Podcast: Dread Hunger's James Tan talks the hit social deduction game.

19 apr 2022 · Tales From GameDiscoveryLand

Welcome to the second Tales From GameDiscoveryLand podcast in Season 1. In this episode, recorded a few weeks back, we talk to James Tan of Digital Confectioners, one of the key creators of smash hit social deduction game Dread Hunger. He talks about the project’s ‘hook’, its surprise Chinese success, and post-1.0 path to 1 million units sold (!).

Presented by Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, this bi-weekly, limited series podcast features conversations with smart people in the video game industry on how games get discovered and played. Below is a lightly edited full transcript of the entire podcast.

Reminder: you can get hold of episodes via our official podcast page, and also via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Pocket Casts. If you need it, here’s our podcast RSS feed. And thanks in advance for listening.

Podcast transcript: Dread Hunger’s James Tan!

SIMON: Imagine you're an explorer, trapped on a ship in the Arctic tundra, with your crewmates. Some of them may not be entirely who they seem. How do you survive, find the traitors, and win the game? This is the conundrum in the Digital Confectioners-published social deduction game Dread Hunger. It's one of the top titles on Steam right now, thanks to its massive viral success in China.

For our latest podcast, we had a chance to explore these wild viral discovery moments for the game with James Tan, one of the main creators of Dread Hunger. How did the team approach development? Why did the game take off shortly after its 1.0 launch? And what can we all learn from his success?

I'm Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, and this is the Tales From Game Discoveryland podcast.

[Music]

SIMON: Great, so here I am and I'm here with James Tan, how's it going, James?

JAMES: Hey Simon, this guy really well, thank you.

SIMON: Cool, yeah, I'm excited about this because you're one of my first guests on the podcast, and I get to talk to you about Dread Hunger. And Dread Hunger is a game that's doing pretty well recently. So firstly, congratulations on that - are you happy with how it's being received right now?

JAMES: Thank you. Likewise, this my first podcast so I'm very excited to do this as well. Yes, I would say we're extremely happy with the results, and extremely happy about the success of the game.

SIMON: What I wanted to start with was talking about the background of the creation of the game. I know that social deduction games have been around for a while - even before Among Us. And Among Us is obviously a well-known one. But there's also games in VR - like Ubisoft had Werewolves Within that I think was social deduction as well. So I wanted to ask - what made your team want to make a game like this? What's the genesis of the project?

JAMES: So this project started around late 2019, when we got together with a good friend of ours, [Killing Floor creator] Alex Quick. We had made games together in the past - we made Depth together way back. 2012 was when we started that project together with him. And essentially, I gave Alex and my lead product designer Neil free rein to do whatever they felt like doing. And given that Depth was an almost hardcore, PvP, asymmetric style shooter, they wanted to do something a little different.

They explored around all these different genres and all these different themes - and they settled upon social deduction. It wasn't very popular right at that moment, and they've been playing some really popular board games surrounding social deduction, things like The Resistance, card games like that.

I think that sort of sparked this initial idea of: “Oh, what happens if we try asymmetric from a different angle of hidden information, rather than one side is sharks and one side is divers.” They are obviously very different. But in this case, it was more about “Oh, what if the asymmetry was about information, and how asymmetrical that that can be?”

And it sort of evolved from that idea, rather than looking at: “Is social deduction a really popular genre within the gaming space at that time?” In terms of the theming, a lot of it was very much based on on the TV series The Terror. At the time we didn't think many people were looking at that - so that's why we decided to go with that theme.

SIMON: And that's pretty interesting from a discovery point of view. You were accidentally early to a genre that, at least from Among Us perspective, suddenly became quite popular… Probably from a discovery point of view it's better to go into a genre that has some people familiar with it, than one where you have to blaze your own trail, right?

JAMES: So when we first started looking at these genres, social deduction and survival, we started by picking out the stronger genre, which was actually survival at the time. We wanted to have that asymmetrical gameplay using some of the misinformation [concepts].

But the game initially was more focused on the survival elements and sprinkles of misinformation, where one player would say “Oh, you know, I just went and did this” when they actually didn't do that - or “I just saw somebody do this”, when that actually didn't quite happen.

We really liked those kinds of betrayal moments. They gave players more room for player-generated stories about funny things that would happen. I think it's fair to say that when Among Us really started gaining a lot of traction… [we] pivoted a little bit in the marketing message. So we focused a bit more on: “You’re all trying to survive in the cold scenery, you don't know what is… in the wilderness out there and there’s these animals trying to hunt you down.” And on top of that” “the worst enemy is potentially your crewmate.” And I think that made for a really compelling theme.

SIMON: When I was talking to you ahead of this podcast, you wanted to make sure that you’d answer who would say “isn't it just Among Us in 3D?” To your point… there's quite a lot more gameplay in it, right? There's a lot of survival elements, there’s action. So you would describe it much more as a hybrid, genre-wise than simply a pure social deduction game, right?

JAMES: Yeah. I think the best way of putting it is that Among Us really focuses just purely on the social deduction - that’s the pure focus. Because we throw in more survival elements, we get to the point of feelings, like, desperation of ‘how do I survive?’

And maybe in order to survive, there are things that I'm going to need to do that I otherwise normally wouldn't. And so trying to put players in that kind of situation. I think it's very similar to maybe how you would actually feel if you were stuck in the Arctic, and you had a very small crewmate size. And you're trying to go out and look for resources, food… and there probably are things you're going to have to do in that situation.

I think the strongest element in Among Us: when you are the impostor, it's very clear that you know what you're supposed to do. You're just supposed to eliminate everybody else in the most stealthy way as you possibly can. And when somebody gets eliminated, they go into that discussion room to figure out who is or who isn't the impostor. And then they throw whoever [they think] that is into space.

In Dread Hunger, it’s a lot more about subtlety. There's a lot more arguing in terms of “yeah, but he did this” or “he also did this” or “she did this, but she also did that”. You know, “why would, in our case, an impostor have been a troll?”, “why would a troll go and get all this coal for us that we actually need - like, why would they do that?” And possibly the troll is playing a long game, so he tricks them or tries to gain their trust.

There's a lot more of those elements coming in when you can do actions where you're trying to gain somebody's trust,. So during our play tests… when we were playing, often we would play the long game, where we would gain everybody's trust. And just constantly say things like: “if I was a troll, I wouldn't be bringing back all this wood” or “I wouldn't be bringing back all this coal”. Only for… halfway through the game or near the end of the game, we’d be saying: “Haha, actually, I was the troll and I've just stolen all your food”, or “I've just poisoned all your food”.

There's a lot of these kinds of subtle elements which feed into the social deduction. We feel rather than just accusing somebody just outright: “Oh, you're the impostor”? There's really not a lot you can do about that situation, once the group has decided that.

Even if somebody identifies you as a troll [in Dread Hunger] and says, like, “I actually saw this player do this thing” which… positively identifies him as a troll? Because it's still a survival game, trolls can still fight back. So yes, they might be discovered. But that's not the end of the world for them. So they can still gather resources to craft weapons… and just go on the offensive.

SIMON: That's pretty cool… it's pretty complex. It's interesting to me in terms of how you developed this - there's obviously quite a lot of complexity of tactics. How did you work with earlier development? Did you announce the game early? Did you have a lot of further alphas and betas to get people interested, and then tuned the gameplay? Or were you a bit more private earlier?

JAMES: We were definitely a lot more private early on, I would say. There was just a lot more experimentation. And I think it's fair to say that this is where a lot of the experience comes in.

With Alex and Neil having played a lot of these social deduction board games, [they considered] what are the kinds of emotions or feelings, or the kind of situations we want to recreate within this game. And then thinking about the game design from a point of view of - rather than just the straight mechanics of “Okay, so we add this weapon that will allow players to do X or Y or Z?”, it's more thinking “Well, what are tools that we can add to the player's arsenal that could create these situations for us?”

SIMON: In terms of design, it seems like you've kept it pretty close to the chest. And even in terms of announcing the game - how long before Early Access release did you end up announcing? And how did you go about building up a head of steam for Early Access?

JAMES: The general strategy that we tried was to use Steam’s playtest functionality. We already had a very dedicated community following from Depth, so some our community from Depth followed us through to Dread Hunger, which was awesome.

So we started with this very small contingent of players - we were playing the game and we were exploring different concepts and different ideas. But even then that period of time only lasted several weeks or so - and then we went from playtesting to Early Access.

By that stage, we had a reasonable-sized team working on the game - around 20-30 people at that point in time. And so within internal play tests, we were already starting to see a lot of the situations that we wanted to create within the game happening naturally.

SIMON: It seems like after you went into Early Access and even up to date, you've done a pretty good job of the Games as a Service approach. You've been quite aggressive with doing regular updates. So I wanted to ask about that a little bit - was your team already used to this very [iterative] approach from the other titles you'd worked on? It seems like you were quite efficient at it.

JAMES: For Early Access, we knew it was important to have really regular updates, I think it's become part of Early Access now. You can't do Early Access now where you just go like “Okay, the game is there, and you'll hear back from us in three to four months time with an update.” You need that regular roadmap of content drops, and we've been doing that for Depth for a really long time.

Depth launched in 2014, and we only recently sunsetted that game in 2022. So it's been a really long time, and we're very much used to creating some Games as a Service. But I do want to say that Dread Hunger is not really designed to be Games as a Service, in the sense that we're not going to do regular DLC or regular monetization methods that you would normally see in GaaS.

SIMON: It's games as a service in the sense that it's regularly updated, but it's not games as a service in the sense of [a major concentration on] IAP or DLC. That makes sense to me.

I want to talk a little bit about the success of the game, because I remember seeing the game once or twice through Early Access. And it was an interesting one because it had definitely not failed, it wasn't like it had a dead community.

But it seemed to be bubbling along all the time at a mid level of, I'd say low thousand of CCUs? So.. how did you see that? What were you doing during Early Access to try to juice it? Do you feel like you've had some success? Or do you think it's just the fact that it wasn't 1.0 yet that was making some people hold back on it?

JAMES: I think there's a lot of speculation as to what happened during Early Access. We don’t have a ton of proof… but I'll say it here. We generally divide it into two parts of the world - we've got the West and the East, this particular part with the East being China.

We think what happened in the West is that there definitely was some level of burnout… from the social deception category of games. In the sense that everybody had played Among Us… and almost became burnt out on that genre. Where they just said: “Oh, it's another social deception game, I've already played that, I'm done with it, I want to look for something else.”

And I wonder if that's true that is a similar space with Battle Royales. People have played their favourite Battle Royales, and they basically say: “I don't want to play a different one, because I've already experienced what that whole genre has to offer.”

Whereas I think something weird happened with China. Among Us wasn't a massive sort of phenomenon within China itself. I'm curious, and this is pure speculation, whether it's a situation where it takes time for these kinds of genres to go from one region of the world and then they jump to a different region of the world. And then maybe they come back into previous regions, when you get this new generation of players who haven't played those types of genres before.

These genres may be coming and going in waves - like, for the longest time I thought that first person PvP arena-style shooters were basically done. We'd seen Quake 3, we'd seen Unreal Tournament. And trying to make one maybe five years ago was basically a no-no. But I think certain games like Halo Infinite have come back, and shown there's actually possibility again to do those sorts of things.

SIMON: So - I think you had good success through Early Access but it was kind of bubbling along. And it seems like, just after full release, China especially started to notice [Dread Hunger] and then also the West did.

So can you talk about the period around full launch and how it went? What were the first signs that you felt like you were starting to do better? Did you have local partners that helped with that, for example?

JAMES: Dread Hunger is an interesting game because we self-published it. We didn't have any sort of external publishing help with it at all. And more interestingly, we did not actually have any partners in China to help us with that at all. We focused all of our PR and marketing efforts purely in the West.

And so seeing the sudden rise in China was a complete surprise to us, Something that we hadn't anticipated at all, and not something that we even tried to really do, as such.

We learned from Depth that localization is really important. A lot of game developers will say you should localize your game to pretty much all the languages that you think are going to be important to your game. From our experience, we also looked at it from a point of view of… “Are they more comfortable with their own native language versus just English, or versus some other language?”

We definitely feel that within certain countries, they very much prefer their native language. So localization was the main thing that we did to ensure that players in those regions could play the game very comfortably.

I think there's a lot of history with social deduction [in China], and I had no idea. A number of years ago they used to play a game just called Werewolf and this was the real life version of this - very similar to Mafia, right? And what happened was they had some very popular streamers just play this game in real life. And it became pretty popular. But that popularity transitioned into a TV show. So they had celebrities playing this game as a TV show, and that gained a ton of popularity as well.

So… the general population of under '30s had all played this type of game, [and] it became popular enough that people were actually setting up sort of cafes, very similar like karaoke bars. These were cafes where you could go to and play this game with random people in real life.

This was all unknown to us… but when we found out we said: “Oh, okay, that makes sense.” Because of people under 30 [in China], 80% of them had played this type of game before. They could see the connection between those games and what this game is trying to achieve.

We didn’t know this happened - and it was only fairly recently when we found out… We suddenly made the connection. “Oh, okay, that makes sense!” I'm sure some of us might be thinking: “Well, you know, if it was that popular, certainly there would have been games made like this, right?”

Truth is there were games that were made like this in China, as well. The problem was that they tried to take the real-life Werewolf game and just transition that into a mobile game. So it became a bit like a Zoom meeting… they basically have people just on a webcam, and they put webcams up in a row.

Basically, you're chatting. But it didn't have the same vibe as the real life thing, because people would often AFK, and [players] were just using that game as a means to do other things. Whereas with a video game, it's a lot more of a directed experience, where you've actually got tools that you can use.

SIMON: Yeah, and Dread Hunger is a very nice looking game. It's like a triple-A adjacent-looking game. So that's obviously going to help, because there's plenty of players on Steam who want to play good looking games that aren't like, cartoony and/or Among Us-like.

Obviously that [China surge] has led to problems for you as well, because your game is lobby based. So can you talk a little bit about that? Some of the West has been complaining that there's a lot of foreign-language speakers in lobbies? Do you think that's a little bit overblown, or have you ever tried to do anything to help with that?

JAMES: I see that as a similar problem to what PUBG had in the past, where you've got the sudden influx of players who all speak a different language. And it's essentially impossible to communicate with each other.

As for what we are doing about this, we've added language filters, so you can start filtering by languages. We've added regions, so you can say: “Okay, I really only want to look for games within my region.”

We're doing more things to help facilitate easier ways of finding matches within a certain set of parameters. Whether I only really speak English or Chinese - you can start filtering for those. There are some things that we're still cooking up, but it is a very complex problem to solve.

We've even sort of had the wild idea - if we could use like, speech recognition or something to take in what they're saying through the microphone and translate and then convert it to English on the other side. But we found that's a very difficult problem to actually solve.

SIMON: Yeah, I think Microsoft has tried to do that in real time, and it's taken them massive computing power, so yeah!

Roleplay is a big part of this game, and I did want to ask about community management and player management. I saw that you had a code of conduct, which I thought was kind of cool. Could you talk a little bit about how you decided to set upthe code of conduct and whether you feel players pay attention?

JAMES: Early on when we were in the Early Access phase we had Romy, and she has been doing a fantastic job along with the community management team. We actually had a very pretty serious trolling problem right at the beginning.

I think that taught us a lot of lessons. Social deduction or social deception as a genre is very interesting, because when people are playing it right, you not only get the real sense of betrayal but you go, like: “Oh, I should have seen that coming, that's totally obvious.”

But I think there's a very grey line, there's a fuzzy area where you could be trolling and you can just say: “Actually, I'm the thrall [one of the bad guys in Dread Hunger!], I'm supposed to do this sort of thing, right?”

So Romy's been doing a fantastic job with the community management team there. For social deception games, you sort of have this very grey area where [there is] trolling and griefing. It's okay if somebody is a thrall and they're doing things that basically [create an] advantage.

And when the game is played right, you get that feeling of: “Oh no, I've just been betrayed and I should have seen that coming… all the signs were there, and I just didn't quite pick up on it”. And next time, if I see somebody doing these things, I'll know better for sure.

The problem we had really early on is that we just had a lot of trolling and a lot of griefing. And when you have games with VOIP and you have games where you can do things that negatively affect other people, I think that's when we decided: “We really need to start encouraging people to play in a way that's enjoyable and fun for others.”

And I would say that our community is fantastic because they know where to go within that very grey, fuzzy kind of area. And I'd say that's something that we're really happy about - our community is doing a really great job there, and actually just making it fun for everybody.

SIMON: That's really good. And ultimately you're right, this only works if everyone on the team of players is playing within the same boundaries. And I do think it's great that you've had a really clear code of conduct about what you expect acceptable behaviour and unacceptable behaviour to be.

JAMES: Yeah, it's difficult, right? Like, it's always tricky. There was a part in the game where we had made the game… a lot more fuzzy than what it is today. For example, as a crewmate, you used to be able to build these explosive powder kegs and you had legitimate uses for them. They were quite lethal - if you saw thralls and you wanted to defend an area, you could start throwing down kegs. You could also use kegs to detonate and explode icebergs that were in the way.

There were legitimate uses for those. But most of the time, unfortunately, as we grew the community much larger, it just became a tool for griefers to use constantly. So we had to change the gameplay a little bit, where we say: “If you’re a crewmate, there are just some things that you just can craft, you can't do.” Because often we got the the very blunt response of “Well, if you let me do it, I'm going to do it.”

SIMON: I also wanted to ask about your monetization methods for the game. Obviously, the main way you buy the game is standalone. But I did also notice you have a few cosmetics available. My impression is that’s not a massive part of the game's future - because it's a fairly period game, so you're not going to be selling space helmets. But I thought it was cute you can buy glasses and I think maybe hats [right now]. Can you talk about how much of a focus you put on that? And is that something that you'll be doing more of?

JAMES: Yeah, I would say that we wanted to get away from trying to transition this into a live service, or to make it into a GaaS. We think that this model can work really well. But we don't feel that's what we wanted to do with this. And in terms of adding more in-app purchases, that's certainly something we'll be doing just because we've got ongoing costs to cover.

But I think one thing that completely surprised us was the average and median play times for the game. We didn't anticipate it being so long. For Depth, we had an average play time, I think, about four or five hours. And then the median playtime for Depth was one and a half hours. Those are the numbers that we're used to, right?

But for Dread Hunger, we're seeing average playtimes of 30 hours, and we're seeing median play times of seven or eight hours - which is in our opinion really, really long. We didn't anticipate people would be ‘maining’ the game this much.

So yeah, I think our current strategy now is really just to focus on original [standalone game] sales, in terms of purchases, and to make the pricing right on those. And then go for in-app purchases in the long run.

SIMON: I used GaaS earlier in this for games as a service and I think you're right, some people associate that with much more IAP-led economies. But also there are games like Astroneer and No Man’s Sky that just keep updating, but they don't have a great deal of in-app purchases.

And they just rely on people buying new copies of the game. So it sounds like that's really what you're going for - mainly - in the medium term.

JAMES: I think we just see this as a much more straightforward economy for people to get into. They buy the game once, and… they can play basically forever. And if they want to continue supporting us, that's fantastic. And they can do that, rather than being led into an economy where it's like: “Okay, the game might be free or the game might be extremely cheap.”

One of the things with Dread Hunger is [that] we don't do daily drops, and we don't do per-round drops… I think it was an experiment of ours to say “Well, can we get a lot of intrinsic reasons for people to keep playing, rather than a lot of extrinsic reasons?”

