How a game studio launched and sold 3,500 units in 2 days

Audio version of case study

This is the story of an indie game developer who launched their first game and generated 3,500 sales in the first 48 hours.

Now, at first glance, 3,500 sales may not sound that impressive, especially to someone in the game industry, but also to anyone who sells products.

My agency is a product marketing agency. We've got clients who have sold hundreds of thousands of products, and in this case, this client doesn't seem that impressive, right?

Well, that's wrong because, on average, an indie game developer sells anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 copies in total. This is a story of how he sold 3,500 in the first two days.

How did that happen? Why did that happen?

In this story, this is one of the rare cases where we cover the thinking, strategy, and direction for marketing, not the implementation. Often with our clients, in fact, almost 95% of our clients are thinking strategy and the execution of those strategies. Until success. This client was purely thinking.

And so how did it happen? How did the person launch their first game, a very good friend of mine by the way, and why is it going well from their first try?

There are a couple of reasons for that. The first reason is that when we came on, he was at the very early stages of development, and the thing about when you are an indie game company, especially when you haven't got validation for the direction at which you want to take your company, you don't know what game to launch. You don't know what product to make. This is product development, not game development.

Three ways to go about making a good product

At the end of the day, we build products and need to sell them. But it's more accurate to say that the market has a need and we need to fill it. A very simple idea, but very, very, very hard to execute on. In this case, our client was considering all the different directions he wanted to take. The first simple idea we offered is that marketing starts before a product is even conceived, because deciding who you want to help and what problem you want to solve happens before you start building the product. Therefore, marketing starts at the very beginning. And the very first idea we shared is that you need to make a good product.

But what does that mean?

A good product is a product people want that solves their problem. Well, how do you do that? There are three ways.

Guessing. Which is what a lot of people do, like when they just get into building a product, and they find out it doesn't work after they've invested time and money. That's the first way.

The second way is by solving your own problem. If you've got a pain, for example, my agency builds its own internal sales tools. Why? Because the way we sell is very consultative, and we do lots of consulting before people ever exchange money with us, and there's no sales tool designed for that kind of selling. So we build our own tools. When you solve your own problem, you eventually have a product of your own that you can potentially sell. So that's the second way.

A quick recap: the first way is to guess; the second is to solve your own problem.

The third way, which I like to call the cheat code of product development, is to find a very old product that was popular, still has an audience that loved it, and remake it. This is very, very smart. And that's what he did. He found a very old game called Wall Street Raider, which is very popular. By the way, I played that game 15 years ago. But he found that game's IP owner and offered to rebuild it. The game is very complicated to remake. But my client is very clever and a very good developer, and decided to do that.

And so he went on to build a game. And so he has now fulfilled the first criterion of marketing success: having a good product.

How to do PRE product launch marketing

And the way he did it was a legal cheat code strategy, mind you: you go out and find a product that is really good, that the market still has some demand for, and you remake it.

So now you've got a good product, great, fabulous. The problem is, that's still not enough to win. Because if you think about the average stats for indie game success, it's 2,000 sales. 2,000 sales is enough for me to conclude that a ton of people liked that game. It's still a lot of people.

It's just not a complete business. You can't build a complete business off that kind of revenue. And so you need the second part. Which is a proper marketing system. So, for any product, there are actually two sides to launch marketing. Very important. We're talking about launch marketing here.

There's the before-you-launch stage, and then there's the after-you-launch stage. So, the before-you-launch stage, the best advice I can give you that I gave to my client here was that you really need to talk to the people.

You want people to tell you if this is "it". Does this fulfill the need that they say they had with an incomplete version of the product? Incomplete being important because you need to update it based on their feedback. Now, a lot of people will look at this and say, "This is product development", and you are correct, but the foundation of marketing is solving a problem and giving that solution to the person who says they have the problem. That is the foundation of all marketing.

I would even argue that if you've got that part right, then the Facebook ads, the landing pages, the e-mail marketing, and all that stuff are secondary to this bit. And so he did that. He did it in front of me; actually, I was right there, I saw the whole thing. And he got the feedback; he added it to the game, and what emerged was not just a good game, but a good game updated to a modern visual style. So now it's a beautiful game by today's standards, and it's a good game because he took all the feedback from the last game and made all the updates that were needed.

So now he's done two things right. First, he has a good product. Second, he aggressively play-tested and allowed the voice of the customer who reported the problem to influence the product's direction to some degree.

How to start POST product launch marketing

Now, the last thing you need is the actual physical marketing bit, which, in a lot of senses, today, in today's world, we have the internet, which is not one place, right? We have got many pockets of communities all over the place. In fact, I would argue that the internet is just a collection of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of communities (and also customers and repeat customers.

Some are micro, and some are large. For your company, it is highly advisable to create your own community around that game, not just for playtesting, but also for people who are not playtesters and could be potential customers.

Because I said earlier that the foundation of marketing is having a product and solving a problem. That's the first foundation. There is a second one. And the second foundation is: can you contact these people directly and keep in contact with them?

Communities are the second best way of doing that, right? Second. So you've got them in a community, you can message them, you can add posts that they can see, and they get notifications for. Second-best way to directly communicate with them, after e-mail marketing.

So you now take these three things: good product, great playtesting and pre-community, and then great active community, which can be better, and we are working on that. But you take those three things, and you get somebody who sells their game, and, in the first 48 hours, exceeds the average total sales of other indie game developers.