PR & Marketing Lessons Learned from Goat Simulator

[Music] hi everyone does he work alright thank you guys so much for coming I'm so glad to be here I'm Armand Ebru sogok I work as a game designer and PR manager coffee stain I was supposed to tell you guys something before I started it was turn cellphones on on silent and there was one other thing right did I forget some evaluation yeah what was that yeah remember to give evaluations right and hopefully remember to give good evaluations anyway I'm here to talk about goat simulator I'm going to talk about basically the marketing lessons that I've learned it's been a hell of a ride and I'm happy to share them with you guys so actually I started out as a level design intern initially on Magica right after that I got a job at coffee stain studios I was doing the level design game design that kind of stuff and when my contract was about to expire they were looking for someone who could do PR and I pretended I knew how to do PR and while so I got the chance to do that and so I basically learned what I was doing that's my back I don't have any actual PR education but in some ways I think that's actually a good thing so confessing in 2013 were in a really tricky situation we had just finished sanctum 2 which was like our biggest IP back then we have been working on sanctum for two years I think in total under the sanctum 2 for another two years we were pretty we weren't sick of our game but we were we felt like we wanted to do something different so we prepared to start a whole new IP that was going to be like our next big game that we're going to work on which wasn't goat simulator though it was something totally different this really big game that we were planning to make and basically we just had a one-month game jam for people that weren't involved in pre-production so we could basically just play around do whatever we want I pitched goat simulator as an idea and as luckily I got some people that started working on it with me and that's how the game started during the early days of goat simulator we weren't really you know we weren't really planning on making a big game we mostly focused on playing around learning new tools we bought all the 3d assets from the internet because you know it's not like we're going to release it anyway it's just a stupid coke game and the project was really relaxed it wasn't that serious you basically just go to work work on whatever you felt like doing and put it in the game no one was keeping track of what was in the game you know our game gyms are so it wasn't really super serious this was our planning I know this is in a bum from Sweden this is moose talk but all I can translate it to you basically just as first-week goats other week I got the moves and then I got the moves on a level then a goat that can do a trick and so on that was basically planning so it wasn't really there wasn't really anything that that was solid or set in stone and if you knew basically what you should be working on but it was still really free and you could do pretty much whatever you wanted then one day I put up a really short video of gameplay on YouTube and just over one night it had like it just exploded I went to sleep and I when I woke up it was like all over my Facebook feed we got I think it has like 6 million views now or something it was insane we had never were never used to having this much you know eyes on us and this much attention so our main thing was that we were we just felt like how do we how do we not mess this up because we all obviously there's a lot of people looking at us we have a lot of cool things that we a lot of potential customers and how do we do something make something good out of this because the game was still it was like three or four weeks into development it was pretty scary but later on we felt like we basically took everyone from our other projects were twenty employees a coffee stain we took everyone put them on goat simulator we kept adding content into the game but we still figured that we don't want to do any we don't want to transition into a serious game we still wanted to keep the playful crime style I'm sure we could have you know we had a couple million views on our YouTube trailer we could have gone to a publisher and be like oh hey give us this a month this much money will make a triple-a gulp game for $60 it will be you know GTA with goats but that wasn't really the spirit of the game because I think the game went viral because it was so small and so stupid and kind of buggy so we just wanted to keep going in the same in the same spirit that the first trailer was the giraffe thing so I was I was doing a interview with a journalist and they always ask the same questions they asked me why do you play a goat why don't you play a giraffe or a bear or something and I was getting pretty tired of the questions I was like well you know giraffes are just basically really tall goats and bears are just really fluffy goats and as I was coming back to my as I was going back to my desk I figured you know wait a second maybe maybe there's something here so I went to her animator and I asked him if I would buy a giraffe off of the Internet would you have time to animate it and since we had no planning he was like yeah sure I can do it tomorrow so we did at the end of the week we had a playable giraffe and as as soon as you could played the giraffe we were just like yes this is perfect we've got to do this and now unlockable goats are like a huge part of the game if you google tall go there there's actual picture of a giraffe but we you know we decided that there's no freaking out loud we still got to do it in the same way as the game was from the start we knew that reviewers were wouldn't like it you know how how they great games they're like game play is seven out of ten our graphics six out of ten audio and you know if you play goat simulator like that then you don't really get the game so we just we just didn't bother we just didn't get in touch with would reviewers they would ask me for keys and I just wouldn't I wouldn't even even answer them back we actually tried to calm down the hype which you know people are always like oh hey I know what you're doing you're doing like reverse psychology not at all we just felt like there were there people that we had comments on our YouTube video and people were like oh I can't wait till this I can't wait til you guys add animal control in the game and like helicopters like in GTA and we don't even have any AI like the reason that