I think this goes into the psychology aspects of game design a little bit. For Depth, we… have constant drops that occur at the end of every game. And people's focus would shift away from “I want to play the game”, to “I'm only playing the game to get the drop”, and that was that.

SIMON: So you're definitely keen, at least at this point in the game's history, to keep people's motivations much more pure and around actually playing the game. Rather than worrying about auxiliary stuff related to it?

JAMES: Yeah, absolutely, because some of the behaviors that we saw in Depth were really kind of interesting to us. People would play the game, but they wouldn't really actively participate in them. Or they would do things that would only increase the score, so that they would get more drops.

We just didn't want to see that happening again, where you've got a population which are majority focused on “I just want drops.” They'll join the game and they'll just AFK the whole thing. We added AFK prediction, and then they find a little hacky program that will move them every now and then. Then it becomes us spending way more time stopping people from abusing those systems than focusing on making the game better for people.

SIMON: I also wanted to ask you about… when you've seen the game go a little bit viral, especially in China, I know you can't really monitor this but - did you get a sense that it was streamers playing in groups that was a reason why it got bigger? Do you have any sense about how it ended up blowing up?

JAMES: Yeah, so learning about the history of what happened with social deduction and the Werewolf game and so forth, that was a revealing point to us. But we didn't learn about this until much later.

When we see a sudden-up spike and whether it's CCUs or sales, you just go like: “Is this a one off Is this gonna last a day or two days, or three days or something? Or is this going to be more of an ongoing thing?’

I think the way we figured this out was when we were seeing basically constant growth every day, and we saw it for longer than a week. The first time that we started seeing these spikes it was around the middle of January, about a week before our [1.0] launch. So we started saying: “Oh, there's a new region playing this game” and then we thought, “Oh, that's interesting”. And as [CCUs] continued to grow through the week, we were wondering “Is this going to last, or is this going to disappear?”

So we started tracking our retention numbers - our D[ay]1s to D30s, well, we didn't have D30s at the time, but D1s to D7s. We saw that they were above [the industry standard]. These were numbers published by Supercell, and they indicated if you have the [right] percentage numbers you've got a sticky game. And if you've got a sticky game, you're likely to continue to grow.

We really learned about this in Depth. Depth has a very low retention, I think its retention is really: “People might play it for a couple of days, and they're done with it forever”. They've seen it, they're done with it. And the extrinsic benefits like the drops and so forth help a little bit - but they're not strong enough to constantly keep people coming back.

What we saw in Dread Hunger was totally different. People were constantly returning to the game, which was fantastic. And we think it's that combination of two things. You've got streamers playing the game, and good retention. And so when people do go in there and buy it and they're really enjoying themselves, you're going to get this constant growth pattern, basically just going up and up and up and up.

SIMON: It's interesting you mentioned Depth. Depth may have relatively poor retention in your view but also it’s sold a lot of copies. Is that because it has a really good upfront hook? Is that the reason it does well, you think?

JAMES: So this was really good advice from somebody’s opinion I really value, which is Jamie [Cheng] from Klei. He revealed to me that you really want your game to do well when it's not on sale. If it only does well on sale, you've got a problem, because you're constantly having to do sales to keep chasing that.

So with Depth, I really think the reason why it probably sold a lot of copies? It's probably because it is a good game but it was also [regularly discounted to] $5. And so you get to this point where you sell the majority of your copies through really cheap sales, the $4 to $5 range.

Once the bulk of your sales come from that [price] region, it's almost like you get this feedback loop. People are saying it's a good game but it's only worth $5, so I’ll only pick it up when it's $5. I think with Depth, the main driver was just the fact that it was cheap. It was good for it being that cheap - but we had anchored ourselves incorrectly.

Whereas with Dread Hunger… people are buying it without a discount. During the Lunar New Year sale, even though we weren't on discount and we had just recently launched at that time period, we were still hitting in the top 20s on the [Steam] global top sellers.

We were looking at that and we're thinking: “Well, if we can still hit the global top 20 and not being on discount, and not being really present on the storefront [since Steam had a front page sale takeover]… this is doing really well.” Whereas most of the time, if you're not on discount during a Steam sale like that, you're probably just going to disappear and never be seen again.

SIMON: I agree - and I know you made Depth, I would like to defend it. I do think it has a good hook, because it's a good looking game where you're playing as a shark or a diver, right? I think people are excited about sharks attacking divers. So I think that's just a really good entry point… I do think Depth has a bit of a hook, actually.

JAMES: I mean, we do like Depth a lot ourselves. And I think there's just a lot to learn from how we made that game’s game design.. I think that has really fed back into… how we changed our design philosophies surrounding Dread Hunger.

I think at the time, for Depth specifically, we were looking more at Counter-Strike and what they were doing. This is how we got to the whole “oh, let's let's think about drops”. And after going through all of that, we decided “Okay, maybe we don't want to try that again for whatever's next.” And in this case, it was Dread Hunger.

SIMON: If I go to your Steam page, there is another title called Last Tide, and it's some kind of aquatic Battle Royale. Was that something that was your core game for a while, and who worked on that? It seems like it was pretty cool, but it didn't end up achieving escape velocity.

JAMES: This was very much the same team worked on this game as Dread Hunger. From a studio makeup, we’re really strong in engineering, Myself and my co-founder Sam, we’re both engineers. Him being more on the infrastructure side of things, and me more on the Unreal Engine side of things.

At the time, when Battle Royales were coming out, we were looking at them: “From a technical perspective, we think we could do a better job in terms of… framerate, in terms of network and playability.” This was during when [Battle Royales] were just a mod.

It wasn't really like “Oh, PUBG landed and became a massive success, so now we're going to start doing that.” The way we see things is that if we try to chase massive successes like that, you’re going to fall. Unless you've got really deep pockets, it's really hard to chase a massive success. Timeline wise, we started working on that really early on. And we didn't really shift focus to purely working on that game to until later in 2017-2018.

I think the short story is that, we launched it. And by that point there were so many Battle Royales available… it got to a point I think, around our launch, everybody was announcing their Battle Royales. There was too much supply, and not enough people.

One of the things that we learned is that…people are playing [PUBG] it for like a median time of like 15-16 hours and the average playtimes must be just bonkers, like 100 hours or something. Trying to pull people away from their ‘main’, which in this case might be PUBG, might be Fortnite, might be other Battle Royales… it’s a really difficult thing to do.

SIMON: Yeah, that's something I've noticed, actually. There were some genres [that I call] them “displacement genres”. You have to displace the game that's already incredibly popular - and this has been a problem all the way back to a World of Warcraft.

Everyone was like “wow, World of Warcraft is doing so well, we'll just make lots more of World of Warcraft“. And the answer is, you have to get someone to stop playing World of Warcraft to start playing your game. I agree, I think that's ultimately the issue with Battle Royales. And obviously the good news with social deduction games is there's really less games in that space right now.

There's a few games out there, but [social deduction games] are more sophisticated and I think a bit more complex to make. So that's probably another reason that you've managed to distinguish yourselves. I think you can't ham-handedly slather on gameplay mechanics and social deduction - they're pretty subtle from a gameplay standpoint.

JAMES: Yeah, absolutely, and I think making multiplayer games brings its own level of complexities and difficulties. We just have to deal with a different set of problems compared to single player games.

SIMON: So we're approaching the end of the chat now and I wanted to about where you see yourself going in the future for the game, for the next few months. Right now, you've picked up this head of steam… What's your plans for the future?

Are you going to be updating it often? Are you thinking about other platforms or other gameplay mechanics? Are you just concentrating on kind of getting it right for the people who are playing it?

JAMES: A bit of both… Definitely there's still room for improvements that we need to make to existing systems and existing things such as improving the lobby filtering, lobby searching and things like that.

I think when something reaches any level of popularity like this, you're going to start to see things like cheats and hacks being used a lot more. So that's something that we're also working on reducing, improving the play experience for people who are currently playing.

But there are new ideas and new thoughts surrounding game mechanics and all these different things. As for the different platforms, we've got a lot of different things in mind there as well. Nothing ready to announce just yet, but we hope to jump onto that as soon as we possibly can.

SIMON: I guess one final question before we go. This may be unfair for people who are in the middle of making a game or don't have a chance to play games, but I like to ask people what games they have played or have been playing in the recent or semi-recent past ,and why they liked them.

JAMES: I guess the only real game that I've been playing a lot is Minecraft at the moment. And that's really because I have been having a really fun time playing with my daughter. There's something magical about that game that just seems to spark interest and excitement at that age.

It's really fun reliving that, because I remember playing Minecraft when it was the original Java version way back in 2008 or 2009 And so it's kind of interesting… seeing how the game has changed in like the last 10 years or so.

SIMON: Yes, it's a wonderful game, My son is very into Minecraft. He's six but he isn't really into playing, and he's just into all the YouTube videos and lore surrounding it. I think you're right, Minecraft has a lore and the logic that I think children really enjoy, whether they're actively playing it or not.

JAMES: It's super fascinating just because on first glance when you look at the game, you think: “Okay, I know what this is all about.” But as you start digging into it further, you start going: “Oh, actually, there's a lot of interesting layers here”

SIMON: That's great. That's wonderful. Okay well, thank you so much James. Thanks for coming on and we really appreciate it.

JAMES: Yeah. Likewise.

[Music]

SIMON: So that's about it for this week's show. We'd like to thank James Tan for coming onto the podcast - you can find out more about Dread Hunger - tagline 'You are who you eat', at Dread Hunger dot com.As a reminder, this podcast is made by GameDiscoverCo, home of newsletters and consulting - and now a podcast - around video game discovery. Sign up to our newsletter at http://newsletter.gamediscover.co, and upgrade paid to Plus access if you can. You get extra newsletters, charts, Discord access, eBooks and more.Our final credits: many thanks to our producer, editor, and transcriber Alejandro Linares Lopez, theme tune composer Keith Baylis, aka Vimster, and all of our subscribers and listeners. And we'll see you back in GameDiscoveryLand in the near future.

