Satisfactory: A Masterclass of Game Marketing

cian is a strange company that somehow has some magic that almost guarantees success in the game games industry where U success typically is anything but guaranteed the video game satisfactory has sold over 5.5 million copies since its initial release in 2019 it was the only game of the first wave of Epic gam store exclusives that was profitable after paying the developers coffee stain Studios $1.5 million for the exclusivity beating out some really high-profile games like Metro Exodus ano 1800 and the division 2 it was coffee stain's most successful game to date beating their previous games like goat simulator and sanctum 2 so what is it about this humble Factory game that is so compelling to people enough for 5.5 million people to buy an incomplete Early Access game and for so many of those sales to be on epic games a platform that was receiving a lot of online hate at the time but Revenue share doesn't matter if you don't have any customers 88% of nothing is still zero something something haven't you even considered that yes we have previous success when talking about a game or a song or a movie or really anything like that it's important to acknowledge the background coffee stained Studios wasn't exactly brand new when they announced satisfactory while still a pretty small Studio they had success with sanctum 2 and to an even greater degree Goat Simulator they made a name for themselves and I have to imagine that this lent them some credibility and maybe some marketing dollars that certainly doesn't hurt and it's important to acknowledge epic games exclusive say what you will about epic games but satisfactory owes a lot of their success to the epic game store exclusivity not because the platform promoted the game necessarily although it definitely did highlight it quite a lot but because epic injected coffee stain with a T of money as part of the exclusivity this gave them the resources to hire great people and spend more time on features because of that cash flow we got payment for the exclusivity deal um now how that's good for us and maybe even good for you is that one it gives us stability as a studio we will be fine after creating satisfactory it means we may be able to support it for longer I don't know I think we have a a nice history there of putting our resources into cool projects so I hope that you know us being financially stable with satisfactory means we really will keep doing that in the future Coffey stain made those $1 million go far and this unique opportunity to get a ton of money early on in development has almost certainly contributed to the fact that we've had so many major updates doing Early Access right the first big point in satisfactory favor is actually the fact that it is early access and that's because it's one of the few games to actually do early access the right way you've heard the horror stories but satisfactory is the exception because satisfactory is a bit of a Sandbox game the style lent itself well to being incomplete but even from the beginning the developers did a very good job of making this game feel finished and even though it was a Sandbox game there was plenty to do and plenty of progression there was a diverse world full of things to interact with and use lots of items to manufacture and buildings to manufacture them in and enough progression to hold interest will also create in that sandbox environment that let players go crazy and build whatever they wanted to it was also relatively bug-free and the bugs that did exist were rarely gamebreaking sometimes they were just funny I think part of this is because they only plann to get to a certain point for 1.0 in terms of the feature set and the money made from millions of unanticipated sales allowed the developers to keep adding features beyond the original scope for a long time this early access game has been purely a labor of love along with a strong start that had minimal major issues the developers also released a ton of major updates in a small amount of time the first release of the game was in March 2019 and by March 2020 we were on update 3 which introduced fluids and pipes the awesome sink and shop and Hyper tubes over the next 4 years we've gotten through update 8 so the update frequency did slow down but every single major patch has come with a ton of hype with trailers and announcements leading up to the release whenever new features get added there's a Resurgence in interest again as as players wonder how these additions will affect how they play the game not to mention that the community managers have made a liveaction patch notes video full of skits for all these big updates unique Community Management now speaking of community managers along with updates to the game satisfactory had a unique and effective way of keeping the community engaged and communicating about these updates they did this through a somewhat unconventional approach to Community Management most companies game developers included have a mostly professional stale and Safe Way of giving news to their fans developers who have clearly never been in front of a camera before are clearly reading off a script that the marketing team wrote giving talking points about the best features in the new update get ready because we are rolling out the largest change to all Legends since the game launched with our Legend upgrade system but that's not how coffee stain approached satisfactory and the person to start all of this was jaay farlay there's literally a Jay sitting right over there hello he was a developer but asked if he could take over Community Management while he was certainly professional and presented the information well he pushed the boundaries of how companies communicate using humor sarcasm and memes but not in a how do you do fellow kids kind of way you could tell he was having a great time and being a genuine meme Lord and if you start from the beginning you can see his confidence and level of comfort grow in these videos he just wanted to have fun cuz he knew that's what people wanted to see eventually snut hopped in as another Community manager and and the two were able to play off of each other really well in videos and live streams perhaps the height of the absurdity was the release of the anime body pillows whatever I miss whatever I'm missing snood I can I can cuddle up with him give him sweet little little smooches whisper sweet nothing