This week was amazingly productive, one of the best since I started development. I think I got a boost of motivation from seeing Outsider on Steam and the stream of impressions and wishlists! While my sales expectations have always been, and still remain, tempered, it is cool to see even a single potential customer. The excitement doesn’t come necessarily from the monetary gains but the idea that someone out there could play and enjoy my game. Cool!

I finished almost all writing reviews except the final pass for the tutorial and the four demo chapters. I could release the content as is, but I still want to make that final pass… First impressions are important.

It’s great seeing the writing coming together; the difference between the early drafts and what I have now is massive. After a few tweaks on the writing process, I think I got to a workflow I’m pretty comfortable with. I still have the problem of being unable to work more than 3-4 hours a day on writing, but careful planning allowed me to keep a constant pace in content creation. In other words, I’m getting better at it.

But writing isn’t the biggest concern right now. The “marketing funnel” is. Everybody says marketing is the hardest part of being an indie developer, and I can “thumbs up” that. Steam does a terrific job at selling games that sell themselves… In other words, those games that are very appealing at a quick glance. But it won’t do anything for hard-to-market games like Outsider, and I wouldn’t expect otherwise, as every (successful) mass-market retailer on Earth does the same. But this means I need to do a lot of work to get Outsider to where I want it to be.

For instance, I’m seeing terrific numbers for clickthrough… People like the game’s capsule and want to check the game page when they see it in search results. This is a pretty hard thing to achieve, and I got it right on the first try! However, my “wishlist rate”, the percentage of users that add the game to the wishlist upon seeing it, is just average… As most people know, Steam is a “winner takes all” marketplace where the averages are low, and the top 10% makes the players’ money. I won’t settle for “average”.

Over the week, I’ve tried many things to streamline the “funnel”; some things appeared to make a positive difference, while others didn’t. One type of problem I fixed as recently as yesterday was that my Steam trailer showed the “whoistheoutsider.com” URL, making people leave Steam and go to the game’s page here on this site… But this page just shows the trailer and tries to send the user back to Steam! I’m sure I lost a lot of people this way. I changed the Steam trailer to make it shorter (based on Reddit feedback from one of those “destroymypage” subreddits) and to show the “WISHLIST NOW” call to action. In the next several days, I’ll see the results along the other improvements I’m planning.

The marketing funnel is something I need to nail before I start pouring money into ads or even considering an Early Access release. Otherwise, I’d pay people to go to the game’s page and close the tab. I antecipate several weeks of work until it’s optimized… let’s hope I can make it happen sooner rather than later!