u/KursiveKunai

Just wanted to share this story and say that you shouldn’t give up just because not everything is going the way you expected.

Two months ago, we thought we had everything figured out. We've been polishing The Dark West demo for weeks, had hundreds of playtesters explore every single bit of the game, and things looked really good days prior to the launch. IGN covered us; the organic hype was insane, with hundreds of people waiting for the release just to jump in and try the game, and every large influencer we reached out to was interested in covering. As a cherry on top, we were scheduled to participate in the Next Fest just days after the demo release with (judging by the pre-release hype) hundreds - if not thousands - of players active from day 1. If there’s a peak moment for an indie dev, this was it.

Then June 10th came and what followed felt like the shipwrecking, violent storm hitting us from all sides while we were just trying to hang on and survive. The game wasn’t properly optimized for lower-end configurations - it ran so poorly on some setups that we received 32 negative and 0 positive reviews in a few hours, all addressing this one issue. Imagine that, 32 reviews, 0% positive xD. There were no hotfixes we could implement quickly, nothing we could do in a short amount of time to save the day. 

It got so bad that we had to call an emergency meeting at 2 AM in the morning, where we ultimately decided to take the demo page off Steam and cancel our participation in the Next Fest because the game was just not there yet. We also had to call off all the influencers who were willing to move things up in their already busy schedules just to include our game. 

From 100 to 0 hype in just a few days.

This was a hard hit for all of us. Looking back now, I’m so proud of the team for sticking together and pushing through. It felt awful to watch everything you worked towards just go out like this. The devs were pushing 12+ hour days in the week before the demo release; we, marketers, went above and beyond to generate all the hype, the PR team connected the studio to all the major outlets, and in general everyone was working super hard to ensure we made it. We still didn’t.

The week after was especially hard for the leadership because the enthusiasm was at an all-time low and they had to deal with both motivating the people AND dealing with all the fires that emerged as a result of what happened. Keep in mind that, by this time, everyone was already exhausted from pushing extra hard before the demo release. We all thought we were just gonna hang back and chill, watch the fruits of our labor yield, yet instead we had a make-or-break problem to deal with.

But we decided not to drown in despair. What happened happened, and nothing could have been done to change that. What could be done, though, is to fix all the issues that we knew existed now, optimizing the game properly, and delivering a new, better version of the demo ASAP. So, for the next couple of weeks, everyone was laser-focused on this one goal and… we delivered!

On July 20th, the new version of the demo was released to the public. There wasn’t insane hype like the first time, influencers, press, etc. - we didn’t want all that pressure. We wanted a working product, a game players would enjoy playing and genuinely be interested in coming back to.

In the first 3 days, we’ve had over 5000 players try the demo, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive! The game was working perfectly fine even on lower-end configurations, the players were having fun, and we were finally able to sit back and relax. By now, over 13,000 unique players have tried The Dark West, and we’re proud to say the game is sitting just a few thousand below the 100,000 Wishlists mark!

The moral of the story is - don’t give up. We had a major setback that could have easily pushed us down and, if we didn’t stick together, eventually led to the project's failure. Yet we decided to push through and deliver despite all the troubles - and it paid off. Seeing all the positive feedback now compared to what happened the first time is the reason enough for me to believe that, if you work hard and trust your guts as well as the players supporting you, anything is possible!

Here's the link to the game if you'd like to check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3574750/The_Dark_West