I believe what you mean when you say the first wave of popularity is **consistent popularity **, which basically means your game can retain a large sum of players constantly.
To achieve something like this sure isn’t simple, but it is definitely possible.
Looking at an example, the popular indie hit Jailbreak went on the front page almost overnight. This happened because of three organic reasons:
- Quality of the game
- Refreshed an old game, called Prison Life
- The game was enjoyable and made people return to play again
Now, Jailbreak is an outlier in the grand scheme of things. They achieved success overnight. Let’s look at another example, Overlook Bay.
Overlook Bay is another successful game that gained popularity through the media. The creators of it are influencers and got into contact with other large influencers to sponsor their game. When they released, they had several thousand players playing primarily due to their youtube fanbase and other influencers’ videos. After the first week though their player count dipped by a large amount because this isn’t organic popularity. They used their influence to get players to play their game - they would play it whether or not it was engaging. This is an inorganic way of achieving success.
From looking at these examples you now know of two ways to achieve success. I’ll bring in another example.
I’m sure you all know of Adopt Me, a hit indie game that is achieving overwhelming success right now. Well, how did this happen? Let’s dive deep into Adopt Me’s past for a second here.
A couple of years ago, a similar game to Adopt Me was called “Adopt and Raise a cute kid”. This was before Adopt Me existed. This game was immensely popular but never lived up to its full potential. NewFissy, the creator of treelands had an idea to make another game. This game is now called Adopt Me, and he/his team most likely got the idea from Adopt and Raise. He and his team polished his game to live up to the potential that adopt and raise didn’t achieve. When they released, they only had a few thousand players, but over time the game kept growing and growing. A month after release, they had tens of thousands of concurrent players. This type of popularity growth is called exponential growth, where they retained their players so well that they kept coming back, and new players kept coming to their game adding to their player base. This is only possible on games that are truly engaging, a classic simulator couldn’t achieve something like this.
One last example here, and for this one I’ll use the simulator genre.
Surely by know you have seen at least one simulator game on the roblox platform, Saber Simulator, Bubble Gum Simulator, etc. These simulator genre games are typically one-and-done games, which essentially means they’re popular for a short amount of time and then die out. This kind of growth is called unstable growth, where a game can get popularity extremely quick, stay there or not, and then fall back down to the “unpopular” category. BGS is still rather relevant though, this is an outlier example.
Now that we have seen 4 examples of popularity growth, let’s reiterate them here.
- Instant Growth (Jailbreak)
- Influential Growth (Overlook Bay)
- Exponential Growth (Adopt Me)
- Unstable Growth (Saber Simulator)
To whoever is reading this, identify the best way your game can grow. If it’s a game where people could lose interest quickly, you might want to try going for influencers or for advertisements (unstable/influential).
If you believe that your game is of high quality standards and could stay relevant for months/years to come, I’d say that you should go for an exponential growth plan, but instant growth is possible. It’s extremely risky though if your game flops.
To grow your game exponentially you might want to do a little bit of everything.
Develop a fanbase of supporters early, set funding goals for consistent advertisements, and contact a couple of influencers. This is the best way to get your game relevant and popular.
On the other hand, if you want your game to get you rich and famous quick, which isn’t ideal but it’s possible if your game retains players well, then set a very high budget for advertisements and run them. If players like your game, your game will likely be on the front page for a while. If not, you’ve lost a lot of funding.
As always, you’ll want to identify what your game will be best at. This post is a bit of a run-on, but I hope you learned something here. These “studios you’ve never heard of before” know how to market their game, and I just told you how to as well. Get out there and do it.
