[Hi, I’m ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and you’re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter, a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Had originally planned a round-up, but it turns out something else came up that I just had to write about. You may recall me mentioning, in the last newsletter, the amazing ‘out of the blue’ success of multiplayer party game Among Us on Steam. (It’s the top global seller right now.)

Well, somebody was kind enough to point out that the Brace Yourself Games Discord has a ‘Clark Tank’ chat channel – twinned with Ryan Clark’s Twitch stream/YouTube videos on game discoverability.

Turns out Forest (ForteBass on Twitter!) of Among Us devs InnerSloth had been sharing his story there. So I got permission from ForteBass to share some of his insight with you all, which I augmented with research. (Yes, Ryan, I’m sneaking around your Discord server stealing content now!)

What’s the big deal, anyhow?

I’ve been watching YouTube videos of Among Us, and it plays so, so well as a social online game. It has big influence from Mafia/Werewolf, obviously, but also reminds me of a ‘you’re actually in the world’ version of Spaceteam.

The tension as you wander around the level trying not to get killed (if you’re not the impostor!) while accomplishing tasks is great. And then voting off potential impostors really ups the ante. Check out this video from Blitz if you want to get a good idea of the social dynamics at play:

So, some background. Among Us actually launched in June 2018 on Android and July 2018 on iOS. After launching in November 2018 on Steam, and having an extremely slow start there, the game has just exploded in recent weeks – in ways almost unprecedented on Steam for a title that’s been available for some time.

Just check out Among Us’ reviews graph on its Steam page since launch.

On Steam the game is only priced at $4.99, but it also has a bunch of DLC such as in-game pets. You can see a similar but slightly later ‘reviews explode’ effect on Android for the Google Play version of the game (amusingly, the URL is ‘Space Mafia’), if you look on SensorTower:

Interestingly, Among Us is free on Android and iOS, where it monetizes with similar cosmetic IAP as the Steam version. And it turns out that even ignoring the recent spike, there were millions of downloads on mobile – especially Android – before the game broke out on Steam. (SensorTower is estimating 11 million Android downloads, even ahead of this big August 2020 boost.) I had no idea about this.

ForteBass’ comments bear this out: “It’s the end of 2019. America and Europe are not our big customers: Brazil, Korea, and the Middle East are. Google Play is our breadwinner & IAP for maps and pets are why.”

So it turns out that YouTubers have covered this game extensively before, just not English-language ones. Some of those early spikes “..started with Godenot (3.6M sub Youtuber) [earlier in 2019] who found our game on Google Play (probably recommended by players? Possibly via Itch.io, even… I know he streamed from mobile before switching to PC.) We had considered wrapping up Among Us back then, because profitability was not in sight. But the Brazilian audience drove us to create more content, and that was wise.”

As for another major territory in question: “Our first audience was Korea, and they still constitute 50% of our Steam Among Us sales. That all started in Dec 2018 with Kevin Choi. He found Among Us via itch.io, and I think that’s because we got a day of promotion on the front page. This is literally the only promotion we have expressly asked for.”

So as we can see, Among Us was popular and had good retention in other territories way before this big viral spike in North America and Europe. But it looks like those who saw streamers playing the game gravitated towards the free mobile version – also because those territories play more mobile than PC games. And heck, the game hit a million downloads overall in May 2019. So, it wasn’t exactly ‘unknown’.

Taking it over the top on Steam

Was there any hint that the game could also do well on Steam? Well, yes – not least because Valve itself took notice. ForteBass takes up the story here: “In February 2020, Steam reached out to us for a daily deal, and we went for 50% off. If I remember rightly, each of those two days produced an entire month of sales, and left us with a higher baseline of sales after, as well as a boatload of wishlists. So that in turn made our Summer sale worthwhile – which snowballed into minor top seller visibility. (#35-ish).”

So, sounds like the Steam featuring helped step the game up visibility-wise. And at this point, Among Us – which was already great – had been polished and had extra maps, pets, and many rounds of bugfixes in place. So it was well set-up to break out, if somebody noticed it.

ForteBass speculates: “But why did we get a daily deal [in Feb]? Well, I didn’t ask, but at the beginning of the year, Kaif (a… UK streamer) and his friends picked us up. We were already profitable by that point and actually had just announced Among Us as complete, which caused a sizable drop off of players. Kaif completely reversed that and brought in a wave of new European players (a new-ish market for us), particularly on Steam (which was our #2 marketplace at that time).”

