Join us in person December 11th for the final VGDS event of the year! We'll be having Q&A's with Clara Sia from Devolver Digital and Noel Berry from EXOK! Tickets available at bit.ly/vgdsdec2024
Very good video! 😊 I remember Tia's first post in reddit and I found it very interesting. All the weekly updates for the last expansion that she did were very good and keep the community engaged! As an argentinian, I saw very close the situation with the regional prices.. It was very sad that a lot of people with vpns were taking advantage of that. As Tia said, this was a problem for a lot of games. After some time, Steam implemented a way of checking the credit cards, so to buy in Argentina now you need to have a credit card from there. Also, the prices are not in local currency anymore, now are in USD, so you avoid the problem of having the prices of the expansion higher than the base game. But I hope developers keep taking into consideration Steam's regional prices, because it is true that a game costing 25 usd can be 10% of a salary. And now, it is not so broken as in their beginnings. Congrats for all the work done, to Tia and Ludeon!
17:00 "Children added rich new storytelling" I rememeber 8-ish years ago, people were citing Tynan Sylvester as saying he would never add pregnancy and children to Rimworld. :D I'm glad he was willing to back away from that hill instead of dying on it, b/c that (and other aspects of the Biotech DLC) really was a great addition to RW. Some players at the time were very vocal about insisting it was too much work, highly inappropriate for a game that is often jokingly referred to as a warcrime simulator, etc. For me, this was not the first time or the last time to see people rationalizing something to stay the way it is, and/or why a hypothetical change would be bad. Humans are risk-averse and thus conservative by nature -- change causes uncertainty, and historically uncertainty could often mean IRL death for our ancestors for 200,000 years. But since we don't regularly get eaten by cavebears any more, we channel these primal instincts into other life choices: xenophobia, dysfunctional/abusive relationships, sticking with a bad job, wanting more of the same even when it's mediocre (chain fast food) or a new alternative could be better or worse but PROBABLY would be better (taking a chance on a local small-biz burger shop). This last point very much applies to games and movies. Established fan bases often become extremely militant about reboots, revamps, sequels, new DLCs, etc. It's absolutely true that publishers, producers, directors, devs etc are also guilty of often reinventing a worse wheel -- but they have to reinvent their IP enough so that it's not a complete copy-paste job for every new installment. And they're incentivized to do this because players and audiences are notoriously cheap and fickle about taking chances on completely new titles or IPs. Only stellar new titles go on to breed their own franchises, while average new titles go on the trash bin. Better a bad franchise than a new average original work. So for Rimworld DLC and other games/movie sequels, part of the trick is to positively bait and switch audiences -- rope the established fan base in with enough elements of the familiar old ways, while lacing each new installment with enough new content to massage the product towards a desired direction. If done right and overall customer satisfaction is high or outright enthusiastic, the new changes get rolled into the game's overall positive image. But it takes a high level of commitment, risk appetite, and a belief that to some degree the devs know more than their vocal fans do. When the devs/publishers/producers completely lack this drive or vision, you get conservative corporate cash cows like COD BLOPS 6 -- very expensive to make, high production value compared to crappy little indie phenomena like oh say Vampire Survivors, but COD players are basically paying full AAA prices for new DLC story expansions that rehash the same game and story narrative pacing that every other COD has used (because it works for that audience), and that happen to be bundled with an incrementally revised version of the same game engine every time. Said tongue in cheek: I don't see any xenogenes or children in BLOPS 6, after all. XD But seriously, if Rimworld was Call of Duty, each DLC would have been released as a completely separate game. Tia addressed this with the point about managing risk -- less risk to release DLC for an existing title instead of making it a new title, even as a sequel. Both COD and Rimworld see new incremental changes to their core game engine with each release, but RW packages it as a free update to the base game plus an optional DLC purchase. For years, I've thought RW and a number of other indie games going on a decade-plus have come up with some great ways to monetize player time, stay relevant, while also respecting their players instead of treating them like a resource to be milked for cash. Project Zomboid and BeamNG are the most hardcore I can think of -- they use a strategy of "we'll keep developing if players keep buying the base game." Never a DLC yet. More similar to Rimworld are Arma 3 and Space Engineers -- they also use the hybrid base game free updates plus additional optional DLC content model. I'm sure there are many more examples and variations on indie monetization, so this list is not complete or even the best examples.
He did not say that he would never add children he said that he wanted to have a well developed and established team that could be dedicated to doing it right.
