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Looking Back at the Femdemic Launch Weekend
🕑 Added 2023-08-01 19:38:21 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
It's time for me to step back and tell you how last week's launch of Femdemic has performed. I have learned a lot for the future, but I think I can be very happy with how it's going. First of all...
Sales
I'm not supposed to give you exact buyer numbers, but let's just say since the release day, the game has sold every few minutes.
That is a tremendous success. We've been in the first spot of the itch.io top seller list non-stop since I woke up on Friday. (You have to enable seeing NSFW games in your profile settings to see them first.)
It has sold double the amount my previous non-NSFW game did in four years. But it's only been less than a week.
It's not enough that it would have made back the development cost or given me a chance to live off of just this if Patreon didn't exist yet, but again, it's been less than a week. I do not know where it'll end up, but it looks tremendously better than any of my previous game releases. I also feel like the game has sold to more people than just our tfgames bubble. There are definitely some more sex-positive LGBTQ folks that have spoken up and that are not into Compliance mode at all, which also leaves me to my next point...
Reviews
There aren't as many reviews on Steam as expected from the amount it has sold, but I can see why. You may be okay with buying the game, but publicly discussing it might still make you uncomfortable. I can understand that. It can be like publicly admitting your kinks.
However, the reviews are the biggest issue right now. Angry people are likelier to write something, and if not enough other people who like the game write something, the game will get buried, and a good starting week doesn't matter anymore.
Right now, the game has a mixed rating on Steam, and that's due to 5 reviews. In comparison, on itch.io, we're at 4.8/5 stars. Three of those on Steam are folks saying that idle games take a long time to reach content, which is true, but also, the game was advertised as an idle game, so I don't quite understand how that is a review, but I guess they aren't untrue. And also, nothing I can do except rethink the marketing, except the game literally has "idle game" in its name, on Steam at least.
The other two reviews are more detailed and make some interesting points.
One was from an idle player who wanted more automatization. The other was from someone who wanted female sex partners.
I don't think they will change their reviews, but I tried to address them nevertheless.
In general, if you like the game and haven't left a review yet, I would be so so thankful for you to do that so that the game can get a positive overall score. There are also not enough reviews on tfgames.site, so if you can't do it on Steam, please consider writing something nice over there. (https://tfgames.site/?module=viewgame&id=3045)
Patches
So yeah... you all know me. I work a lot sometimes, and during a game's launch week, I go crazy to try to make everyone happy. Just like during an Alpha release of BMO TV, when I used to upload five new builds during a weekend sometimes. So, since Thursday, there have been six patches already, the first three just being small bugfix builds. Then those reviews started nagging at my mind, and I began adding things. The first thing I agreed with from a review was that LGBTQ audiences should get an NSFW option for their Liberation story. I could see that making that mode fully SFW made sense at the moment, but of course, with the game being advertised as NSFW, that's not what players that Liberation was made for wanted to see. So it was with good intentions, but at the end of the day, people just want NSFW if it's called NSFW. The new mode, I think, makes a lot of sense. When the transgender women hosts become happy, they look for partners. However, it needs another patch in a few days that adds a little more variety. Right now, they will only find random female partners. To be truly sex-positive, they should include all sorts of encounters and maybe also stable relationships.
Then there were more comments about the medications in Compliance mode being too harsh, and I agreed, so I released a patch yesterday to address this, reducing their number from 5 to 1 per area and making them easier to destroy.
Last but not least, that review about insufficient automatization made me think of two new mutation boons. One for auto-buying units and one for auto-leveling areas. I hope those will make real idle players a lot happier, although that one reviewer had a lot more to say that I don't agree with, so I doubt he will be happy.
Marketing
Another interesting topic is the marketing of the game. And we had a ton of it. Of course, right after release on Thursday evening, I pushed the game on tfgames.site, which was unsurprisingly the biggest driving factor for traffic to the store sites. Since Tuesday, I have also started flooding DeviantArt with TG Captions in the Femdemic universe myself, and then on Thursday, we also started releasing all the side stories to tgstorytime, fictionmania, etc. Tgcomics.com posted two days of Femdemic comics on Friday and Saturday. And more artists pushed their content to different platforms over the days. There are still a few more coming up very soon.
So far, this is only what I did entirely on my own. The weeks before, I had organized all of that myself. So let's dive into what the marketing company did. Mostly social media posts, community outreach posts, a press release, handling press key requests, which I haven't seen a review so far, and setting up a press kit. They also handle advertisements on Instagram and Trafficjunky.
So they are doing a lot of stuff. However, when looking at the traffic data, it seems that everything I did on my own was far more impactful on the sales so far. So I haven't yet been able to conclude whether hiring them was a good idea. They have been very active, responsive and have been doing stuff.
There's another big PR push coming up this weekend, which they will probably be better at handling than me on my own, although it is a partnership that I organized without them. So they were very helpful over the last weeks but were way too expensive for their impact. Still... as I said in my post about deliberating to hire them, I would have always wondered what would have been if I hadn't done it. So now we know more about the next game launch.
Overall, I still had to do a lot myself, leading to my final point.
My stress level
So, launching a game is stressful. I think everybody understands that.
In the games industry, we always hear the story of Phil Fish, who went crazy after answering all people who had negative opinions about his game, and I can understand that. It's stressful to see people talking about something you've poured all your heart into.
Releasing a game is an emotional rollercoaster. Since Thursday, I have had to contact dozens of people, write dozens of texts, prepare dozens of banners, read reviews, post to social media, read every message, and answer you all on Discord. And, of course, then also hastily prepare bug fixes and program new features because I couldn't stand not addressing the issues mentioned in the reviews. Refresh all five different websites that have support forums for the game now every ten minutes. I could go on and on. On Sunday, I fell asleep in the middle of the day and slept five hours from 1 pm to 6 pm. So yeah, I guess this was not a healthy weekend. I was stressed, but I feel like I can finally breathe a little more with the new patches out there... until the next negative review arrives, of course. ;)
So please, to help my mental health, if you liked the game, leave a positive review on Steam and/or tfgames.site so that the negative ones aren't as impactful.
Thanks for reading. I'll return with the BMO TV Beta release and another Femdemic marketing message this weekend.
Best,
Rel
Comments
Dominique Ducote
Thanks for the reminder for a review. I'll say I wasn't sure what to expect from the game besides the first victim transformation, but once the world.domination part unlocked I was pleasantly surprised and looking forward to what else is lurking in this game.
Aika
Wow that was a deep dive into the behind-the-scenes 😁 hope you manage to give yourself a break soon
