Diagram of the influenza virus, courtesy Chris Bickel/Science

In Part I of Bill Harris' 180 Degrees column, he and Armageddon Empires' creator Vic Davis discussed how Davis got into game development, as well as the gamer interest and sales pattern for AE during its first three months of release. In today's second and final installment, the two examine the impact of influential journalists and outlets had on AE's sales in the months that followed. Finally, Harris steps back from his interview to extract some lessons that are invaluable to understanding how independent developers must approach their publicity and marketing campaigns differently from their peers at the big publishers--what Harris calls "the infection vector." Enjoy.

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Part Three: Post-Release, Four to Six Months

At the end of October, Armageddon Empires was selected as "Indie Pick of the Month" in Games for Windows magazine. With that mention, page views on the website went up sixty percent in one week.

Yes, it was a real boost. Breaking the downward trend was a huge morale booster. The sales benefit was not immediately noticeable and still pretty modest, but it was a definite turning point. I'm still trying to figure out a model for how customers come to make their purchase decision for AE. You could probably identify sub-groups of customers... those who bought within the first 48 hours, those who spend a week with the demo, those who needed to hear something positive from a third party, and those who are still on the fence but might revisit it when their gaming backlog gets whittled down...that type of thing.

Then, in December, there were three prominent mentions. First, in the "Tom vs. Bruce" feature in Games for Windows. A week later, Kieron Gillen posted a highly favorable review at Eurogamer. At almost the same time, Tom Chick put AE as #4 in his top games of 2007 list.

There was more. In early January, Gamasutra/AIGameDev.com gave Armageddon Empires the "Best A.I. in an Independent Game" award, and Bill Trotter posted another highly favorable review at The Wargamer.

Here's what page views and sales look like with the second three months added (the arrow marks three months from launch):

 

So, to put it in technical terms, what the hell happened?

It really just went super critical like a nuclear reaction. And during this time, other contacts were starting to bear fruit, which just built more momentum. It's really interesting to try and trace the spider web of connections and word of mouth buzz that kept rippling slowly along. And let's face it, Armageddon Empires is not a casual or mass market game and even among the NGG crowd it can be an acquired taste.

That's a remarkable lineup. Tom Chick, Kieron Gillen, Tim Edwards, Bruce Geryk, Gamasutra, Bill Trotter (who reviewed the game in late January)--it's a Who's Who of game criticism. I don't ever remember so many influential people lining up behind the same indie game.

It was great and terrifying at the same instant. I know the game is rough around the edges. Even after 8 months of polishing it's still got some big ***. I'm grateful that they could all look past that and see some of the things that I think AE does really well... like offering difficult decisions, depth of strategy and stimulating complexity.

You've used a few military analogies to describe your marketing campaign, but I think it's closer to a model of infectious disease. To cause a pandemic, a disease must be highly contagious, but it can't be so virulent that it kills the host before it can spread. Players are infectious agents.

When a player's interest dies off in a week, it's unlikely that they'll influence anyone else to try the game. Armageddon Empires has so many different strategic decisions in the course of a game, and the game generates so many interesting stories, that players have a ton of things to talk about. That seems like a critical goal: make a game that gives players something to talk about. That way, their interest stays high, and they can infect others.

Ah, so I'm like the Black Death rather than Ebola. I like the disease analogy because I've always been intrigued by the concept of how "awareness" of the game spreads among possible "hosts." I think it's called an infection vector if you want to use the epidemiology analogy.

My role as plague bearer among the gaming community, though, wasn't anything calculated or something that I came up with as a coherent marketing strategy. I suspect that raw sales due to forums are not actually that significant...respectable, sure, but the big value is that it exposes your game to the opinion makers/critics/reviewers that frequent the boards and that's the huge hurdle any indie faces.

Summary: The groundwork of continual improvements and forum activity, along with discussions engendered by the rich strategic complexity of the game, drew the attention of gaming critics. That attention translated into far more widespread exposure.

Part Four: Post-Release, Seven to Eight Months

So interest in the game had turned around in terms of page views and was gathering a huge amount of critical interest for an indie title. On January 25, there was a long interview with Kieron Gillen over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Then, on January 30, Armageddon Empires was mentioned in one of Tycho's news posts over at Penny Arcade.