NPCs just run in a random direction and goat simulator and trip over buckets and and everything on the floor is because they have no pathfinding they just run somewhere and the nature power so there's no chance that we're gonna have time to put that in the game anyway so we felt that you know we wanted to calm down people and be like okay relax this is still this is going to be a game that you play for an hour and you have fun and that's it it's not going to be you know the next GTA except with goats and all so the bottom line is sometimes like people when I'm at PAX and stuff like that people walk up to me and they're like oh sell me on goat simulator and I'm always like you know there's there's no sunshine I can blow up your ass that will make you like the game if you don't if if the name goat simulator doesn't excite you then you know there's nothing I can do and you probably probably hate having fun but I feel like it was really really important that people knew what they got and they knew what they were buying and that they didn't you know into the game and be like oh this is just you just play a goal and do stupid things because that's the game anyway when we release the game it's so great it outsold all our other games in a matter of days I think we we noticed that we don't actually need journalists who like her game we got terrible reviews we got like 1 out of 10 they told us that we were the worst game ever but we we still sold really well so we figured that we don't need journalists like our game we just need them to talk about it and then you can let players decide whether they like it or not and the funny thing is that we will get reviews that were like 1 out of 10 this is terrible and then they notice I talked to journalists and then be like oh goat simulator reviews even though they're terrible they get like three times as many hits as other articles they get like so many more comments I suppose because it's a very polarizing game either you hate it or you love it and so we would have journalists that will give us 1 out of 10 and say this this sucks no one should play it and then I started putting up articles like you know this is how we find all the goats and goat simulator most fun places to go and goat simulator because they noticed that they were getting hits right so that was funny and I would just send them this picture I don't care when we released the game I remember when I wrote the key features for sanctum 2 and I was so nervous it was like the first time I was doing it and I took like weeks I was writing it I was like correcting every single word nothing can be wrong you know exchange this word to this other word because this other word sounds more action related but forego CI I didn't have time for goat simulator so I just wrote like you know you can be a goat you do stupid things and I didn't actually I was like okay this will work for now and then one the game releases I'll maybe change it later and as soon as I update it on Steam it got up on first page of Reddit because people thought that it was so funny that we were actually being honest with you know what what our game is about and we weren't you know trying to sell people on our game because that's what I tried to do with sanctum 2 we were like you know do we have 16 maps and 8 weapons and this many enemies and a high speed action game shoot things but we'd go simulator we were just like you know it's a dumb game and if you like dumb stuff you're gonna like it if not then no problem at all save your money it's probably better that you save your money anyway so um after this happened I sell on a kind of pure policy for the game I decided that we're gonna focus on our community we're not going to focus on scoring higher reviews with press because they're not kind of like anyway so you know why bother we're not going to oversell because it's just not consistent with the game it's not the type of game controversial articles are better than good reviews because controversial articles get if an article makes you angry then you link it to your friends or you know your link in your skype chat or you talk about it what people aren't ready and if if there's actual discussion to be made then people can talk in the comments and they they engage much more with actual articles and when when again when I wrote the press releases for sanctum 2 I was trying to make it as shiny and as blingy and cool as possible but in in goat simulator basically the only important thing was to make you know short short quotes that describe the game and you know short feature lists instead of trying to impress people we we did a I don't know if you're aware we did an MMO expansion there's some background info for that we've got a lot of requests to add multiplayer to our game which is impossible because there you can't add multiplier into goat simulator we would have to remake the game from scratch would take us two years and when we win we would add it and we probably have to add it for free right and when we would add it people would just be like oh is four people still playing this is still relevant so you know we could never do multiplayer but we could do a fake MMO so hey we made a fake and well with like scripted goats with that ran around we had a chat that me and another designer scripted where you know fake players would yell at each other you know they would sell iron swords foretold gold and they would call each other nerds and idiots and you know don't trust Razer killer 33 he's a scammer he stole my gold all that kind of stuff and we would actually have people who thought it was a real animal so obviously it worked we would have to add it for free though because we were scared that we were going to get sued and the feature list in that memo was also like really stupid you can play a warrior Rouge magician magician hunter in a microwave level cap was so we released this right when World of Warcraft released their am what was the warlords of warlords of draenor and their level they increase their level cap from 1990 to 100 so we had to make it 101 we had hundred actually but then like I think two or three days before release they announced their there I know I saw their level cap two or three days before we released and I went up programmer and I was like can you change it to 101 he was yeah it was like yeah no problem it's like you know one minute work so we put level cap hundred 101 and and that was actually a thing that was quoted a lot we got featured on Engadget which have like they have like 1.5 