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Podcast: Mod.io's Scott Reismanis on the impact of UGC in games
18 mag 2022· Tales From GameDiscoveryLand
Welcome to the fourth Tales From GameDiscoveryLand podcast in Season 1. In this episode - recorded a few weeks back - we talk to Scott Reismanis, founder of platform-agnostic game mod host/platform Mod.io about the evolution of UGC (user-generated content), the impact of this content in games, and the future of the space.
Presented by Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, this bi-weekly, limited series podcast features conversations with smart people in the video game industry on how games get discovered and played. Below is a lightly edited full transcript of the entire podcast.
Reminder: you can get hold of episodes via our official podcast page, and also via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Pocket Casts. If you need it, here’s our podcast RSS feed. And thanks in advance for listening.
Podcast transcript: Scott Reismanis and Mod.io
Simon: Have you heard all the fuss about user-generated content for games in recent years? If your game supports UGC or mods, it can significantly boost its virality and discovery. Which is why we were so excited to catch up with Mod.io founder Scott Reismanis for our latest podcast.
Scott was also the founder of ModDB and IndieDB, and has been involved in the mod scene for more than 20 years. His new VC-backed company, which helps run cross-platform mods for games like Snowrunner, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Deep Rock Galactic & Skater XL - is doing some interesting work to make mods available multi-platform.
So let's hear all about the benefits and pitfalls of making modding a discovery engine for your games. I'm Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, and this is the Tales From Game Discoveryland podcast.
[music]
Simon: Okay, so I'm here with Scott - How's it going, Scott? Are you having a good day?
Scott: It’s going well, thank you. Just wrapped up a successful trip to GDC, and it's great to be talking today.
Simon: Awesome - we've certainly known each other for a while. We did some work together back in the day on things like the Indie Royale bundles but obviously I'm very interested to hear about your latest project Mod.io.
I was looking at the progression, and you noted on your blog that you had 12 million mods downloaded in 2019, 70 million in 2020, and 208 million in 2021. So clearly, the service - which provides mod support and a kind of centralized [hub] for a bunch of different games - is going quite well.
Can you talk about what particular games your growth has been led by? I'm interested to hear like the three or four games that you feel that people are really, really getting going on Mod.io.
Scott: So Mod.io and modding in general has typically spanned many genres of games, whether it's open world RPGs, like your Skyrims and your Cyberpunks, through to simulation games - we always said if it has a bus, trains, cars or planes in it, it's suitable. Right through to the multiplayer first person shooters and competitive games - where just customizing your avatar or changing the level can have a big impact on gameplay.
For us, our growth has been driven by, probably, all of those genres. But in particular simulation titles, for whatever reason. We've got a lot of truck and bus and car related games on the service. And they're just extremely popular with the players because once you've tried the 5 to 10 vehicles available to you, naturally you want something that's faster, bigger and got more wheels - whatever it might be.
So they've really driven it . But it's definitely a diverse bunch, because we've got games like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator that kind of break the mold. It’s in physics simulators that people are dropping-in characters, and they've submitted 1.5 million pieces of content - and driven a lot of downloads.
Simon: Can you talk about the broad type of mods that you're seeing? I think people have different opinions of mods based on what they think ‘mods’ means - and it's everything from cosmetics to kind of total conversions. Can you talk about the different classes of mod that you often see?
Scott: The lines have really been blurred the last few years. Historically, when I got started in modding with ModDB back in 2002, mods were all total conversions. There really was no such thing as cosmetic mods back then. And so that's where you got your Counter-Strikes & your DOTAs. That type of content emerged from that scene, because the only way to really ship a game as a amateur or indie developer was to modify existing titles and create something new out of it.
Fast forward to the last… 10 years. Modding's become, I would say, much more accessible, somewhat more cosmetic. And that's been driven by a few factors. The first has been that digital distribution makes these smaller mods easily accessible for players.
Jumping through hoops to download Counter-Strike was something that players did and justified. But jumping through hoops just to download a new skin for your character didn't necessarily make as much sense. So the rise of [Steam] Workshop made [that content] available to the players at the press of a button - which we're also doing a Mod.io.
That has really opened up the door to sort of cosmetic and sort of more simplified mod types - and people often call them UGCs [User Generated Content]. For us, it's all the same, whether that content is drag and drop in-game and UGC and something that's made just through a few clicks of the mouse. Or it’s content [that’s] made in a level editor, or requires 3D modeling knowledge and skills….
The games that generally perform the best… recognize that too. And they try to make modding approachable, but also allow for a really deep dynamic range of creation. So if you want to go deep and really want to go advanced, that's available to you today. It's a bit of a mixed bag - and there’s just so much more content that players can make, and games can enable them to make.
Simon: Yeah, I was looking at some of your top titles. And I did notice they had total conversions in them, but they also had skins as well. So I could see that there was quite a lot of difference there. The popularity of mods depends on how [devs] display it [in-game] and how integral it is to gameplay. Do you think there's just some types of games where mods are more integral to gameplay than others?
Scott: There definitely is. We generally say that games that have a very strong story-line or narrative or very strong art style, it's difficult to work mods into that. Because first, the mod creators are going to impact that stylized approach that you've created for your title.
Whereas games that are multiplayer - naturally, people really want to try new levels. Once you've played the first five gameplay modes in the game, you want new levels for it, that you can experience multiplayer on. Or you want cosmetic skins, new weapons and items in the world.
That's what allows you to personalize your player experience and… stand out relative to other players. So that genre really goes well. And then it's the really open-world RPG or simulation games that also skew in a single player direction where people want to change a skybox. They want to make new graphics and HD pack updates or just change the objects in the world. It's definitely more imagination driven creation. And because the scope is so large at those games, mods tend to lend themselves really well to it.
Simon: I was quite impressed with the range of titles you've got on there. I guess one question I had is: how much maintenance is there in order to set this up [as a developer]? Obviously, one thing devs are always thinking about is “How complicated is this going to be?” Maybe you can talk about the most complicated that you've seen and the least complicated.
Scott: There's a few things that you need to consider here from the perspective of a game developer. One is the actual implementation of mod support (ie: what content are you going to allow your players to create in your game?) And so for some titles, that might mean they're just sharing save files and it's just drag and drop gameplay.
And then whatever they remix and create, they save and… submit and share as a piece of content. So that's sort of more like your Space Engineers and your Totally Accurate Battle Simulator type titles where the game is almost the creation.
You build your own spaceship, you share it - Besiege is in the same [category], where you build your own machine and you share it. Or TABS, where build your own little characters in the character editor and share it. In those titles, the focus for the studio is how they build those editors and make them work. Because it's core of the gameplay there's a lot of effort that has gone into that.
Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum. And that's sort of more like your Insurgency or Snowrunner that we've worked with. The creation happens outside of the gaming experience, and as a result of that the knowledge and skills that the creators require is a lot different.
In the case of Snowrunner, I think there's like a 40 to 50 page PDF document on how to make levels and vehicles. That’s what the community started with, a deeply technical guide that involves a lot of different skill sets. And at first glance for someone, it is daunting - there's a lot to it. And yet there's been, I think at this point, over 1500 vehicles submitted. So that's a classic example of ‘never underestimate the power and talent and the resourcefulness of your creative community’, because with very little they can figure out a lot.
In some ways, that actually leads to the most emergent and interesting creations. Because you've given them that scope and that flexibility. You haven't necessarily defined what they can and can't do. And they'll figure out ways to push boundaries and do really interesting things. So that definition is really up to the game studio to decide and then to put that policy into motion.
But the advice that I always like to provide is - never underestimate what your creative community can do. Because if developers could figure out how to reverse engineer Grand Theft Auto to add multiplayer mode, or Euro Truck Simulator to add multiplayer mode - that's pretty complicated tasks that they've done. Chances are they can probably mod your game, if you give them the opportunity too.
The second part of this question is - how do you solve the distribution piece and making that content accessible? And that's sort of where we come in as a service at Mod.io. We provide plugins for Unity and Unreal, and an SDK for other engines.
Our goal is always to lower the barriers to entry to support custom content, not just on PC, but also on consoles - by having those tools be as drop-in a solution as they can be, complete with UIs and everything. Our goal over a longer period of time? The [phrase] that we like to use internally is: “We want to help mods feel official - feel legitimate, like they're part of the game.”
[Mods are then] a first class citizen, and the level of polish and presentation and accessibility for players of all types is scaled up. So, every design decision that we make… is taking one more step in that direction. And I'd say that we're certainly not entirely there yet. But we're getting close with every iteration and every learning and lesson that we take from developers. And we've had studios that have got up and running ‘start to finish’, with debugging in less than a week. We've had one studio do it during a game jam in 48 hours in Unity. So it's possible, but there is lift.
Simon: In terms of the tools you provide and your competitors - Steam’s Workshop is the most obvious one that comes to mind for me. But I wondered… can you explain maybe, who you think your competitors are, and how they do things differently?
Scott: Yeah, so there's a number of different ways that modding is supporting games. There's the unofficial communities that have always existed - so that's your ModDB, which is something that I started 20 years ago. There's NexusMods, which got started around a similar time-frame. And then there's a number of other communities like that.
Essentially, that's what gets used when the game studio doesn't provide any official support, but there's players still modifying the game. So they find and set up a community where they can share - and other players can find and download - that content.
So that's… where modding has sort of come from. There's a few hoops that players have to jump through: to exit the game, and then download and install that content manually, or with the assistance of a launcher installer. When modding then moved from this and Steam took it to with their Workshop solution is an SDK that game developers can integrate.
So this is probably the primary competition for us, in that Steam provides a tool that automates that installation. And developers just have to do the plumbing and connecting of the SteamWorks Workshop SDK. Mod.io is the same. So the plumbing is very similar and the outcome is also identical. Players can now access mods in game via the in-game menu, they can browse content, they can click subscribe and then the SDK behind the scenes automatically puts that mod in the folder for the game to detect and run.
Where Mod.io diverges from [Steam] Workshop is that we're pushing cross-platform and we really want to enable mods beyond just PC on mobile, VR, and console devices. We've seen great numbers - it’s still a very new area of gaming. As well as allowing studios to set up their own communities, get close with their players and their creators. They can identify the type of content that their consumers want through that interaction that they now have sort of ‘control’ over - and also really building their brand.
So there's like three or four levels that we differ that are quite important for us, and for studios that want to do more with modding. Other than that, Overwolf’s looking to do that - and they’re still buiding that product. You also have sort of cloud-like services like Accelbyte, and PlayFab from Microsoft that do… very rudimentary UGC frameworks. So you can kind of get the plumbing in. But you’ve still got to build the house, and the community and all the interfaces on top of it.
I think this is an area within gaming that's obviously the biggest focus. We've obviously all seen the metaverse’s emergence. And whilst that's not exactly what we're trying to do, the success of Roblox and other titles kind of validated [that] this is an important area within gaming.
Almost every title is trying to work on their player engagement and then their content strategies. It's very likely that there's going to be a lot more ways to approach this problem in the future… that we haven't even considered yet.
Simon: It's interesting you mentioned console, because I think I saw somewhere in your materials that more than half of your downloads are on console, looking at individual mod items.
That's something that people don't always think about - because they think about PC as the main modding area. I'm presuming, in some cases, these mods are like vehicles or maybe [vehicle] designs for games rather than total conversions. But… how extreme does the console modding go? Obviously, you can't just do arbitrary geometry into a Xbox version that works on PC, right?
Scott: Yeah, there's certainly different rules that apply to the console platforms, and every platform applies its own rules. We exist to demystify that and make it easy for studios to tackle. And as a result of that you get different outcomes. What we've noticed was then on PC, probably 1 out of every 100 games do any kind of modding and you can see it.
So it's still early days for modding on PC. But at the same time, it's something that players have grown up with, and been used to - and had exposure to over a long period of time. If you look at consoles on the other hand, you could literally count on one hand the number of games that provide this functionality to their players. And it's been your really big titles.
So it's just Skyrim - that’s got cross-platform mod support - Minecraft, your Robloxes and Microsoft Flight Simulators. So there's only really a very small pocket of games that have it. We help titles like Snowrunner, and also TABS, and also Space Engineers and Skater XL and others launch on PlayStation, Xbox and beyond.
Being such a unique selling point and so early to market with this functionality, the consumer response was really quite insane. The number of downloads and content consumption of those players was… up to five times their PC counterparts.
Now, I think it's because it's such a unique feature. It's such a unique feature for subscription services like GamePass - it's a really good way to retain players in those titles, and retain subscribers without necessarily having to ship more content. Ultimately, I think just the players were super responsive to it.
Also, some of the rules that the console systems apply actually appeared to be almost beneficial. On PC, in some of those titles, they allow all mods. So any mod that gets submitted is instantly available for all players. On consoles, they curate every week or month or whatever cadence the studio wants to curate, on to those platforms.
As a result of that curation, where they validate that the mods work and then approve them for the console device - it almost becomes an event that players look forward to. They know that every week, Snowrunner has its mod drop on Xbox and PlayStation. We get to see the new 10 mods that are coming to those devices.
So it becomes almost like a season pass… happening weekly, just due to the quality and quantity of content that's been made by the players. That then drives a lot of engagement for that game. So I think there's a number of factors that are contributing to the numbers that we're seeing. But it’s certainly very validating for us and exciting for the studios that have done it.
Simon: Great! So I guess I did have a question about mobile. I did notice that more mobile games in recent months are talking about mods - or at least unique content. I saw that SuperCell has set up a platform called MAKE where they're trying to get people to make more skins for their games. Have you got very far into the mobile space yet? What are your thoughts on how that's going to go?
Scott: Modding has historically been a PC Western game phenomenon. And its penetration into mobile markets, free to play markets, Eastern markets hasn't really happened yet. So for us, that's a really exciting opportunity and change that we see coming.
There's not a mobile studio that we can talk to, that isn't thinking about this in some form or another. And they’re considering their strategy and approach to this. From my perspective, there's a few things that I don't think studios are always aware of.
Content creation doesn't have to happen on the device of consumption. If you've got a passionate player base, modding is a multiplier of success. And so there'll be a percentage of your users that see themselves more as creators than they do as consumers. When you enable this functionality, they'll figure out whatever you offer to do it.
So in the SuperCell case, with their MAKE program, people aren’t making those characters in the game. They're using 3D editing software on PC, and then SuperCell curates the best content officially into the next release of the title.
So I think we're going to see over the next few years, a massive rise in user generated content on mobile. Those games build entire business models around content and player engagement. And there's no better way to engage players and build a flywheel that can continue to grow and sort of be self-fulfilling than user generated content.
So… it makes a lot of sense. It's just that it is complex. There's a lot more to consider. There's a lot more restrictions on those devices, and things that you've got to do to implement it. So from our perspective, we've still been focused on that traditional gamer and that core gamer…. so we don't officially have our [mobile] modding solution set up.
However, our platform is agnostic. There's absolutely no restrictions on how studios use it. So we've already seen a few smart titles that are on iOS and Android that have adapted our technology to work on those devices. And they've got content flowing through them, and being available to the players.
So we think that this is an area where the industry 's going to grow enormously. Because from my perspective, mobile is so much different from PC - where if you ship a successful game, there's probably 30 clones of it on the App Store within two months.
Like, it's incredible how quickly the industry responds to it. And so I often wonder, what happens if someone ships like a Match 3 builder on iOS, and then the players could come up with their own themes.
So then they would have made the candy, the lemonade, the chocolates, goats, whatever it might be. And they'll come up with all their own themes, animations, different gameplay modes, different progression systems. And maybe [the game] could have maybe created a lot less churn for themselves, and a lot less of this copycat phenomenon that happens.
It's pure speculation… but I often wonder what would have occurred if that had been the case? Because that's a really simple game that people would say is not suitable for modeling at all. Like, why would you want a match three game, right? The gameplay is so simple. And I'll say no. I actually think that application does make a lot of sense.
So yeah, it's an interesting area of the market. It’s still extraordinarily early, and I think it'll be several years before we start to see much movement. But there will be a lot of movement once it starts.
Simon: Talking of mobile reminded me of micro-transactions - which reminded me to ask you how you think this all works with monetization. Because clearly some [developers] are monetizing via cosmetics, and mods are sometimes cosmetics. What do you say to people who've talked to you about that?
Scott: I suppose we… point to Roblox as an example of how it can be done well, Roblox launched their Developer Exchange [in 2013], and that's the point at which creators could actually earn on the platform. And growth really kicked off for them every year subsequently.
And also what happened every year subsequently is their in-house content production, like the official content that the creators were making, became less and les. To the point where I think at the end of last year, they said that they do no in-house content production - it's entirely done by their players now.
I would like to believe that we'll see similar trends in gaming once this becomes player accepted, and it's done in the right way. And if it also becomes accessible for studios to implement.
What they'll realize - and we've talked to a lot of studios about this, and we've looked at our own metrics: the amount of content that can emerge from your creative community is upwards of 5 to 10 times what you can produce in house through your content production team. And the quality - depending on the tools you provide, the assistance you provide and especially if there is a monetary incentive, definitely trends towards matching or even exceeding what you could create in-house.
And the originality always exceeds, because modders are going to try to fill out niches and address weird and wonderful things for the game you may not have considered or thought of.
I believe that any game that approaches UGC monetization in the right way? It's not going to be an immediate impact for them. But over time, that content if presented right, if given the legitimacy and curation that it deserves, will add to the bottom line for that studio, and slowly start to displace the need and demand for in-house content.
To the point now where they can run almost user-generated content season passes, user generated content daily drops - whatever their monetization strategy is, they can start to apply those concepts, but with the creations from their community. And really, I think the reason why this hasn't occurred more, and Roblox is more of an outlier than the norm is because it's just a long way outside of what studios are comfortable, and good at doing.
[Roblox] are great at… building the infrastructure and the systems to do reporting, compliance tax and all of that on a global scale. And package it all up with community moderation, safety and everything else. That's a huge undertaking, and none of that is game development work…
Simon: And it's been a little controversial sometimes, if you've already had a modding scene out there to try and turn it paid, right? Because there were some issues where, I think, Skyrim tried to introduce paid modding and didn't go so well, if I recall?
Scott: That's correct. That's why I really emphasize there's ways for studios to do this the right way, and there's ways to do it that's the wrong way. And for us, we see it as something that should be complementary and strengthen the player experience and not necessarily change the rules on the players.
In the case of Skyrim, that's sort of unfortunately what happened, where I would say that's a community that absolutely loves content for that game. But suddenly having it all be monetized meant that there were certain conflicts… that arose. Had that not been the case and had this been something from Day One in that title, I think we would have seen a vastly different outcome. Or had it been approached in a… slightly different way, there would have been a different outcome too.
I tip my hat to them trying, and I think it's sort of the right step. But there's just probably a few more steps that need to be taken first, and a few more rules that probably needed to exist for it to happen.
But Game Pass and other subscription services are pushing access to tons of players and different business models. I think it makes too much sense for a lot of studios to ignore. And now's the time that players need to be educated and shown that user generated content and monetization can be a really positive thing, in terms of the quality and range of content that can be created as that scales up.
Simon: In some ways this is quite a different view for a core developer, though. Because as you explained it, the extreme version is Roblox. And essentially Roblox is now a platform - it’s creative, but it is enabling creativity entirely in its user base.
And for many developers, I think, that's quite surprising, because they're used to the concept that they're the font of creativity for games. So how do you think people reconcile this? Do you speak to people who are a little nervous about giving away control over creativity?
Scott: Most people are nervous, especially if their business model is already content driven. And also if they're used to having complete and utter control over their game and its direction. The notion of letting go of that is a really big step.
History, I would say, has almost always shown that your players are going to do interesting things. They're also going to very occasionally do things that you won't want. or doesn't align with your values or qualities that you set for yourself in the studio. So really, you've just got to decide how you want to approach and handle and manage that.
There's like five or six techniques that we use at Mod.io to help address this and provide studios comfort - whether it's:
* great discoverability tools that automatically surface the good content, reinforce good behavior and bury the bad.
* 24/7 community-based reporting and action systems that allow the community to control that.
* complete moderation, where you are in control of what is shown and available for your consumers at all times.
So there's a lot of different ways you can address that to provide comfort and to ensure your strategy aligns. And there's a number of projects that we're working on in Mod.io in 2022 and beyond that will further reinforce that. We want to help studios set up a really close dialogue with their creative community, so they can guide and assist in the direction that creators take their game - by running events and other mechanisms to sort of drive that.
I think it all comes down to your strategy - and every game’s strategy should be slightly different. We're happy to advise and provide our feedback on how we would approach modeling in a particular title, for studios to take on board.
Simon: In a related kind of area - how do you think companies think about legal liability? I've noticed that Roblox has a lot of arguably IP infringing stuff on it. And I think their [view] is generally to use more of a DMCA-like approach - ‘If anyone contacts us, we'll take it off’. But obviously very large companies don't tend to work like that. Do you think that's one reason why some of the largest companies have been more nervous about mods than they perhaps should have been?
Scott: I would argue that Roblox is a very large company, it was a $40 billion plus market cap when they IPO-ed, they're one of the biggest in the business. But yeah, DMCA, and the ability for community to report content is the most important tool available to us. Tthat's what the legal frameworks have sort of set, and become industry norm across all systems. And so having a very rigid process in place that allows users in-game - and via the web - to report content for IP and other reasons.
Those reports then go into a dashboard, and that dashboard is then actioned within a certain timeframe by either the studio or us. They are the steps that must be followed to ensure compliance…. That’s the way that it's done on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and any other UGC platform that allows people to submit content that they've created themselves… We're no different, and it does work quite well.
In terms of giving studios comfort, ultimately, I think that comes back to what I said previously about providing different mechanisms and ways… to approach their strategy for content in their game. Most do that reporting flow, and it works really well and they just allow all content.
But there is the option for full curation if they want it - and then they can be in complete control of that. They can also release more simplified creation tools that don't allow people to bring outside assets into their game… so the ability to do it is further reduced. So there's a lot of different ways.
Ultimately, I think the upside is that the creativity, player engagement and growth that modding drives for these titles will ultimately always outweigh the few bad actors that can be quite easily managed out of the system.
And so I think Roblox is the perfect demonstration where if they came from that mindset of worry, they would have never achieved the scale that they did. So you've got to put a new hat when you're approaching UGC and see this as an opportunity to do something bigger than you presently are - and then just decide what is your strategy for management?
Simon: Yeah, I definitely agree with your point. Roblox is a very large, very high market cap company. I guess they're not a very old company… if you have vintage lawyers in the building, they'll be like “you're doing WHAT?” Whereas I think if you've come from a YouTube generation, you're much more used to it. So I think that makes a lot of sense.
And I wanted to ask about monetization from a different point of view - which is [Mod.io’s] monetization. I know obviously you are venture funded right now, and you're just sort of scaling up. So I just wanted to ask: what is your kind of short, medium and long term business model for Mod.io?
Scott: Right now, we're going through a market education phase with UGC where, following Roblox’s success, there's probably not many studios that didn't have a look at UGC and what it can mean for their current type of games. And potentially building towards next generation of games - building it as a first class citizen and an early feature in those titles.
So we’re VC backed - we’ve got great backers and a really long roadmap that we intend to deliver. Because we understand that there's there's going to be a phase of market education. We're not necessarily in a rush to make some of the mistakes that we've seen in the past [such as] the Skyrim example.
And so we want to ensure that we have the capital necessary to deliver on our vision, which is to make the UGC much more ubiquitous across the industry, much more accepted, and a business model and a revenue generator that studios can approach and pursue - should they choose to do so.
So for us, phase one [is] market education. And that's focused across innovation and just good delivery and building a relationship with the players, the creators in the studios. And establishing ourselves as the thought leaders in the spaces. And as a result of that, for indie titles and smaller titles - Mod.io is an entirely free platform for you to use.
For larger titles and triple A titles, especially ones that want custom branding and a more ‘white label’ experience where it's integrated with their community and their single sign-on provider, we charge a nominal fee per piece of content downloaded. They can easily measure and track for usage of the service.
But ultimately, we want to be a revenue generator and a revenue positive venture for studios that want to do that. And we do acknowledge that not every studio wants to turn on revenue with mods, and they just want to leave it open. But we will provide the functionality and a fully managed solution so studios can use us to deploy ‘Roblox as a service’ in their game, where they can explore various monetization mechanisms.
[So] step one might be just as simple as the Twitch model, where it's patronage and it's just backing creators. Step two might be allowing a curated marketplace of your top [user-generated] content, almost like season passes… and then step three might be a full marketplace and a much more open system.
That's going to happen over a number of years. And so every conversation we have with Studios is different based on their needs and the direction that they're taking. And that's why the VC funded route is the right one for us.
Simon: Yeah - and I'm glad to hear that you're providing for a multitude of different options there. Because I do think there's some people who just want their mods to be free. But there's also going to be some people in the future, I'm sure, who think: “Well, someone spent a really long time on this mod, it would be nice for them to get tips or some kind of payments”. I think I get it there.
Scott: Bulk of games, I would say definitely do just want mods to be a free feature for their players that they love, and they just want that. But there's certainly also a pocket of games that their business model is shifting - and they think that it'll lead to more content for their players and better, more diverse content.
They really want to enable it and they want to explore the different ideas. And that's why we're taking this stepped approach and we're going to provide optionality and package that up.
Simon: And I think also with the Game Pass on the rise, you know - it's getting much easier to get your game into a wider audience with Game Pass. But then you do have the worry, you know - are you generating any additional revenue?
Is just the Game Pass inclusion fee going to be enough? And that's why people are looking at being slightly more aggressive there. But I also share your feeling that it's really nice to have free mods from the community, and it's nice to have other options as well. It shouldn't be one thing or the other.
So I guess we're coming towards the end here. But I just had a final question for you, which I'm asking all of our guests, which is: you don't have a lot of time to play games but - have you been playing any games in the recent or semi-recent past? And if so, which ones have you been playing?
Scott: So believe it or not, I play an enormous amount of board games. I think through the pandemic, the ability to have a really social gaming experience has been really close to my heart. And there's no more social experience than board games, because by their nature, they're sort of slower and you can chat while you play them and they're not action and necessarily fast moving.
So I found them to be a really strong social outlet for myself - and we're playing all manner of games. Just the other night we played… Power Grid - my favorite title of all time from a board game perspective to play. I've got 40 plus in my collection…
Otherwise, when I want to solo play online, I do a lot of Magic The Gathering. I’m a big fan - it's a good time sink and a perennial. They are always releasing new content. And of course, I can't go past first person shooters. So when I do get the chance, I'm [playing] Counter-Strike and Chivalry and some of these mods that were created many many years ago, and are now evolved into much more polished versions of the same game. If I feel like something competitive, I do enjoy those.
I don't play things like Elden Ring… that are really punishing. I just don't have the time and patience to handle that.
Simon: Thanks again, Scott. It was a delight to have you on the podcast.
Scott: Likewise. Thanks, Simon. Great to chat.
Simon: And that's all we've got for this installment of the podcast. We'd like to thank Scott for coming on to talk to us - you can find out more about Mod dot io at its appropriately named website, uhh, Mod.io.
This podcast is made by GameDiscoverCo, home of newsletters and consulting - and now a podcast - around game discovery. Sign up to our newsletter at newsletter.gamediscover.co, and upgrade paid to Plus access if you can. You get all kinds of cool extra stuff - and our gratitude.
Finally, the credits: many thanks to our producer, editor, and transcriber Alejandro Linares Lopez, theme tune composer Keith Baylis, aka Vimster, and all of our subscribers and listeners. And we'll see you back in GameDiscoveryLand in the near future.