I track all my demo downloads via my Amazon S3 control panel. A couple of times a day, I log in and jot down the bandwidth used and enter it on my journal calendar. On January 30th, I did a double take when the bandwidth had jumped 50 Gigabyte. I was thinking there was going to be hell to pay for this billing error! Then I checked my analytics page and saw the referrer spike and knew something was going on. I nearly fell off my seat when I saw it listed as Penny Arcade. I've often been asked what the secret was to getting on the PA radar screen and I can only reply that that is still a mystery known only to Tycho and Gabe. But I can tell you what not to do. Don't be like me and send an email on release day daring them to break your server. I'm thinking they probably didn't remember that lame email or they would have just skipped saying anything.

Let's look at what that Penny Arcade mention (and an additional mention in a subsequent post) did for page views and sales, as well as forum traffic.

 

I think it's worth noting that even before the PA mention, the game had clearly moved onto a different track. It took four and a half months to get to 40 percent of your sales goal, but you went to 70 percent+ in just seven more weeks. So while Penny Arcade was certainly the Big Bang--total sales roughly doubled in just three weeks--the game had clearly distinguished itself and was bringing in more players.

Oh yeah, I was really pleased by the time January had rolled into view and the downward trend had been completely reversed. But the PA mention made me go from hopeful optimism about continuing long term to certainty.

How much continued development work did you originally anticipate when the game was released? Did you ever think it would stretch for another nine months?

Yes and no. I honestly didn't anticipate that I would have as many bugs to fix. That's been humbling, but you just have to take responsibility and lower your head and wade into them. Armageddon Empires is really a nightmare in complexity as far as the rules go when units are moving around the board. I think it's something maybe only other programmers can really empathize with. It's a little bit like chaos theory--a really small and simple set of variables can yield a tremendous amount of complexity. So when you click on a hex to move that army to attack a Mutant stronghold, under the hood there is a lot going on...everything from observations checks, to supply path determination using A* to a complex recursive rules arbitration for who can attack whom and who gets a message telling them that their stealthed unit has a great opportunity to strike a blow for the Empire.

From a marketing standpoint, I think going beyond the bug fixing and making the game a bit of a living creature is something that I just stumbled upon. I got some great suggestions for improvement both on the many boards I frequent and via email. I've tried to pick and choose what is feasible and most economical to implement. So the game is a quantum leap from where it was at release.

The other thing that I am pursuing is additional content. I love the game and the world that it's set in so creating the additional content is a real pleasure. I decided to do at least one and maybe more (if it's successful) free mini-expansion packs. I got the idea that I should build the pack around a coherent theme. The first pack is intended as a reward for the players who have bought in to AE and supported it. So Cults of the Wastelands has been invented to make the indie factions more mobile and dangerous, and to add some additional challenge to the game.

Has anything happened post-release to change how you plan to market and support your next game? What have you learned about pursuing a market for a game after it's released?

I've certainly learned a lot. I'm not sure how much I can really change, though. My advertising budget is always going to be modest. I've found that the best advertising is one friend telling another. Somebody blogs about it and then somebody else notices. I'm probably going to rue saying it, but I think I've jumped the first hurdle and at least made my tiny presence felt. There is a small but growing awareness of Armageddon Empires.

So now you've exceeded what I thought was a crazily ambitious sales goal by over 50 percent, and the game's still selling. After grinding away for three years, you're an overnight sensation.

I'm not going to quit my day job though...well you know what I mean. And if the game is a minor "sensation" then I'm happy for that, but I've got to try and parlay this hard won awareness into the expectation that you can come back to my website and find more stimulating turn-based strategy games in the future. I'm hoping to get the next game out by early next year (Winter 09). I've got a lot of the design patterns and technology that I built for AE so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. But on the other hand I've got a lot more business and marketing duties as well as upkeep on AE to worry about. Indie life suits me just fine, though, so I'm not about to trade it in for anything else.

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For indie developers trying to gain an economic foothold, Vic's experience is invaluable, and discussing what happened after the game launched in such detail made me realize that the single most aspect of marketing an indie game is the infection vector.

It's easy to understand why. The first week sales of Armageddon Empires are only 1.66 percent of the nine-month total. Sales for the nine-month period are 60 TIMES the sales of the first week. Even if Vic had focused heavily on pre-release marketing, it's unlikely that first week sales would have been even 10 percent of the nine-month total.

Traditional studio releases don't have an infection vector as a sales model. Traditional releases are more like a strongman at the fair, swinging a big marketing hammer to send the excitement bell as high as it can go. When the game is launched and the bell is rung, though, it's very rare for excitement to continue to grow. Instead, it falls at a rate that's often far faster than its rise.