million followers and Twitter is something hanneke you know it came out I think came out like the same week that World of Warcraft released their expansion and in the press release I think we wrote something like we're we apologize to the employees Blizzard if they see any decrease in sales because we released our MMO expansion at the same time as them that was ported a lot - we made a zombie expansion later on and by then I had learned this you know horrible thing so the first thing that we have like the main model we have we had was that it was the only survival game on Steam that isn't in early acces and that it probably isn't true I'm sure there's tons of games in the art in early acces there are survival games but it you know it's it's not important that's not the point we're trying to make we're just trying to kind of make fun of people you can craft anything you want as long as it's one of the half dozen weapons in the game and that was also when you have a short sentence that people can share and that's interesting in some way it can be funny but it doesn't have to be I know that everyone doesn't make farm animal simulators but you can as long as it's something that's short and kind of shareable then it goes out so much easier then when you try to do something like you know do we have we have 44 Maps what's what's 44 maps how large is a map how long does it take to play a map is it like a super meatboy map that takes 10 seconds or is it like do you play for hours it doesn't tell you very much but when you have a short message that people can relate to and that they can share with each other then it's so much easier to reach out to people and it's so much easier to you know gather them at one place and that was also really that worked really well all right I'm gonna talk more about reddit later because it's been really big help for us so basically you know the best press release is as short as possible one cent is about the game feature list press kit there's nothing else you need maybe a call from you that would make a good headline and I've learned that you shouldn't try too hard to make press excited about the game because I think the truth is that press is I'm sure the press people are excited about games but they see you know they get like 100 press releases a day and it's they can't be excited about every single game so it's better to just give them something that's easy that they can copy-paste and just put it on their site something that's fast rather than trying to you know sell them or win them over in some way oh say something about youtubers a lot of people ask me about you know how does how does youtubers fit into this I think youtubers aren't isn't anything isn't related to PR there's nothing you can say to a youtuber that will make him want to play your game if he doesn't find it interesting especially the big ones I mean PewDiePie is like you know he doesn't carry he has 40 million subscribers you know you can't be like oh you know I'll give you I give you a steam code he has you know he can buy all the games on Steam that he wants I think if you want to get youtubers to play your game then you that's a game design question it has nothing to do with marketing it is nothing to do with PR when people play our game on YouTube it helps your marketing and PR but it's nothing that you can as a PR manager that's that can't be your responsibility because that should be the game designers responsibility to not only make a game that's fun to play but also make a game that's fun to watch when someone is playing it so we don't just that most of our community seem to gather on Facebook we got like eighty thousand likes first couple of weeks on sanctum we had like 20,000 likes for years and we tried so hard to increase them we'd go simulated we just got like a ton of people in just couple days so it was it was obvious say you know we need to put more energy into Facebook and we need to you know make it it became our main channel communication because you know even journalists will follow us so there's and sometimes when I if I write something on Facebook it'll end up as an article anyway so you know we realized early on that we need to focus on Facebook now how Facebook works I'm sure like if you work in marketing and stuff like that you know how Facebook works but I'm gonna explain it fast anyway basically updates are always tested on a small group if you have a hundred thousand followers on Facebook and you write something that doesn't get pushed to a hundred thousand people because you know we all like 150 different Facebook pages if all of them would update every day we wouldn't be able to see anything else Facebook would be full of ads so basically what they want to do and all Facebook wants you to do is to filter out all the bad updates and push up all the good ones so what they do is they try they test an update on a small group like a hundred or a thousand people if the update has good engagement like likes shares comments then is pushed out to a slightly larger group if it still works and it's pushed out this larger group again so it's strictly strictly controlled by Facebook which is a good thing reddit is basically an really really big Facebook page where everyone updates everything and you can control what goes up there but it's still it still follows the same kind of idea where you let the users and the interest that the users have in what you write you let that control how many more people see it because on the front page of Reddit or only the the updates that have had the you know the most uploads most engagement and stuff like that so that you know that's how the system works but usually marketing people stop there they never look at how people work you know that's half the equation two we like to share things on Facebook to impress our friends we all want to be you know that funny person that has the best cat videos or you know the most interesting articles about whatever and that's why you always that's what cats are more violent viral than anything else because you know you just rather share a cute picture of a cat than patch notes to a game you know if you play call of duty and call of duty release release is a new gun and you have 300 friends on Facebook maybe two of them play call of duty so that's only relevant to two of your friends and you're gonna look like a nerd to the rest of them and your grandma's gonna be like wow you know why is arming sharing pictures of guns what's he gonna do so you know that's why things that everyone can