard of this game. I think this is a legitimate problem facing a lot industries, especially digital products. Doing some quick searching I found someone estimating that Spotify sees about 55 days worth of new audio uploaded every day. Everyone is creating and we don't have enough to line to consume.
Personally, I suspect that if I went through the exercise of looking at my Steam library and trying to project when I would be able to play through all of the games I currently own, it would probably exceed my life expectancy. Definitely if you add in all of my console game collection.
There's not a great solution. Corporations try to punch through the noise with marketing. One of the most important pieces of Steam as a platform is their ability to promote games. There are whole networks of influencers- streamers, video creators, podcasters, bloggers, magazine writers, etc all trying to help sort out the games worth playing.
But the problem persists - there are too many games being made. And I don't want to just say to put up more barriers to entry, because indie development is important for getting fresh new talent and ideas into the industry. Some of the best experiences I've had have been indie games, and some of the worst offenders for cranking out banal, mediocre time sucks have been huge corporations with giant marketing budgets.
The only solution I can think of is more "platforms" rather than games. Minecraft, GTA V, Skyrim. Especially with mods, you can get a unique and interesting experience without having to invest into learning and understanding a whole new game.
Steam never showed me this game. It said I have never played a game like it.
I've played arpgs, tactical RPGs, and crpgs,
What more do you need steam?
Pixel RPGs? Western RPGs?
I guess steam thinks the target audience is people that played Red Dead Redemption on steam.
Maybe it's just too expensive? I don't see myself pay 18 bucks for a little indie game with quick repetitiv gameplay. Of course it was work to create the game, but I can't tell how long it is or how long I'd play it, before I get bored by the gameplay. Should've gone with 10 bucks.
Looks terrible.