And that gets us to the current day. Or at least to mid-July, where things got really crazy for the team. Rounding the story off: “First, yes, Twitch streams are the cause of our [most recent] spike. This started just after the Steam Summer sale, which is actually pretty important for us as a 2 year-old game which cost 5 dollars that has already reached 75% off. Pluto and Sodapoppin’s timing was impeccable… I haven’t talked to Pluto yet, but I’d bet that he found Among Us during the 2020 summer sale, which frankly, is the only Big Steam Sale that’s gone well for us.”

And indeed, Reddit sleuths have pinpointed the exact Twitch VOD where everything took off. Sometimes it takes one big streamer to ignite his peers, and looks like that’s what happened in this case. (Among Us is particularly good for streamers because it pulls in the ‘play with your streamer buddies, and you can cross-promote between your channels’ thing. Plus – the drama!)

Conclusion – the path to the top goes where?

Well, I have to say that my research in writing this article didn’t go where I expected. The team behind Among Us made a really amazing game that succeeded in a very unconventional way across a free mobile and an inexpensive PC version.

It rode multiple viral streamer waves while the team desperately upgraded the infrastructure to keep up, it constantly improved, and it’s a great (and vanishingly rare?) example of a multiplayer-only title that’s not an obvious Fortnite-y AAA beast becoming a smash.

As ForteBass notes, the odds are often stacked against multiplayer-first titles: “I initially didn’t want to make Among Us because of the multiplayer aspects. We had seen stuff like Bombernauts flop and the added complexity of multiplayer made it really unappealing. But our other game idea wasn’t panning out, so I prototyped Among Us and it was immediately fun and interesting.”

So if you really want to go for it with multiplayer, you have to have all of the right elements in place. ForteBass concludes: “Everything else has been patience, a high retention game, and frequent public updates. Discord is very important for this. It goes nuts when we announce literally anything.”

So, onward – and congrats again to Forest and his team, who are planning a sequel and all kinds of good things. And good luck to ‘em!

It’s hard to believe but this week marks five years since the release of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. We’re extremely grateful for all the players who have given our weird game a chance. None of this would have been possible without your support, so from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU.

Now that we have some perspective on selling a videogame over the course of five years, we wanted to share some data, because our sales graph didn’t take the shape we expected, and we thought it might be of interest to other developers.

TL;DR: Lovers had an okay-but-not-great launch, and we expected the game would fizzle out fairly quickly, but in fact sales ended up increasing for a few years, and it ended up being quite successful, thanks in part to updates, ports, discounts, word-of-mouth, and of course luck (don’t want to pretend that there isn’t a TON of random chance affecting how games fare).

Launch and Year 1

We launched the original 2-player version of Lovers on Steam and Xbox One on September 9, 2015. It’s a niche game in that it features local co-op, not online. We knew that would limit its sales, but we didn’t know by how much. There were a few other local multiplayer indie games getting buzz back then, like TowerFall, so we figured there could be a market for it. But we had no way to gauge it.

Here’s the shape of our first year of revenue:

Our biggest spike was our launch. We hired a PR company to help us get blog and review coverage, which more or less worked, but our second week of sales declined by half and it continued to drop from there. We ran some 33% discounts after only a couple months to take advantage of Steam’s Autumn and Winter sales (plus we were extremely fortunate to get some front page rotation in Winter) and we got some brief boosts, but then quickly returned to baseline. It was disappointing, but not really surprising.

In February 2016 we launched on PS4 around Valentine’s day, coinciding with discounts on the other platforms and a marketing effort (meaning we re-hired that PR company to push out a press release, and also did an old-fashioned twitter GIF storm). But again, sales fell back to baseline afterwards — although having an extra platform in the mix kept our total baseline sales from declining further.

Year 2: Party games, word-of-mouth, and a bundle

After year 1, we expected our best days were behind us and our future sales would follow the same gradual decline. But surprisingly, our sales stopped declining, and even increased somewhat. Why?

This graph is an example of the stegosaurus tail sales curve, where a game’s long tail, instead of just sloping downwards, is covered in spikes. So what made the difference? Let’s dive in.

