![]() ![]() "We just weren't anticipating the response, and now it very much feels like we're working on a live game." They had also expected their Early Access experience to be them interacting with a limited community providing feedback over time, but the game's momentum has been growing and the size and voice of the community is already nearly overwhelming. When it garnered approval from the community in a matter of days, they moved up their plans to debut the game on Early Access. Popovich and Monomi Park co-founder Mike Thomas had been warned that the Steam Greenlight process can take a couple months, so they built that time into their schedule. ![]() Because you broke even in terms of that sale, and now you've got however many thousand people who are aware of your game."Īs a result of all this, essentially nothing with the game's marketing and promotion has gone according to plan. If just one person buys it out of the entire lot who saw that YouTube video, it's worth it. "Once you have Steam keys, you don't want to just give them away to anyone who has 50 subscribers, but you want that to spread, because it's worth it. "I think it's pretty important to understand that is the new advertising for games, streaming and YouTube and people informing one another through the channels they enjoy," Popovich said. He's seen some developers resistant to the idea of doling out free copies of the game to smaller YouTube personalities, but Popovich said there can be a good return even on those. Secondly, Popovich said that once the game started to get noticed by YouTubers, they reacted quickly to it and sped up their plans to distribute Steam keys. ![]() The action in the game is consciously oriented toward the camera, with actors deliberately designed to face the player during interactions, and there's an unpredictability to the gameplay that ensures different people will see different things happen on various playthroughs. "t's pretty important to understand that is the new advertising for games, streaming and YouTube and people informing one another through the channels they enjoy."įor one, the game was designed to be very YouTube friendly. But that's not to say the small team at Monomi Park didn't work for their break they just worked in less direct ways. Somehow it kinda got out, and pretty soon we had a number of YouTubers reaching out to us."įor developers struggling to gain attention for their games, that part about "somehow it kinda got out" might be frustratingly glossing over a pretty key point, as could be Popovich's admission that he didn't actually reach out to anyone for coverage. "So we put it in front of friends and family and also invited some outsiders that had been following me on Twitter, and people that we knew from other jobs to check it out. "We wanted to get on early access as early as possible in 2016, and around Christmas time we were preparing a build we felt very good about, and we were going to put it in front of people," Popovich said. But when asked about how the tiny developer engineered such a successful debut, co-founder and designer Nick Popovich described a situation that was at least as serendipitous as it was strategic. Since debuting on Steam Early Access in mid-January, the pastel-colored first-person management sim has sold more than 100,000 copies. Monomi Park's first game, Slime Rancher, isn't technically out yet but it's already a hit.
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