#Spellbreak patch notes full#

We just had another set of Imgur gifs go viral just a couple of weeks ago, and it still drives hundreds of thousands of views. There’s a lot of these out here, and they change all the time, but focus on areas where you can still get on a top viral page. And no one had even heard of the game we hadn’t even announced the name for the game yet.Ī big reason why I think we were able to grow is channels like Imgur, like 9gag, like Reddit, where you can actually still go viral without needing a base to build from. By doing that, we were able to generate 200,000 views, and that would drive tens of thousands of email signups for our email list. So what we did instead is we took our development blog and we put it on Imgur.

That’s not things like Twitter or Facebook because, at the time, our Twitter had very few followers, a couple hundred. The number one thing I think everyone should be doing right now is focusing on their high upside channels. To give you a sense of where we started, what we wanted to do was capture interest from excited fans, get their email addresses for them to sign up for our pre-alpha, and then get them engaged with the game. And the really unsatisfying thing is that the best way to make players care about your game is to make a game that players care about. I think it’s important to acknowledge that. On top of that, I think we made a bunch of really smart decisions, but we also got really lucky. I’m going to give you a bunch of advice here, so I think it’s important to take all of it with a grain of salt. But I think it’s really important to find a way to make players care about your game.īefore I jump into all of the lessons learned, a quick disclaimer: Every game is different. I look back at some of those videos now of what the gameplay actually looked like at that time, and it was very early in terms of its course of development. We knew we had to show traction, and it was way before any of us were comfortable having players in the game. If you think it’s too early to start, I can tell you that we made the decision to go out in a pre-alpha because we were not really getting anywhere with potential partners and publishers. It’s your job to make people care.Īnd it’s not too early. You’re competing with Netflix, you’re competing with Facebook and TikTok.

There are so many games coming out, and there’s so much noise all time, and you’re competing with everyone. I cannot recommend enough how humble you should be about this. If there’s one thing you take away from this talk, it should be this: No one cares about your game. I cannot recommend enough how humble you should be about this.It's your job to make people care. If there's one thing you take away from this talk, it should be this: No one cares about your game.

#Spellbreak patch notes full#

We’re going to be releasing it on Xbox One, Switch PS4, and the Epic Game Store with full cross-play and full cross-progression.īut this presentation is focused on the pre-alpha that we ran over the summer of 2018, and how we gained traction for the PC alpha launch in February 2019. We started developing it back in Q4 of 2016, which feels like forever ago, but we are launching the cross-platform version later this year. We have about 85 people on the team currently, but we’re growing to around 150 to support Spellbreak for the rest of this year.įor anyone who hasn’t seen it, Spellbreak is an action spellcasting Battle Royale. We’ve raised about 30 million in total venture capital over a couple of rounds of funding. We’re mostly located in Boston, although right now everyone is remote. Our first game was a mobile title, then we did another PC title before Spellbreak. It’s still relevant today.įirst, a couple of details on Proletariat. This was how we worked through the summer of 2018 to build our pre-alpha sign up. I think a lot of the folks are probably in a similar situation to Proletariat’s-we wanted to build a new IP, but we weren’t an existing developer that had lots of previous traction and a large existing customer base. Today I’ll be talking about how we used Imgur, Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to gain 600,000 pre-alpha signups for a new IP from an unknown studio.

Develop a community content generation engine This transcript has been edited for clarity. In this presentation, Seth Sivak, the CEO of game publisher Proletariat, reveals how he and his team grew Spellbreak from an unknown title into a meme-spawning phenomenon. This session was part of “Working with the Gaming Influencer Ecosystem,” an event hosted by a16z that explored the platforms, audience behaviors, creator dynamics, and best practices for partnering and collaborating with influencers.