The use of wish-listing as such a key metric is interesting to me, because there is a subset of the community for whom wish listing a game you're excited about and is coming out soon doesn't make sense. For most of the DLC, I knew I was going to buy the expansions when they released and I was actively participating in the community so I knew the release date. As a result, the only DLC I wishlisted was Royalty because I was on the fence as RW DLC were an unknown quantity at that time. I use wishlists when I want to wait for reviews, release is a long time away, or I am waiting for a sale and want a notification when one happens and a lot of other gamers do the same. I'd have loved to see similar analysis on other marketing performance metrics
The reason devs are so focused on wishlists is because it is the strongest indication to steam that you are interested in a game/dlc, so they (steam) use this information as a big part of their recommendation algorithm. With the death of other social media platforms, steam has become the primary way pc gamers discover new games, so thats why you see devs asking for wishlists as it increases their discoverability in steam's algorithm. So in short, wishlists isn't just about the number of people who will buy your game, its also about how many people will end up seeing your game.
The issue is that that only holds true where all else is equal. But by their own admission theyre changing factors that may affect wishlisting in a way that doesn't proportionally affect total sales. For example, a short time between announcement and release might have fewer wishlists than a game with a long time even if total impressions and total sales were the exact same. You need to consider other data points, especially when you ultimately don't care about wishlists specifically but sales.
I'm not convinced mods alone are enough to keep a game alive. The fact this game still enjoys dev support a decade later despite having no subscriptions/microtransactions is unusual and interesting.
18:30 As someone who owns all Rimworld expansions and Star Citizen: the constant creation of in engine promo material that simply can’t be achieved in game is a big part of why I stopped supporting SC.
"Not every game has this" Is probably the truest thing said here Rimworld doesn't need a sequel, it needs expansions upon its base content. Anything you could do with a sequel could easily be done as an expansion, and that's why if in 20 years there's 400 dollars worth of DLCs for the game I wouldn't be mad, cause if they're staying the current course of expanding on the base content of the game with massive additions like this, we'll do well. That's the thing, if he ever decided to make a sequel it would have to be an entirely different game, a move to 3 dimensions _could_ justify it but that would muddy the waters with any expansions they've already released, unless they implement all the DLCs and transfer ownership of the DLCs themselves to the new game somehow. No, if Rimworld were to get a "sequel" it would have to be a different kind of game. Changing gears to a grand strategy, a total war game perhaps, or it would zoom in and make it an RPG or action shooter. Marketing around a "Rimworld 2" would be a nightmare, as it would reset your modding community, be hard to justify, and complicate the state of the existing expansions and their customer base.
To expand on the idea of why I said that was the truest thing said here... Basically, Royalty was actually a pretty big let down... despite being the biggest content drop of all the DLCs, since it promised royal pawns, kings and lords, LEADERSHIP just in its name. Please understand, I'm saying let down, not that it is a bad expansion. The biggest marketing mistake with royalty is that it was called Royalty, calling it "Adventure" or "Empire" would have served it much better. And yeah, if they had done an announcement ahead of time the DLC would have come out to some pretty negative reviews since the expectation of the DLCs name was just not met. Had they hyped it up, got those wishlists and had a lot of the community to see the expansion before its release it would have set an expectation that would have flopped. Just go look at the store page for Royalty... the "Royalty" section of the features added was quite literally the smallest section. Since it was just "released" out of nowhere, most people's exposure to Royalty were streamers and UA-camrs playing it and showing you all of the internal mechanics of it. Able to explain all the good content under the hood while tempering expectations of royal pawns LEADING colonies. That DLC was the biggest disappointment of all the DLCs because its titular feature of "Royalty" was just a facade for "magic" casters, but because it released without fanfare people had very little time to build up the hype of kings and lords ruling colonies so it was much less of a let down. PR "expert" not understanding the very community they're working for is making assumptions based on what they learned in school and not understanding the nuance of the real world. A marketing campaign for Royalty would have kneecapped it, anybody within the community could see that.
As for the "got caught cheating" Nobody really cares about certain things being cheated in, we get it you're trying to make a colony for a trailer not actually play the game and survive, the problem was that the colonies weren't believable as in the person creating them was NOT a Rimworld player. It wasn't about the colonies in the trailers being fake or even looking fake, it was the fact that gamers will sniff out PR/Marketing people that don't actually play the game they're selling and what they saw in Ideology really threw up the red flags of a marketing person making trailers without ever playing the game. What happened is that during Ideology the community outed her as somebody who doesn't play Rimworld (whether its true or not), and that's a really bad PR situation to be in. A community manager or marketing/PR head not playing the game they're selling is like a bald man selling haircare products, it's a massive red flag and more destructive to sales than being RC'd in Australia at the very least.
