Author / Translated by Simon Carless / Pixmain Games
How does a game get a 250,000 Steam wishlist before it goes on sale?
This may be something that many game developers would not have dared to imagine, but Galaxy Breaker by EXOR Studios did.
This time, we had the privilege of having a conversation with Pawel Lekki at EXOR Studio. Pawel Lekki is an experienced Steam game developer who has produced games such as Zombie Driver HD and X-Morph: Defense. The Galaxy Breaker, which was launched in October 2021, has accumulated nearly 250,000 Steam wish lists a year before its official release. In the end, the game achieved a 92% praise rate on Steam, and the cumulative sales exceeded 200,000 units.
While EXOR Studios' work has not historically received artistic acclaim in indie gaming circles, they have the support of many Steam core players, enough to keep the studio running well in Poland. And their latest game, Galaxy Breaker, also took EXOR Studios to the next level, so I'm curious how Pawel fulfilled the "250,000 Steam Wishlist."
Promotional video for the game
Q: Would you please introduce Galaxy Breaker and talk about why you think it will sell well, and will the audience of this game be the same as the fans of your previous works? Does it have some unique innovations?
Pawel: Galaxy Breaker is a game that combines action RPGs, slashing, base building, survival, exploration, resource management, and tower defense, and we fans consider it a combination of StarCraft, They Are Billions, and Diablo.
But Galaxy Breaker, which we developed with our own game engine, The Schmetterling, allows us to place thousands of enemies, hundreds of defense towers, and huge bases in the game, and achieve very precise and instant-responsive hand-to-hand combat.
I think this generation is mostly looking for games that are rich and playable, like Fortnite, which has elaborate combat, base building, and a lot of customization. One of the design goals of Galaxy Breaker is to allow players to experience a variety of different content in the game, and the practice of limiting the game to a single genre is outdated.
Q: From the time the Steam page was public to the release of the game's prologue, did the game's exposure do a good job, and if so, can you be sure what the reason is?
Pawel: We released a CG trailer for the game on March 8, 2019 via the PlayStation blog, Xbox Wire, and sent it to the media, and the initial response to the trailer was very good.
A day later, we posted a "Daily Deal" on Steam that pointed to a custom list of Steam connoisseurs with all of our games, including Galaxy Breakers.
After about a month, we accumulated 8,000 wish lists, and we were very happy with the result, because the last game, X-Morph: Defense, accumulated 10,500 wish lists after nine months of publicity.
The first two months of galactic ruptures are the results of a promotional period
After that, we mainly promoted by participating in the game show (PAX East, GDC, E3, Gamescom, PAX West), continuously updating social media (at least 2 times a week, targeting Imgur users) and live game broadcasting (Twitch and Mixer), and from the beginning, we adopted the exposure strategy of continuously releasing small updates and intermittently interspersing big news.
The most important thing to do in the promotion process is to share the game with streamers and YouTubers. Actually, attending the game show didn't bring a lot of wish lists, but we got to know a lot of streamers, and when the first preview version was released on November 14, we sent this version to the streamers we knew at the game show.
Through their live streams and videos, Galaxy Breaker received a great response, adding 12,000 wishlists to the game over the next two weeks. By the end of 2019, we had accumulated 50,000 wishlists, which was our initial goal.
[Simon's note: The uneven quality of wishlists is obvious, but as you can see from this amazing opening of Galaxy Breakers in 2019, EXOR Studios has a natural appeal to core players and is also experimenting with a variety of different things to aggressively raise the wishlist numbers.] ]
We didn't stop there. For example, we also had news coverage in 2019, and although it brought a small increase in wish orders at the time, it was still a little successful in early 2020, even though we did not have a single game trailer during this period.
It wasn't until March 2020 that we decided to give PC Gamer the final trailer for a 24-hour exclusive promotion. The collaboration was so effective that the site and other follow-up articles carried a lot of traffic directly.
Another surprise in the news report was that we received a review from Eurogamer because we had previously participated in the Digital Dragons Indie Showcase.
It can be said that although participating in the exhibition will not get too many timely returns, the exposure obtained after the exhibition is still very amazing. The day before the Steam Summer Sale, both June 15, 2020, we have amassed a total of 95,000 wishlists.
Publicity results from January 1, 2020 to August 14, 2020
The Steam Summer Games Festival showcases upcoming games based on the number of wish lists that the game has accumulated, and it's time for our upfront efforts to promote real rewards.