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Podcast: Devolver's Clara Sia on the streamer-led discovery process for games
4 mag 2022· Tales From GameDiscoveryLand
Welcome to the third Tales From GameDiscoveryLand podcast in Season 1. In this episode, we talk to Clara Sia. She’s currently the ‘influencer strategist’ at noted indie publishing label Devolver Digital, but has previously worked in streamer relations for a number of years, and streams on Twitch herself.
Our subject? The vitally important - and very complex - YouTube and Twitch ecosystem, one of the primary ways that PC and console players discover games in the 2020s. Below is a lightly edited full transcript of the entire podcast.
Reminder: you can get hold of episodes via our official podcast page, and also via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Pocket Casts. If you need it, here’s our podcast RSS feed. And thanks in advance for listening.
Simon: Streamers - they're kind of important to people discovering your game, in 2022. Incredibly important, in fact. Which is why we were so excited to get veteran influencer manager and strategist Clara Sia to the podcast.
Clara is currently working at Devolver, and previously had a long-time stint at a third-party agency. She even streams herself on Twitch, and we had a lot to talk about, given the complex nature of the streamer ecosystem.
So let's dive straight into what I like to call streamer anthropology with Clara. I'm Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, and this is the Tales From Game Discoveryland podcast.
Simon: Hey everyone, and welcome to The Tales from GameDiscoveryLand Podcast. I'm Simon, and I'm here with Clara. How's it going?
Clara: It's going swimmingly. Yourself, Simon?
Simon: I am doing great, thank you. I'm very excited to talk to you because we're talking about streamers, and… something that I think is very important and honestly still not discussed enough in game discovery. This is how you deal with streamers, and how you interact with them, and how they think.
I wanted to start by asking you - you've been a longtime Twitch partner yourself focusing on indie titles, I wanted to ask how you personally pick games to feature. Is it the outreach from the dev? The game being great? All of the above?
Clara: Typically, all the above, I've always been a casual streamer. So just because I have a little purple check mark it doesn't mean I'm serious or like, a career streamer. I originally started playing Guild Wars 2 and then I moved on to other MMO. I originally did it because… people were giving me in-game gold towards a legendary [weapon] to stream. I… grew to love it and I moved on to triple A titles and retro games.
Then I got [Twitch] partnered later that year, and I discovered indie games for the first time. Actually, I just decided I didn't care about numbers, I cared more about just having fun and finding new things.
So the discovery is now my favorite aspect of picking and streaming games. I used to do these themed weeks like, you know, paper-themed indie games, dark-themed games, farming… Or if a game or dev at a booth made an impression on me at PAX and then follow up after, I’d play their game.
But now I'm super casual. I used to stream five days a week. Now I'm just two nights a week. So I pick something that's come out recently… that fits my current moods. It’s oftentimes more chill these days… I think they're called cozy streams now. And because I'm not a career streamer, I have the luxury to play what I want, and I don't bother with this strategic game choice.
That being said, if I ever did want to put serious focus into my stream, there'd be a number of things I'd have to change about it to be commercially successful. And that would include game choice, I would definitely have to be more strategic about it.
Simon: That's the nice thing about Twitch. You can have people from all areas, people doing it for fun, and you can have people doing it more strategically for income. And I did wonder about indie titles in particular.
It seems like maybe indie titles have a tougher time breaking through on Twitch sometimes than YouTube - have you seen that? And why do you think there might be?
Clara: I actually think it's the opposite, personally. It depends on the genre. Some genres and games will do better on Twitch than on YouTube and vice versa. They're completely different platforms & different mediums of content.
I'd say though, generally, it's probably easier to break through on Twitch than on YouTube. But YouTube has more lasting power for all genres, due to its evergreen nature. So [YouTube’s] not just for games as a service, or highly replayable games or open world games, which just typically generate more content innately. But if you have your game [featured] on YouTube, that will last forever, because they very rarely take those videos down. Whereas on Twitch, it's fleeting.
I'm not saying that [Twitch] streaming is easy. But it's definitely an easier choice for a streamer to take a chance on a game for some number of hours until they get bored than on YouTube - to commit to pre-recording, editing and then publishing it permanently… on their channel.
So for YouTubers, that content is worthless until it's published and they won't know how it will do until it is published. A streamer [Twitch] streaming a game - all of that content is usable, it's monetizable content right away because it's live. And they get live feedback as to whether or not it's working for their audience.
So for me, it's been easier to break into [pitching games to] streamers that way. And then you get the hybrid influencers who are somehow able to do both live and VOD content successfully. I'm not talking about just uploading their live streams, just raw streams to YouTube. I mean, they made YouTube-specific content, and they made Twitch-specific content.
I'm saying Twitch specifically instead of streaming because Twitch is still - by far - the king of all live streaming. So that's where you want your content to live. And in a live-stream fashion, Twitch is where you're going to be looking, mostly.
Simon: As you say, it's like if you want to put together a video for a new game on YouTube, then you are going to have to spend time learning it. And I'm always impressed with folks like Splattercat. They seem to be able to learn games enough to do pre-recorded content on them, and then edit it down. And they can only spend a day on that, and that seems really crazy to me.
So I think what you're saying is, if you want someone to try a game for two or three hours and see if they like it, then Twitch is sort of a good place for them to get started. And then maybe if you get the hang of that, then folks who are on YouTube would be also be interested in your game.
Clara: Yeah, one typically kind of follows the other. Again - it depends on the game, the launch, the story beat as well. Oftentimes you'll give YouTubers earlier access because then they can pre-record, they'll adhere to an embargo. And then they publish the content a certain day - and then live-streamers just go live.
[Twitch streamers] don't have that pre-setup time that's required. And then, as I say, oftentimes if something's a hit on YouTube, then Twitch streamers will follow and vice versa. It really depends on what the strategy is for that particular beat.
Simon: One thing that devs often ask me or I've seen them say: they feel like Let's Players or streamers are playing the same game over and over again. And in some way they feel like that's ‘unfair’, or something. Do you think that's like a fair criticism and why do you think that happens?
Clara: Well, sure, there are definitely a lot of single game or single genre streamers, It's the path of least resistance. There's often still value in targeting both variety and non-variety streamers, though. So I wouldn't necessarily rule them out. I definitely still shoot for anyone who plays in the same genre as your game, even if they stick with mostly… one or two titles.
Variety is always harder to gain traction than sticking to one game or genre. There are a number of strategies and metas that come and go in order to maximize viewership.. But they do it for a reason, for the same reason that sitcoms have formulaic structures.
You set the expectation and then you meet the expectation. It's very tempting for streamers, especially new streamers, who want to be unique to have specially themed days, regularly scheduled events like talk shows, interview segments, things like that but. But by and large it alienates their viewers… it segments them. Viewers typically want a consistent experience, with very little barrier to entry.
And talking about streamers specifically. YouTube again, you can have the preamble it's all pre-recorded. It’s edited - you can skip back and forth. But unlike YouTube, you can't really easily rewind [on Twitch]. It's not designed that way as a live-stream - [you can’t] catch up on any pertinent information, find out what's going on.
The majority of [Twitch] stream [viewers] will join midstream. Some will ask what's going on - at which point the streamer or moderator needs to interrupt things, answer them, fill them in. Most viewers on Twitch, though they don't talk at all. They just don't chat. They're just what we call lurkers.
They take in, maybe a minute or two of content… and then they silently decide to go elsewhere, if they aren't immediately caught on to what's happening. So for me it's understandable why a streamer would choose to stick to one genre or one game, because it is the path of least resistance. That is where… the easiest revenue lies for most.
Simon: So for example, for Northernlion, if you come onto one of his streams as a viewer, you're expecting him to be playing some kind of randomized game where he's making slightly sarcastic comments to the audience. And it's kind of different every time, right? That's how it works.
Clara: Yes, and then if he finds a game - and it's not just limited to Northenlion. But if he finds a game, he typically sticks with it for a while if it does really well. I think right now he's really into Super Auto Pets, and he gained a lot of notoriety from The Binding of Isaac.
Roguelikes have great replayability. Everyone kind of plays through them differently, and you get different stories every single time, so… yeah.
Simon: I wanted to ask a little bit about designing games to be streamer friendly. I think we've seen games like Isaac that have done tremendously well - it's got a multi-year ‘long tail’ on streamers. Have you identified the particular things in The Binding of Isaac that makes [streamers] play it for so long, so far after release?
Clara: The replayability is huge. If you've got a one shot narrative game, you get one playthrough out of it at most. Most [streamers] don't even finish them, typically - a lot of streamers don't finish games. If they're variety [streamers], they just keep moving on to it.
I'm one of those people as well. You just keep moving on if you don't stream very often. If you stream a lot, sure. There are people who grind it out and do 12-hour streams a day. I cannot fathom that. But most of the time, these people are streaming in their off-time, they have regular day jobs and they're ‘tasters’.
About what made games [replayable]? Well, first of all the genre. [For] roguelikes, the randomness of it, the procedurally generated aspects of those games make it so that each experience is different. And every influencer creator wants to be unique, they want to stand out - and they want to create their own stories.
One [aspect] is through the gameplay itself. Another one is through its presentation and how unique it looks. I advise on how to make games appealing to streamers all the time… but I would never dream of changing a developer's vision, if streamers aren't part of their interest in marketing.
So not every game is made for streaming. Not every genre will appeal to influencers, and some of them are just as a whole tough to sell. So point and clicks, for instance, or puzzle games. That's always going to be: “you're fighting against the stream”.
They'll still make it. There's always going to be the one or two breakouts here and there. But for the most part, it's instantly: ”Oh, we've got a lot of work here”. So any [game] where the playthroughs are unique to each player, typically have a better chance to pick up [interest]. Like sandbox, survival, branching story paths, ‘choices matter’, even if it's vanity.
Anything where the influencers can make their own hilarious stories. We just actually launched an immersive sim called Weird West that I knew would generate some crazy shareable moments on social. There are friends within the Northernlion ‘circle’ who will play games that he recommends - because they talk, they know each other very well.
They know what they're into, and then they create new ‘inside jokes’ within the streaming communities, which is something just so attractive to them. Anything that generates strong reactions.
So horror games will always have a place in content creation, absolutely… and then of course, you want to have something that's visually appealing or interesting. And interesting is in the eye of the beholder. So… it can absolutely look like a super low-poly mess, and it'll still be appealing.
It can still be appealing to influencers, I mean, look at Crab Game, right? Give them some good clickable thumbnails… you don't have to be hyper realistic, but have a distinct look and that is already a huge step above 95% of what's released on Steam.
Then [streamers/YouTubers] will mostly be talking over your game, so sound is slightly less important, but still important. It's one of the most commented-on aspects of the game, as you're watching any streams. Like: “Wow, this music is so great”, or “their voice acting is really good”. But not too much voice acting, because then you're taking away from the streamer’s voice.
So they're all these little aspects that affect the appeal to streamers. And then… you can get really fancy and do Twitch integrations, ‘chat to game’ interaction, Twitch extensions, metagames… it goes on and on and on.
Simon: How much do you think the streamer has to ‘think’ when they're playing a game, versus responding to the audience? Because I've had this concern… if some games are too complicated, you won't really be able to spend any time seeing what your viewers are doing. Is there kind of a ‘happy medium’ there?
Clara: Oh, that's tricky because you [have to take into account] different bands of streamers and their concurrent viewership. So the bigger the stream, the less likely they're going to be reading their chat at all. They kinda glance from time to time, pick out some choice things to respond to, and then they go back to the game.
If they're skill-based influencers… like, shooter type influencers or strategy-based, and so you're seeing them putting in some ‘sick plays’ as they call it - they interact a lot less, because they actually stay focused.
Most streamers, though… are more seen as entertainment streamers. And they will do about half and half. When I play a game and someone [asks] “How far are you into this game?” to tell them how much progress I'm at, [I say] “I've been playing it for four hours… but realistically, in real game hours, it’s like two and a half.”
Because that's how much [non-game] time I'm spending rambling off-tangent about things, responding to chat, reading chat, looking at other clips, getting distracted with Tweets and things that people want to show me. I have ADHD, I'm diagnosed with ADHD, so it's even harder for me to stay focused. But that's kind of part of the fun.
Simon: It basically means you just need to be able to stop playing the game for a little bit to see what people are talking about. Or indeed, if your chat is going so fast, because you're a really popular streamer, it's not like you see what's going on that much anyhow. You're just going to be concentrating on… if people are subbing to you, and you're [just] going to say thanks to them.
Clara: Exactly - you reward the people to monetize your stream. There was this incident where Sodapoppin - he's so big and his chat is just constantly moving. He didn't even know, there's unfortunately things called hate raids, I'm not sure if you’re familiar [with the term]. But he received the hate raid, and he didn't even know it happened, because he just doesn't look.
But you don't want to ignore your…. smaller or mid tier streamers. They have highly dedicated audiences, they are just lapping up every word. They're there to watch whatever that streamer plays. They're there for the community and for the streamer, not necessarily for just the gameplay.
So they're also important in your marketing plan. Don't take those out of your plan - always take them into account. And those are the ones where you can actually be in the chat, as a developer or publisher You can sit in that chat, you can interact with them and get direct feedback, or you can just listen.
Simon: I was interested in talking about… how you subdivide streamers, at least mentally. You talked about it a little bit and I think it's just difficult. A lot of developers, who have not really paid a lot of attention to the streaming world? It's difficult for them to [understand]. So, if you were to subdivide the three or four main types of streamer - could you?
Clara: Yeah, and it's not just streamers, it's all kinds of influencers, including YouTubers. I will always avoid, when I can - unless it's a very specific crowd - ‘No Commentary’ YouTube channels. I mean, they're called spoiler channels for a reason.
Their audiences, by and large, watch those videos because they don't want to buy the game. They just want to see it. And so they'll post all the boss fights or all the cut-scenes, or just play through it so they don't have to buy it.
But there are certain channels like Alpha Beta Gamer for instance, right? It’s ‘No Commentary’, but his audience specifically looks for new and upcoming games that might interest them. So there's always exceptions, but you just have to get to know them.
Definitely don't strictly use follower and subscriber counts as the only metric to care about. There's the highly engaging [influencers] - it's so hard to break them up. Fur sure, there’s entertainment - but that's in itself such a big category, and the skill-based. And then you’ve got the Tomato-s of the world (Dumb Dog is another one). He's very good at games, and can read chat… and can make funny commentary and stories.
And then from that you've got the highly engaged [streamers and YouTubers] - they're very concerned with the community… they will respond in the comments, they will respond to chat. They have Discord channels that they participate in every day, they're on social, they respond on social…
And those are very appealing to marketing as well, because their audiences are there for them, they will listen to them - they have true influence. Then there's the other [category of influencers] that are very commercial. They're there for the brand deals. They are celebrity level, and they also have value, depending on your beat. But, you know, get ready for other types of conversation that come up.
Speaking of the follower and subscriber counts: look at their views more, the concurrent viewership. Look at engagement - is there any? You're gonna see some channels that have very high viewership and zero comments - what is up with that? If there are comments, what are they saying? Is their community a good fit? Are they asking questions? Or are they just saying, “nice”?
What kind of commentary does a creator do? Are they more critical? Like, for instance, Splattercat is there to specifically showcase new games. He is there for the discovery. He's there to spotlight devs, and so a service for them, as well as his viewers. Or are they more involved with just making revenue and boosting their brand?
What kind of content do they make? Do they do Let's Plays, editorials, reviews, comedy cuts, Top 10 lists, more deep-dive tips and guides? There's just so many different types of activations that you can get into. So it's really hard for me to bucket them all.
Simon: That's kind of why I like the space. So I think I'm a bit of a wannabe cultural anthropologist, you know, and I think there's so much out there. There's so many weird scenes and specific types of streamers. Like, because I was a little bit involved behind the scenes on Hypnospace Outlaw, I was checking out Jerma's stream [of the game]. And you know, he has a whole other kind of very odd ‘meta’.
And there's all kinds of interesting people out there. But it's definitely been my contention that a lot of game companies don't spend enough time understanding this space. Has that been your one of your thoughts - that maybe sometimes we spend a lot of time thinking about sending out press releases, but less time on getting deep into the anthropology of how streamers work?
Clara: I love that you call it the anthropology of streamers. It has its own ecology, its own ecosystem. I can't tell you my time where one of my previous clients, any of my previous clients would ask me things like “Clara, Is ‘POGGERS’ Good?” or “What is ‘kappa’?” [Poggers and Kappa are Twitch expressions]
So how do you get around that? I mean, if you have the time, if you have the energy and you have the resources to do it, be a part of the culture. Join the streams, watch the videos, be in their chats or Discords, interact with them on Twitter - which by the way, is still the best place to connect with them on social media. It’s not Instagram, it’s not TikTok. Some of them are there for sure, but Twitter is still the place to be.
It is a culture with many subcultures. And it's not just understanding the lingo, it's also (and this is probably the biggest disconnect here) understanding their needs. There's a massive, massive lack of appreciation for what influencers want in a partnership with brands, which includes game devs.
Ultimately, they want engagement, they want viewership. It's how they make their revenues, how they grow, how they obtain notoriety, and garner and hold on to influence - whether or not they like that word. A lot of people don't like that word, but that's what they want.
They want to legitimize their long hours. But what affects that viewership - up or down? That's the mystery. So you have to put in the time and energy to get the creator ethos. It is very time consuming, that's why I had a job for four years at the agency, and the business only grew and grew, as our success and influencers grew.
To give a little context, there were only two of us influencer managers there in a team of 13-14. By the time I left, 40% of the company’s revenue for that year was influencer work. So it's such a large piece of the industry that deserves to be understood. and will only pay back to you if you take the time to understand it.
Simon: I completely agree. I've interviewed SplatterCat for this newsletter. I had NorthernLion talk at GDC in 2014. So I've definitely been super interested in the space for a long time. And I think what people sometimes fail to appreciate is just the depth of these audiences, and… the amount of streamers you can deal with, even foreign language streamers.
