How to publicize RimWorld

[Rex705]

Like others have said the Yogscast are big on selling indie games to viewers and built their 5 million subscriber empire on the indie game Minecraft. One of the kickstarter games I backed called Stonehearth let Sjin of the Yogscast do a video of the game and it exploded past it's goal and the developer even put up a chart to show the massive increase of pledges after Sjins video went out.

Sjin has a series he calls Sjindie games where he shows off a new indie game each episode to promote awareness of lesser known indie games. Sjin has done a series on Prison Architect and Sips is currently playing it so I am sure Rimworld is perfect for them. Shoot them an e-mail

https://www.youtube.com/user/YogscastSjin/videos?view=0
https://www.youtube.com/user/YogscastSips/videos?view=0

[Blitz]

I guess I am a bit late to the party, but as a YouTuber, I have learned a few tricks in the last few months and get around 20 requests a month (even with my small channel) to do LP series and First Impressions on games. I am in contact with lots of publishers and developers on a weekly basis. I want to see RimWorld succeed on sales.

Honestly, I would say to get the game a little more complete before jumping into these bigger (or even medium) YT channels and media outlets. You have enough money to survive, let the game grow for a little longer. We have a great community built around an Alpha game with awesome mods. Games have a way of getting hyped to the sky and crashing down to earth hard if they are not in a addicting stable game with replayability (Starbound, Cube World, DayZ...). I would suggest that the you should wait until you have a steam ready game to hit these big YouTubers and websites/blogs all at the same time (I will even let you call it "The Media Blitz").

If you attach a large crowd of the big YouTubers all to release videos around the same week, you can gain a huge "Hype". If you attach this hype to a steam release, the game will go to the top sellers on steam, which will create it's own buzz there. The lower viewed YT channels and lesser websites/blogs will pick up on the game and do their own reviews/impressions/LPs trying to gain some if the tail end of the hype. The game will snowball and go from that sleeper hit to Indie Game of the Year (entirely possible if timed correctly).

The problem with slowly getting 1-2 big youtube personalities trickling in is they will be more hesitant to fight over the "First Video" that brings in crazy good amount of views because there would be a ton of videos already out there with 500k+ views. Everything will slowly trickle, and the viral peak will be a lot less. Sure, slow sales are still sales, but getting the HUGE hype all around a holiday weekend where kids are off of school and adults have work off is a LOT stronger. Impulse buys when a new kickstarted game gets on steam on sale for $20 after all of your favorite YTers are promoting it is VERY strong. Think of how big Starbound got after it hit steam on December 4th - right before kids got out of school for Christmas. They loaded down YT with all of the big names that didn't charge tens of thousands of dollars to 'advertise' (yes, some charge). They sold 1 million copies in the first month, but nobody plays it anymore (and likely never will again)...

Steam also has some limitations on to how many "marketing rounds" you can have, and how they are attached to announcements. I do not understand it fully, but it sounds like you can earn more marketing by gaining clicks on the announcements. 10 million clicks for 1 additional promotion. Each game starts with like 5 rounds. If you squander all 5, you lose out and can't promote anymore - which kills the dead games from clogging up announcement pages.

In addition to this, the usability of steam is significantly better than having sendowl send out 50k new emails and dealing with all of the little glitches that would happen.

Ty, if you want to talk about this, send me a PM or email, I can get you in contact with some of my contacts that are crazy good at it. They know the ins and outs of steam and how to work the system, and have worked for the digital distributers. I hope this post makes sense, it's late now...

Blitz

TL:DR - Have patience, get a polished game ready, then hit all of the media HARD before/during a steam release/sale.

edit for clarification - I hope this doesn't giving the impression that I want to control the YT market for the game. This isn't what I intend the post to read like. I know I am a small player in the YT world and understand Ty's position to want the game to become a more popular. I just feel like the game is still early and premature promotion could hurt the longivity of the game. Trust me, most of big YT players have already identified RW as a game that they will cover. I have a list of 10-12 games that will be coming out in the next year that I will cover - the other YTers do the same thing. I was talking with some guys last night - the real games that we want to showcase are the games that we contact the developers for, not the games where the devs contact us.