appreciate are always much much more viral than things that you know only a small amount of people can appreciate so if you know if you're gonna run a Facebook page you can't just think of your fans but you need to think of your the Friends of your fans you need to think you know or my or my fans can look like idiots if they share this update especially when it comes to things like here's here's concept art our game can everyone like and share it please then that gives no means they can still incentive to people to actually like and share it and it just looks like you're you know trying too hard to make people market your game and you're kind of trying to turn your your followers into you know marketers and I people don't appreciate that so I've been doing the power of Facebook updates for two years now and I'm gonna do some comparisons in in water or what were our best posts and what were worst posts and what can we learn from that we worked on a with a company that made shirts first because people were like oh where can I buy a goat simulator shirt so we we had made some art we made a a couple mugs and you know small stuff like that and we thought that it was going to be really big people are gonna go crazy this but when we update when we pushed it to our Facebook it got very very little people even saw and very little people people even thought that it was relevant to engage in I think back then we had maybe a hundred thousand likes on Facebook and as you can see it only got out to 15,000 people I don't know why I have some theories it could be because you know the game is ten dollars the merch is like $25 plus shipping so that instantly removes like 90 percent of all our players anyway it's you know it's nothing that you want to share on your Facebook it's like September 9th maybe you just started high school maybe you just started college you know all the cute people in your class are gonna go to your Facebook page and they're going to see some shirt with a goat on it it's kind of weird so it's nothing you know we gain a lot if you share this but you don't gain anything from sharing this yourself we were on a competition we had a we added the Steam Workshop to the game because we wanted people to make mods and make extra content and what I have to you know have a community that was kind of alive so we did a competition where we we would let players make maps and then we would judge them and you know the best one would win something cool and it was more successful than our shirt campaign probably because it was free yeah but one thing that was you know detriment was probably that it's not something that everyone can do it's not something that everyone has wants to do it's not something that everyone has time to do even so it wasn't we got like I think we got a dozen or so submissions but it still took us like took us some time to play through the Maps there was like this administration cost to it where we had to still had to do some things for this to work and and in the end it it was good but we didn't get that much results that we hoped like we all we had people or like oh you know everyone's gonna start making goat simulator Maxima now but it's not really wasn't really how it worked this picture got 90,000 views and like 330 shares this was right when the video released their new graphics card and there are actually goat hours like this actually this is actually a thing sometime around like the 17 1800 s in Ireland they had a ton of goats apparently and they I guess they thought that the goats they wanted to do something that looked good so they built towers and let goats climb up in them as a decoration basically for rich people in the United Kingdom so I found this picture I think someone sent me this picture and I just put it up on our Facebook page and people thought it was really funny we got like six thousand likes compared to what was the other like a couple of hundred likes we've got a ton of shares and you know if you click the share button you see what people wrote when they shared it and everyone was like hahaha look at this you know they wanted to show this to their friends because it was pretty funny this is our worst update ever patch notes for the mobile version of the game terrible probably because only a fraction of our users play mobile we have the game on Steam and Xbox on PlayStation so it's only interesting for a small part of our players anyway and there's there's there's nothing you can say it can be like oh yay maybe you pull out your mobile and and they download it but there's nothing really why would I want to share this on my Facebook page this got like one hundred and forty five thousand people reached it's two letters two letter updates one picture I was playing as there's a I think this is called giant goat or like fish goat or something like that it's a blue whale you can't even control it you can just like roll around because you don't have any likes and I got stuck like in a I was gonna jump into the pool but I got stuck right next to there and I thought it was a funny picture so I took it I threw up on our Facebook page and you know people thought it was really funny and they shared it and I think you got up and read it as well this is our most viral Facebook post ever that we've ever done there's not even any text it's just a picture I didn't mean it didn't even make this player this picture I found on Google or something 9,000 shares if you're gonna buy advertisement form Facebook on popup ads whatever you're going to do half a million reach is pretty expensive right it's like you end up paying like a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand dollars for it if you're gonna do it like a campaign to push your game to that many people and this was like two minutes of work this was like literally haha that's funny drag and drop to desktop drag and drop to Facebook update and because it's it's a funny thing to share right so that was really successful for us so basically what I learned from Facebook is that and and this applies as like I told this applies to read it this applies really any social media out there and social media is growing like crazy people don't share or comment on things that make them look stupid there's no reason you want to share you know passionate to a game about goats on your on your Facebook page well what do your friends have the game from that I think it's important as a marketing person to use your common sense to not like stare yourself blind on the numbers and you know try to impress