My only reason to love sandbox game as long it includes some war crime in it. And rimworld hitting all the checkmark for me, such as butchering human and creating human leather cowboy hat. It was fun but you are punished with mood debuff. That until ideology dlc come to play where you set your colonist belief, meaning you can build a colony without limited by inhumane act such as slavery, skull spike, robbing other camp and converting people to your belief.
I hate how to sees the art i love as a cash cow. She doesn’t know what makes it good. If it didn’t sell well she wouldn’t think rimworld is good. She feels evil.
I don't see what's wrong with getting compensation from people willing to give it for making the art. Continuing a success is how they fund more ventures. And yeah if it doesn't sell well then clearly people don't want it. You can't expect artists and developers to just cater to niche audiences and visions with little support.
The art you love is made by artists who need to eat, have places to live, go on vacations, pursue hobbies, and all the things that make lives worthwhile. Marketing itself isn’t good or evil-the artists do need to earn a living. It’s all down to the strategies they use. They emphasize being honest in their advertising and building organic support by delivering what their players want. Imo, that’s ideal.
I hate how to sees the art i love as a cash cow. She doesn’t know what makes it good. If it didn’t sell well she wouldn’t think rimworld is good. She feels evil.
This is the second time this account posted the same comment, word for word, to the same video. Is this an actual person or is this a bot? It feels like a bot.
Join us in person December 11th for the final VGDS event of the year! We'll be having Q&A's with Clara Sia from Devolver Digital and Noel Berry from EXOK! Tickets available at bit.ly/vgdsdec2024
Mood: +10 "Watched an informative presentation about Rimworld's marketing.
Fascinating look at one of my favorite games from such a different angle, thank you Tia and BUS for sharing!
Very good video! 😊 I remember Tia's first post in reddit and I found it very interesting. All the weekly updates for the last expansion that she did were very good and keep the community engaged!
As an argentinian, I saw very close the situation with the regional prices.. It was very sad that a lot of people with vpns were taking advantage of that. As Tia said, this was a problem for a lot of games. After some time, Steam implemented a way of checking the credit cards, so to buy in Argentina now you need to have a credit card from there. Also, the prices are not in local currency anymore, now are in USD, so you avoid the problem of having the prices of the expansion higher than the base game. But I hope developers keep taking into consideration Steam's regional prices, because it is true that a game costing 25 usd can be 10% of a salary. And now, it is not so broken as in their beginnings.
Congrats for all the work done, to Tia and Ludeon!
Really good video, I wish it was slightly longer
Whoa it's the guy!
@@Conthemon it's the dude with the stuff!
If only we could have vanilla presentation expanded.
It was fascinating getting a peek behind the scenes. Excellent presentation!
17:00 "Children added rich new storytelling"
I rememeber 8-ish years ago, people were citing Tynan Sylvester as saying he would never add pregnancy and children to Rimworld. :D I'm glad he was willing to back away from that hill instead of dying on it, b/c that (and other aspects of the Biotech DLC) really was a great addition to RW.
Some players at the time were very vocal about insisting it was too much work, highly inappropriate for a game that is often jokingly referred to as a warcrime simulator, etc.
For me, this was not the first time or the last time to see people rationalizing something to stay the way it is, and/or why a hypothetical change would be bad. Humans are risk-averse and thus conservative by nature -- change causes uncertainty, and historically uncertainty could often mean IRL death for our ancestors for 200,000 years.
But since we don't regularly get eaten by cavebears any more, we channel these primal instincts into other life choices: xenophobia, dysfunctional/abusive relationships, sticking with a bad job, wanting more of the same even when it's mediocre (chain fast food) or a new alternative could be better or worse but PROBABLY would be better (taking a chance on a local small-biz burger shop).
This last point very much applies to games and movies. Established fan bases often become extremely militant about reboots, revamps, sequels, new DLCs, etc. It's absolutely true that publishers, producers, directors, devs etc are also guilty of often reinventing a worse wheel -- but they have to reinvent their IP enough so that it's not a complete copy-paste job for every new installment. And they're incentivized to do this because players and audiences are notoriously cheap and fickle about taking chances on completely new titles or IPs. Only stellar new titles go on to breed their own franchises, while average new titles go on the trash bin. Better a bad franchise than a new average original work.