[Haplo]

...

I fully support Blitz's description. And I don't say that because I like his channel, which I do btw  , but he described exactly how I think it could work best. Right now there is too much missing to be a full game and therefor only a few People would buy it with the produced hype of big YTs. And if you fill up the content later on, the hype is gone and there isn't that much to do about it anymore. I've seen this with games like e.g Towns bevor. The first hype was high, but the content was missing (and bugs and...), so there was much unrest in the forums.

So... +1 for Blitz's description from me

[Sion]

First, take a look at this guys Gun Sync Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Ash100HD/videos
Than imagine this done with RimWorld 

[TimMartland]

I though Gamersdissent did an awesome playthrough of RM, and he's pretty big. Awesome channel, go check it out.

[sparda666]

I love this game, but I definitely agree that we want the game to be a bit more polished before publicizing it massively. The main thing I think that needs to be ready before heavy publicizing is the usability and UI. We don't want big YouTubers struggling with the ills system or failing to figure out why their colonists wont put out fires and get frustrated during the video.

Right now,  the tutorial helper provides information that is very easy to ignore. I feel it has low visibility and is somewhat noisy (90% of the time, it's telling me that I can change the speed of the game (even during battles where its forcing me to play at 1x))

[Tynan]

Thanks for the deep explanation Blitz. You thinking pretty much mirrors my own on this. Basically, letting the game gestate in peace for a while and get really good before the final emergence with fireworks and hype to the sky. You only get to launch the rocket once; you want to have something good to put on top.

[jamieg]

Thanks for the deep explanation Blitz. You thinking pretty much mirrors my own on this. Basically, letting the game gestate in peace for a while and get really good before the final emergence with fireworks and hype to the sky. You only get to launch the rocket once; you want to have something good to put on top.

This guy should be a philosopher 

[OnyxShadow]

Someone already mentioned Twitch, and I actually watch several gamers who play these type of games and have a good number of followers. LethalFrag, CobaltStreak, and Tornis have all played similar games (including alphas and betas) and have periodically even brought the game creators and devs on stream via Skype while playing.

[DAOWAce]

Not sure if TotalBiscuit would be interested, he does his WTF is thing which covers less publicised games, and seems like he might have a taste for this sort of game, could send him a copy or something.

I definitely want TB to do a WTF thing, but I think I'd rather wait until the game is more complete first. For this stage I was thinking it'd be cool to get the game to some of the mid size or smaller players. The big guys won't look at it a lot of times (or even more than once) so I want it to be nice and finished when they do. It's still only Alpha 3.

Pretty much this.

TB will net you a huge spike in sales.. but he doesn't cover games in development anymore.

Rim World has been in alpha for quite a long time, longer than I expected it to be.  At this rate, it will be quite a while before it comes into the spotlight.

Your best bet in present time is to get it on Steam's Early Access program.  It was greenlit months ago and there's still been no progress I've seen to getting it on Steam.  Early Access is now the way to go, not greenlight.  This will give you publicity and undoubtedly net you sales, especially if paired with even just small Youtubers, but getting someone on the Yogscast to do a video on it would be pretty great.

Though, the $30 price tag may be a bit much for what the game is offering, especially in its current state.  I personally haven't bought it for that reason.  I'd feel more comfortable if it was $20, and even then it's still a bit of a hard sell. (As much as I want to play it, my financial status doesn't allow me to.)

So yeah, in summary, get it on Early Access and speed up development and either drop the price by $10 or put it on an extended sale.  Look for YTers as a secondary objective.

[Haplo]

...
So yeah, in summary, get it on Early Access and speed up development and either drop the price by $10 or put it on an extended sale.  Look for YTers as a secondary objective.

That is the gamer side speaking: Bring it out as fast as possible, with as little cost to me as possible.
For a firm who wants to seriously make games for a longer time it is better to release it a bit later, when there is more content and you can sell it for a higher price. You only have a release hype once. And if it is in the early access part you miss out on the bigger mass who want to play finished games and may pay a higher price for them. Don't think that you'll get a big sell plus, once you declare it to be finished.

