Why Great Games Fail

0:00 - A great game 1:50 - The expert 2:59 - What games work on Steam 4:21 - Where Season did well 6:01 - Why talk about Steam? 7:38 - Marketing doesn't mean success 8:20 - DATA 8:44 - A secret formula 9:32 - What games don't work 10:53 - What about Steam Deck? 12:11 - A buzzy game you might know 14:48 - Ways to make a game work 15:36 - What about cozy games? 17:16 - Sports games do bad on Steam 18:22 - Pokémon-likes, on the other hand... 19:38 - Something doesn't add up... 22:11 - This is like software design 23:24 - Twitter is not real life 24:25 - NBZ helps me 26:04 - What people read on a Steam page 28:01 - The false door test At the end of January, a game released that changed how I think of games completely. Season A Letter to the Future had been building hype through multiple trailers during PlayStation events. Season, at its simplest, is a game about riding a bike, taking pictures, and recording audio. Call it wholesome or cozy, but Season fits nicely into this extremely popular niche of games whose goals are not to best an opponent or kill an enemy. In Season, Estelle's goal is simply to document her world and its culture before that culture comes to an end. Season's first trailer drew a lot of interest. It looked beautiful and contemplative and like a game I was going to devour. It was rather big news when word came out that the game's director and Scavenger Studios co-founder Simon Darvaux had harassed staff working on the game and had a toxic management style. It was a little quieter news when an investigation found that Scavenger Studios had dealt with Darveau's toxicity appropriately and that he would return to the studio in a more isolated role working on a different game. But perhaps the most shocking news came months after Season's release in June, when Scavenger Studios laid off half of their staff due to the game's extremely poor performance. After a strong indie game hype cycle and being featured in multiple PlayStation events, Season only sold around 60,000 copies across PS5 and Steam. The game underperformed what was expected in sales, and very likely, I think, underperformed what was necessary to make up the costs of development. When this news came out, I put a link to the gamesindustry.biz story in a Discord server that I frequent. The series of responses that I got from today's guest are what completely changed how I think about games, or at least how those games are marketed. In this video, NBZ walks me through the ways that indie games are marketed and why some great games fail when others don't. MY LINKS Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD