The Stanley Parable developers are pleased but shocked with the success of the game.
“Do not expect success, but be prepared in case it happens,” developers for The Stanley Parable now say in wake of their game selling 100k units. The game, originally a Half Life 2 mod, released on Steam last Thursday.
Before the game’s release, Galactic Cafe put together five trailers with zero substantial footage from the game, a demo also with no actual footage from the game, and let’s play videos. Because talking about the game has the potential to completely ruin what makes the experience so fascinating, the developers made use of content not in the game to keep the demo from spoiling the game while it still presented what players should expect in the game.
“This is going to be a running theme throughout this postmortem: if you make the marketing material interesting on its own, it’s irrelevant whether it “sells” your game,” the developers write on their devblog.
Let’s Play videos stirred interest in the demo. Developers worked with several YouTubers to create exclusive content for each of them, something that took extra work, but it was also something Galactic Cafe believes had a significant payoff. These videos drew hundreds of thousands views, but even beyond that, Galactic Café says the custom versions came from a “desire simply to give something back to a community that we cared about and to have doing so.” It’s also something the company would like to do again in the future.
“Give people a reason to talk, that’s all we aimed for, and the rest sorted itself out. Release a whole bunch of things for free in fairly quick succession, then at the end of it put a price tag on the last one,” Galactic Café concludes. “it was a lot of extra work, but the results feel very much worth it.”
The Stanley Parable is also available on PC right now, but Game Informer reports a Mac version be available. There’s no release date yet, but the team is working on it now and hopes it will be ready soon.
Source: The Stanley Parable