So for Rimworld DLC and other games/movie sequels, part of the trick is to positively bait and switch audiences -- rope the established fan base in with enough elements of the familiar old ways, while lacing each new installment with enough new content to massage the product towards a desired direction. If done right and overall customer satisfaction is high or outright enthusiastic, the new changes get rolled into the game's overall positive image.
But it takes a high level of commitment, risk appetite, and a belief that to some degree the devs know more than their vocal fans do. When the devs/publishers/producers completely lack this drive or vision, you get conservative corporate cash cows like COD BLOPS 6 -- very expensive to make, high production value compared to crappy little indie phenomena like oh say Vampire Survivors, but COD players are basically paying full AAA prices for new DLC story expansions that rehash the same game and story narrative pacing that every other COD has used (because it works for that audience), and that happen to be bundled with an incrementally revised version of the same game engine every time. Said tongue in cheek: I don't see any xenogenes or children in BLOPS 6, after all. XD
But seriously, if Rimworld was Call of Duty, each DLC would have been released as a completely separate game. Tia addressed this with the point about managing risk -- less risk to release DLC for an existing title instead of making it a new title, even as a sequel. Both COD and Rimworld see new incremental changes to their core game engine with each release, but RW packages it as a free update to the base game plus an optional DLC purchase.
For years, I've thought RW and a number of other indie games going on a decade-plus have come up with some great ways to monetize player time, stay relevant, while also respecting their players instead of treating them like a resource to be milked for cash. Project Zomboid and BeamNG are the most hardcore I can think of -- they use a strategy of "we'll keep developing if players keep buying the base game." Never a DLC yet. More similar to Rimworld are Arma 3 and Space Engineers -- they also use the hybrid base game free updates plus additional optional DLC content model. I'm sure there are many more examples and variations on indie monetization, so this list is not complete or even the best examples.
He did not say that he would never add children he said that he wanted to have a well developed and established team that could be dedicated to doing it right.
Thanks for being so informative 🙂
The use of wish-listing as such a key metric is interesting to me, because there is a subset of the community for whom wish listing a game you're excited about and is coming out soon doesn't make sense.
For most of the DLC, I knew I was going to buy the expansions when they released and I was actively participating in the community so I knew the release date. As a result, the only DLC I wishlisted was Royalty because I was on the fence as RW DLC were an unknown quantity at that time. I use wishlists when I want to wait for reviews, release is a long time away, or I am waiting for a sale and want a notification when one happens and a lot of other gamers do the same.
I'd have loved to see similar analysis on other marketing performance metrics
The reason devs are so focused on wishlists is because it is the strongest indication to steam that you are interested in a game/dlc, so they (steam) use this information as a big part of their recommendation algorithm. With the death of other social media platforms, steam has become the primary way pc gamers discover new games, so thats why you see devs asking for wishlists as it increases their discoverability in steam's algorithm. So in short, wishlists isn't just about the number of people who will buy your game, its also about how many people will end up seeing your game.
The issue is that that only holds true where all else is equal. But by their own admission theyre changing factors that may affect wishlisting in a way that doesn't proportionally affect total sales. For example, a short time between announcement and release might have fewer wishlists than a game with a long time even if total impressions and total sales were the exact same. You need to consider other data points, especially when you ultimately don't care about wishlists specifically but sales.
Im surprised she didn't talk about mods much at all. considering that's the sole reason the game was kept alive for so long.
For real, Oskar is the best employee they have
They don’t sell or market mods, so I think that would be pretty out of place.
I'm not convinced mods alone are enough to keep a game alive. The fact this game still enjoys dev support a decade later despite having no subscriptions/microtransactions is unusual and interesting.
of course ambigiousamphibian is there! I started playing the game a while ago because of him
Go Tia, go love it
I was there during the price controversy, yeah, best Ludeon keep quiet from now on.
18:30 As someone who owns all Rimworld expansions and Star Citizen: the constant creation of in engine promo material that simply can’t be achieved in game is a big part of why I stopped supporting SC.
tia got some idea
"Not every game has this"
Is probably the truest thing said here
Rimworld doesn't need a sequel, it needs expansions upon its base content. Anything you could do with a sequel could easily be done as an expansion, and that's why if in 20 years there's 400 dollars worth of DLCs for the game I wouldn't be mad, cause if they're staying the current course of expanding on the base content of the game with massive additions like this, we'll do well.
That's the thing, if he ever decided to make a sequel it would have to be an entirely different game, a move to 3 dimensions _could_ justify it but that would muddy the waters with any expansions they've already released, unless they implement all the DLCs and transfer ownership of the DLCs themselves to the new game somehow. No, if Rimworld were to get a "sequel" it would have to be a different kind of game. Changing gears to a grand strategy, a total war game perhaps, or it would zoom in and make it an RPG or action shooter. Marketing around a "Rimworld 2" would be a nightmare, as it would reset your modding community, be hard to justify, and complicate the state of the existing expansions and their customer base.