your boss is too much people want to share funny things people don't want to share commercials other updates that are really terrible are when our games on a sale like go team leaders on a 75% off sale no one clicks on that no one like it that you might tap out and go on Steam and buy the game but you're never going to share that to your friends [Music] people don't like being you know walking commercial walking commercials so I think it's really important to entertain your people you know create an environment that people want to be part of you know how Apple has already called Apple bars you know the Apple things where you go you go with your computer and they're always like so nice they're there customer service is it's basically like a party right like Apple stores for like a party and they make it a party that you want to go to and that's something that you should think about when you make social media as well make your make your website or a Facebook page or whatever it is make it a cool party that people want to visit instead of you know forcing people to share things for you this is my saddest slide how is media today I think media today is really terrible it hasn't really changed since mass marketing was invented a hundred years ago it's still built on obsolete technology I don't know how often I get emails that are like you know do you want to buy ad space on a building in a city somewhere in the US and we're you know we're situated in Sweden anyway we're like do you want to buy ads on a train and it's not really you know it is it's not really something that our customers are going to see anyway or basically you know a lot of people that are on trains are gonna see but it's not something that is relevant for us at all what developers do is that they use pre written responses everywhere you know you write something to your Facebook page and they're like thank you for your feedback - Jack we will take it into consideration we're really glad that you like your game and that's you know if you're going to write that you might as well not answer at all and developers either put PR professionals between themselves and the players that's usually what the large companies do the company is to have the money the companies that don't have the money like in the developers they just ignore their fans completely because they're so scared of you know I'm gonna say it I'm something stupid people are gonna hate me or they just don't have a lot to answer at all I had when we made the MMO expansion we were looking for suggestions from from our fans so I wrote this update you know what what would you want to do what would you want to stay updated simulator with and the responses that we got work terrible it's like you can't use them it's the lasers what am I going to do with lasers or like squirrel diving suits what how can that be an expansion even so I just started them you know making fun of the suggestions I kind of it was a Monday I was sitting you know down with my coffee and I was like yeah holy people are stupid and someone's gonna quote me on that anyway I was I was just you know kind of chatting with them and you know not making fun of them that much a little bit but like you know playing around and being playful and I noticed that we got so many so much more engagement like you know I would get more likes on my comments than on the actual you know thing that I updated and people started like you know tagging their friends like oh look what they're doing like you know their Facebook page guys drunk and you know it kind of became a thing which was really funny this was like also one of our most viral posts I don't know how much this is worth how many hundreds of dollars in marketing this is worth but it was it was really really successful for us so when you do something that works you want to keep doing it right so um I notice you know casual interaction really increases engagement so much with people they see you're applying and they want to comment as well of course you know they someone writes some stupid I reply with something stupid so people are like oh can i I'm gonna say something even more crazy and I think basically you know interacting with your community is so much better than trying to manage them in some way I think there's basically three types of comments there are comments that aren't very useful like the ones that you guys just saw there are foxy comments you know people that want to kill you because you've made a freakin game man and actually useful suggestions but though those are really rare though so during thank them too I did the thing that I just said that you shouldn't do which is ignore every single comment that wasn't I don't sanctum to I can't wait and then I just reply thanks or smiley you know I would be play really safe because I was really new at marketing and I was like I don't want to start a Twitter storm I don't want people to you know get mad at me but in goat simulator I basically interact with them as I wouldn't interact with them in real life so if you would walk up to me and you should you say they I should give away my work for free this is exactly how I would reply to your comment and I really you know initially I was like I hope I replied and then I checked back in like two minutes and I'm like you know as something bad happened as it as it exploded it didn't and then you know we we just end up getting more and more likes and people would just laugh and you know even of course I'm not I mean I'm writing in caps lock of course I'm not angry we're just playing around and you know people would find it funny and even the people I will kind of make fun of will just you know be really in on it and they would think that is funny I decided that I'm gonna reply to every single comment even if it's totally pointless if write something pointless maybe you just want someone to answer maybe just you just want to be seen for a while like David he just needs a hot you know a relaxing cup of hot chocolate so dealing with toxicity it's that's the hardest part of course it's easy to make fun of you know people that are you know happy and making fun of themselves little bit we'll send them to we just ignored it we had we had like once one of our programmers was like wrote something it was like I remember what about you just wrote a comment and people are like you know if you reply to toxic comment you just get like 100 toxic comments back people just like there's no shortage of angry people on the internet and as soon as you reply you just