5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel is a game that came out 4 days ago. It appeared on my timeline through a friend's tweet, and at the time I checked it out, the game's twitter page had zero followers, the developer had no social following I could find, and a google search gave zero results aside from the store page. The Discord server had just been opened to the public with no one in it aside from devs and two beta testers. It seemed like the only way it started getting attention was simply just being on the 'What's New On Steam' and @microtrailers automated twitter accounts, where the title and trailer of the game were so ridiculous that it gained traction quickly.

Within hours those tweets racked up hundreds of retweets. In the first day the game had around 50 reviews, on it's second 100, and on its 3rd day it had 200 reviews on a $12 game. For people who are non-Steam savvy, that would usually translate to anywhere from 1k-10k copies or $10k-$100k in revenue within 3 days.

You Really Don't Need a Publisher

There's a famous GDC talk by a famous publisher called 'You Don't Need a Publisher'. Obviously the title is meant as a funny hook 'haha the publisher is telling us not to work with them', but I think that's a bit of a distraction from the fact that the talk itself is a little misleading. It tells you, here's what we publishers do, and gives you a list of things that seem intimidating for a new developer to do. And they say 'developers come to us because these things are a lot of work, and they don't want to do these things themselves'.

But there's already a false choice being presented to you: either you do all of this stuff or the publisher does it. And all of this stuff is so important - of course marketing is absolutely vital! Getting the attention of streamers, fancy trailers with live-action production, introducing you to the right people! These things will help your game so much, that the returns from them will be more than that 30% cut you give to the publisher!

But in reality, as a factor of how likely a game will go viral, almost everything pales in comparison to how cool the game itself is. What if, with a good enough game, the amount of PR work you need to do to get the ball rolling is totally manageable by 1 or 2 people?

Of course, with '5D Chess', just because there was no outward marketing push, that doesnt mean there wasn't a game plan to maximise their chance of success, through decisions in the game itself, trailer, description and title. The game's title makes for a strong opening, making you think "is this some kind of meme game?", checking the trailer, being more mindblown, checking gameplay and reviews, realising "oh this is the real deal". A really effective sales funnel that barely needed a marketing budget.

'5D Chess' really caught my eye because it's rare to see a game go from totally zero public awareness to this much success so quickly, but also a testament to how a trajectory like this really is possible - as an extreme case of how a game can totally succeed in marketing itself. 3 days after release it already has community tournaments organised, people uncovering new strategies, making lots of guides for new players, all with minimal input from the developer - 60 short messages in the discord server, mostly about bugfixes. The energy and excitement that a great game provides can fuel a community on its own.

Unlike in 5D Chess and its multiverse time travel, we can't explore multiple timelines where the game released both with and without a significant external PR push. My theory is that it tends to be significantly better to spend effort on a game's marketability than on marketing the game, because the latter happens automatically when the former is good enough but not vice versa. I guess we won't know for sure, but trusting in the marketability of your game is a gambit that you may checkmate stalemate chess reference thanks for reading my thoughts!!

A reply re: publishers

The insistence that publishers are necessary is one I just don't think is true. Some publishers act as producers - you could hire an experienced producer like the Superliminal dev did. Some publishers do big PR pushes - as long as you make a game that's eyecatching, people will see it, and if you don't, then a publisher's PR push isn't likely to help you anyway. By taking on the tasks yourself (or hiring people to help you) you will not only see that these tasks are not unsurmountable, but also you are future-proofing yourself to needing to work with publishers again on your next game because now you've built up independent skills in your company and a fanbase for your future games.

It's the goal of publishers to convince you that you really need them. It's painted as a cooperative exercise where both parties are helping each other like puzzle pieces playing to their strengths. There are so many successful self-published games that demonstrate how false this is. We ourselves self-published our first game without a publisher, no PR push, no hype - and are very happy for it, and many of my friends are in the same situation.

Our friends that do work with publishers admit privately that it was mostly a monetary thing: the publisher was able to bypass withholding tax laws because the publisher was located in a country that had a tax treaty with the US, and so cash going from US -> publishers country -> developers country lost significantly less withholding tax compared to US -> developer's country, so even with the publishers cut, the developer literally gained money from the deal even if the publisher did nothing at all.

Alternatively, it was a funding thing and the developer really needed money and was willing to give good PR to the publisher (the irony) in return for the funding. But other devs don't see this, all they see is 'successful dev worked with publisher, therefore publisher must have done something good!' But it was never to do with how publishers can access vital PR avenues that other people can't - the market is too open at this point for any particular people to be gatekeepers.