Greenlight – Our experience in getting through in 8 days

Hey everyone, first of all, thanks to ALL OF YOU for the votes, shares and words of encouragement, you all rock!!!

As submitting to Greenlight was our first real foray into the gaming wilderness with Wulverblade we thought we’d post up our experience in case it’s of any use to anyone else. We’re n00bs to this and we were breaking our Greenlight virginity!

Background:

First off, lets get one thing straight, we had no experience in this whatsoever. Both myself (Mike) and the Darkwind guys are all used to working on games, but not owning or releasing them. We’re contracted to work on other peoples’ projects and things like Greenlight, PR and getting exposure are not something we’ve ever done before…and we suck at it. We have some press contacts but we don’t have any in the PC gaming sector, so we knew we were going into this alone. We have, however, been in development for a good few years, been to a number of shows and now, luckily, have some die hard followers whom we love to bits and are kind enough to share our stuff on a regular basis. As we’ve always said, every last tweet, share, comment, and like makes all the difference. We really do appreciate everyone’s help.

Plan of action:

First of all, we knew our Greenlight page had to pretty, it had to show the game off in the best way possible. So we used the available formatting options to create attractive headers, gathered new screenshots and used our existing trailer. Our trailer sadly is a year old and doesn’t do the game justice, we should really have created a new one for Greenlight but sadly didn’t have time to spare with PAX around the corner. We did, however, manage to create some nice gifs to add into the body copy and lets be honest, everyone loves gifs…

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Here is the final page we went with: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=668913925

With the page ready we didn’t want to walk into this blindly and with no sort of plan, so before we launched we looked at what avenues of communication we had and how best to use them. Basically, social, social, social, and face to face!

  • We have around 500 newsletter subscribers
  • Our combined daily site traffic is around 300-400 vists
  • We have a combined twitter following of around 7000
  • We had made it into PAX East in the minibooth, this was going to be a great time to promote the game and Greenlight

So, those were our weapons of Greenlight war, how were we going to deploy them?

Well, we knew that being at PAX was going to be a bonus, but we were under no illusion that it alone was going to do it, as let’s be honest, we are small fry and we weren’t about to get a boat load of press. BUT we were going to get some exposure and we were going to get people playing. So our hope was that people would enjoy it, take a flyer and remember to look us up and vote.

We’d heard that the key is not to have a massive surge of interest in your game on day 1 and then let it drop off quickly, apparently it’s better if you can keep a steady flow of visitors to your Greenlight page. So that was our plan. To spread out what we had over 5 days.

Forward into Battle! Tuesday Day 1:

We launched our Greenlight campaign late on the Tuesday night during the week of PAX (which ran Friday-Sunday). We wanted it up and ready ahead of time so that there couldn’t be any mistakes or false starts. I then tweeted that night just before going to bed (it was about midnight here in the UK when it went live). This worked out well, really well in fact! As you can see, we got just under 600 votes that night! We were bowled over!

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Wednesday Day 2:

The next day we used solely twitter. I spent day 1 basically tweeting about it like a mad man. Not so much as to spam my lovely followers, but just enough to catch my fellow Brits in the morning and then again in the late afternoon to catch the awakening US. I also made the tweets visually appealing by adding in a sexy gif that I hoped would attract attention to the tweets…

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Then our amazing followers were kind enough to RT, fave, and mention us to a degree I never expected. Our ratio of yes’s to no’s was great too, we were around 72% yes at the end of the day.

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Thursday Day 3 – What now?

Well, with our twitter following used to probably its highest degree, we put up a couple of extra tweets, again with tasty imagery/gifs to catch attention, but also launched our email campaign to our subscribers. We don’t have a big following, just under 500. But those people have expressed interest in the game, so we were hoping that a good percentage of them would be interested in the Steam version and may vote and hopefully share.

It worked out pretty well! Whilst we dropped from the day before (to be expected) we did maintain a good rate and it didn’t drop off entirely.

The best bit was, we’d broken into the top 100!!!

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Day 4, 5 & 6 – PAX!

With the newsletter out and twitter used up, we now needed something extra, PAX was going to be it. We really hoped that we could keep up the momentum. Added to PAX we also posted up on our respective sites, tweeted again (making use of #screenshotsaturday primarily) and also (for what little it’s worth) posted updates on things like Linked In (yuk). But as we said, every little helps. We needed everyone we knew to take a look and hopefully give us a vote. I even asked my cat, but he seemed to have little interest.

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We can safely say that being at PAX was helping here as the level of interest stayed pretty level and the ratio of yes/no stayed close to what it was. We did drop down to around 68% yes by this point, but we were pretty happy with that. We’d also managed to enter into the top 50 which was amazing!

Day 7 – We have nothing left

Day 7 was like that moment in battle where you’ve sent in all your troops, all your reserves and pulled out all your best tricks. You’ve now got to hope to the gods and pray. Well, as you can see, it dropped off monumentally. But even though it dropped off it was still climbing! We got up to 41st at the end of day 7!

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Day 8  – WE’VE DONE IT!

Amazing! I woke up, grabbed my phone to check if we’d broke into the top 30 and was distressed to see no ranking…reason being…we’d made it, we were GREENLIT! Wahooooo!

You can see below all our detailed stats and how the votes and visits changed over the course. This was such an exciting time and SO nerve racking. We’re just so glad that the game was this well received and its just the boost we all needed. Not that any of these means anything its just a nice boost at this stage in development.

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I hope this post is helpful to anyone looking to hit Greenlight soon and to anyone that is we wish you LOTS OF LUCK!

Thanks.

Mike.