attract them you know even more so we were just like ignore every single toxic comment but we'd still be kind of afraid because we were like what if I delete this comment that tells me that I should go kill myself is that censorship or people gonna get mad or we're gonna get you know raided by even more goons that come over here and harass us even more so you were like kind of you know you're really scared you weren't really didn't really know how you were going to handle it but goat simulator is you can talk back as much as you want as long as you're funny doing because I think there's a really big difference between you know when someone attacks you and you wrestle them down to the ground and roll around in the mud like an idiot and when you know someone attacks you and you just deflect and make fun of them so you know the way you answer is really really important especially you know as long as you're funny and you don't even have to meet their their criticism if their criticism is really angry and you know really toxic here's a bunch of toxic comments basically you know if you're gonna come to my Facebook page and talk then you you know if you deal it you got to be able to take it yourself you know Jeffery comes to my page talks about my mom I'm gonna get him back a Steven guy to the top right this update that provokes Steven so much was that we had ported the game to Mac and we were like okay goat simulator is our Mac now you can play it on Mac and Steven is like oh my god I'm so angry how do you do this they don't deserve this game and you're like if you just burst their bubble then they realize that they're being idiots right because some of them we've all been 12 right I remember when I played Warcraft 3 on my own computer and you beat someone you're like ha ha you suck and basically if you act like that you just need someone to you know sit you down and be like okay is this is this really worth getting angry over this really something you should be upset over you know and when I wrote this it was these were like some of our biggest updates as well like if one person is toxic to you you make fun of them you're gonna get like 10 people that agree with you that are going to start making fun with them too like people would like write write comments and rate and be like ha you got burned man you know so as you were allowed to talk as long as you're funny there's you know this update was really unnecessary and I replied and you know someone put up on reddit and as you can see under their five hundred and forty one thousand views that's also hundreds or thousands of money in marketing just you know if even really helped us out you know just by you know commenting back to people are you replying when people thought there's no way he thought that we were gonna reply to that and then we did and people thought that was really funny and you know it saves you a lot of marketing House this is all the top posts about goat simulator usually takes around the will release goat simulator it took around three to four thousand votes to get featured on the front page now it's more like five or six thousand because right it has really grown a lot but you know this is totally free marketing I said that I was going to more about I read it I myself never update anything on reddit because I think reddit is kind of like its its its own community they have you know their own type of talking they have their own memes and stuff like that it's kind of like going to a party and selling steak knives you know you know there's those things and people are enjoying themselves and you're like why don't you buy these things why don't you why don't you buy my things and everyone's just gonna get angry at you and you're everyone's gonna know that you're that developer that keeps coming to Reddit gaming and keeps pushing your stupid game on us so I think this is also also thing where you should just try to make fun content and if you do that then people will find it reddit as you know they have eyes everywhere if you do something funny they're gonna find it they're gonna put it up already and if it's funny enough it's gonna get uploaded there's no reason that you should as a developer try to like do commercial for your company already last notes and tips we're going to do questions I intentionally saved 15 minutes so that we can do you guys can ask and we can discuss things so I hope you thought about questions so far but first I'm gonna go through the last tips if you're gonna go away with something in this talk then I would say that you should remember to when you do marketing produce content that people want to share don't just produce content that people that you earn something from make things that your fans earn something from sharing it as well create a cool party on the internet that people want to go to instead of creating a huge billboard of you know marketing and screenshots of your game and I think it's really important to stand out in every single way they possibly can now again I know that everyone isn't making a game about goats so it doesn't always have to be stand out in a funny way although I think games could be way more funny than they are I think people are way too serious in the games industry but basically doing something that people don't expect is always going to get you more attention than doing what everyone else is doing because if you have a crowd of people like if you have a hundred marketing people everyone's like banging counts impulse and yelling about their game if you just you know wear a pink suit and stand there then everyone's eyes are going to get drawn to you yes questions please we have microphones over there line up let's do questions hi I make your own game about mice so that's kind of a Facebook page that has 1.6 million likes how did you get that much they gave me six you buy them and but we have a problem with your facebook page it's that it's very scattered between many many languages and I see all your updates are in English but when we post something on Facebook we have like 200 comments that are in 20 different languages and it's really hard to reply to them all in a witty way so how do you manage them we just don't do that yeah you don't have any comments in other languages than English no i-i've actually it doesn't happen we I guess that we got similar Karen became big with youtubers and there's a lot of like YouTube fans that come on our on our page and I don't have a good response to that question I'm sorry you could you could do things that aren't