To participate in this event, we had to prepare a demo that could be played, and in order to customize a special experience for the game festival, we spent about 2 months polishing this vertically sliced demo. Eventually, Galaxy Breaker became one of the most popular games during the Steam Games Festival, with an additional 42,000 wishlists added.
The demo was very well received, but it could only be experienced during the game festival, so we also decided to release a separate game prologue with additional game content and game story background. After that, we spent six weeks refining the demo to the standards of normal game release, while also translating the game content into 10 languages.
The day before the game's prologue was released, we had amassed more than 146,000 wishlists, making it into the top 50 of steam game wishlists.
Q: Please explain your plans when you released the game's indie prologue and daily sale, and how did you do it? And what was the ultimate effect?
Pawel: We posted the prologue directly on August 5 at 22:00, without any special announcements on our channel or any pre-event publicity. At this time, our partner in China, Surefire Games, also began to carry out marketing promotion activities in Chinese mainland social and media channels.
On August 6th, we launched a 2-week EXOR Studio Sale and received a 24-hour Steam homepage promotion in the form of a "Today Deal". We've also updated and launched the Galaxy Breaker demo as part of the Steam homepage, making the game prologue and demo the same.
From August 5 to September 24, the galactic rupture was downloaded 180,000 times.
Other notable achievements:
115,000 downloads of galaxy cracker demo (20,000 during exorc studio sale + 50,000 during summer game festival + 13,000 via AMD News + 23,000 organic downloads)
More than 295,000 people downloaded the Galactic Rupture prologue and demo
The Galactic Cracker's prologue has a 95% response rating
During the EXOR developer promotion period, Galaxy Breaker received 56,000 new wishlists, accumulating 235,000 as of September 21
The Galactic Rupture itself received 18,000 wishlist additions and 7,900 followers
During the EXOR Studio Sale, revenue from our existing products was 30% higher than the last daily sale on December 4, 2019
Exposure on Steam also attracted a lot of outside traffic, such as Lirik's Twitch livestream (he has 2.6 million followers on Twitch)
Q: After the popularity of the promotion, what kind of wish benchmark did the game return to? Is there more than before? Do you think that's due to the exposure of Steam itself, or are more people discovering the game through live streaming, or both?
Pawel: To be honest, after this event, it was difficult to determine the baseline ratio of a wish list. Because we've been running various promotions since then, by September 21st, there were 400 new wishlists a day, compared to 80 per day before the prologue was released.
When Galaxy Breaker is broadcast live by a Chinese anchor on Bilibili, or during Gamescom, our wish lists spike. In addition, there are many external organic traffic that is difficult to determine the source, and perhaps many people are just talking to their friends about the game, which also increases Steam's organic traffic.
[Simon's Note: I think the real sign that a game might perform well is more than just "Did you get a single spike in wishes from a feature or demo?" ", and it's also the amount of daily natural wish list growth when you don't have much promotion happening, and the number of the former and the latter is quite good! ]
Wish list situation after the Galactic Crackers released the prologue
Q: You seem to have a lot of channels and methods to promote the game, can you talk about how much manpower is used to do this? Is each channel to be grasped, or is there a focus?
Pawel: From the beginning of the project, we had a full-time community manager (Piotr Bomak). He has an update plan and publishes it on all of our social media.
Our development backbone also conducts twice-weekly live development streams, and the development team also takes time to showcase some "in development" content. For example, Piotr spends hours with programmers grabbing wonderful screenshots. In addition to me and my brother, at least 2 of our 14-person development team have been working directly in marketing.
In addition, we have worked with external companies from the very beginning of the project, especially PR expansion. The team at Agnieszka Szóstak is responsible for all of our press releases, completing most of our engagement with traditional media and streamers.
Then after the prologue was released, we also started working with Surefire Games to promote marketing in China.
Q: Do you have any expectations or plans for the launch of your product? What do you expect a wish list conversion rate to be?
Pawel: Our last game, X-Morph: Defense, accumulated 10,500 wishlists, with a conversion rate of 0.7 for the first week of release. For Galaxy Breaker, our initial goal is to accumulate 50,000 wish lists with a wish order conversion rate of 0.4.
However, the current game wishlist has exceeded our original goal by five times, and may be doing better, the final conversion rate is unknown, but it should be no problem.
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