To expand on the idea of why I said that was the truest thing said here...
Basically, Royalty was actually a pretty big let down... despite being the biggest content drop of all the DLCs, since it promised royal pawns, kings and lords, LEADERSHIP just in its name. Please understand, I'm saying let down, not that it is a bad expansion.
The biggest marketing mistake with royalty is that it was called Royalty, calling it "Adventure" or "Empire" would have served it much better. And yeah, if they had done an announcement ahead of time the DLC would have come out to some pretty negative reviews since the expectation of the DLCs name was just not met. Had they hyped it up, got those wishlists and had a lot of the community to see the expansion before its release it would have set an expectation that would have flopped.
Just go look at the store page for Royalty... the "Royalty" section of the features added was quite literally the smallest section.
Since it was just "released" out of nowhere, most people's exposure to Royalty were streamers and UA-camrs playing it and showing you all of the internal mechanics of it. Able to explain all the good content under the hood while tempering expectations of royal pawns LEADING colonies. That DLC was the biggest disappointment of all the DLCs because its titular feature of "Royalty" was just a facade for "magic" casters, but because it released without fanfare people had very little time to build up the hype of kings and lords ruling colonies so it was much less of a let down.
PR "expert" not understanding the very community they're working for is making assumptions based on what they learned in school and not understanding the nuance of the real world. A marketing campaign for Royalty would have kneecapped it, anybody within the community could see that.
As for the "got caught cheating"
Nobody really cares about certain things being cheated in, we get it you're trying to make a colony for a trailer not actually play the game and survive, the problem was that the colonies weren't believable as in the person creating them was NOT a Rimworld player. It wasn't about the colonies in the trailers being fake or even looking fake, it was the fact that gamers will sniff out PR/Marketing people that don't actually play the game they're selling and what they saw in Ideology really threw up the red flags of a marketing person making trailers without ever playing the game.
What happened is that during Ideology the community outed her as somebody who doesn't play Rimworld (whether its true or not), and that's a really bad PR situation to be in. A community manager or marketing/PR head not playing the game they're selling is like a bald man selling haircare products, it's a massive red flag and more destructive to sales than being RC'd in Australia at the very least.
reading this just made me think, god bless tarn adams
Very interesting
Songbird?
My only reason to love sandbox game as long it includes some war crime in it.
And rimworld hitting all the checkmark for me, such as butchering human and creating human leather cowboy hat. It was fun but you are punished with mood debuff. That until ideology dlc come to play where you set your colonist belief, meaning you can build a colony without limited by inhumane act such as slavery, skull spike, robbing other camp and converting people to your belief.
way before ideology there were ways
if theres a need (for canibalism and slavery) there is always a way
the game still doesn't have toilet
Dub's bad hygiene
this game already a Legend they dont really need Marketing
and Tynan is always vanish for 1-2years then new expansion pop up out of nowhere hahaha
so she's the reason rimworlds only selling a tiny fraction of what it should? I mean for real have you seen them promote the game worth a shit?
Honey, we've been playing the game long before you've joined the company.
Strange comment
puple hair, not a good sign, it's over.
She knows.
Its over.
I hate how to sees the art i love as a cash cow. She doesn’t know what makes it good. If it didn’t sell well she wouldn’t think rimworld is good. She feels evil.
I don't see what's wrong with getting compensation from people willing to give it for making the art. Continuing a success is how they fund more ventures. And yeah if it doesn't sell well then clearly people don't want it. You can't expect artists and developers to just cater to niche audiences and visions with little support.
The art you love is made by artists who need to eat, have places to live, go on vacations, pursue hobbies, and all the things that make lives worthwhile.
Marketing itself isn’t good or evil-the artists do need to earn a living.
It’s all down to the strategies they use. They emphasize being honest in their advertising and building organic support by delivering what their players want.
Imo, that’s ideal.
**Richard Stallman intensifies**
You don't know jack.
how dare they wanting to feed themselves and their family
I hate how to sees the art i love as a cash cow. She doesn’t know what makes it good. If it didn’t sell well she wouldn’t think rimworld is good. She feels evil.
This is the second time this account posted the same comment, word for word, to the same video. Is this an actual person or is this a bot? It feels like a bot.
@@aaronmartin8027 UA-cam occasionally causes double posts