[StormProxy]

Yamimash/markiplyer/ImmortalHD/BedBananas/Dokudokus/Spoonerisim/Tobuscus/UberHaxorNova/Creature hub.

[Mouvitz]

Do you know of a popular YouTuber who you think would do a good RimWorld video?

This may not be a new idea, well it's actually my first thought when discovering this game: Sips must play this! He loves this kind of games, is extremely popular and funny, and canadian. Still waiting for his let's play, it must happen sooner or later .

And see what he did to the popularity of Towns, big boom, even if the game was flawed and bugged.

EDIT: Silly me, of course this was already mentioned multiple times in the thread, sorry for being tired and missing it. Anyway, I too support and hope for this.

[niteruner]

In germany coldmirror did play a very early version of rimworld, which brought me to the game btw. She has about half a million followers, but is only known in germany. Part 1 of the "let's play" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2beZP1OkyKo. She takes it really houmoristic but i think the content is displayed very well.
also, as far as i know, shane dawson playes all types of unknown games, maybe you can write him or contact him, as he is one of the most known Youtubers on the list.

[DAOWAce]

snip

I feel like you took a part of what I said right out of context and focused on that.

He's asking how to publicize the game. I suggested how to publicize the game. It wasn't my 'personal taste'. The only thing personal I mentioned was the price being a bit too high for me to purchase it because of my financial situation (I'm unemployed, is that better?).

So, let's elaborate.

First off: Getting on Early Access puts you on Steam immediately.  It may not be front page publicity, but it's still mentioned in the news section and on the news feeds like Twitter.  People WILL see it.  Not to mention it's Steam, something people have become so stingy about over the years and will only buy games that are on Steam, so you attract those people too.

Second: The price. $30. Look at the game; it's simplistic, with a very basic art style. Price usually justifies quality, and the art style is 'low quality', so to speak. (I have no problem with the graphics.)  $30 is half of a new AAA game (even over half if using the $50 benchmark).  It's out of proportion, especially compared to some $15 games that have been released over the years.  Couple that with AAA titles going on sale for as low as $5 and yeeeah, it's not looking too good.

There's also no 'campaign' or 'story' so to speak.  Yes, you make your own story, but a lot of people play games for campaigns, objectives.  What this game caters to are the sandbox crowd, possibly even the 4X crowd, which aren't that big. A type of campaign mode would get more people into the game, but I can't see how it would really work.  Some objective/challenge based missions would probably work (siege a base, defend your base, etc.) and would add a lot more to the game in terms of perceived content.

A shaving of $10 off the price will attract a far larger audience.  $20 is a fair price for the game; anything higher and I can't see it being worth it, both on a personal and global level.  While a price drop may miff some people who've bought it already, an easy counter is to not include the prototype games; leave that as the $30 tier.

And my last point: Development speed.

How long has Rim World been in development since its first playable build was released?  (The first time I saw the game was on Das' channel in October.)

How much progress has been made?  (Partially serious question; I briefly looked at new videos and saw the art was updated.)

From my brief looks of the situation, it's another Minecraft where mods are making so much more progress than the actual development of the base game.  (Hell, now that I think about it, it's even more expensive than Minecraft!)

I don't like things being rushed, but I don't think that's a factor here (I actually have no idea).  I don't know anything about Tynan (sorry!), so I don't know if Rimworld is his full time job or not, but if it isn't, I'd suggest making it so if financially capable and in turn have that increase development speed.  If this already is the case, then, well.. either one man development is really hard or some optimizations may need to be made in the development process.

Course, this is all guesswork, so don't be too harsh on me for being completely wrong.  I'm not currently a developer, but I have planned to create a small game for quite a number of years now, but I completely lack focus and skill to do anything but use other people's assets and throw it into a game world.  I also have no friends who want to bother helping (including one claiming it's 'impossible and will never sell'), so there's that demoralizing me even further.


Boy, it's been like half an hour since I started typing this and I've lost my focus.  I guess I'll end it here.  I hope people don't take this post the wrong way.  I want to see the game succeed, and this is solely my view on why it's not as popular as it could be (outside of it being unfinished, of course).