5/26/2023 0 Comments Paranormal agency game big fish![]() Īnyhow, there’s one final thing that Joe said that I really wanted to highlight: “My single most significant piece of advice… don't try to sell a product (your game) instead, try to tell its story - there's a massive difference between the two.” ![]() ![]() And we think the area is just plain undersupplied with longer, more complex titles - with a few exceptions like The Callisto Protocol. (Perhaps they can be big with streamers/hype, but not always convert well to sales - which makes established companies nervous to get into them?)īut just ran something about why horror games are so big on Roblox that speaks to the genre being a big deal. We do think that - for whatever reason - high quality horror games can be an under-served niche, which is helping Paranormal Tales. He managed to pick up a ton of visibility thanks to high-profile streamers - including Lirik, Sodapoppin, Valkyrae, and Jacksepticeye - commenting on and liking the Tweet. Joe even picked up a later viral Twitter post with a hashtag: having spotted that #twitchstreamer was trending, he posted something about the game with that hashtag. The press were happy to cover, especially after it went viral elsewhere: “Dozens of media sites posted about the game, including IGN, GameSpot, Game Informer, GamesRadar, and more… I purposefully waited and used the Jake Lucky tweet as a reference for how PT was ‘going viral’.” Joe notes that he was a regular subReddit contributor, so he didn’t look like a flyby promoter, and “the copy for the Reddit post was very natural and actually how I felt (I was very nervous, haha).” Reddit also helped out quite a bit: this r/pcmasterrace post by Joe ended up making it all the way to the front page of Reddit. Later Tweets from folks like Jake Lucky also did great, using the messaging “two indie devs, Unreal Engine 5, bodycam horror”, in that order. Twitter was a surprisingly big driver: an initial Tweet from the official account went viral after Joe tagged the HorrorVisuals Twitter account, who RT-ed, and then folks such as Siren Head creator Trevor Henderson added momentum. I kept some of these creators and journalists briefly in the loop about the game during those eight months.”įrom there, how - specifically - did the game go viral? Walking through some of the major inflection points: ![]() This includes journalists who have previously covered horror games and content creators who cover horror, too. The devs found their niche & kept ‘em warm - Joe says: “Alongside developing the game, I built a curated list of horror fans. (aha!), and the YouTube video’s description says: “My friend and I are making a bodycam style horror game inspired by P.T.” Specifically the game’s title, Paranormal Tales can be shortened to P.T. The trailer does a bunch of smart stuff to help virality : these include the “muffled mic/popping sounds” of bodycam footage, fish-eye visuals, a familiar but eerie setting ( “most people have walked their dog in a forest” ), and some nods to lost Hideo Kojima horror title P.T. Everybody turns their head when UE5 gets mentioned - and a bodycam horror game made in UE5 is like having two hooks in one!” It has a clear hook - horror & bodycam & high-quality game engine: Joe notes that the first-person ‘bodycam’ perspective: “just adds a whole different twist on horror, and it allows room to be really creative. Here’s some of the key takeaways we got from Joe’s write-up of the game’s debut: Which is great, because marketing lead and co-creator of the game Joe Henson just contributed a massive write-up to GameDiscoverCo on the unveiling for the game - it got over 70,000 Steam wishlists in its first week on the store. But it does mean that, when we comparatively ranked the ‘Hype’ ranking increases for all 12,500+ unreleased Steam games, it scored the highest. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was the ‘top overall wishlist gainer’ for the week. And the email we sent to them last Sunday had “bodycam-style horror game based on found footage” Paranormal Tales at #1. So, we at GameDiscoverCo have developed a ‘trending unreleased games on Steam’ algorithm for one of our clients.
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