into his ear if you work in a white color office job can you imagine the company making and promoting an anime body pillow of your manager I'm going to assume most of you can't imagine that happening this is such an absurd thing on both a personal and a professional level and it's a an example of how coffee stain's Community Management style is really just to do whatever's fun they fervently denied pipes were coming to the game they made hoodies with Jason's Microsoft Paint drawings and they do pretty highly produced cinematic skits for their update videos they go above and beyond they do it in absurd ways that no one else is doing I truly hope that Jay's dream of being an influence on Community Management comes to fruition and more Community managers in games and other Industries follow suit my goal from day one no from Day Zero uh was literally to you know radically humanize ourselves as as developers and also you as a community of individual people I believe that there was a breakdown in communication and respect between communities and developers in both directions and I wanted to try and bridge that Gap and maybe demonstrate another way to communicate based on honesty transparency and understanding or to be put more simply respect the best community along with the best community managers it only makes sense that satisfactory has the best community of any game out there it's something the devs and Community managers have said many times and it has a lot of truth to it the community around this game is positive and supportive and always willing to help I'm sure part of this has to do with the positive and fun Community Management style but maybe the vibe of the game just attracts the right kind of person or convinces people to not be negative the Q&A site is a place for players to express their concerns and see if the issues have been addressed and the subreddit is very active not only for showing off cool builds but also asking questions everyone just wants to help and nurture people and if you've ever been on the subreddit you've probably seen temporal illusion and their unique and detailed responses to questions what other subreddit has someone who answers every question with a breakdown of what you need to know and links to relevant information I'll wait you'll also notice that while there is plenty of let's play content around this game there are at least as many tutorial videos to help players find new ways to play the game it feels alive this is maybe a small thing but it's a very impactful thing the world of satisfactory feels alive and complete and always has even from the early stages one thing about Early Access games is that certain areas of Polish like animations are often left for last when you put down that firstand Miner take out the Xeno Basher for the first time or admire a constru structor doing its thing you can't help but be Charmed by the tension to detail around things like animation the same can be said about sound design which is most apparent in the intro sequence and the drop pod planetf complete please ensure the Integrity of your multi-purpose exploration suit is at [Music] 100% remember efficiency first G speed everything is just so incredibly satisfying and immersive players may not think about it consciously but these sorts of things tell us that the game is a labor of love down to the small things that we barely notice different but familiar let's address the elephant in the room satisfactory is not the only Factory game out there nor was it the first the most famous modern Factory game when satisfactory came out was Factoria so it was obviously the main point of comparison being a first-person game with exploration and crafting it also Drew comparison to survival game subnotica which frankly has a similarish art style it is truly a cross between the two yet it's not really derivative at least not at this point in its development it really is its own game yet it appeals to fans of both of those styles of games for myself I was never interested in factorio and frankly I'm still not I'm just not a big fan of top down stuff generally and with the Hostile enemies I would rather just play a real-time strategy citybuilding game so when I was originally pitched the idea to try out this game I I wasn't really sure if I wanted to because it was compared to Factoria which I knew I didn't like but when I started seeing the subnotica similarities I was interested as that's a game style that I more enjoyed and it turns out satisfactory effortlessly melds the two Styles resulting in a 3D firsters automation game that has exploration aspects thus allowing players to really choose their gameplay style more so than in factorio or subnotica and that first- person perspective makes you feel more in control rather than distantly controlling your character in a game like Factoria of course that kind of thing is all down to personal preference but clearly it's a lot of people's personal preference big names some games live and die by the well-known influencers that play them while satisfactory isn't fully at the whims of YouTubers and twitch streamers their influence is clear the most obvious is let's game it out whose success is intimately tied with satisfactor his videos of doing insane things in this game went wild for their absurdity and likely pushed a lot of players into buying it to do their own cre stuff Josh doesn't even upload that many satisfactory videos but players still references Shenanigans all the time his satisfactory videos have millions of views but the most popular topping out at 34 million views at time of writing his second most viewed on his channel but let's game it out was far from the only one big variety game creators like Markiplier and Jack sepy also played satisfactory really early on and these big names pushed interest in the game racking up several million views on their videos if even just 1% of those viewers bought the game that's huge while Josh uploads satisfactory content infrequently and the mass of YouTubers have likely forgotten the game among their daily uploads there is a strong core of creators that still keep the game going in terms of content some of these include names you probably know like I'm kbits total eclipse and bits the regular uploads from creators like these have helped keep interest alive and like a popular game like fortnite where you can keep queuing up for another round or Minecraft where you can