Hi guys, I've been asked several times to share some info about our experience of reaching >40,000 wishlists, so I decided to drop a post about it - maybe it will prove useful to someone.
To be precise, as of today we're nearing 49,000 wishlists.
For most of the development we were a 2-person team and recently became a trio when we hired an art director to juice up the visuals.
Our game:
- is a horror pool roguelite with upgradable cues and a gun mechanics
- the main loose inspiration being Inscryption
- and some players/journalists have compared it to Balatro "if it went for pool"
Still, we weren't inspired by Balatro (it wasn't even out when we started discussing the idea of PoM/we were not aware of it), Inscryption is a different (and brilliant) game, and we think Pool of Madness is quite unique.
What worked best so far:
- Steam events, from Lovecraftian Days to Tiny Teams by Yogscast
I guess no one will be surprised that these resulted in largest wishlist spikes.
The most significant one was when we released a very raw "demo" for Lovecraftian Days, around a month after a 2-person game jam that spawned this abomination of a game, and got some great visibility and very positive feedback.
This required us to prepare the Steam page, screenshots and a short teaser while we barely knew anything about the game, and the visuals were very rough. All while trying to get the prototype to a playable state. But it paid off and reassured us that the game has a very cool core loop and an appeal, despite lacking in visuals at that stage.
Lovecraftian Days were especially effective as we had a special tab for our titles, thanks to our charity efforts (our previous game has gotten 2,000,000+ downloads and we donate all proceeds from it to charity).
We’ve also received a lot of interest from publishers around the world, to the point where we’ve had trouble keeping up with the number of emails at times.
- a recent Instagram got 490,000 views
We focused on showing the unique and weird aspects of our horror pool, like vomiting out powerups, used captions and a hooking thumbnail: human skulls on a pool table and an enigmatic line from the game. This worked much better than our previous tries, but our account was quite fresh and it's hard to say if we can ever recreate this. In short: we’ve tried, but weren’t successful so far, haha.
Long story short, this converted into roughly >1,000 wishlists and >600 Instagram followers, so not amazing, but still satisfying.
Here's a reddit post about it.
- Chinese influencers sharing it on Douyin
It was also randomly discovered and shared by Chinese influencers. This can sometimes be hard to track, so you wake up to a giant spike in views and frantically scour the web while typing random stuff into Google Translate to understand what's happening.
One of those spikes brought us more wishlists than one of the larger Steam events.
PoM has also been appearing in Japanese gaming media from time to time, for example on Gematsu.
We think translating the Steam pages and the demo, as well as the horror aspects mixed with ridiculousness (dead fish raining on the pool table while you're playing) definitely helped here.
- Bluesky: going from 0 to >5,500 followers organically
Things that worked very well:
We immediately jumped on Bluesky at the right moment, when many people started migrating from X.
We asked to be added to many gamedev and horror lists that were popular back then. Followers from those still trickle in.
We interacted with many new players and developers interested in similar games, horror, Lovecraft's work and such.
- VR support
Many wishlists seem to come from the VR category on Steam, which we didn’t anticipate. At one point we disabled the VR tag as some players thought it’s VR only, and daily wishlists dropped by half for a while.
What is not going great:
- Our posts on various SM are not getting as much traction as we'd like to, despite some spikes.
- We asked someone well-versed in the mysterious ways of Tik Tok to help us there, but it's not going well.
Where we dropped the ball:
We whipped out the prototype in a couple of days a couple of years ago - before Balatro completely exploded and created a new genre with many followers releasing all kinds of "haunted sports/gambling" games - then got a nice starting momentum with the raw "demo".
If we could crunch our way into a fast release, we wouldn't be classified as "Balatro-like"* and the "freshness" factor would definitely play to our benefit. But realistically, it was impossible at the time, partly because we try not to crunch and partly because we had other projects and responsibilities to take care of. We also could've been more active on SM in the early stages of development. In the end, we leaned into the “Balatro-like” bracket after journalists and players kept describing our game that way.
That said, we're nearing 50,000 wishlists, the game is getting better and better and the feedback from playtests and early demos has been great.
*For clarity: we think Balatro is a great game, I'm just trying to provide some context - we didn't know that it existed/our unique idea would become a crowded genre.
What’s next
We’re participating in the Next Fest starting tomorrow, recently launched a…
…trailer by the creators of the CloverPit trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUEEFxFSgPk
…Next Fest Demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2887480/Pool_of_Madness_Demo/
Give them a peek if you found this post interesting/useful in some way/if that kind of game floats your goat.
Some backstory:
- 2-person studio from Poland that recently grew to 3 core members
- our first original game as Bit Golem was a free, charity-focused project called Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft that crossed 2,000,000 downloads (completely different genre, so the conversion is naturally very low) - but that's a completely different story from simpler times (2021) that we detailed in another post.
