reddit – Exbleative

Have been scrambling about doing all sorts of stuff this week after hearing EXO ONE would be at Rezzed. Partially getting over excited maybe, but also wanting to maximize the opportunity and make the game look its best for the end of March. So to that effect I’ve been:

Sweating in the 40C heat here in Adelaide with no air con in my office
Improving both planets
Finalizing the height map for Planet 2
Working on final details/grass/rocks etc for Planet 2
Had a ‘breakthrough’ realisation of how we can more easily see through clouds and keep our bearings at the same time
Emailing a swathe of people I know in game dev, generally asking for their thoughts about the whole Rezzed thing and how I should handle it (since I probably won’t be flying over)
Turning up my PR/Marketing efforts. Mostly feels like to no effect whatsoever, lol. Either I’m bad at it or it just takes a far bigger, longer concerted effort than I think! Made me think of Jacob Leichty’s (from Astroneer)Tweet:

Twitter is for deleting the notion in your mind of "I wonder if anyone cares"

— Jacob Liechty (@SparseJacobian) February 4, 2017

I’m pretty sure people care about your game Jacob, stop complaining, omggg!! :)

For my marketing troubles last week (I probably spent almost 2 solid days doing nothing but…) I gained 3 newsletter subscribers and a handful of Twitter followers. Boom! It also seems that Reddit somehow dislikes me about as much as I dislike it…! I’m joking, I love Reddit, I just hate posting anything to it, because I get downvoted and comments like this:

Somehow nothing I ever post there gets any love at all. I feel like Reddit is like this:

“You did something great? You’re personally telling us about it? Go away!!”

However… if…

“My friend did this and now that happened and OMG isn’t that amazing?!” Upvote!!!

Ok, end of rant. Back to work. I officially abandon all Reddit hope lol.

Thanks for following!

Sales from a mention on /whoadude subreddit

The above is a rather nice result from being on /whoadude for only 2 days! I know, its not staggering sales, but I just thought I’d post this up as what I think is an interesting example of what some small marketing efforts can yield. The owner of the subreddit /whoadude emailed me and mentioned he was going to feature the game, and that if I could provide some promo codes, that would draw even more attention. A free app service of some kind on twitter picked it up and tweeted it as well, so hard to know if that also had an effect.

I had no idea reddit even had these kinds of ‘header’ posts, but /whoadude has one, its just a small line of text which said “App feature, Unknown Orbit” or something along those lines. Check it out here. The owner changes it every couple of days to something he think his audience will like, and I can somewhat see the link between his audience and my game :) I might have to have a second attempt at getting my game in front of an astronomy kind of audience, as surely they would love the game?

So all I had to do was write in /whoadude asking people to message me if they wanted a free code, and that was it. Sales stayed quite “high”(er!) all month!

The 5 star ratings continue to flood in, and when I get quite good effects from small marketing efforts like this, it is encouraging, so as soon as I get a spare moment, I’ll be adding a couple of new planets to the game. Will see how sales increase once there’s more to do within the game, different environments, challenges, etc. Hopefully it wont be too long!

Cheers!
Jay

Tag: reddit

EXO ONE end of week update – 10 Feb 2017

Subreddit Effect on Game Sales