I found that there can be German language streamers or Turkish language streamers that are massive as well. How do you try and keep track of that type of stuff? Do you have a country by country list as well? Because not all these folks are English language speakers.
Clara: Not country by country but language, because they are all over the place [geographically]. So in French, it could be any number of countries that have France as their national language. When I was at the agency, I was global outreach. Now that Im at Devolver Digital and we have an army of PR agencies from around the world, I can now disseminate some of that work - because they speak the language.
It helps with a lot of things, not the least of which getting embargo information very clearly communicated with very little risk of miscommunication. But I have affinities with, definitely, certain demographics, certain non-English demographics.
I absolutely love Portuguese creators, they are fantastic. The Spanish creators also, there's highly, highly dedicated audiences, massive audiences. Probably some of the biggest audiences if not the biggest audiences you'll see on Twitch are actually, I think, from Spanish and Portuguese streamers.
Korean streamers are also fantastic, I love the German streamers as well. They each sort of have like things that they gravitate to a little bit more to. Russian streamers and Russian YouTubers - very highly dedicated. And kind of a tip if you want to look at sponsoring them, they have lower rates by far [compared to] North American streamers and YouTubers.
We coordinate the outreach. We make sure all the timing is the same. Certain regions may get a little extra love, depending where our devs are. Because there might be any certain affinities to [the game], or if [a region] has shown any special affinities to a game pre-launch, which does happen a lot.
For instance, Serious Sam [games] are made by Croatian devs. And then the latest Serious Sam game came out from a Russian mod team turned dev team, and so we had lots of love from Russia. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open and be very, very open to the fact that it's not just about our little bubble here. There's tons of influencers all around the world, and they're just wonderful to work with. I absolutely love it.
Simon: You mentioned the paid side of things and I was going to ask. Obviously, you have been involved in helping to pick streamers for paid streams but - do you have any tips for people considering using paid streamers? Are there times when you can pay money and it's really a waste? Or is it that some types of streamers do you think don't get great ROI for people who actually are selling games?
Clara: Oh yes… when I was at the agency I ran end to end service for influencer campaigns. So I also created processes… what that means is if there was an influencer budget for a launch from what any of my clients, I'd be the one to spend it. I’d do the recommendations, I’d create the lists, I’d do the outreach and the negotiations, the admin work, the legal contract, the compliance, all that stuff. So the budgets ranged from $5000 to six digits - and I came close to a seven figure spend at one point.
If you're considering paying for content, sponsoring influencers, creators? You can do any sort of activations… and it doesn't have to be just gameplay. I actually personally love the more creative things like doing a cosplay, or commissioning a creative controller.
But, you know, anytime you're paying, that is the one spot in influencer marketing where I will always say to hire someone because it is terrible work to just walk into uninitiated. It's not just a matter of “Okay, well, if you do this, I'll just paypal you 50 bucks” or “I'll send you $1,000”.
It is curating, first of all, the right talent for the part. There are literally tens of millions of streamers… and YouTube is massive. Then there's negotiating the rates and the terms, the deliverables. And you're not talking with independents only at that point, you're talking with the agencies [or talent managers] that represent them.
There's [also] contracts… definitely have one drafted up by someone in the legal world, don't do it yourself, cover your butts… there's also a lot of nuance for negotiating rates. It's not just a matter of standardized CPMs. You have to consider their actual influence, their engagement across all the social platforms, the production quality, the value adds and follow ups, especially if it's evergreen, you know, [if it] lives forever.
Some agencies just charge more for the one-off activations, because they're mostly interested in long term brand deals, or they're very old school Hollywood. There are some agencies that are very much snapping up influencers now… and you'll see eight managers and their assistants on every email. Every single one of those people gotta get a piece of the pie. All I see the dollar signs going up, up up, when I work with them - it's gotta be worth it.
And then sometimes the advice is not to spend any money at all. There's a misconception that if you have a big game, that's when you should have your big budget. For indies… the sorta double A area, that's just not going to be the case and definitely not for triple As.
I definitely had some triple A clients back at the agency - they had so much power and influence as the brand… those games will get coverage, and you don't need to spend money there. I mean, you can and you'll still probably get something out of it. But it's the ones that need the visibility, that's where you need to put the budget. It’s reversed. That's one thing that I tried to get out there.
Everyone's approach with the deliverables is differeent. Mine is simply have fun, make the game look good, make me look good and that's it. I don't want to take away your voice…
Simon: Yeah, you don't want to be too specific. Because as you say, if you're producing agreements [that say] ‘you can't say these 12 terms while you're doing the video’…
Clara: ‘Make sure you have the six hashtags in your going live tweet’, yes, let's just kill their algorithmic engagement right off the top!
Simon: I'm also on the same page with you - I'm definitely a bit of a paid ad skeptic in general. But I do think you're right - in many cases, big brands can spend around launch and it won't hurt.
But probably, people were gonna pick up that games to start with anyway. And if they keep playing it is going to be based on whether it's actually a good game or not - which you can't really control on the marketing and streaming side of things.
Clara: To answer one part of the question that I totally neglected - who isn't as effective. There are certain spheres where they're mostly meme or troll channels. Their viewers are there to watch them, their personalities, and they aren't really there to buy the games at all.
You'll still get a bump by giving them a code. If they play the game, your [Twitch] category will rise just from that alone - their numbers will just bump the category up, that's good too. But you probably want to stay away from paying their agencies. They charge a lot of money, and you're not getting as much back for that - so just something to keep in mind.
Simon: Yeah, maybe folks [like that] are good for selling energy drinks, but they might not be good for selling games.
Clara: Exactly, or toilet paper which I have seen - I think it's hilarious.
Simon: Yeah, it's getting pretty non-endemic with sponsors.
Clara: I love the blend of lifestyle and gaming - it’s the dream.
Simon: I had another related question. And I'm not picking on any of these sites in particular. But what do you think of third party sites that match streamers to devs and publishers like Woovit, Keymailer or Lurkit. How do you think they fit into the ecosystem?
Clara: I think marketing is hard and expensive, and game development is hard and expensive. I don't ever blame anyone for using those services. And in most cases, it's probably better than nothing at all. But you do have to be careful who you're dealing with.
Certain platforms I won't name which have had practices where they simply list every game. It's just standard. They list every game out there on the platform, and available for requests. They take requests, the dev and publisher have no knowledge of this, and then they get pitched for a sale with like: “Look at all the people interested in your game that we drummed up”.
So that's not the best practice and they promised me that they stopped doing that. But I'm still finding our games on there completely not initiated by us or our devs.
And despite [these sites] all claiming that it's impossible to spoof identities of influencers on there, I have been shown by influencers how easy it is to pretend to be them asking for keys on those platforms. I have… countless times asked someone that I actually know, sent him a DM: “Did you request this key?” And he’s like: “I've never signed up for that platform.”
It got to the point where I didn't send any keys at all of those platforms. I'd reject everyone, and then send the keys… directly, to their DM and email. So it at least got to the right place, whether or not they wanted the key in the first place. At least I'm not neglecting them if it happened to be them, and it's not going to somewhere else.
Just to clarify - why do people do this - why do they spoof, why do they scam? Whether it's on the key distro platforms or a YouTube scam network, they're just getting more [popular] now, vanity Steam curators or over email - it's because they want to make money selling those [Steam] keys on the gray market.
I've had many small devs tell me they put their games up for Early Access to [get] visibility on these platforms - and then their games end up on cracked warez sites… or the gray markets within days.
So… if you want to put money into doing even the bare minimum work in influencer outreach, hire a freelancer who has actual relationships with influential creators, and then they can get the keys to the right place. Even with the most reputable platforms… you're not hitting the really big people, because those influencers are in such high demand. Almost none of them use these platforms.
Simon: I think sometimes these platforms… some of them are well run, and some of them get kind of good levels of small and medium creators. But ultimately, I fear that there's sometimes a bit of a box-ticking exercise for PR companies who want to show that they know how to do streamers.
Because they can send people who don't know any better a list of all the people who ask for a key - despite the fact that those people may or may not be influential, or on a few occasions, may or may not be the people that they claim that they are.
Clara: Also… [on] Steam curators. I just Tweeted about this. But I have a plea - please, to anyone listening, please stop sending Steam curator keys over email. If you're going to send them at all… please send them over Curator Connect, where they get the game sent directly to their [Steam] library, and they can't resell them.
If they're asking for keys over email, it's because they want unredeemed keys to sell in the gray market. And they certainly do not need multiple keys for their “Team” to write two sentences and click ‘Recommended’, because there's a character limit.
Simon: I actually think it's unfortunate. I think the Steam Curator system started out as a good idea, but I think it's become a little non-dynamic. And I think in the end, it wasn't quite the solution to the problem it wanted it to be.
And in fact, the uplift… even if a medium sized [Steam] curator covers you is a little is a little limp,still. So yeah, I think it's worth staying away from entirely, potentially.
Clara: Oh, well. I didn't say it but…
Simon: I just did, I’m in charge, I’m in charge of this podcast so I guess it’s OK [laughs]
So just focusing on what maybe devs and publishers misunderstand about streamers: I know we talked about this a little bit, but I do feel like there's gonna be quite a lot of the audience who just don't deal with streamers, Twitch-ers or YouTubers on a regular basis. What's the thing a lot of people misunderstand when they think about the motivation of streamers?
Clara: Definitely one is exactly what you said, just the motivations of streamers. It's very basic - they just want viewership. They want to have something that's sellable to their viewers, whether it's just watching or they're actually buying and they get affiliate revenue out of it - it doesn't matter.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions isn't about the streamers themselves. I don't think there's the biggest mystery there. It's actually what we [as streamer relations professionals] do. I think, the mystery [from a client side] is like - ‘What are we hiring? Are you just sending things out?’
I've never really kept secrets from my clients… I just send the same email that you do. Mine might be even more boring, because otherwise I end up in spam. But they respond to mine. So it's the relationship and the steeped know-how - that's what you're buying when you hire an influencer marketer.
It's just the fact that we've been talking to them a long time. We get them. And a common misconception of what we do is the same [issue] as community managers: “Oh, they just tweet a lot of things” No, it's a lot of… behind the scenes strategizing. Actually… I got to pick my title when I went to Devolver, it was influencer relations manager at the agency, and I changed it from influencer to strategist.
It came to me in a dream, because a lot of people just think I sit at my desk and send game keys out to streamers and YouTubers all day. [That is] the smallest part of my job. The work is mostly consultation - it’s strategies, recommendations, anticipating response, setting expectations, planning, pivoting, constant change, executing both paid and organic work, and then extending that tail even after launch.
And that's something I really love about working in-house versus at an agency. There's pros and cons to either. At the agency, I felt more like a mercenary - whereas I feel more ownership working in-house at Devolver Digital. These games are my games, you know. And I feel like I own them forever. But maintaining relationships is still the key. So my job starts actually as early as the pitch - from the first call. And then it straddles… community [and] production, but mostly lies in marketing.
One thing that I think developers don’t understand is how to interact… with influencers in a stream chat. For instance, I see all the time - very key mistake - they backseat [the] game. You know, they just don't want the streamer to miss anything, so they go: “No, look under the box, there's something in there.” Don't do that, please. Seriously, let them experience it themselves - nothing will kill the stream faster.
Then, maybe this was a bit controversial: I don't think you have to play games or a lot of games to make a good, even commercially successful, game. But I do think that if you want to specifically appeal to creators as part of your plan, you need to stand out.
And to do that, you need to know what has stood out before to them, what appeals to them. And you have to play a lot of games to understand that. That’s one of my values. I play a lot of games - I'm always playing games. And if a pitch comes in, I can compare it to a lot of things that have worked and have not worked and why. “Let's look at the difference?” - “How does this stand a chance?”
Something else, almost no streamer likes motion blur. Give us the option to turn it off. And accessibility options - hugely important to a vast number of streamers. These are people now showcasing how your game is playable, how it's played. Give them more options. I think that's a really big one to highlight.
Simon: I think discovery, as I've talked about extensively in my newsletter, starts very early in development. So I also feel when I consult or when I work on things, if I'm bought in with like three months to go, I'm kind of like: “Well, I can help you 20%, but it would have been 80% if we talked about this like a year and a half ago.” So…
Clara: As the letter pusher, I will send emails for you [laughs]
Simon: Yeah, I can definitely hit the send button [laughs] - let’s talk a bit earlier about this.
I think it requires you to have a more holistic approach. I do think that's key nowadays, because to your point - I'm looking at games that are popular on Steam now, and a lot of it's driven by streamers. So you really need to have a good understanding of whether streamers will like your game, quite early in the process.
Clara: Yeah, absolutely, and then sometimes you just throw the kitchen sink out. Go on Twitch, throw some GIFs out, throw some MP4s out - what is it that people engage with? What did they lean into? Again, if that is your goal. If you don't care for influencers, make the game of your dreams - don't compromise for anything.
But, you know, do your A/B testing, get out there, there's no time like today to get out there. But as you mentioned, holistic approach. When I look at a pitch, I don't just look at the pitch. If I'm interested, I then go to their Twitter accounts or social media, I check out if they've got a Discord - how's their community? How healthy is it? What are they talking about? Are they already sharing? You know - what are their values? It's absolutely a holistic approach when you are dealing with this.
Simon: Yeah and that's interesting, because certainly as an influencer strategist, that isn't necessarily what people would expect you will be doing. But I do think that's an important part if you're really going to help with strategy, which I think is increasingly important.
Clara: Yeah, I mean, like for me, one of the biggest things I do is - what is the hook? What is the thing I can do? What is the one sentence I can use to sell a game to influencers? Sometimes it's simply notoriety - “This guy made Pony Island”. That was enough for Inscryption for instance, you know. Daniel Mullins, he's got his cult following, or like - “Do you like Frog Fractions?”
I don't typically like to do it, because to me it feels reductive. But, you know, saying things like “Zelda meets Dark Souls”. But I know that it does sell - quickly - an idea. And it's not to be reductive. It's simply, like: “No, listen to the rest of what I have to say” So yeah, it is finding what influencers like, what's worked for them, what it is that they put in their [YouTube] titles - that's a big clue.
Actually, if you go to YouTube, there are two things that are very important to the algorithm for pickup. And if they do well in the algorithm, you do well.. One is the thumbnail: give them assets, transparent, layered assets, isolated assets that they can customize for their video. The worst thing you can do is only provide the same key art to everybody, and that's it.
They can't do anything else - they have to get their own screenshots, which may or may not do very well. Give them elements to move around and make unique thumbnails, that's part of the algorithm pick up. The other one is [YouTubers] think really hard on their video titles, because that is also algorithmim.
So look at what they write in their titles. SplatterCat, like you said, excellent dude for picking the right words that will get picked up by the algorithm. He plays so many different game types - look at what he's writing about, and that's what they're interested in.
Simon: We actually just had a podcast… from Kate Gray and… she's worked in NintendoLife, Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun, and she was talking about the importance of giving key art to the press as well.
We definitely think that getting the right key art to people is important. And it's not always the same art that you put on your Steam page. So you really need to think about, like, how you're segmenting your media, and who you're sending it to.
Clara: Absolutely.
Simon: I think we're getting towards the end here. But I'd like to ask a final question that I'm asking to all of my guests. And it's just in terms of what games you've been playing recently or semi-recently that you're really excited about, that you'd like to tell our audience about.
Clara: What am I not? [laughs]
I'll leave Devolver games off the list because I'm always playtesting. Lately, very most recently, Tunic is absolutely brilliant. I recently 100 percent-ed Nobody Saves The World, also brilliant from Drinkbox.
Clara: I've also like the rest of the world been playing Elden Ring. It's on the backburner now while I get through the latest launches. Or, as I like to call it, ‘Breath of the Wild on crack’, because it is amazing. Just imagine Breath of the Wild but there's real danger everywhere - love it.
I regularly revisit Deep Rock Galactic, one of my favorite games of all time. I just started Core Keeper, I am obsessed with getting my biweekly-ish achievements in Vampire Survivors, it’s an auto-fighting game - it's so good.
I got hooked on Dicey Dungeons recently, it's kind of an older one. I'm halfway through a run on The Captain, which is a fantastic little sort of choose your own adventure game, fairly well written great pixel graphics. I just got back into Hades, I 100 percent-ed that, and Dandy Ace, in the same category. I’m replaying Katamari Damacy, and Cookie Clicker because I'm a loser.
Simon: I think you managed to singlehandedly exceed the number of games mentioned in all four of the recorded podcasts so far - so congratulations.
All of those great games - apparently I don't make enough time to play those, but I obviously need to. I'm impressed and as you say, it’s good professional work as well. I presume you expense those games, I hope, because it is a business expense.
Clara: You know, I should start [laughs] I expense my Xbox Game Pass. I'll say that.
Simon: Okay, it's a good start.
Well, that was wonderful and thank you, that was a great list of games - some of which I'm gonna have to go back to, I think. [laughs] And yeah, once again, thank you so much for being on the podcast, it was a pleasure. That was lots of amazing feedback about streamers, and how you approach them and how you work. So thank you.
Clara: It’s been an honor to have been on here. Thank you so much for the invite.
Simon: And that's the end of this particular podcast.
We'd like to thank Clara for coming on to the podcast. You can check her Twitter account at SeriouslyClara if you'd like to know more about her and her work.
Once again, this podcast is made by GameDiscoverCo, home of newsletters and consulting - and now a podcast - around video game discovery. Sign up to our newsletter at http://newsletter.gamediscover.co, and upgrade paid to Plus access if you can. You get extra newsletters, charts, Discord access, eBooks and more.Our final credits: many thanks to our producer, editor, and transcriber Alejandro Linares Lopez, theme tune composer Keith Baylis, aka Vimster, and all of our subscribers and listeners. We'll see you back in Game Discoveryland in a while. Thanks for listening.