just keep EXP exploring satisfactory never really ends it has near infinite content potential because it just takes so long to build things and make megafactories you could stream this game every day for years and still bring something fresh every time these creators have also been encouraged by the developers coffee stain's weekly live streams often end in a shout out to a Creator or they show a clip of one of their videos and encourage people to check them out this channel has been highlighted at least three or four times if not more they always raid someone who's playing satisfa as well lastly we always have a content creator highlight Sno juicy very juicy indeed and this week it's none other than satisfactory news satisfactory news they've been around for a little while I can't believe we haven't highlighted them like ever I think satisfactory news has been around since the release of the game if I remember correctly yeah addictive gameplay I just mentioned how satisfactory has near infinite playability but that is another reason why this game does so well they really captured the perfect formula story- based games can be a flash in the pan maybe taking 5 hours or maybe taking 50 hours or more but they're often a single experience that you play through once and then you kind of forget about it or you have online multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or League of Legends that you might spend thousands of hours in but also might get stale to drop into over and over again or you might get burned out by the grinding in the competitive aspects satisfactory lands Somewhere In The Sweet Spot in between it's not competitive and while you can argue there is some level of grinding it's clear what the goals are and it's not always super repetitive even though a story is coming and there is a progression to ascend through you can just kind of ignore those aspects and treat the game like a Sandbox if you want I love that middle ground because I never know how to treat sandbox games stick me in Minecraft creative mode and I'll freeze up I need a goal satisfactory has just enough guide rails and limitations that allows me to be creative while solving specific problems the gameplay Loop were presented with is very addictive and somehow building factories just never gets old each project is at least a little bit different whether it's due to the parts you're manufacturing the terrain you're trying to build on or the logistics of how to get every material you need into one spot and when you're done with the logistics and the main structure you get to be creative with the visuals of your building and there is rarely a sense of urgency despite there being clear goals if you choose to assemble the space elevator parts and do all the M research the other thing is that much like the name of of the game suggests figuring things out is very satisfying the math can be somewhat complicated but you don't have to be an engineer or an Excel wizard to optimize a production line I know I'm not either of those things the point is you will be in a constant state of problem solving and solving those problems whether small or large is incredibly satisfying it keeps you invested in the gameplay Loop while I'm mostly talking about the late game gameplay of constructing big factories it's hard to ignore the opening hours of satisfactory and how that gameplay Loop pulls you in with constant but well-timed advancements you start off handcrafting and Gathering leaves for power but before long you have a basic Factory setup and just as you're getting frustrated by having to use biomass burners you unlock the ability to use coal power and then you realize you need to leave your safe little home base area to seek out more rare materials the pacing of the early game is so well done and before you know it you're stuck in the mid game and can't stop yourself and you've solved problems and frustrations and naturally progressed through a combination of gentle nudges by the game's objectives as well as a need to find more advanced Solutions in order to have fun it's this kind of early game that draws people in and keeps them there and I think this game really doesn't have a lot of new player drop off from a game design perspective satisfactory gives you the perfect combination of handholding and freedom and pushes you in the right direction gently without feeling like you're being told what to do for me and many others it's the perfect balance of sandbox and linear gameplay before I bring this video to a close I want to give a quick shout shout out to the video satisfactory and unlikely Masterpiece by grifflicious I actually hadn't watched their video before writing this script but I've had it bookmark for a long time and I wanted to make sure I wasn't just copying that concept thankfully their video covers totally different topics but I think it's a good watch along with my video to get a full picture of why satisfactory is a success and there's is more specifically from a game design and mechanics perspective which I also think is very important I also want to thank everyone for allowing me to be a part of this journey this channel has almost 10,000 subscribers and as I mentioned in a previous video it started as a project for someone I worked for and later came under my sole ownership where now it's a passion project of mine it also allowed me to become an editor for Jace something I still do and an editor for coffee stain themselves where I've been able to help bring dozens of YouTube videos to life including the update 7 patch notes video which is one of the projects I'm most proud of being an editor on some shots of my factories are forever immortalized in that one if you made it to the end I'd appreciate it if you liked and subscribed there are countless things that contributed to the success of this game so if you thought of something I didn't mention let's discuss it in the comments below I'll see you in the next video and thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Satisfactory News

Views: 16,625

Keywords: satisfactory, satisfactory news, satisfactory gameplay, satisfactory tips, satisfactory tutorial, satisfactory tutorials, satisfactory guide, satisfactory guides, coffee stain, satisfactory success, how did satisfactory succeed, epic games satisfactory, jace varlet, snutt treptow, community management

Id: SMkC2xDRuKM

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2024