Strategy and results

A short section about my game here for context: I'm making a 2D top-down drift game called Drifters Don't Brake: Midnight. A sequel for "Drifters Don't Brake", a game that made ~400 copies.

Last month I wrote a post here about how many wishlists I got after accumulating 1M views on YouTube Shorts and TikTok together. I also talked a little about my project and first experience with the two video platforms. Here is a link if you wanna read that first: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1rnl1np/how_many_steam_wishlists_i_got_with_1m_tiktok/

At that time I had already been posting videos for 40 days. I only posted low effort videos. Pure gameplay with some background music. For some reason, one of my TikTok videos went viral accumulating almost 900k views alone. It didn’t generate too many wishlists tho. I reached 500 at the time of that post. Now, a month after that post, my game has 6k wishlists.

At the end of that previous post I mentioned that I was testing putting a little extra effort into the videos. I started adding narrations and subtitles on top of the gameplay to see if that would generate more views. And it did.

YouTube Shorts: Not too long after I start posting the narrated videos my average view count went from 400 to 1k, then 2k. Most shorts I post now get around 5k views. One of the shorts hit 2M views, and a couple others surpassed 50k views.

In the beginning I thought YouTube shorts was very unstable in terms of view count, but now it seems to be the most stable of the social media I’ve been posting.

TikTok: Before I started posting narrated videos, my average view count was around 300. The narrated shorts instantly did better, reaching 1k views. Currently, average view count there on flopped videos is around 1500 views, but many videos go over 50k views. No other video reached close to 1M views, but a couple videos went over 100k views. TikTok seems to be the most unstable in terms of views. I never know if my video is gonna get 2k, 10k, 50k, or 100k views.

Instagram: I decided to give instagram a chance. I’ve heard before that it is the social media that better converts views to wishlists. The only issue is that you can’t schedule videos from a computer. I even tried the Meta Business website. It seems to allow you to schedule some post, but after scheduling, the post disappears and is not posted. Shit is broken. You need to schedule through the phone app. I’ve just been manually posting the videos daily through the PC.

Instagram is more similar to TikTok in terms of view count. Flopped videos get around 4k views, a few videos get over 20k views. One of the videos got 2M views though, which was surprising.

All of that accumulated around 6M views in this last month. That was enough to bump my game from 500 to 6K wishlists. The videos that went viral on each platform are different, but it gives me an idea of what kind of video works and what doesn’t. At some point I had two different videos going viral at the same time on two different platforms (YouTube and Instagram) and that got me 1k wishlists a day for 2 days. Now I’ve been getting around 100 wishlists a day, which is surreal to me. I went to Next Fest with 200 wishlists and left it with around 350. Then I started posting my low effort videos that bumped me to 500 wishlists in 1.5 months, then getting 5500 more in a month with narrated shorts.

Instagram was in fact the one that converted the most, then YouTube, then TikTok. I couldn't find a way to add a hyperlink on TikTok, so people have to copy and paste the link I added there, or google the game. Instagram is a little behind on videos. I started posting narrated shorts there after I started on YouTube and TikTok, so Instagram is almost a week behind.

How did I get those views?

Honestly, I think my game fits in a nieche that isn't super explored, and hasn't had big titles released recently. There aren't many big 2D Top-down drift games out there. I didn't do any research beforehand, I was just making a game that I enjoyed playing. I did look into Steam to see if I could find games that were similar to mine, and the most similar one was Absolute Drift, an 11 years old game. Then, after start posting videos, people started mentioning that my game reminded them of a free mobile game called Data Wing. A 9 years old game. Data Wing is very often commented on my videos. Every 2D top-down car game looks similar, so I've heard my game looked similar to many other games. However, none of them has the same theme as mine, a futuristic neon pixel art style.

I guess my game scratched some nostalgia people had by reminding them of some other cool game they've played before, while still looking and feeling fresh.

What workflow works for me?

I really dislike video editing. But I found a workflow that is good to me. I record my voice and mix it first in a separate software, then I use an AI to generate the subtitles and another AI to polish the subtitles. The first AI that transcribes it isn't perfect. It adds one subtitle for "top-" an another for "down", separates "95" from "%", includes commas and periods... So I created a text file with some instructions on how to cleanup the SRT file and I send that and the SRT file to the second AI. It works pretty good. I record a bunch of audios first, then I start creating videos for each of them. Recording and mixing audios takes me ~15 min per audio.

Then I start creating the video on a video editor software. I already leave a bunch of gameplays pre-recorded, so I just need to add my voice and the subtitles, pick a couple gameplay moments that fits the subject, edit it a little bit to make the video more dynamic, pick one of the tracks of the game to add as background music, and done. Each video takes ~20 min to make.

For subjects, I talk about anything in my game. Literally. My game is very simple, and there isn't much to talk about, but I always end up finding something. It's also OK to repeat subjects after a couple of weeks. 95% of my viewers are seeing my content for the first time, so they won't know the video's topic has already had a video before. Of course it's a different video, with a different script, just subject is the same (do not reupload videos).

I don't really write scripts. I write what I want to talk about, then I turn on recording and start improvising, recording sentences separatedly. And since I can separate the audio recording from the video making, I can work on videos while I think on ideas to record later, then record a bunch of audios at once and repeat. I'm not always doing the same thing, which helps.

I think that's too much writing already. I hope this helps and inspires someone to start doing some sort of marketing for their game :)