fasse kurz zusammen :  My team and I are about to release our next game Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping tomorrow 22nd May, and I wanted to share with you all some data and "pre-mortem" thoughts about releasing a sequel to a game within 1 year of the first one releasing!

I did a post like this last year for the original Duck Detective, and it helped distract me from being nervous so I'm back again

The TL;DR:

    People still really love ducks

    We got very lucky the first time (and not as lucky this time)

    TikTok not converting as well as last year for us

1. The Wishlist Data

The first game had 76k wishlists on release, the sequel is going to end up on ~60k wishlists (currently on 59k+). So a 16k wishlist difference is pretty large, over 20% difference.

I wrote in December how the new game actually had a faster wishlist velocity here on Steam page release, almost double in the 1st week. So what happened? We think, our core fans are showing up to support us early, but it's been harder to convince new people to check out the game.

Our demo plays on Steam also reflect this. The first game had 36.7k downloads and 17.5k plays. The sequel has 17k downloads and 9k plays. Around half the amount.

It's been harder promoting a sequel compared to the original idea. One reason is how our messaging is more cluttered. We found using the word sequel performed pretty badly, so we've avoided that messaging where we can.

It's not to say it's bad by any measure for our small team - we just have these data that we can compare to.

2. Ducks are sometimes lucky

Last year, we got phenomenally lucky with our promotion efforts. We managed to get into a bunch of events and even a Nintendo Showcase. It was really incredible, and gave us loads of attention that we just weren't as lucky to secure again. Every one of those opportunities converted into at least a couple thousand wishlists, and it really added up. This time around, things have just been different. It feels like people are more focused on Switch 2 news than games coming to Switch 1. Event showcases with Steam sales pages have been cemented as a good wishlist tool, and so it's much much more competitive to get into these showcases (and also Steam is more saturated with events).

I also want to point out how the game will only show up in Popular Upcoming on the Steam front page for a few hours before release. Only 10 games can show up on this list, and due to the huge number of games that release each day on Steam, we sit in slot number 12 for May 22nd games. We were in a similar situation last year, but we like to release later in the day. We know Thursday is a very popular day to release, but if you can ride your way into New & Trending over the weekend, that's much better than sitting in Popular Upcoming for an extra day.

I didn't expect us to be as lucky with the sequel marketing this year, but I'm still always amazed at the speed that marketing best practices shift. It's a constantly changing environment and we need to always be looking for cool new opportunities.

3. TikTok is an enigma

On top of this, last year, we also found TikTok to be a huge platform for our promotion. We were at a point leading up to release were videos would consistently get 20k views or higher, and could actively see hundreds of wishlists pouring in from TikTok. This time around, TikTok has not been working in our favour. If a video got ~1000 views in 20 mins last year, we knew that would get us at least 100k views within 48 hours. Now, videos are hitting ~1000 views in 20 mins and then they just stop going any higher. We're not really sure why, but TikTok has always been mysterious to us, so we can't really make any conclusions about it.

We've also been trying some new things this time around. We're trying some paid Reddit Ads right now, and I'll try share outcomes of that once we have more data post-release!

With all of this in mind: How well do you think Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping will do tomorrow?

I'm interested to hear people's opinions

Hopefully this is useful to some people! Feel free to ask any questions (please distract me from work)