Because of a sales curve that is totally different than traditional studio releases, indie marketing tactics must be different as well.

Here's the traditional big-game model:

 

The size of the objects aren't exactly scaled, but they're sized to represent the general importance of each kind of communication to a potential customer. For big publishers, media (be it advertising, reviews, or previews) constitute their primary form of customer communication, and it's the most important factor in producing sales.

Indie developers know they can't use this model. It's just not possible to attract the kind of attention that a commercial release from a large publisher routinely receives.

If they know, though, why do they keep trying to do it that way?

From the conversations I've had with indie developers over the years, the #1 subject on most of their minds is getting more press coverage. Even though they know they can't use the big-game model, they're so familiar with seeing games that way that they still spend most of their time trying to imitate the model.

Vic didn't do that. Here's a representation of Vic's strategy:

 

Initial sales are so small that even the object I used is really too big. Post-release improvements and tremendous customer support via gaming forums, though, resulted in personal recommendations to purchase the game, and over time, this drew the attention of reviewers and the gaming press.

Will this work for every game? No, of course not. Vic's model, though, seems like a much more realistic strategy for an indie developer.

Let's look at a few specifics in terms of Vic's strategy.

1. He gave his customers immediate gratification from day one

Vic didn't show up in forums until he had a finished game in hand. If someone was interested in the game, they could immediately head over and download a demo, and if they liked it, they could purchase the game right there. Everyone who wanted to check out the game was able to, and the game, even in v1.0, was extremely solid and fun to play.

Everyone wants an indie developer to succeed, but that doesn't mean that everyone is willing to wait for the patch.

2. He used the launch of his game as a starting point

The day that Armageddon Empires shipped was a beginning, not the beginning of the end. Instead of just focusing on bug fixes, Vic continued to develop and improve the game in significant ways. Many indie developers put out a patch or two to fix critical bugs, then move on to the next project if the game hasn't gained traction in a few months. Games without marketing, though, usually require longer to gain a foothold.

Releasing new versions with significant improvements usually stimulated forum activity, and kept pushing threads about the game back onto the front page of the forum.

3. He maintained a responsive forum presence

Vic was always around to answer questions in forums, and he was never defensive about what the game could or couldn't do. It was impossible not to get a very positive feeling about the game from his steady and thoughtful presence on the forums.

Here's an example of his persistence: in the primary game thread over at Quarter to Three, whenever anyone had a question about Armageddon Empires, Vic answered it the same day. For six months. He didn't miss a single post during that period.

Plus, and I think this is important, most of the people who write about games hang out in gaming forums, too. Vic's steady approach to improving the game and maintaining a forum presence wasn't speaking directly to the press, but it had the same effect over time.

4. He decided against hosting his own forums

I've never thought about it before seeing what happened with AE, but not having forums on the Cryptic Comet website turned out to be a great idea. The problem with dedicated forums for an indie game is that, over time, fewer and fewer people make a larger and larger percentage of the posts. Almost no one new is exposed to the game in that environment--they have to go looking for the forum. In a general gaming forum, in contrast, the number of people who are active readers is exponentially larger. That's a much larger group of people who could eventually become interested in the game.

The dedicated forum over at The Wargamer was an excellent hybrid, because while it pooled interest, it was also part of a much, much larger gaming community, and there's much more cross-infection (continuing with the disease analogy) in an environment like that.

For a game in long-term development, like Dwarf Fortress, dedicated forums make sense. But for a shipping product, a more decentralized kind of interest can ultimately result in many more people being exposed to the game.

5. He made a game that people could talk about

For an indie developer to succeed, they must get as many people as they can talking about their game, but the game must have something to talk about. Offering complex and rich strategic choices naturally stimulates discussion. Even a perfectly-executed game may not get people talking (for long) if it's simple and offers no unique narrative for the player's own experience. This might sound self-evident, but I think it's a huge part of what keeps people talking about a game.

6. He discovered the infection vector

The sum of all these decisions--immediate gratification; continued improvements; a forum presence; and rich strategic complexity--helped keep people interested in the game, and it kept them talking. Keep people talking long enough, keep them "infected," and they'll infect others.

It's a good infection, though--the kind that people don't want cured.

To read Part I of Harris' post on how Armageddon Empires became a success, click here.