Forum

Community - a place where gamers can feel comfortable coming for support. Over the years we've had several forums for Krabbit games starting with Krabbit Korner, then Krabbit Online and now KrabbitWorld Origins. The new KrabbitWorld Origins forum is by far the prettiest and most welcoming. Gamers are starting to join in. We'd like to invite the thousands of members from our previous (now closed) forums to come back and sign up at the new one. Emailing them from our servers could be misconstrued by one unhappy recipient as spam and that's not a risk we're willing to take, as this could end up with the entire site being shutdown by our ISP. But we'd love to have everyone back. With our invitation we add our apologies for any inconvenience.

Promotional Freebies

Sometimes you just can't give it away. Funny how that works. The thought behind the freebie plan was to get lots of players discovering how fun the game was and spread the word. Turns out in our case, people weren't as interested in a free product as a product they had to earn. We had more success with reduced price promotions than free ones and again more success with full priced versions than reduced price ones. Funny when a big publisher gives away keys to Call of Duty, no one questions it. Some people were even suspicious of free, thinking we were spamming pirated copies. Then again maybe we just didn't offer the freebies in the right places plus our web site wasn't up to snuff back then.

Demos

There are mixed opinions on whether or not demos even work as marketing material, specifically because of the low conversion rate. With the conversion rate for downloads to sales being at 1% (for downloadable games) that means an insane amount of demo downloads. For a game the size of ours that adds up to many terabytes. And success is only possible if the demo is good and does its job.

Servers weren't a problem. We went in prepared on that front. It was our second time around with promoting a 3D game. We thought we had a better plan this time.

Demo version #1 for KrabbitWorld Origins was based on feedback from testers we found in two development communities. Our game was designed with advanced controls for the seasoned gamer so we were getting our feedback from the wrong place, an environment highly populated with casual gamers and casual game developers. Based on their feedback that it was too complex we dumbed the demo down and started it off with a user friendly tutorial, a bit of combat, quest content and finished it off with character selection and a final battle. That got us reviews ranging from “this is a nice and unique RPG” to “dull, dull, dull”. Not the actiony feeling we were going for.

Demo version #2 for KWO incorporated Battle Modes to throw the player right into combat which is what this 'beat em' up' game is really about. This demo was received more positively by gamers and journalists with comments like “the Canadian dev team got it right this time”. We got many more downloads but still not enough to convert to adequate sales.

Demo version #3. KrabbitWorld Origins Advanced Demo, a whole new ball game taking us a full month of long hours to create. This one came to us in our 'walking around the block' business meeting. An advanced demo with cut scenes. Let's show the players the real fun of the game. High level 92, custom colored Krabbits, fully equipped with elemental bracers, adorned with ear cuff jewelry and the chance to play all 6 as well as be aided by each henchie available in the game. Playing the story, experiencing cut scene drama and a final epic battle. This one is going well download-wise so far. Third time a charm? ;) Let's hope so. But in marketing you can't just hope. You have to keep doing and doing and doing. Without end. There are numerous sites that will host your demo. Keep submitting and upgrading them for maximum visibility.

Game Videos & Trailers

Anything you can do that doesn't require contracting out, go for it! Just be prepared to try a few times while you learn. Our first game videos showed game features or some gameplay. Often they were created with content that was still being worked on and needed a few more rounds of polish. Most often the audience that best appreciated these vids were other developers, mostly new ones. With time permitting, and practice honing our skills and vision we began to make in-game cinematics. At least now we could share more of the story and drama of the game. The newer trailer-style videos bring more hits and better response.

There are a number of web sites, other than making your own Youtube channel, that will host videos. 1Up and gametrailers.com are two examples. Gamespot will host them as well. The downside for a small game dev studio is their videos can only be placed in the User Video sections. The upside is if the video is good enough some game sites will grab it and list it under Game Videos where it gets better exposure. Gamershell and Gamespress are two web sites that host game videos from where other game sites can grab them.

Partnerships

Directly contacting larger sites for partnering to become involved in a pilot technology program or simply to get listed can help visibility. This is a great example of how things often depend on timing, a quirk of fate or how the stars are aligned when you try. One person on your team can make first contact and be completely ignored while the other can try the same day and get an immediate response from a different department. More than once, Dean, a male, has contacted someone and got a response where in the same situation, I, a female, have been either ignored or dismissed. Seems it's still a boys club in some places.

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