On April 27th, 2018 we released our first game on Steam. The Thin Silence is the first commercial project by TwoPM Studios for the PC platform. TwoPM is a fancy way of addressing our little team of two part-time game devs who have been making games together for more than 12 years. We’ve exclusively made freeware PC games & commercial iOS games in the past, this was a new frontier. If you’d like to learn more about us please check out our about page or presskit.

We wanted to share our thoughts on the release process, we often look to other developers’ stories ourselves and feel there is always something to learn from. However I’ve read enough postmortems to know they often end up as the exact same story. As such I’m going to do my best to avoid the things everyone already knows, no matter how true they are (“neglecting marketing”) or anything that cannot be acted on (e.g. combat the “changing landscape of industry”). I’m aiming for honesty, so I won’t bury the lead: our game was not a financial success… No matter which way you slice it.

Context: Why The Thin Silence?

TTS was born in a melting pot of different desires and influences. It reflects the pattern we’ve observed in ourselves: make something completely different from our last project.

Our interest in game development has always been retro-inspired and, to us, fit best on PC or console. We’d targeted mobile games from 2011 through to 2013 to learn more about the business side of game development — to some success. We were frustrated by the race to the bottom and intense competition that developed on the iOS App Store. So we decided returning to the PC audience would be a better market fit for the games we wanted to make and hopefully be a little less competitive. We’ll come back to that competitive point, this was 2013 though. We became increasingly curious about whether we could make a career, or at least a side-career, out of game development.

We felt like we weren’t capitalising on the expressive narrative potential of our games and wanted to try something new. The Thin Silence is largely inspired by our personal experiences with mental health and gave us a chance to understand & express ourselves.

Preparing for Release

After 2–3 years of development we realised we weren’t making progress fast enough if we wanted to ever cross the finish line— unlike a hobby project, you can’t wake up one day and call it done. We started to seriously consider what was going to be involved in getting the game out there. We decided to bite the bullet and post The Thin Silence on the Greenlight program for Steam. Aside from our devlog this was the first public showing of the game.

Our devlog stats, that’s 214 replies and 36141 views of the thread overall between 2013 and 2018.

We concepted, storyboarded, recorded and edited a Greenlight trailer together, including recruiting a voice actor. We wrote press releases and manually researched journalists to contact about the game. We updated our devlog on TIGSource and posted on Twitter throughout the process. Despite all this we barely made it through. This was around the time Valve had started relaxing the requirements on Greenlight.

Our final stats for Greenlight, these are fairly middle-of-the-road numbers: 1091 Visitors, 410 Yes votes, 312 No Votes

Short Interlude on Publishers

Every second article says the same: “You don’t need a publisher, but it certainly helps”. I’m just going to echo that. We know our strengths and we also know that we both suck at selling our work. This is combination of lack of talent for marketing work, cluelessness and conflicting priorities. We’re working on the cluelessness aspect, the others are hard to address. Even being Greenlit, offloading our PR strategy to Nkidu was pivotal to us actually finishing the game. We realised that there wasn’t enough time to be project managers, developers, sound designers, writers, artists, accountants, and public relations officers.

Briefly, there are a lot of publishers out there now and pitching to them is good practice for selling your game to the general public. You need to know exactly what you’re making and why it’s good or else publishers are going to skip right over your email. Trust me, a lot of publishers skipped over our emails. If you can’t sell a publisher on your game then anticipate difficulty selling players on your game — don’t give up, but anticipate.

Finding a publisher is not a panacea; nothing can replace getting out there and selling your own game. We were already bad at this but after five years we were tired. We spent so long planning to make something good, making something good, reevaluating it was good etc. that we didn’t leave anything in the tank for telling other people it was good. A publisher is not going to let you ignore marketing and take the responsibility away but they’ll at least stop you from flying blind.

Setting Expectations: What’s realistic?

In the lead-up to releasing The Thin Silence I spent a lot of time reading about the industry and researching similar games. The community has been bickering about the “indie apocalypse” for years now and there’s a growing perception that it’s impossible to “break in” to the industry these days.

I think this is a return to normality. Almost all entertainment industries deal with market saturation problems after a certain maturity level. Indie games have grown up and there are a lot of absolutely incredible games coming out. It’s not enough to make a good game and expect that consumers will find it, research it or take a chance on it. They’ve got titles like Hollow Knight, Celeste & Iconoclasts! Here’s my comparison: success is distributed, and seems to be distributed in the same “champagne glass” as global wealth:

“Champagne Glass” Distribution Model (also a graph of amount of effort required to make a 10/10 graphic)

I don’t put much weight into game scores but that’s more because the rule holds true rather than because it doesn’t:

If your indie game is not at least an 8+/10 to consumers, you have almost no chance of being noticed in 2018. In fact there’s a serious chance you might sell ZERO copies. Yes, you read that right.

I’m fairly comfortable taking a realistic viewpoint on our own work: The Thin Silence is not a top-tier indie game™. I believe we’ve made a very good game, the best we’ve ever made, but it’s at least one tier below where we need to be.

We weren’t in a strong commercial position. We’d made a slow, thoughtful game with a neo-pixel-art style. The market segment for that game is already small and it’s hard to be attention grabbing with something axiomatically gentle. We knew we needed to find a way to make this game compelling to potential buyers. Through discussion with Nkidu we started to come to terms with just how much of TTS was about mental health.

Once we’d had this realisation the gears began to spin a little faster. We had both heard of Checkpoint and their work from both YouTube and Twitter. It seemed like a natural fit, we’re both Australian and focused on the intersection of mental health and video games. We reached out and formed a light partnership fairly quickly.

Keep pushing, even when it seems hopeless

Our outcomes

So, for all that where did we end up? Personally my Twitter audience grew a lot from this game, although I’m still playing in the small leagues in terms of followers. This is a small point but has become increasingly important to the indie game community.

We had considerable press interest leading up to release with over 400 press requests for review copies. This translated into dozens of reviews, streams and videos around the net, including coverage from The Washington Post & Rock Paper Shotgun. We also received an honourable mention at The Freeplay Awards 2018.

Our ratings generally ranging from 6–9/10 (see Metacritic), with a couple of outliers on both ends. Generally if people didn’t like the game it was because they “didn’t read the label first” or people loved it because it resonated with their personal history. This was by far the most rewarding aspect of the game, seeing people’s personal connection to our work is, for us, what the creative process is all about. But the objective facts are this:

The game has been wishlisted over 1400 times on Steam and to date we’ve sold less than 200 copies combined across Steam, Humble and itch.io

We are both in the very fortunate position that we can make games and not rely on them for our livelihoods. No-one could live off sales of this game. We live in Australia and the proceeds of this game did not even cover the cost of founding our company and completing our tax return.