text maybe like do more screenshots instead of like language updates yeah that's exactly what we do we always post a image with no text on it that just explains what we want to do but on Facebook recently released a feature that lets you post in one post in two different languages and it's really recently like it's like two weeks ago but we used to make one status for every language before and that Richard really poor so much work though yeah it scatters the comments a lot so people don't see the the post it doesn't have many comments so they with it so it's kind of common I didn't try Google Translate even if it doesn't make any sense even if you sound like it is it's not a big deal I think okay thanks thank you I'm sorry I can answer better hello nice talk you mentioned that Facebook was your main like venue to get to the fans and how you feel about it like the web site do you have to have the web site just the basic stuff or because a lot of developers try to update the web site and then update the Facebook post and Twitter and stuff it just it's so much work so how do you feel about that you know the games website or just the studio website also I think our studio website is more for people that you know what I apply to work with us they want to know more about coffee-stained as a studio I think it's so much easier to play at people to go on face because most everyone's on Facebook and it's just you know you always saw a facebook tab in your phone up you always use subscribe it's so much easier to subscribe to information on Facebook then be like you know take out your calendar and write like every Saturday remember to check their website for new information so I basically think you I think you just scatter your fans if you have them on two different places and you just you just put in like a link to your Facebook page in your website and then yes if you want outpost or info just go to Facebook yeah or and do like one of those things where you you get a small screenshot of the latest update that you had on Facebook on your website so that people can you know get an update without you having to update two things every time you you do something thank thanks for the talk is really good and I really like the voice that you have you know when you're interacting with your fans on the goat simulator page and I wonder if you know when you guys come out with your next game that's not I mean it fits really perfectly with the goats brand and if you come out with like sanctum three or something that's like more serious how would you adjust that voice on the Facebook page for sanctum three as opposed and how would you apply these lessons into something that's more serious that's a really good question if you look at you know civilization beyond Earth and they have it's a sci-fi game and of course they have a ton of sci-fi fans on their on their page so they update things like articles like you know when they found like gravitational waves they put it up on Susan Mayers civilization beyond Earth and they got like so many shares from that because their fans are really interested in space stuff right because you play a space game so I think you can definitely you know it doesn't only have to be funny things you can do like they're doing it if you have a game that's about being an cowboy right like a cowboy you know right like an astronaut or something like that you know make it something different than just you know thanks for playing our game please you know tell all your friends Thanks hi thank you very much for the talk is really good they did a great job branding good sim my question he's talked a little bit about reddit and obviously I think it's really good advice not to use it as a commercial tool but in terms of an engagement tool how often do you interact with fans on reddit and you know what you you one other thing you mentioned something that I work on and my role is getting devs to talk to players you know what have you done to kind of have your devs out there a little bit more and did you have them go to Reddit or just Facebook or anywhere else I read already threads but I don't I don't reply ever I think I did it like the first couple of times but it's like as soon as reply you get like a hundred people who are like oh I have a suggestion why don't you make a bird simulator instead why don't you make you know my mom really likes dogs can't you make a game that has like her dog that looks like her dog she'll be really happy you know you get this so much spam and you tell them oh you know can't you guys go to our Facebook and ask me those things there and like stop marketing your facebook on our page so I read all of them there's there's an app you can get that basically whenever someone writes goat simulator anywhere on the Internet and and you know on a reddit or whatever I get a an email with a link to the site so everybody every time there's a write threat about goat simulator I see it I read through it but I you know I don't comment on it if they want to talk with me go to our Facebook page thank you very much is a really good talk we're localizing a game that's a kind of like a very off-the-wall style like it's basically a rail shooter' meets dating sim called a gal gun that we're bringing over so West and it has thank you so it's got that kind of very ridiculous sort of marketing style to it as well but you got it's an amazing engagement on your Facebook page but I'm wondering like do you guys use Twitter very much and how you utilize that Avenue as well not that much we use personal Twitter's so you follow us on Facebook if you want to know about you know the brand goat simulator but if you want to know more about our employees and you follow us on our personal Facebook page or personal Twitter pages and you know on Facebook I maybe update you know once every other day on Twitter you can do whatever you want like you know update every day post you know pictures of your food or whatever I think Twitter should more be you people want to follow people on Twitter and brands on Facebook I think okay so you guys don't utilize Twitter really for goat simulator stuff like you do on Facebook we have a coffee stain Twitter where were you right you know if we're at least something we wrote on a write on coffee stain Twitter but I you know I update that maybe once or twice a month when we have something to say we update on Twitter because otherwise there's not much you can do there's not much you can write on Twitter and it's only 144 characters and most people miss