Sequel Announcement Learnings
It's been only 4 days since we announced a 2nd episode of Duck Detective and I want to share some data and thoughts
Our announcement strategy mirrored exactly to last year's plan with the 1st game. A world premiere of the trailer and game announcement in the Wholesome Snack Showcase (part of the greater Game Awards December announcement frenzy).
The main difference was that we were much more prepared. We had finished making the trailer back in August and likewise store page, presskit, and other assets were prepared over a month in advance. I think this helped us get into the showcase, as it seemed much more competitive this year to get into any of the Game Awards adjacent events (based on anecdotal evidence talking to other devs).
I feel like marketing is like shifting sands beneath your feet. Every year the landscape is warping gradually, and suddenly in larger jolts when you try to squirm. We had the complacency knocked out of us in July when we realised that these showcases were much more competitive than in 2023. I think with any future game announcements we will want to work just as hard to get attention.
The Wishlists
We hit 11k wishlists within the first 4 days, with a little over 3k wishlists in the first day cycle* (only 12ish hours from when the page went up in the evening).
This is really promising. So far it's 95% more wishlists than the 1st game in the same time period. And that gap will continue to widen as we can already see that the wishlists are dropping off more slowly day by day than the 1st game.
It's a strange feeling going from building our marketing campaigns around hitting this 10k number in total, to now reaching that in just the initial announcement. I feel very privileged getting to work on games that thousands of people are interested in playing, and I endeavour to never let that feeling diminish.
The Social Media Posts
During the 1st game, we had our first ever "successful" TikTok post, garnering over 200k views. We were eager to repeat this success, but also apprehensive about whether we still could pull it off. It's been 6 months since we'd properly got into the video creation headspace. Unfortunately, our first 2 videos had a mediocre performance, just scraping a few 1000 views. We changed up our tactics, and crafted a new video that hit the 200k views in 48hrs that we were looking for.
What we changed and our thought process: We suspected viewers on TikTok felt alienated from the 2nd game hype as we were only getting comments from people who already played the 1st game. We opted to remove all messaging about a sequel and instead just focus on the fact that we announced a new game. We also mixed in successful cuts from the 1st game along with the new footage from the 2nd game.
This led to a much larger reach, and many new viewers who were seeing Duck Detective for the first time.
So my recommendation: If you are looking to announce a sequel on TikTok, ignore any sequel messaging and focus on the excitement of a new thing.
For other platforms like Twitter and Bluesky, where your posts are more directed at followers, the sequel messaging worked fine for us.
The final, and maybe most important platform is Steam. Specifically the "Cross-Promotion News Post" that will show at the top of owners' library pages. The thing is, cross-promotional news posts are massively nerfed compared to regular news posts.
So previously for the 1st Duck Detective, I decided to just use a regular post for cross-promotion. But Steam does moderate these news posts, and a warning was dolled out and our news post relegated to cross-promotional visibility oblivion.
But just hours before this year's announcement went live, I decided that we would try this same ruse again. I figured this time, the 2nd game is so closely linked as a sequel, surely Steam wouldn't alter it. And thankfully they didn't, and I'm really glad I decided to risk it again. Because, honestly, if you are forced to use the cross-promotional category, you're not going to get as much reach - and marketing on the very platform you sell your games is metaphorical gold dust (and real wishlists).
In-Game Promotion
Chris Zukowski mentioned in a recent blog post that since Steam's rules have changed on cross-promotion it is a good strategy to include an advert to new games within old ones. So that's exactly what we did.
I saw this playthrough by a VTuber with 1.5M subscribers. They call out the title of the next game and even brought the key art on screen afer they saw the advert, so effectively, there is no way to measure the impact of the main menu advert for this reason. One thing is certain, the in-game advert is already paying off.
Conclusion
That's all I have to offer after 4 days. I still feel a great deal of trepidation about the release. I'm really liking how the game is shaping up and think it is a lot better than the 1st in many ways, but there is also a lot more expectation from players. The fact that the game is fully voice acted is no longer a pleasant surprise but a necessity. I know if the game did half as well as the 1st we would still be fine, but the idea of permanently thwarting the need for external finance would be monumental.
It's probably easier for an outsider to tell how well the game will do. This was the case for the 1st Duck Detective. But unfortunately, we must live with this angst. Game development performance anxiety.
Joni