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Podcast: Dread Hunger's James Tan talks the hit social deduction game.
19 apr 2022· Tales From GameDiscoveryLand
Welcome to the second Tales From GameDiscoveryLand podcast in Season 1. In this episode, recorded a few weeks back, we talk to James Tan of Digital Confectioners, one of the key creators of smash hit social deduction game Dread Hunger. He talks about the project’s ‘hook’, its surprise Chinese success, and post-1.0 path to 1 million units sold (!).
Presented by Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, this bi-weekly, limited series podcast features conversations with smart people in the video game industry on how games get discovered and played. Below is a lightly edited full transcript of the entire podcast.
Reminder: you can get hold of episodes via our official podcast page, and also via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Pocket Casts. If you need it, here’s our podcast RSS feed. And thanks in advance for listening.
Podcast transcript: Dread Hunger’s James Tan!
SIMON: Imagine you're an explorer, trapped on a ship in the Arctic tundra, with your crewmates. Some of them may not be entirely who they seem. How do you survive, find the traitors, and win the game? This is the conundrum in the Digital Confectioners-published social deduction game Dread Hunger. It's one of the top titles on Steam right now, thanks to its massive viral success in China.
For our latest podcast, we had a chance to explore these wild viral discovery moments for the game with James Tan, one of the main creators of Dread Hunger. How did the team approach development? Why did the game take off shortly after its 1.0 launch? And what can we all learn from his success?
I'm Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, and this is the Tales From Game Discoveryland podcast.
[Music]
SIMON: Great, so here I am and I'm here with James Tan, how's it going, James?
JAMES: Hey Simon, this guy really well, thank you.
SIMON: Cool, yeah, I'm excited about this because you're one of my first guests on the podcast, and I get to talk to you about Dread Hunger. And Dread Hunger is a game that's doing pretty well recently. So firstly, congratulations on that - are you happy with how it's being received right now?
JAMES: Thank you. Likewise, this my first podcast so I'm very excited to do this as well. Yes, I would say we're extremely happy with the results, and extremely happy about the success of the game.
SIMON: What I wanted to start with was talking about the background of the creation of the game. I know that social deduction games have been around for a while - even before Among Us. And Among Us is obviously a well-known one. But there's also games in VR - like Ubisoft had Werewolves Within that I think was social deduction as well. So I wanted to ask - what made your team want to make a game like this? What's the genesis of the project?
JAMES: So this project started around late 2019, when we got together with a good friend of ours, [Killing Floor creator] Alex Quick. We had made games together in the past - we made Depth together way back. 2012 was when we started that project together with him. And essentially, I gave Alex and my lead product designer Neil free rein to do whatever they felt like doing. And given that Depth was an almost hardcore, PvP, asymmetric style shooter, they wanted to do something a little different.
They explored around all these different genres and all these different themes - and they settled upon social deduction. It wasn't very popular right at that moment, and they've been playing some really popular board games surrounding social deduction, things like The Resistance, card games like that.
I think that sort of sparked this initial idea of: “Oh, what happens if we try asymmetric from a different angle of hidden information, rather than one side is sharks and one side is divers.” They are obviously very different. But in this case, it was more about “Oh, what if the asymmetry was about information, and how asymmetrical that that can be?”
And it sort of evolved from that idea, rather than looking at: “Is social deduction a really popular genre within the gaming space at that time?” In terms of the theming, a lot of it was very much based on on the TV series The Terror. At the time we didn't think many people were looking at that - so that's why we decided to go with that theme.
SIMON: And that's pretty interesting from a discovery point of view. You were accidentally early to a genre that, at least from Among Us perspective, suddenly became quite popular… Probably from a discovery point of view it's better to go into a genre that has some people familiar with it, than one where you have to blaze your own trail, right?
JAMES: So when we first started looking at these genres, social deduction and survival, we started by picking out the stronger genre, which was actually survival at the time. We wanted to have that asymmetrical gameplay using some of the misinformation [concepts].
But the game initially was more focused on the survival elements and sprinkles of misinformation, where one player would say “Oh, you know, I just went and did this” when they actually didn't do that - or “I just saw somebody do this”, when that actually didn't quite happen.
We really liked those kinds of betrayal moments. They gave players more room for player-generated stories about funny things that would happen. I think it's fair to say that when Among Us really started gaining a lot of traction… [we] pivoted a little bit in the marketing message. So we focused a bit more on: “You’re all trying to survive in the cold scenery, you don't know what is… in the wilderness out there and there’s these animals trying to hunt you down.” And on top of that” “the worst enemy is potentially your crewmate.” And I think that made for a really compelling theme.
SIMON: When I was talking to you ahead of this podcast, you wanted to make sure that you’d answer who would say “isn't it just Among Us in 3D?” To your point… there's quite a lot more gameplay in it, right? There's a lot of survival elements, there’s action. So you would describe it much more as a hybrid, genre-wise than simply a pure social deduction game, right?
JAMES: Yeah. I think the best way of putting it is that Among Us really focuses just purely on the social deduction - that’s the pure focus. Because we throw in more survival elements, we get to the point of feelings, like, desperation of ‘how do I survive?’
And maybe in order to survive, there are things that I'm going to need to do that I otherwise normally wouldn't. And so trying to put players in that kind of situation. I think it's very similar to maybe how you would actually feel if you were stuck in the Arctic, and you had a very small crewmate size. And you're trying to go out and look for resources, food… and there probably are things you're going to have to do in that situation.
I think the strongest element in Among Us: when you are the impostor, it's very clear that you know what you're supposed to do. You're just supposed to eliminate everybody else in the most stealthy way as you possibly can. And when somebody gets eliminated, they go into that discussion room to figure out who is or who isn't the impostor. And then they throw whoever [they think] that is into space.
In Dread Hunger, it’s a lot more about subtlety. There's a lot more arguing in terms of “yeah, but he did this” or “he also did this” or “she did this, but she also did that”. You know, “why would, in our case, an impostor have been a troll?”, “why would a troll go and get all this coal for us that we actually need - like, why would they do that?” And possibly the troll is playing a long game, so he tricks them or tries to gain their trust.
There's a lot more of those elements coming in when you can do actions where you're trying to gain somebody's trust,. So during our play tests… when we were playing, often we would play the long game, where we would gain everybody's trust. And just constantly say things like: “if I was a troll, I wouldn't be bringing back all this wood” or “I wouldn't be bringing back all this coal”. Only for… halfway through the game or near the end of the game, we’d be saying: “Haha, actually, I was the troll and I've just stolen all your food”, or “I've just poisoned all your food”.
There's a lot of these kinds of subtle elements which feed into the social deduction. We feel rather than just accusing somebody just outright: “Oh, you're the impostor”? There's really not a lot you can do about that situation, once the group has decided that.
Even if somebody identifies you as a troll [in Dread Hunger] and says, like, “I actually saw this player do this thing” which… positively identifies him as a troll? Because it's still a survival game, trolls can still fight back. So yes, they might be discovered. But that's not the end of the world for them. So they can still gather resources to craft weapons… and just go on the offensive.
SIMON: That's pretty cool… it's pretty complex. It's interesting to me in terms of how you developed this - there's obviously quite a lot of complexity of tactics. How did you work with earlier development? Did you announce the game early? Did you have a lot of further alphas and betas to get people interested, and then tuned the gameplay? Or were you a bit more private earlier?
JAMES: We were definitely a lot more private early on, I would say. There was just a lot more experimentation. And I think it's fair to say that this is where a lot of the experience comes in.
With Alex and Neil having played a lot of these social deduction board games, [they considered] what are the kinds of emotions or feelings, or the kind of situations we want to recreate within this game. And then thinking about the game design from a point of view of - rather than just the straight mechanics of “Okay, so we add this weapon that will allow players to do X or Y or Z?”, it's more thinking “Well, what are tools that we can add to the player's arsenal that could create these situations for us?”
SIMON: In terms of design, it seems like you've kept it pretty close to the chest. And even in terms of announcing the game - how long before Early Access release did you end up announcing? And how did you go about building up a head of steam for Early Access?
JAMES: The general strategy that we tried was to use Steam’s playtest functionality. We already had a very dedicated community following from Depth, so some our community from Depth followed us through to Dread Hunger, which was awesome.
So we started with this very small contingent of players - we were playing the game and we were exploring different concepts and different ideas. But even then that period of time only lasted several weeks or so - and then we went from playtesting to Early Access.
By that stage, we had a reasonable-sized team working on the game - around 20-30 people at that point in time. And so within internal play tests, we were already starting to see a lot of the situations that we wanted to create within the game happening naturally.
SIMON: It seems like after you went into Early Access and even up to date, you've done a pretty good job of the Games as a Service approach. You've been quite aggressive with doing regular updates. So I wanted to ask about that a little bit - was your team already used to this very [iterative] approach from the other titles you'd worked on? It seems like you were quite efficient at it.
JAMES: For Early Access, we knew it was important to have really regular updates, I think it's become part of Early Access now. You can't do Early Access now where you just go like “Okay, the game is there, and you'll hear back from us in three to four months time with an update.” You need that regular roadmap of content drops, and we've been doing that for Depth for a really long time.
Depth launched in 2014, and we only recently sunsetted that game in 2022. So it's been a really long time, and we're very much used to creating some Games as a Service. But I do want to say that Dread Hunger is not really designed to be Games as a Service, in the sense that we're not going to do regular DLC or regular monetization methods that you would normally see in GaaS.
SIMON: It's games as a service in the sense that it's regularly updated, but it's not games as a service in the sense of [a major concentration on] IAP or DLC. That makes sense to me.
I want to talk a little bit about the success of the game, because I remember seeing the game once or twice through Early Access. And it was an interesting one because it had definitely not failed, it wasn't like it had a dead community.
But it seemed to be bubbling along all the time at a mid level of, I'd say low thousand of CCUs? So.. how did you see that? What were you doing during Early Access to try to juice it? Do you feel like you've had some success? Or do you think it's just the fact that it wasn't 1.0 yet that was making some people hold back on it?
JAMES: I think there's a lot of speculation as to what happened during Early Access. We don’t have a ton of proof… but I'll say it here. We generally divide it into two parts of the world - we've got the West and the East, this particular part with the East being China.
We think what happened in the West is that there definitely was some level of burnout… from the social deception category of games. In the sense that everybody had played Among Us… and almost became burnt out on that genre. Where they just said: “Oh, it's another social deception game, I've already played that, I'm done with it, I want to look for something else.”
And I wonder if that's true that is a similar space with Battle Royales. People have played their favourite Battle Royales, and they basically say: “I don't want to play a different one, because I've already experienced what that whole genre has to offer.”
Whereas I think something weird happened with China. Among Us wasn't a massive sort of phenomenon within China itself. I'm curious, and this is pure speculation, whether it's a situation where it takes time for these kinds of genres to go from one region of the world and then they jump to a different region of the world. And then maybe they come back into previous regions, when you get this new generation of players who haven't played those types of genres before.
These genres may be coming and going in waves - like, for the longest time I thought that first person PvP arena-style shooters were basically done. We'd seen Quake 3, we'd seen Unreal Tournament. And trying to make one maybe five years ago was basically a no-no. But I think certain games like Halo Infinite have come back, and shown there's actually possibility again to do those sorts of things.
SIMON: So - I think you had good success through Early Access but it was kind of bubbling along. And it seems like, just after full release, China especially started to notice [Dread Hunger] and then also the West did.
So can you talk about the period around full launch and how it went? What were the first signs that you felt like you were starting to do better? Did you have local partners that helped with that, for example?
JAMES: Dread Hunger is an interesting game because we self-published it. We didn't have any sort of external publishing help with it at all. And more interestingly, we did not actually have any partners in China to help us with that at all. We focused all of our PR and marketing efforts purely in the West.
And so seeing the sudden rise in China was a complete surprise to us, Something that we hadn't anticipated at all, and not something that we even tried to really do, as such.
We learned from Depth that localization is really important. A lot of game developers will say you should localize your game to pretty much all the languages that you think are going to be important to your game. From our experience, we also looked at it from a point of view of… “Are they more comfortable with their own native language versus just English, or versus some other language?”
We definitely feel that within certain countries, they very much prefer their native language. So localization was the main thing that we did to ensure that players in those regions could play the game very comfortably.
I think there's a lot of history with social deduction [in China], and I had no idea. A number of years ago they used to play a game just called Werewolf and this was the real life version of this - very similar to Mafia, right? And what happened was they had some very popular streamers just play this game in real life. And it became pretty popular. But that popularity transitioned into a TV show. So they had celebrities playing this game as a TV show, and that gained a ton of popularity as well.
So… the general population of under '30s had all played this type of game, [and] it became popular enough that people were actually setting up sort of cafes, very similar like karaoke bars. These were cafes where you could go to and play this game with random people in real life.
This was all unknown to us… but when we found out we said: “Oh, okay, that makes sense.” Because of people under 30 [in China], 80% of them had played this type of game before. They could see the connection between those games and what this game is trying to achieve.
We didn’t know this happened - and it was only fairly recently when we found out… We suddenly made the connection. “Oh, okay, that makes sense!” I'm sure some of us might be thinking: “Well, you know, if it was that popular, certainly there would have been games made like this, right?”
Truth is there were games that were made like this in China, as well. The problem was that they tried to take the real-life Werewolf game and just transition that into a mobile game. So it became a bit like a Zoom meeting… they basically have people just on a webcam, and they put webcams up in a row.
Basically, you're chatting. But it didn't have the same vibe as the real life thing, because people would often AFK, and [players] were just using that game as a means to do other things. Whereas with a video game, it's a lot more of a directed experience, where you've actually got tools that you can use.
SIMON: Yeah, and Dread Hunger is a very nice looking game. It's like a triple-A adjacent-looking game. So that's obviously going to help, because there's plenty of players on Steam who want to play good looking games that aren't like, cartoony and/or Among Us-like.
Obviously that [China surge] has led to problems for you as well, because your game is lobby based. So can you talk a little bit about that? Some of the West has been complaining that there's a lot of foreign-language speakers in lobbies? Do you think that's a little bit overblown, or have you ever tried to do anything to help with that?
JAMES: I see that as a similar problem to what PUBG had in the past, where you've got the sudden influx of players who all speak a different language. And it's essentially impossible to communicate with each other.
As for what we are doing about this, we've added language filters, so you can start filtering by languages. We've added regions, so you can say: “Okay, I really only want to look for games within my region.”
We're doing more things to help facilitate easier ways of finding matches within a certain set of parameters. Whether I only really speak English or Chinese - you can start filtering for those. There are some things that we're still cooking up, but it is a very complex problem to solve.
We've even sort of had the wild idea - if we could use like, speech recognition or something to take in what they're saying through the microphone and translate and then convert it to English on the other side. But we found that's a very difficult problem to actually solve.
SIMON: Yeah, I think Microsoft has tried to do that in real time, and it's taken them massive computing power, so yeah!
Roleplay is a big part of this game, and I did want to ask about community management and player management. I saw that you had a code of conduct, which I thought was kind of cool. Could you talk a little bit about how you decided to set upthe code of conduct and whether you feel players pay attention?
JAMES: Early on when we were in the Early Access phase we had Romy, and she has been doing a fantastic job along with the community management team. We actually had a very pretty serious trolling problem right at the beginning.
I think that taught us a lot of lessons. Social deduction or social deception as a genre is very interesting, because when people are playing it right, you not only get the real sense of betrayal but you go, like: “Oh, I should have seen that coming, that's totally obvious.”
But I think there's a very grey line, there's a fuzzy area where you could be trolling and you can just say: “Actually, I'm the thrall [one of the bad guys in Dread Hunger!], I'm supposed to do this sort of thing, right?”
So Romy's been doing a fantastic job with the community management team there. For social deception games, you sort of have this very grey area where [there is] trolling and griefing. It's okay if somebody is a thrall and they're doing things that basically [create an] advantage.
And when the game is played right, you get that feeling of: “Oh no, I've just been betrayed and I should have seen that coming… all the signs were there, and I just didn't quite pick up on it”. And next time, if I see somebody doing these things, I'll know better for sure.
The problem we had really early on is that we just had a lot of trolling and a lot of griefing. And when you have games with VOIP and you have games where you can do things that negatively affect other people, I think that's when we decided: “We really need to start encouraging people to play in a way that's enjoyable and fun for others.”
And I would say that our community is fantastic because they know where to go within that very grey, fuzzy kind of area. And I'd say that's something that we're really happy about - our community is doing a really great job there, and actually just making it fun for everybody.
SIMON: That's really good. And ultimately you're right, this only works if everyone on the team of players is playing within the same boundaries. And I do think it's great that you've had a really clear code of conduct about what you expect acceptable behaviour and unacceptable behaviour to be.
JAMES: Yeah, it's difficult, right? Like, it's always tricky. There was a part in the game where we had made the game… a lot more fuzzy than what it is today. For example, as a crewmate, you used to be able to build these explosive powder kegs and you had legitimate uses for them. They were quite lethal - if you saw thralls and you wanted to defend an area, you could start throwing down kegs. You could also use kegs to detonate and explode icebergs that were in the way.
There were legitimate uses for those. But most of the time, unfortunately, as we grew the community much larger, it just became a tool for griefers to use constantly. So we had to change the gameplay a little bit, where we say: “If you’re a crewmate, there are just some things that you just can craft, you can't do.” Because often we got the the very blunt response of “Well, if you let me do it, I'm going to do it.”
SIMON: I also wanted to ask about your monetization methods for the game. Obviously, the main way you buy the game is standalone. But I did also notice you have a few cosmetics available. My impression is that’s not a massive part of the game's future - because it's a fairly period game, so you're not going to be selling space helmets. But I thought it was cute you can buy glasses and I think maybe hats [right now]. Can you talk about how much of a focus you put on that? And is that something that you'll be doing more of?
JAMES: Yeah, I would say that we wanted to get away from trying to transition this into a live service, or to make it into a GaaS. We think that this model can work really well. But we don't feel that's what we wanted to do with this. And in terms of adding more in-app purchases, that's certainly something we'll be doing just because we've got ongoing costs to cover.
But I think one thing that completely surprised us was the average and median play times for the game. We didn't anticipate it being so long. For Depth, we had an average play time, I think, about four or five hours. And then the median playtime for Depth was one and a half hours. Those are the numbers that we're used to, right?
But for Dread Hunger, we're seeing average playtimes of 30 hours, and we're seeing median play times of seven or eight hours - which is in our opinion really, really long. We didn't anticipate people would be ‘maining’ the game this much.
So yeah, I think our current strategy now is really just to focus on original [standalone game] sales, in terms of purchases, and to make the pricing right on those. And then go for in-app purchases in the long run.
SIMON: I used GaaS earlier in this for games as a service and I think you're right, some people associate that with much more IAP-led economies. But also there are games like Astroneer and No Man’s Sky that just keep updating, but they don't have a great deal of in-app purchases.
And they just rely on people buying new copies of the game. So it sounds like that's really what you're going for - mainly - in the medium term.
JAMES: I think we just see this as a much more straightforward economy for people to get into. They buy the game once, and… they can play basically forever. And if they want to continue supporting us, that's fantastic. And they can do that, rather than being led into an economy where it's like: “Okay, the game might be free or the game might be extremely cheap.”
One of the things with Dread Hunger is [that] we don't do daily drops, and we don't do per-round drops… I think it was an experiment of ours to say “Well, can we get a lot of intrinsic reasons for people to keep playing, rather than a lot of extrinsic reasons?”
I think this goes into the psychology aspects of game design a little bit. For Depth, we… have constant drops that occur at the end of every game. And people's focus would shift away from “I want to play the game”, to “I'm only playing the game to get the drop”, and that was that.
SIMON: So you're definitely keen, at least at this point in the game's history, to keep people's motivations much more pure and around actually playing the game. Rather than worrying about auxiliary stuff related to it?
JAMES: Yeah, absolutely, because some of the behaviors that we saw in Depth were really kind of interesting to us. People would play the game, but they wouldn't really actively participate in them. Or they would do things that would only increase the score, so that they would get more drops.
We just didn't want to see that happening again, where you've got a population which are majority focused on “I just want drops.” They'll join the game and they'll just AFK the whole thing. We added AFK prediction, and then they find a little hacky program that will move them every now and then. Then it becomes us spending way more time stopping people from abusing those systems than focusing on making the game better for people.
SIMON: I also wanted to ask you about… when you've seen the game go a little bit viral, especially in China, I know you can't really monitor this but - did you get a sense that it was streamers playing in groups that was a reason why it got bigger? Do you have any sense about how it ended up blowing up?
JAMES: Yeah, so learning about the history of what happened with social deduction and the Werewolf game and so forth, that was a revealing point to us. But we didn't learn about this until much later.
When we see a sudden-up spike and whether it's CCUs or sales, you just go like: “Is this a one off Is this gonna last a day or two days, or three days or something? Or is this going to be more of an ongoing thing?’
I think the way we figured this out was when we were seeing basically constant growth every day, and we saw it for longer than a week. The first time that we started seeing these spikes it was around the middle of January, about a week before our [1.0] launch. So we started saying: “Oh, there's a new region playing this game” and then we thought, “Oh, that's interesting”. And as [CCUs] continued to grow through the week, we were wondering “Is this going to last, or is this going to disappear?”
So we started tracking our retention numbers - our D[ay]1s to D30s, well, we didn't have D30s at the time, but D1s to D7s. We saw that they were above [the industry standard]. These were numbers published by Supercell, and they indicated if you have the [right] percentage numbers you've got a sticky game. And if you've got a sticky game, you're likely to continue to grow.
We really learned about this in Depth. Depth has a very low retention, I think its retention is really: “People might play it for a couple of days, and they're done with it forever”. They've seen it, they're done with it. And the extrinsic benefits like the drops and so forth help a little bit - but they're not strong enough to constantly keep people coming back.
What we saw in Dread Hunger was totally different. People were constantly returning to the game, which was fantastic. And we think it's that combination of two things. You've got streamers playing the game, and good retention. And so when people do go in there and buy it and they're really enjoying themselves, you're going to get this constant growth pattern, basically just going up and up and up and up.
SIMON: It's interesting you mentioned Depth. Depth may have relatively poor retention in your view but also it’s sold a lot of copies. Is that because it has a really good upfront hook? Is that the reason it does well, you think?
JAMES: So this was really good advice from somebody’s opinion I really value, which is Jamie [Cheng] from Klei. He revealed to me that you really want your game to do well when it's not on sale. If it only does well on sale, you've got a problem, because you're constantly having to do sales to keep chasing that.
So with Depth, I really think the reason why it probably sold a lot of copies? It's probably because it is a good game but it was also [regularly discounted to] $5. And so you get to this point where you sell the majority of your copies through really cheap sales, the $4 to $5 range.
Once the bulk of your sales come from that [price] region, it's almost like you get this feedback loop. People are saying it's a good game but it's only worth $5, so I’ll only pick it up when it's $5. I think with Depth, the main driver was just the fact that it was cheap. It was good for it being that cheap - but we had anchored ourselves incorrectly.
Whereas with Dread Hunger… people are buying it without a discount. During the Lunar New Year sale, even though we weren't on discount and we had just recently launched at that time period, we were still hitting in the top 20s on the [Steam] global top sellers.
We were looking at that and we're thinking: “Well, if we can still hit the global top 20 and not being on discount, and not being really present on the storefront [since Steam had a front page sale takeover]… this is doing really well.” Whereas most of the time, if you're not on discount during a Steam sale like that, you're probably just going to disappear and never be seen again.
SIMON: I agree - and I know you made Depth, I would like to defend it. I do think it has a good hook, because it's a good looking game where you're playing as a shark or a diver, right? I think people are excited about sharks attacking divers. So I think that's just a really good entry point… I do think Depth has a bit of a hook, actually.
JAMES: I mean, we do like Depth a lot ourselves. And I think there's just a lot to learn from how we made that game’s game design.. I think that has really fed back into… how we changed our design philosophies surrounding Dread Hunger.
I think at the time, for Depth specifically, we were looking more at Counter-Strike and what they were doing. This is how we got to the whole “oh, let's let's think about drops”. And after going through all of that, we decided “Okay, maybe we don't want to try that again for whatever's next.” And in this case, it was Dread Hunger.
SIMON: If I go to your Steam page, there is another title called Last Tide, and it's some kind of aquatic Battle Royale. Was that something that was your core game for a while, and who worked on that? It seems like it was pretty cool, but it didn't end up achieving escape velocity.
JAMES: This was very much the same team worked on this game as Dread Hunger. From a studio makeup, we’re really strong in engineering, Myself and my co-founder Sam, we’re both engineers. Him being more on the infrastructure side of things, and me more on the Unreal Engine side of things.
At the time, when Battle Royales were coming out, we were looking at them: “From a technical perspective, we think we could do a better job in terms of… framerate, in terms of network and playability.” This was during when [Battle Royales] were just a mod.
It wasn't really like “Oh, PUBG landed and became a massive success, so now we're going to start doing that.” The way we see things is that if we try to chase massive successes like that, you’re going to fall. Unless you've got really deep pockets, it's really hard to chase a massive success. Timeline wise, we started working on that really early on. And we didn't really shift focus to purely working on that game to until later in 2017-2018.
I think the short story is that, we launched it. And by that point there were so many Battle Royales available… it got to a point I think, around our launch, everybody was announcing their Battle Royales. There was too much supply, and not enough people.
One of the things that we learned is that…people are playing [PUBG] it for like a median time of like 15-16 hours and the average playtimes must be just bonkers, like 100 hours or something. Trying to pull people away from their ‘main’, which in this case might be PUBG, might be Fortnite, might be other Battle Royales… it’s a really difficult thing to do.
SIMON: Yeah, that's something I've noticed, actually. There were some genres [that I call] them “displacement genres”. You have to displace the game that's already incredibly popular - and this has been a problem all the way back to a World of Warcraft.
Everyone was like “wow, World of Warcraft is doing so well, we'll just make lots more of World of Warcraft“. And the answer is, you have to get someone to stop playing World of Warcraft to start playing your game. I agree, I think that's ultimately the issue with Battle Royales. And obviously the good news with social deduction games is there's really less games in that space right now.
There's a few games out there, but [social deduction games] are more sophisticated and I think a bit more complex to make. So that's probably another reason that you've managed to distinguish yourselves. I think you can't ham-handedly slather on gameplay mechanics and social deduction - they're pretty subtle from a gameplay standpoint.
JAMES: Yeah, absolutely, and I think making multiplayer games brings its own level of complexities and difficulties. We just have to deal with a different set of problems compared to single player games.
SIMON: So we're approaching the end of the chat now and I wanted to about where you see yourself going in the future for the game, for the next few months. Right now, you've picked up this head of steam… What's your plans for the future?
Are you going to be updating it often? Are you thinking about other platforms or other gameplay mechanics? Are you just concentrating on kind of getting it right for the people who are playing it?
JAMES: A bit of both… Definitely there's still room for improvements that we need to make to existing systems and existing things such as improving the lobby filtering, lobby searching and things like that.
I think when something reaches any level of popularity like this, you're going to start to see things like cheats and hacks being used a lot more. So that's something that we're also working on reducing, improving the play experience for people who are currently playing.
But there are new ideas and new thoughts surrounding game mechanics and all these different things. As for the different platforms, we've got a lot of different things in mind there as well. Nothing ready to announce just yet, but we hope to jump onto that as soon as we possibly can.
SIMON: I guess one final question before we go. This may be unfair for people who are in the middle of making a game or don't have a chance to play games, but I like to ask people what games they have played or have been playing in the recent or semi-recent past ,and why they liked them.
JAMES: I guess the only real game that I've been playing a lot is Minecraft at the moment. And that's really because I have been having a really fun time playing with my daughter. There's something magical about that game that just seems to spark interest and excitement at that age.
It's really fun reliving that, because I remember playing Minecraft when it was the original Java version way back in 2008 or 2009 And so it's kind of interesting… seeing how the game has changed in like the last 10 years or so.
SIMON: Yes, it's a wonderful game, My son is very into Minecraft. He's six but he isn't really into playing, and he's just into all the YouTube videos and lore surrounding it. I think you're right, Minecraft has a lore and the logic that I think children really enjoy, whether they're actively playing it or not.
JAMES: It's super fascinating just because on first glance when you look at the game, you think: “Okay, I know what this is all about.” But as you start digging into it further, you start going: “Oh, actually, there's a lot of interesting layers here”
SIMON: That's great. That's wonderful. Okay well, thank you so much James. Thanks for coming on and we really appreciate it.
JAMES: Yeah. Likewise.
[Music]
SIMON: So that's about it for this week's show. We'd like to thank James Tan for coming onto the podcast - you can find out more about Dread Hunger - tagline 'You are who you eat', at Dread Hunger dot com.As a reminder, this podcast is made by GameDiscoverCo, home of newsletters and consulting - and now a podcast - around video game discovery. Sign up to our newsletter at http://newsletter.gamediscover.co, and upgrade paid to Plus access if you can. You get extra newsletters, charts, Discord access, eBooks and more.Our final credits: many thanks to our producer, editor, and transcriber Alejandro Linares Lopez, theme tune composer Keith Baylis, aka Vimster, and all of our subscribers and listeners. And we'll see you back in GameDiscoveryLand in the near future.