what you tweet anyway because there's so much more noise on Twitter than on Facebook okay great thank you rule of thumb for how often you need to post and maybe you don't have this problem but if you don't have anything interesting to say is it best not to say anything that's that's so hard it's basically when I have something fun in mind I post it I try to post every other every third day if we're releasing something new if we have like you know we have a bunch of new screenshots or gifs that we want to show off then I could post every day but I think there's a risk in you know being saying something just for the sake of saying it and I think that kind of just makes you look a little bit lame and boring so you know update as often as you can as long as it's good things so we're making a game called chicken and it's not spelt right it's kind of weird and it's like you build creatures with blocks so we got picked up with our tech demo by the YouTube community and like PewDiePie Jack Oakley in it and it happened very organically and since October we got like 20 million views on all those let's play videos but now we're about to release an early access and we're getting like very rigid and thinking about this release so do you think we should let our YouTube community pick it up again organically by buying it or reach out to them so I know you said don't get PewDiePie a key like if he can get it he can get it himself so we're wondering if we should be like reaching out like nudging or just let it go you can definitely like there's nothing you don't lose anything in reaching out I said that mostly because there's a lot of people that are like oh you know I email you pie Mikey but it hasn't replied I don't know why and you know he gets a hundred people emailing and things every day and he probably doesn't read the emails himself it's probably like some agent of his or something like that so I think yeah try to reach out try to just let them know that you're still releasing the game and the main tip try to be try to make them put up their video when you really when you've already to release your game or like when you're one day ahead of releasing your game because otherwise people are going to see it but they're gonna forget about it like that's what we had with goat simulator we had people started making clones on freaking iOS before before our PC version was up there was like goat 3d simulator on iOS and you they would get so many downloads when PewDiePie made his video because they would look for goat simulator on on the App Store and that this that's what they would have found so I think when when a video goes out you got a ton of people looking for your game and it's really good if your game is available in so give them like give them a cue today the week of launch you're saying yeah something like that cool thanks a lot just to follow on what they mention on Twitter or Facebook do you have like you have of course webpage of page for goat simulator but for your other games you use like Facebook page for each of your games or will be better to just have one for like confiscating and then have a change when you know depending on the game you're launching at the time when I started working on coffee saying we had a Facebook page for sanctum so it's just be natural for us to make a new Facebook page for our new games I don't know if that's the right way to go I hope so but you know you can try it and you know give you an email and tell me what you think it's better oh yeah I don't know myself but I think I think you know it's not it's probably not a big deal in the end the most important thing is just that you make good updates and then everything else worked out just focusing Monday in the game and at the moment right yeah thanks hi there um so a few years ago like our the game we're making right now just sort of went mildly viral and you know originally we got you know taking by surprising we also it's called castle story is on early access me who I am bata sweet thank you but you know we got taken by surprise and we sort of redirected everybody on our company's Facebook page and you know what you like we got like something like 25,000 likes right now I think but just feels like it's sort of as a limited scope yeah of of growing because it's like completely unrelated to the game itself so do you think like how do you feel about that like the fact that you know basically should we start from scratch and make it like a castle story a Facebook page and you know how much how many followers do you have 20 thousand I think at the moment but not on its on the company page it's not on like we don't even update the game page so what are your thoughts on that it's it's a hard question I don't know I think there's there's a point in having your the name of your game always be showing because that what we had with them you know the share this goat for no reason and then it would it would just say goat simulator share this go for no reason and that's really good brightness like half a million people see your brand and that's good so that's the good thing about having a page just for your game but the bad thing is that later when you release a new game you split up your community again kind of the same answer as the other guy I don't know what's best maybe you can find out and then you can tell me all right will do thanks I was just I think the last question because otherwise you're gonna get angry I have a short one I was just curious what app you use to find mentions of goat super motor app okay it's really good yeah usually I think it's like hundred dollars a year or something it's really cheap yeah alright thanks a lot for coming guys it's been a lot of fun you

Channel: GDC

Views: 9,899

Rating: 4.7269626 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, goat simulator, coffee stain studios, game marketing, marketing

Id: zUZVGMLfswk

Length: 58min 37sec (3517 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 07 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Zloty_Diament]

I really like this strategy. Game was quickly getting on top, so journalists had to buy it themselves after all, because it was hot, and they had to make a statement on it. Mostly these were 2/10 statements, but who cares, they paid to write about it xD

It's 2014, people can watch and judge themselves if they want this game or nah, devs did excelent job, by saying exactly what this game is about. They didn't bothered wasting time on creating some complicated words, just changelog-styled text