You may have had a good weekend, maybe you played a video game, and then you moved to a different part of your home and played another game, because that’s quarantine, baby, but you probably didn’t have a weekend as good as the developers of Autumn boys. The party game Battle Royale, which is not yet available, reached the top of the charts on Twitch and Steam. However, this did not come completely out of the blue. Like many other Twitch success stories these days, he organized his acquisition of the platform through marketing that leveraged Twitch’s specific structure.
Autumn boys is a 60-player physics-based mini-game collection coming to PC and PS4 on August 4. Friday night briefly became the most-watched game on Twitch with more than 200,000 concurrent viewers, and it was about to repeat that feat on Saturday. On Steam, it became the sixth best-selling game even though it is not yet available. In isolation, you could have imagined that the game was the next big thing, that its intrinsic merits, such as game and visual experience, were so undeniable that everyone jumped on the bandwagon the second they could. But these days, publishers have gotten particularly smart using Twitch to create this impression, even when it’s too early to tell if a game is going to be more than just a flash.
the basis of Autumn boys‘marketing strategy is one that a growing number of video game publishers I have caught: Give beta keys to the best streamers not only to play, but also to give away. This, in effect, makes Twitch a gift center, meaning viewers who want keys, or even people who don’t normally watch Twitch, flood streamer channels in hopes of swiping sweet drops and candy. Autumn boys, who doesn’t have the money of, let’s say, ValorantBehind him, he wasn’t directly connected to the Twitch drop system, with streamers instead of handing over the keys the way they wanted. However, played on that expectation, with some viewers even spamming non-existent chat commands like “! key” in hopes of getting one.
Not long after a weekend test began on Friday, top streamers like Saqib “Lirik” Zahid, Felix “xQc” Lengyel, Matthew “Mizkif” Rinaudo, and Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris shot their streams, and viewers appeared. in manages Developer Mediatonic and publisher Devolver took every opportunity to encourage streamers to request passwordsSo lots of smaller streamers kicked in as well. On top of that, the message surrounding all of this was clear: The beta had a time limit, so would-be gamers needed to get the streamer keys as soon as possible. Over the course of the next few hours, the game became a Twitch phenomenon.
These kinds of tactics work on Twitch because the platform, unlike many of its competitors, is still numbers-driven. While YouTube and Facebook rely heavily on algorithms for displaying content, Twitch uses a number of game directories organized by a simple recommendation system or by concurrent viewers, depending on which option users choose. Until recently, however, Twitch was powered almost entirely by the latter system, and streams are still, as a rule, much more likely to be seen if they are near the top of a directory. This means that success begets success. If someone clicks on a game out of curiosity, they will first see the first streamers on it, and in all likelihood they will click on one of their channels rather than some rando with just a small handful of viewers whose channel is functionally buried.
G / O Media may receive a commission
The same goes for game directories. The best games, based on viewer count, are extremely visible on Twitch’s “Browse” page. The fewer viewers a game has overall, the more it is buried. All of this makes it a system with little room for upward mobility, not a great thing for streamers or smaller games, unless you’re willing to system game, enter into sponsorship deals with popular streamers, or some combination of the two. This doesn’t always work for developers and publishers, but on Twitch, it’s possible for the stars to align in a way that they just can’t on more algorithm-based platforms. Game makers can’t bet everything on algorithms; They are too unreliable. In comparison, a central navigation page that a large number of users visit regularly on a gigantic platform is a blessing. If you can push a game to the top, even briefly, you get a huge visibility boost, one that can, for example, turn a game’s preorder page into a top Steam seller.
This was not Autumn boys‘first beta. Mediatonic and Devolver had spent previous weeks building rumors through a series of closed beta tests. This, however, was a significant expansion of the floodgates, one that capitalized on everything that had happened before.
That does not mean that Autumn boys‘meteoric rise was solely the result of brute marketing force. You definitely have a severe case of “right play at the right time” syndrome. Battle Royale fatigue is real, and both streamers and viewers are looking for a game that does something legitimately, but still observable, different with the last-person format. Autumn boys It makes it literal with a collection of mini-games that focus on not falling down. It has no influence from the standard touchstones of Battle Royale or other action games, but is based on Mario party and cult classic game shows like Takeshi castle, giving it a nostalgic appeal even when trying something new.
Basically there’s a reason Mediatonic and Devolver seem to like their possibilities so much. It’s a smart and fun game, and it’s encouraging to see that a smaller game takes up the same Twitch space as big hitters like League of Legends, Fortniteand Call of Duty, even if only briefly. That being said, as with any partially manufactured Twitch phenomenon, the question now is whether Autumn boys actually it will have staying power once this period of relative scarcity ends. Will it be a game where everyone tunes in even when there are no beta keys on the line? Or will it suffer a precipitous drop similar to Valorant, which was announced as the next big thing on Twitch during its key drop beta phase, only to get significantly less impressive numbers after launch. With the Twitch top 20 as calcified as it is, most days the same handful of the best games dominate, while others sit on the sidelines or don’t rise at all, it’ll be interesting to see if there’s anything as groundbreaking as Autumn boys can take its toll in the long run.
Recommended stories
.