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Podcast: Kate Gray on how media discover your games
4 apr 2022· Tales From GameDiscoveryLand
Welcome to the first Tales From GameDiscoveryLand podcast in Season 1. In this episode, we talk to Kate Gray - a veteran writer for sites like NintendoLife, Kotaku, and RockPaperShotgun - about what the media expects from game creators, how to attract media attention, and most importantly, the things NOT to do.
Presented by Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, this bi-weekly, limited series podcast features conversations with smart people in the video game industry on how games get discovered and played.
Reminder: you can get hold of episodes via our official podcast page, and also via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Pocket Casts. If you need it, here’s our podcast RSS feed. And thanks in advance for listening.
Podcast transcript: Kate Gray on how media find your games
SIMON: Picture the scene. You're trekking through the dense jungle of video game discovery, without a map. You're looking for a familiar face, a helping hand, a useful conversation about how people find and play your games. And perhaps you've found it in the form of long-time journalist and writer Kate Gray.She's worked with NintendoLife, Kotaku, RockPaperShotgun and many more outlets besides, across her career to date. Our conversation is centered around what the media expects from game creators, how to attract their attention, and most importantly, the things NOT to do.I'm Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, and this is first ever episode of the Tales From Game Discoveryland podcast.
SIMON: Hey there - I'm here with Kate. How's it going, Kate?
KATE: Hi. It's going well.
SIMON: Excellent. I was super excited to talk to you because of your experience both on the dev side of the business - community management and writing - and as media. Firstly, I wanted to chat a little bit about the concept of game hook, because I wondered - what's your definition of game hook? Like, how do you see it when you get shown games?
KATE: That's interesting, because I see tons of Steam pages every week and a lot of them are very formulaic, which is not in itself a bad thing. If there's a formula, I know what to expect from you. But I think it's really honing in on what your game can offer that other games don't.
That's where you're going to find your hook. You can cover things like the genre. If it's a really interesting genre or a particularly popular genre, you can talk about that. You can have a really good tagline - that's less common, but I'd love to see more sexy taglines. You can imagine what your demographic is and try to laser target them. But the hook is very much similar to the elevator pitch, where you want to summarize your game in just one - maybe two - sentences with enough attention-grabbing keywords..
It makes the press pay attention and, it makes people's ears perk up. That's going to be doing a lot of the selling of your game, and the press will pick that up and run with it as well. So have a good hook.
SIMON: From my perspective, I'm always interested in the visual hook as well. I know that a lot of us are browsing Steam pages all the time. Do you think there's something visually in games where you look at them, when you get a little bit more interested? Have you noticed particular facets to games that help you with that?
KATE: I mean, games have this sort of interesting visual art aspect that maybe movies don't really have in the same way. You can have people who really love pixel art games, they're going to pretty much snap up any pixel art game, or like a voxel game or low poly game - an art style can be a hook.
So, lean into that if that's an aspect that you have. The screenshots can do a lot of the work there, obviously, and the trailer as well. But if somebody is browsing Steam, generally what you want is to have something eye-catching as your thumbnail. You have such a little amount of time to grab somebody's attention, and you have so little space to do it in.
Because on Steam, you are basically just a picture and maybe a title. And that's going to have to communicate a lot of information, so to have it brightly colored, if that fits with your game. It might not stand out a great deal because everyone's doing that. But it really capture the feeling of the game in that one header image - put some thought into it.
Of course, this also applies to the Switch eShop and other storefronts as well. Actually, I think on Switch’s eShop, people tend to use different images. I can't say why, but that's something to bear in mind. You know, tailor your images to each platform, each storefront and pick your screenshots well.
This is something that I covered in my recent presentation. A lot of people are just taking really boring, really random screenshots. And I'll usually only use one to two of them, because the rest of them are just unusable for one reason or another. So really put some thought into the screenshots that you're putting up?
SIMON: Yeah, I'd like to drill down on screenshots because I've noticed that as well. And one thing I've noticed with people is people are not very keen to put their UI in screenshots sometimes. Sometimes, it's because the game is early and they don't feel like they have a good UI. But certainly when you're picking screenshots because you want to talk about a game, are you looking for a mix of ones that look good, and ones that look like what the real game is like?
KATE: I would say, if you're putting together a press kit of 10 screenshots - which is what I would advise? You're the one who can sell your game by how it looks, you might as well include 10, it's a nice number. I would pick a mixture of “this is what the game actually looks like” so UI and all that kind of thing, and then a lot of more posed screenshots with really nice composition, nice lighting, nice color balance, things like that.
Think about the prettiest moments in your game and stand there, record a video, and then you can take screenshots from that. And just go with one of each moment, you want to have a range across the 10 screenshots. But what you need to think of, in regards to the press covering your game and using those screenshots, is that they will need a lead image. And this one cannot be the same as the one that you have on Steam, because that has a logo on it.
We can't use lead images that have logos because it won't translate well when that piece is much smaller. The logo will be small and it'll be kind of muddy. So you want something that's really big, vibrant, easy to read, even at small resolution. So have at least one that is like that. It can be the key art, the key art is usually the most appropriate - just make sure that it doesn't have a logo, please.
SIMON: That's a really good point - I think sometimes people will use the same screenshots everywhere. But clearly on Steam you don't, and maybe in some cases you can't put key art as one of your screenshots. So it's a good example of where you should be changing up the kind of stuff that you're sending or making available in your press kit, compared to what you put on Steam.
I think it's good to have good posed [screenshots] on your Steam page but also sometimes I find people will abstract their game away entirely. There was this tycoon game I was checking out on Steam a few months ago, and it didn't show any interface. And I just couldn't really tell on the screenshots what it played like. I think if it's early on and you want to get people a little bit excited, that's great. But for people making buying decisions on the Steam page, I think you do need to have a little bit more information.
KATE: I think that's a really good point, people do that with trailers as well. I've seen so many trailers that are more a tonal idea of the game, which is useful. But it can't be the only trailer you have, because I don't know if you're offering me a visual novel, a point and click… it could be anything. I know that it's like steampunk, let's say, but I don't know how I'm actually going to be interacting with the game.
So yeah, I think you make a good point that you really need to pay attention to the audiences you're catering to. On Steam, having screenshots that show you what the game is like is really good. With the press kit you maybe want to err more on the side of “this looks gorgeous”, even if it's not necessarily representative of the game. Because those are the images that are going to come to represent your game within the press, so make them good.
SIMON: Yeah, it's an interesting point even from a streamer point of view, I know that I've spoken to some streamers before like Splattercat, and they've said that key art is very important for streamers as well because of the YouTube thumbnails. So again, maybe your Steam page doesn't have key art minus the logo. But, for streamers as well I think you do really need nice key art or nice posed stuff, right?
KATE: Because if you give me the key art and you include the logo, what is going to happen is that I will crop it. I don't have enough time to Photoshop out a logo and it probably wouldn't be that easy. So I'm then cropping, you know, a good, maybe, half of what's in that key art just to get the logo out of the way. And why would you want someone to do that to your beautiful key art?
SIMON: Exactly... we've just gone granular on screenshots - there's so many little things that you can find that will improve your outreach. From a press perspective, actually something I wanted to talk about, it’s less streamer and player centric is the human story. There are some hooks in games that I think are less about the game and more about, say, the team that put it together.
So, when you see people who you’ve picked in the past for some of your outlets - do you think pitching with a human story is a good idea? Do you think people do it enough?
KATE: I think it is a tricky one to get right. The example that I think of a lot of the time is That Dragon Cancer which was very much a human story. It's about a real experience that somebody had with their child going through cancer. And you can't just manufacture that kind of story, if your game doesn't have that. I think that if you try to force a human story into your very normal game dev experience, then it's going to come across as insincere.
A human story can be anything from “this is a solo developer who's been working on this game for 10 years”. That's interesting because it's unusual. That's not something that you see a lot. Or it can be “this game is about the personal experience of our lead artist” or something like that. But you'll know, I think, quite early on if your game involves a human story.
A lot of human stories that I’ve seen in press release emails are kind of, like: “This is a studio of only four people working from the French countryside.” And I'm like, that's not really that strange. Like it's cool, good for you. If it was “we're working on a farm and we don't have any Internet” then hey, that's a little more interesting. It still doesn't really have anything to do with the game, though, if you know what I mean… unless it was a game about the French countryside.
This is an example. This isn't a real [developer].
[Laughs]
SIMON: You aren't calling out the French countryside in general. No, I think that's fair. I get less of this nowadays now I work with GameDiscoverCo. But certainly when I was working at Gamasutra.com, and Gamedeveloper.com, we'd get developers talking to us about their stories. And I definitely agree that it's important to get it right. You need to understand what's exciting to everybody, not just you.
Something else I wanted to talk about is when people talk to you about games that their game is similar to. And this is obviously something that people are tempted to do. Like either “my game is a genre mashup”, or “my game is like X game meets Y game”. Do you have feelings about either of those pitches?
KATE: I do. One of the things that I will always talk about in the games industry is how messed up game genres are. It’s through no fault of any particular person, it's just that it's still an industry in its infancy, we haven't ironed out a lot of things yet.
Movies when they talk about genres, and books, and TV as well, have defined genres that are about what happens. So you've got rom coms, you've got thrillers, you've got horror. A lot of the time this is about how it makes the viewer feel. Games instead are defined by their mechanics a lot of the time - which can tell you absolutely nothing about what the minute to minute gameplay is going to be like.
As a player, I can play a platformer game and I'm like “okay, all I know is that I'm going to be jumping on stuff?” - that doesn't help. Like, it could be a platformer that's Lovecraftian or it could be Mario, that's a huge range of games. So genres don't really help us when we're describing what a game is. And that ended up with us having to create our own genres and descriptions of games - things like Metroidvania.
Metroidvania is literally defined by two other games. But for some reason that's just a culturally accepted way to describe a game. So personally, I think if somebody comes to me with a pitch that is ‘this game is X meets Y’, I am happy to take that and write about that. Because that is a better way of understanding what a game is like than just calling it… a narrative adventure. That's a ‘nothing’ description, that tells you it's got a story and a story, useless.
I would be careful with this one because you risk a) comparing your game to Nintendo masterpieces - and then if somebody comes to it expecting Breath of the Wild and it's not Breath of the Wild, you're going to make yourself look bad. So be careful of that. And b) don't just choose really obvious genres, if you're going to compare yourself to a game, really drill down on which exact games it is. Don't be like “it's a bit like Zelda”, say “it's a bit like Link to the Past”. Don't say “it's like Dark Souls”, say “it's like Dark Souls III” and here’s why.
I think the gamers right now are tired of hearing about Souls-likes. So you have to be so careful that you're not just another Souls-like. Think about what sets you apart. And don't be afraid to compare your game to other things to help people get in. But once they're in, tell them why it's different, tell them why it's unique. And maybe use more interesting games than the ones that everyone's using right now.
SIMON: I agree. I think certainly “Dark Souls meets” is kind of dangerous and I think, if there's a recent example, one of my clients - The Arcade Crew, they just put out a game called Infernax. And that's a bit like Castlevania, but it's a bit like Simon's Quest specifically. So I actually think that's sort of a good pitch.
‘It's a Simon's Quest a-like’ is certainly not something you would hear so much. If you can find kind of corners or interesting underexposed games to be like, then I think that helps. But I also think sometimes lazy comparisons can be good, because I do feel like people sometimes will buy games based on lazy comparisons.
KATE: I think there's like a risk reward to it because you're very much going to get the reward of the SEO. If you have Breath of the Wild being said in the same sentence as your game title, you're going to benefit from that. But at the same time, all the things I already said! People are going to unfavorably compare it, and you might not have as much of a unique identity, if all you ever do is go “it's like Zelda - pay attention to me - it's like Zelda.” So you know - use with caution, I would say.
SIMON: I believe there are some platform rules - I think Switch in particular disallows you from mentioning other games in the description. I think Steam doesn’t [so much], but I think Steam isn't a massive fan of it, as I recall.
I think some of this feeds into how the press see games. And a lot of it is based on how the articles they write about them perform. Something I definitely wanted to ask you about was - clearly, the press always want to be showcasing new and interesting games. But also there is this pressure for page views, and for people to actually read the articles.
So, is there a danger that the press will only cover a certain [profile] level of games? Or do you feel like they're doing a good job right now of finding unexposed gems as well?
KATE: I think that's a big question. Because there are definitely some writers out there - I'm talking, I suppose, about the bigger press outlets which includes Eurogamer, Polygon, IGN, the ones that have like a pretty stable audience by this point. And then the slightly smaller ones that are specialists like Rock Paper Shotgun and the one I write for, Nintendolife - ‘tm’. (I don't actually think we’re trademarked! )
Anyway, the games they are going to want to write about tend to be a mixture. Pretty much every journalist that I know wants to write about the cool hidden gems that they discovered - because that's cool. It makes you feel like a hipster who just found a really nice cafe that no one else knows about. Everyone likes that feeling and everybody likes saying “Hey, you really should check this out” and being part of an indie that deserves success getting that success.
However, the fact is that indie games just do not do well on their own, unless a bunch of different factors can help with that. Sometimes a game can be a big deal because it's being promoted by let's say, Xbox or Sony, like if it's an exclusive. Sometimes it comes from a well known developer so you'll get the old guard of, like, LucasArts [devs] being like, “I made a new point and click in the 2020s”. And that will get a lot of natural, organic press.
Also if you tie your game into another game, like Dead Cells. I think it was very much… Dead Cells evokes Dark Souls already, and it's a roguelike just as roguelikes were getting really popular. And so it's a matter of luck, timing and the resources that you naturally have.
SIMON: What I wanted to ask you in particular was there's kind of a pressure for page views, but also there's a need to show new things. And so actually a continuation of that [concept], which is something I didn't ask, was around the concept of guides.
It’s interesting nowadays - quite a lot of editorial websites are moving towards being a little more guide centric… Is that something you like - is it actually something that has positives because it brings more people in to read about the new games, maybe?
KATE: So basically, when you're press and you're writing about games, you're constantly doing this balance of time versus reward. Like value, I guess, and that is usually counted in page views. Not because the press gets paid per page view - most of us I think are salaried. That's not the case everywhere, but most of us are salaried so it's not that we need page views to get paid. It's that we need pageviews to keep this website going.
I've worked for multiple places at this point who have said “we write about the triple A stuff, so we can cover the indie stuff” It's a balance, you know, so we'll do Destiny guides so that we can fund writing about some tiny game on Itch that nobody's played. The problem with that is that those indie games are going to get buried by things like us talking about Destiny all the time.
A lot of the time, guides - I think - are hidden from our homepage so you don't need to worry too much about that. But the interesting thing with guides is that I think in general, people who run websites want long tails on things. And news pieces don't have long tails. Reviews - short to medium tail, depending on what the game is. But guides, massive long tail…
You have to do a lot of that content to fund the indie content.
SIMON: I'm generally speaking pro-guides. I actually think guides are helpful, especially written guides - because when I look for guides for games nowadays. Sometimes I have to go to YouTube, and I find that I have to cycle through like 20 minutes of people explaining extraneous stuff, before I find information. So I'm a fan of written guides.
I actually think it's a net positive. But to your point, you would see it generally as a counterbalance. You do some guides for the long term page views, and then you can cover, hopefully, a few more small and medium-level games for the shorter term.
KATE: Yeah and guides generally are big for, like triple A games and indies that are really popular or really hard. We tend to write guides for games that are very long, for example. So that can be, like, how to unlock karts in Mario Kart but it can also be…
I've written about some of the Harvest Moon games, being like “here's how to get sheep” or whatever. Because you know, that's what people will be searching for. But I wouldn't write a guide necessarily for a very short game or a very small one, if not a lot of people have heard of that game - because it just wouldn’t really do that well.
Simon: I think that is a pointer for developers as well. I've been pushing in my newsletter for a while now you should make titles that… have good retention. Sometimes they have good retention because they have enough complexity that people would need to understand them enough to have guides written about them.
So I think it's good [that] there are some small and medium games that have guides - and that's probably an indication that they've got good retention. That's actually good, because they will pick up some of the long tail page views that are people checking out those websites.
I also wanted to talk a little bit about what you've seen developers do because, obviously, you've seen a lot of pitches in your time and you see a lot of press releases. So maybe we can talk about some of the dont’s. What are some of the things that you've seen developers do that you would not recommend?
KATE: Okay, I have a big list from the presentation I did, so I'm going to be looking at that. I think sometimes pitching your game is a little like applying for jobs. You'll hear all this really useful advice, but people don't say how to do it correctly. So I'm going to try not to be the person that's like “never do this”, and not offer a viable alternative.
What you have to bear in mind is that press gets a lot of emails every day, and you are going to have to grab their attention very quickly and very efficiently. My number one thing that you should not do… is a really boring subject line. You would not believe how many people send out emails with a 30-word subject line so I can't even see the whole thing - I'd have to have a super wide monitor, I can't read that.