One unquantifiable factor is that in May 2016, eight months after launch, we finally added support for 4-player co-op (still local only). There was no huge spike at the time, but from then on, we noticed the game got covered more often as a party game, and if you do a random Twitter search for the game it’s probably still the most frequent discussion context (usually it’s “OMG I love Overcooked, what other co-op games are there?”).

When we noticed this, it gave us the idea to make a Steam bundle featuring us and some other local co-op party games. We approached Steam and the other developers, and everyone was on board, so for Valentine’s Day 2017 we launched the Cozy Couch Co-Op Bundle alongside Overcooked, BattleBlock Theater, Moon Hunters, and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Steam gave us great placement, and the resulting spike was almost as good as our launch. It also had the added bonus of boosting our baseline sales afterwards, as players looking for co-op games could see all our games on each other’s Steam pages.

Throughout our second year we also slowly increased our discount percentage during sales. We kept track of our average daily revenue for each sale, and if it started declining significantly we’d increase the discount percentage. By the end of our second year we were doing 55% off.

And just a note — even though all those spikes make it look like we were constantly on sale, since each platform has their own sales schedule there was actually a lot of time we were just sitting in the stores at full price. Plus there were times when we couldn’t get platforms to include us in sales, or give us store placement, leading to little mini spikes where we’d be on sale but not actually have a large revenue bump.

Years 3 to 5: Switch time

We would never have expected we’d have our highest sales in our 3rd year of release, but hey, thanks Nintendo!

We launched on Switch on October 3, 2017, seven months after the console was released. That launch remains our highest sales spike, and the Switch has been our best-selling platform. In a way it was the ideal platform — the audience is open to colorful, approachable games, 2D gameplay, and the base console even came with two controllers! Plus we pushed hard to release in the first year of the console, meaning the storefront was less crowded. It also meant that we got there in time for the Switch’s first holiday season, which ended up being our second highest spike… until two weeks later, when we ran a 33% off sale in the first week of January 2018 to reach all the brand new Switch owners. Then that became our second highest spike.

There’s not a ton more to note in our sales history, just a lot of running our own discounts on all the platforms, and saying yes to any themed discounts that the account managers at the platforms tell us about, plus we kept doing our own sales around Valentine’s day. We have been nudging down our discount percent over time, and we found a sweet spot at 60% off. We tried 67%, to get us under the $5 price point, but for some reason it wasn’t as successful, so we went back to 60%. Occasionally the platforms will ask us to go lower, but for now we’ve been pushing back since this seems to be a good price.

One interesting thing (and really it’s only interesting for local co-op games) was that in Nov 2019 Steam launched its Remote Play Together service. This service lets people play local-only multiplayer games together online via streaming. Lovers is a perfect candidate to benefit from that, and it even got some placement in the service launch promo. Afterwards, we noticed our baseline Steam sales stopped their slow decline and reversed upwards again, although it’s hard to know exactly how much difference it made because there was also the usual noisy year-end sales bumpiness. It doesn’t seem huge, but we didn’t have to do anything for it — just a lucky break. Thanks Valve!

And finally, there was the surreal Covid sales bump in spring of this year, when widespread lockdowns meant people were stuck at home playing video games. Sales went back to normal fairly quickly, though.

And that brings us up to date.

Overall platform sales breakdown

Steam and Switch have been our main breadwinners (even though Switch launched two years later), but Xbox One and PS4 have been solid performers too. Being on all the platforms has been hugely significant.

Final takeaways

Here’s what we believe helped us avoid the immediate sales decay we’d been expecting:

• Support! Even though our initial launch was disappointing, we found it was super valuable to keep supporting the game with patches, updates, and translations.
• Porting! Despite the long delay between our different launches, it didn’t seem to hurt our arrival on subsequent platforms (especially if you can launch early in a console’s lifecycle).
• Teaming up with other games in similar genres! In our case, the Cozy Couch Co-op Bundle was wonderful for building awareness. It wasn’t just a random bundle — it came from seeing what our audience was talking about and looking for.
• Run discounts! Run all the discounts! It’s also useful to keep track of daily revenue during discounts to inform what percentage to choose for the next discount.
• Luck! Always remember to have luck. Good luck!

And finally, let us say one more time: THANKS FOR PLAYING.