I am not going to post every day about this, but the first few days are the most interesting.
On day one the booklet was on the front page of DTRPG on the newest releases and on the latest free/PWYW lists. This brought in ‘free’ traffic as I didn’t have to anything.
By the time I woke up this morning the book was the 28th newest release, meaning you had to scroll sideways twice to find it. By 4pm it was 33rd, so four ‘pages’ deep and 17th on the latest free/PWYW titles. Incidentally that suggests that half of all the new releases are free or PWYW.
I have limited resources to bring to bear from a marketing point of view. I have decided that I will apply them sequentially rather than all at once. If I was bigger I would throw everything out at once and hope that I would achieve that idealistic ‘viral’ event where your audience do your marketing for you. I am not there, my audience is too small.
So on day one I announced the product on Discord. I had joined all the relevant discord servers I could find about a month ago. I didn’t want join, shout out about my game and then go silent again. That looks too spammy. What I did was join the servers, joined in any conversations I could make a contribution to and if I could I mentioned I was working on a game. Then yesterday it was entirely natural to mention the release of the game.
I also did a few tweets using my developer twitter account. That only has 188 followers. Not a lot of clout there. I really wished I had started building my twitter following months of even years ago.
By 7am GMT the game had had 87 downloads of which 3 were paid.
This morning I have been working twitter. I had some successes and a couple of disappointments.
I had tried to engage with the official DriveThruRPG twitter account. They have 21,500 followers. As the playtest was free I was hoping they would give me a shoutout.
No response at all.
I have done blogging for High Level Games. They have about 3,000 followers. I tried to engage with them and again nothing.
On the other hand I reached out to The Kind GM, 8,700 followers, and he could not have been more helpful.
I also spoke to Gavin Thorpe, a sci fi writer, game designer (Games Workshop) and world builder with 11,000 followers and again, he was more than willing to help a fellow creator.
So where are we now?
As I said, for me it is 4pm.
I have had 104 downloads and 6 paid sales. I have created a Discord channel for the game and that has gained 1 new user (that sounds pathetic but from little acorns!). The income so far will more more than pay for the soft cover standard colour interior book. It will also start to pay towards the Hardcover premium colour one.
I am busy for the rest of the day so I am not expecting anything great to happen. In the morning I will continue to reach out to twitter followers I have established contacts with.
Just for reference remember RMu = 145 downloads in several years. NavRPG 104 in about 30hrs.
(These are for Terefang, do you like the gutter are margins?)
I like the way this looks. It’s simple, clean, and easy to read. For a PWYW game, it’s fine — great illustrations, by the way; I hope they appear in the final version.
I’m actually one of the people who paid for the release, and I look forward to reading it over the weekend. However, I don’t think I’ll run any test game(s) at this point, as I’m short of players … and time! Still, I like this project and wish you the best.
(And thank you for all this writing you keep posting on this blog. It’s quality stuff).
Well thank you for downloading the game, thank you for contributing and for the compliments.
The playtest is going to run for a while, but not seven years. There will be a few updates in the first couple of weeks as it is all new and exciting.
When there is a nice steady group of players it tends to settle down.
yes they much clearer now and i can read it even without glasses.
The screenshots above are from the current version of the rules, the next time I update the playtest you will start to see more of the art.
The empty spaces are there temporarily to allow the rules to expand. In the final version the empty space will be balanced with more, smaller pieces of art. I don’t want to add art that I then have to take away.
I have some more text changes to make but they are additions rather than changes to the existing rules. I think an updated PDF will go out next week.