Don't bother, because it just looks like every other email in my inbox. Keep it short, keep it snappy, keep it to the point and I say use emoji if it's appropriate - but your mileage may vary on that. You'll come across a certain way if you use emoji, and it's only for a particular type of game, really. So please, short subject lines. I don't have a lot of time for reading, and you will do both of us a favor if you keep it short. So that's a great way to get them to click on your email.
Imagine that you're looking at your inbox and you have a bunch of really long ‘there's a sale on’ [emails] and all those boring things. And then you have one that's really short. You automatically assume that's from someone who knows you because they're not trying to sell you anything, right?
So it does begin to foster a slightly better, slightly more friendlier relationship before you've even begun to pitch your game, so…
SIMON: You're really looking for an informal - I mean, you're looking to not come off like a big company, right? You're looking to come off like someone who's engaging and is showing you a game because they care about it.
KATE: Yeah, and I think most of the press do want to be approached not in a super overly informal way, where it's like ”Hey, what's up, mate?” But we are people who like games, you know. It's not a well paying job - we're not here for the dollars, we're here because we like games, and we like talking about them.
Presumably, if you're a game dev, you also like games. We already have something in common! So just approach the press as if you're trying to tell somebody about your really cool thing that you're making. Don't be overly like “Oh my God, check out my sick game, here's a bunch of swear words, we’re friends” because that's really off-putting
But professionalism-wise? Do spell check your emails. Again, we're all writers in the press, we're all very anal about spelling and grammar. So it's not going to put you in our good books if you send - like, I've gotten so many press emails where they misspelled the name of the game. [I think] “Oh, no, okay?” - because it just shows that you didn't care enough. Like, this is your big project, this is your moment - and you didn't care enough to check that it was spelled right?
SIMON: I've also seen both ‘bad mail merge’ or ‘wrong outlet name’ which are other things that have always a little painful, right?
KATE: Yeah and I guess that segues into a nice point which is - you can address a journalist as a fan. You can say “hey, I really love your work!”, as long as it's true. People keep [pitching me with] “I really love your work, I read…” and then it's the name of literally the last thing I wrote.
That's not even subtle, you've just Googled me. We're not stupid, We can tell if you're not actually a fan. I'd rather you didn't say anything then pretend like you care about my work. That's just weird, that gives me creepy vibes, like, don't lie. That seems really obvious - please don't lie.
And as a side [point], don't pretend like a journalist that you actually for-real enjoy is the perfect person to cover your game, if they're not. Every journalist tends to have their specialties. Like, some are really interested in farming games, some are interested in super intense strategy games.
But don't go up to the super intense strategy game person and be like “Oh, my cute low-poly platformer. I think you'd really like it” because they won't and that's weird. Again, that's just lying, you've lied, please don't.
SIMON: It’s interesting to your point on this because when I talk about streamers, and I talk about how you should approach streamers, I say “Look for streamers who appreciate the kind of game that you're making”.
And it does seem to me like from a press perspective, maybe because there's less outlets and then more general interest, people don't try and do that so much. They'll just be, like: “Well, we're just going to send the same information to everyone, whether they like it or not.”
KATE: Which is all right. I understand that a lot of indie studios don't have the budget either money wise or time wise to hand write a letter to every individual journalist. So it's absolutely fine to send out some generic press releases to the press if you don't even know if they're interested or not.
But I would still say, target the ones that you think would be interested, and target the ones that matter most to you and pitch it to them. Actually look at what they're interested in and tell them why they should write about it. Make it sound like you're doing them a favor.
SIMON: Just thinking back about when I was covering games both on the B2B side and kind of whatever Gamasutra is/was, I guess that's B2B/B2C. I can think of some people like Sean Murray from Hello Games back before they had No Man's Sky.
He was doing Joe Danger, and I had some conversations with him where he was being super genuine. The emails he sent out were very clearly him speaking to me and not very generic and it made a significant difference.
I mean, I think he was going to have done fairly well anyway. But it made a significant difference to how I thought about covering him, because I think I felt like I was having a genuine conversation with him.
KATE: I do worry - I have a lot of games currently that are coming out that are on my radar, because I've talked to the people behind it… but I do worry that there are going to be a lot of developers out there who were listening to this and thinking “Well, what you're doing is telling me to have high charisma, and I don't!”
And, yeah, I don't really know how to help by saying: “You know, just be just be yourself, be like a friendly person, someone who everyone wants to hang out with”. Because that it's easy for extroverts like me, maybe not so easy for everybody else. I don't want to give unhelpful advice, you know.
SIMON: Yeah, and I think there's also email manners - you can be an extrovert, and have terrible email manners… I think the important thing is if you can at least come out as kind of polite and helpful in email. You don't have to be incredibly charismatic on phone or in meetings.
I think one of your comments would probably be like get to the point, right? I think there's probably some of your ‘don't do’ lists that are about not going on forever and not telling you what you're talking about.
KATE: Yeah and also don't send me an email with no images or trailer in it, please, because I'm not gonna read it.
SIMON: And you said something earlier that I actually want to mention which is, you mentioned people send you email, like, says that their game is on sale - do people really do that? Is that a good idea?
KATE: People do a lot of things. Sometimes people will say “our game is on Kickstarter.” And that used to be a good hook when Kickstarter was new. It's not anymore - same with ‘our game is on sale’. Unless it's like a ludicrous sale, like, it's gone down to one cent, I'm not going to write about it.
Everything goes on sale all the time so, Why would I single out this one game? If your entire publisher or dev studio is having a sale, that's maybe news. But just imagine that everybody else is sending the email that you're about to send, please.
SIMON: I'm on the same page. I think your social media can talk about this, and maybe your Steam news page could mention some of it. But to your point, you need to have segmented decisions on what you're sending to people - and particularly when it comes to press and streamers. I think they appreciate less emails, but emails that have very specific actionable information.
KATE: Yeah, I think it boils down to being respectful of people's time. The press - it is our job to open emails and write about them all day. But that doesn't mean that you can just send me emails that are basically filler. I'm not a robot, I don't just turn press releases into news.
SIMON: Yeah, there’s sites for that - Gamespress.com. Then your press release will appear on a number of external websites without any humans, that’s quite different.
We're talking a lot about electronic communications here, because that's where we are, especially in this COVID era. But maybe it'd be nice to talk a little bit about phone briefings or video briefings, or even in-person briefings. Where do you see the role of those nowadays? Do you appreciate being invited to those, or are you very much [that] my workload is such that electronic [communications] does 80% of the work for me?
KATE: Personally, I don't love phone briefings - unless it is a game that is big enough to warrant embargoes and things like that. I've definitely done a few for bigger games. But even then, sometimes, they're a waste of my time - because they don't tell me anything that couldn't have just been an email.
At the end of the day, what most press want out of those things is information and assets. You can email most of those things. The best thing that you can have as a phone briefing or a video… is a playthrough of the game. And really, if you're an indie, there's no reason you can't just send press a demo - tell them not to write about it before a certain time.
They are very time consuming and energy consuming. I can't do anything else for like an hour, if I've got a weird press meeting or whatever. And it very much makes me do it on someone else's time as well. And a lot of press are on different time zones, so what works for you might not work for everybody.
SIMON: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And if I think about what I've done with GameDiscoverCo it's part newsletter and part consulting. But I only have maybe 15 to 20 hours a week to spend on my newsletter, and I'm putting out like five or 6,000 words a week.
And as a result, other than this podcast - which is an experiment to try and get more content in here and is very focused, I absolutely don't take phone or video briefings. I take everything to email. And that's way more efficient in terms of how you sort stuff.
KATE: Yeah and also, then I have a record of it. I'm not going to transcribe some phone call we had. That's either expensive because you pay someone else to do it, or it's time consuming because I'm doing it. So yeah, at least with an email I can reference it later.
SIMON: You also talked about embargoes just now and that's actually something that I realised I want to ask you about. Because embargoes are something that is obviously used heavily for very large games. But then as you go down [in scale], it's used intermittently. And I wondered your opinions on when it should be used, if it's when it's useful when it's not useful.
KATE: I think with indies, I appreciate things being more like a heads up when it comes to embargoes. Like “Heads up, we're going to announce this on Friday, please don't say anything about it until Friday” rather than like, big company embargoes which are like: “Don't even mention the existence of this character until this date”.
You're like “What? We know he exists - that's so weird”. I don't see many indies doing embargoes, unless it's the kind of game that really benefits from people not knowing things about the game. And in that case, it's less of an embargo, like “don't mention anything” and it's more of a “In your review, please don't mention these specific things”. I think that's reasonable.
I'm surprised more indie games don't actually specify that kind of thing. Usually, reviewers aren't going to be [making] massive spoilers in their reviews. But embargoes, I don't think they're super useful unless there was a heads up.
SIMON: That's good, because I think what you're saying is… you can do embargoes but they're really light embargoes. Press like if you have a chance to write up something ahead of time, if it's a little bit interesting. But you just don't want to be yelled at, and told lots of unnecessary reasons why you can't do something.
KATE: Yeah, I think an embargo for a game that's quite small, it carries the risk of making you come across as a bit uppity. I know that sounds really mean but, do you think that I would break an embargo? Places like Nintendo will do it because they actively have to crack down on people leaking things. But small games don't really get leaked, so…
SIMON: It's less of a big deal… I've occasionally found people who asked you to sign NDAs before they give you embargoed news. And I think that is quite funny.. [for me] that's an indication that the news is not going to be good. So I just ignore them - but yeah, kind of controversial.
Is there anything else just sort of finishing off this ‘don’t-s’ list? Are there any other like three or four quick ‘don't-s’ you would like to tell people that you think they are still doing?
KATE: Yes, number one, don't overdo it with GIFs. GIFs are really nice. But if you send a lot of GIFs in an email my browser will crash - please don't do that. Also, I can't really use GIFs that often - so they're not that useful to press. Include one or two, that's fine - but not too many.
Two, when you're at physical press events don't corner journalists and act like a salesman. It's really obvious and it makes me uncomfortable. Often at events, I am just hanging out with friends or going to see games that I'm excited about. But if you treat it as a business opportunity, then I'm gonna feel really uncomfortable.
And number three, this one is a weird one, it doesn't happen a lot. Please don't send physical press kits without permission - it's really scary. A lot of journalists, especially women and people of color in games journalism, don't want people to know their addresses because they will get harassed.
We're very protective about our [physical] addresses - and if I know that some PR company has my address and is sending things, then that's a little scary. So please make sure that you get permission. I know that it's exciting to keep the press kit a secret and have it as a fun surprise. But it's not a fun surprise if you do it like that, so…
SIMON: Yeah, it's interesting you should say that, because one of my previous jobs was helping to run GDC. And we did notice at one point that we were still collecting addresses for the press even though we weren't using them, so we got rid of that.
I know that the E3 in particular, was very poor at that. That's probably one place that people ended up getting addresses from because E3 managed to leak its entire press list, including addresses.
KATE: I think the last time I applied for a GDC press pass and it asked for my address I filled in the box with “I'm not giving you my address”, so maybe that goes through.
SIMON: I think it might have worked but yeah, it was also one of these things where… sometimes you realize we weren't giving it to anyone but we're still asking for it.
KATE: It's in a database somewhere, that's not cool.
SIMON: Yeah, it's still not cool. Because who knows what happens to that database if the hackers get it?
Actually, we're getting towards the end here. We're talking a lot about the press side of things, but it is interesting to me that you've also worked in the industry and you still continue to cross over and do community management and narrative sometimes.
So I wanted to ask you, as someone who's sort of seen both sides of this. Is there stuff that sort of surprised you or you've been interested to see from another perspective, when you've been doing either community management or narrative in studios?
KATE: I think a lot of it didn't surprise me that much. Like, I knew that a lot of the press, especially the cooler indie press will only really cover indie games if they know about them in advance. It sounds very nepotistic, and it is.
Being on the dev side, I worked for KO_OP which has a lot of indie cachet, so it wasn't too hard to reach out to the press. We already had a game - GNOG - which had a small but successful critical reception. So it was very easy, the groundwork had been laid already.
I knew a bunch of the press, which made it very weird, I had to be a bit hands off with it, so it wasn't unethical. But yeah, like, if you've already got the cool guy status in indie games it's a lot easier. I never really had to experience the “we're building the studio up from nothing, and we really need people to pay attention to us” kind of thing.
Very lucky to not have to deal with that, because that's stressful. But knowing a lot of other people who have done that, who have been like “this is my first game”? It really helps to have a publisher who already knows all the press. Pretty much every indie publisher right now is that. Pick well because the publisher will actually end up saying a lot about you.
If you're published by Annapurna, you're going to be perceived as like, kind of hip, maybe a bit wanky. but in a cool way. If you're published by Devolver, it's like “GUNS AND BLOOD AND EXPLOSIONS” and same with Raw Fury. So you know, a publisher can really help. But be aware that they're also going to come with preconceived notions.
SIMON: Yeah, it's interesting - I've noticed that the top echelon of publishers have quite strong flavor. But then there's a number of other publishers that sort of don't have flavor. And I've been trying to work out whether flavor is always good as a publisher.
Because I think from a press perspective, it sort of helps - and also from a player perspective. But then as a publisher, you end up getting stereotyped a little bit. Then if you want to do something different, it can be difficult
Also from your community perspective, I presume that KO-OP was already stereotyped, based on its previous games as a studio.
KATE: Yeah, we were very much like artsy vector stuff, that's kind of what people expected - which worked well for Winding Worlds, which was the Apple Arcade game we made. So yeah, it's a little harder to challenge ‘our next game is different from the one you know us for’. But it's been done so it's not too much to worry about, I'd say.
SIMON: I definitely think from a non-press and developer point of view, individual players sometimes pay less attention to this than everyone would like. I do think people are just playing a game: ‘What is by WHO?’
[laughs]
KATE: A lot of people will assume that the publisher is the developer. There isn't really that understanding of the industry from players a lot of the time. So, you know, people will say this is a Devolver Digital game, and it's not. They just helped make it be real but that doesn't mean they made it. Usually they have absolutely nothing to do with the development, so…
SIMON: Yeah, I'm quite careful in my newsletter, if possible, to always list the developer and the publisher, because I'm a little sensitive to that. Even on the Switch, I don't know if you know some of the Switch rules, it's difficult to get both developer and publisher in there.
KATE: I know, it's very, very annoying, especially on the Switch - because sometimes the porting studio is entirely different from the developer and the publisher. I think Nintendo tends to list the publisher first - a lot of places list the publisher first. If you don't know about the industry, you don't know the difference between publisher and developer, why would you care?
SIMON: Yeah, yeah, I think that's something that platforms do… that's probably something we should challenge platforms to do better on. I know that Steam does a good job, but sometimes the searching functionality [isn’t great] - it annoyed me on the music side of things on Apple Music for a long time.
Maybe even now, [in Apple Music] it's difficult to search by label - platforms seem to like anonymizing some of these structures. And I think it's good when you can just click on the developer and see what else they made, which generally works on Steam, for example.
Well… we're getting right to the end here and I just wanted to ask you about what kind of games you've been playing recently. Because this is something I'm going to try and also also my podcast guests. Are there games you have been enjoying?
KATE: Yeah, so, I've been playing Earthbound for the first time because it got added to the Nintendo Switch online catalog. And I haven't really wanted to play too many of the old SNES games on the online catalog, because they haven't aged very well.
But Earthbound is incredible. It's aged so well, it could have been made like last year .It's very much a specific type of game. But it's fun to play - like, there's annoying backtracking but that's a modern game thing too. The dialogue is incredible, The localization, I think localization is really underappreciated, it's incredible in this game. It's so good, It's very goofy. It's got a very modern sense of humor, I'm really enjoying it.
And then alongside that, I'm playing Skyward Sword, which has not aged very well at all, I think it's around 10, maybe 11 year old. And, you know, it's a Wii game, it's got motion controls that don't really work. It's very much like a weird Zelda because it sort of stands apart from the rest of them, because it went so hard on the motion controls mechanic.
And it does suffer a little bit because of that, but I think the story is really interesting. I think the aesthetics of it are very appealing to me. And when I say I'm playing it, I'm forcing my partner to play it. I've played it before, so I'm watching him getting frustrated with all the motion controls and being like “I promise you, it'll be worth it” And I'm not even sure if it will be, so…
SIMON: Well, I think an important part of relationships is making your partner play an annoying game and then watching them. So I think that's a good angle for you.
KATE: He really likes Zelda. So I'm like, you can't have not played this one Zelda game.
SIMON: And now he's played it, whether he likes it or not. So that's okay. Well, thank you so much. It was so wonderful having you on the podcast. And once again, I appreciate it.
KATE: Thank you for having me. I love talking about how to email me properly.
SIMON: And now everybody knows. So that's great. Yes, good. Wonderful.
SIMON: And that's our show for this week. Thanks so much to Kate Gray for coming onto the podcast - you can find out more about her and her work at kategray dot me.And if you don't know already, this podcast is made by GameDiscoverCo - we run a newsletter around video game discovery. Check it out and sign up at newsletter dot gamediscover dot co. If you dig what we're doing and want to support us, sign up for our paid Plus newsletter subscription, and get extra newsletters, charts, Discord access and eBooks! For this podcast, many thanks to our producer, editor, and transcriber Alejandro Linares Lopez, theme tune composer Keith Baylis, aka Vimster, and all of our subscribers and listeners. We'll see you back in GameDiscoveryLand soon - have a good one!

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