4-Pack for Ultimate Chicken Horse NOW AVAILABLE!

It's finally here! Go go go! 4 copies of Ultimate Chicken Horse for the price of 3!

Unfortunately, Steam no longer lets people do 4-packs of games. "But what about that other cool game that just came out and has a 4-pack?? Lies!" you cry out in anger. Well, apparently, the games that were in early access or already had Steam pages before a certain time (before ours) were able to keep their bundle packs. 

But that's alright! We have the solution, and it comes in the form of the Humble Bundle store. While it's not bundled like a monthly deal, they also have a storefront where we can put our product, and they've worked with us to make a custom deal which allows us to sell 4 for the price of 3. 

So, all that to say thanks to the Humble folks and their awesome team, and now you can enjoy UCH with friends and not worry about paying full price for 4 copies!

That's all for this week, we're continuing hard work to get the Beta out of Beta and into awesome. Expect updates soon!

YouTuber / Streamer Outreach and the Importance of Starting Small

Hello friends!

Here at Clever Endeavour Games, for our recently launched title Ultimate Chicken Horse, we depend highly on content creators to help spread the word about our game. Content creators in this case refers to people recording gameplay videos on YouTube, playing the game on Twitch, etc. 

What I wanted to write about today is how we went about getting videos from some of the biggest names on YouTube (Pewdiepie, Markiplier, JackSepticEye, SeaNanners, etc.). Someday, hopefully soon, we'll do a proper write-up about the direct effect those videos have on sales. For today however, we'll keep it more general and talk about how we actually reached those people.

Before we break it down, I'd like to debunk a quick assumption: we didn't get those videos from direct contact with these content creators, because we've never actually had that contact. 

Approach only those who might actually play your game.

Above are two YouTubers, one of whom only plays Clash of Clans and the other who is playing Call of Duty. Why would we approach either of them to talk about Ultimate Chicken Horse? Well, actually, the one on the right is Ali-A and is more of a variety streamer, and we would look into what kind of stuff he plays before sending the game / our pitch. If you send your game to people who would definitely not play it, you're being spammy and people don't like that. Word spreads in their community just like it does in game dev! Think before you send. 

Personalize your emails.

Make your emails out to an actual person. Even if some of it is copy pasted, at least write their name and why you think they might like your game. Don't batch email with the recipients in "bcc:" because people know that's what's happening. And for the love of any and all gods, if you need to email to a list, don't email to the whole list in the "to:" field.

Start with the smaller YouTubers / Streamers.

People who "do YouTube" as a living are aware of the content that's out there. The small ones are following the big ones, the big ones are watching the smaller ones for new content. There are a couple of reasons for following this piece of advice:

1. The smaller channels will listen to you, will read your email, and will often respond.

2. Word spreads both up and down (in terms of content creator size / following), so if enough smaller folks are playing, the big ones are likely to see it. 

When I talk about "small" by the way, what I mean is somewhere in the 50k - 500k subscribers range or so, for YouTube. On Twitch it's much harder to tell how big the following is but I'd still say around 10k - 200k is small enough to start. I think you should always give codes to content creators if they ask for it as long as they're putting out decent content on a regular basis, but I don't think it's worth your time to go searching for people with 400 subscribers.

Engage with the community(ies).

We try to leave comments on most YouTube videos, and the response from the communities is really great! People don't expect that the developer will actually be there, and when a YouTuber sees a back and forth between one of their community members / fans and the developer, it earns some respect in their eyes. 

I figured a picture of an angry mob was better than a friendly one, even though these tend to be quite positive interactions :)

On Twitch, it's nice to hang out in chat and to do giveaways if you feel it will help you. Streamers really appreciate it! Of course don't kill yourself to be up at 3am when someone in Portugal is streaming, but do what you can.

Here's an older video of Markiplier playing, in case you were curious to see!

That's all for today folks! Back next week with more updates or info!

May Game Development Update

We’re back! Well, we never left. But we have another update.

It’s been a year (and three days, fine…) since our Kickstarter for Ultimate Chicken Horse was funded! First of all, a huge thanks again all of our backers for their support. And thanks to you non-backers who have stayed interested regardless of Kickstarter. Without these backers and this community support, this game wouldn’t be what it is today and wouldn’t have a community of wonderful creative people making crazy stuff like this:

So what’s new in the last month, in terms of game development?

• Wider search regions (so that more games will show up)
• Bigger buffer in disconnect time so that it’s less likely you’ll get booted if someone’s internet slows down
• Public games in progress will show up in the lobby list, so that you can see if there’s a game that will soon be joinable
• Networked sudden death: in case of a tie, the game no longer freaks out
• Networked outfits: still a bit buggy but you should be able to see your friends’ outfits in online play
• Controller bug fixes
• Emotes and chat! Info in our blog post here. 

…and much more. For the list of changes, see the Steam forum Update Log here.

As you can see, almost all of the changes are bug fixes and improvements to the online mode. We’re working now toward bringing the online Beta out of beta and making sure that the game is as bug free as possible before adding more content (which we’re super excited for) and starting on console ports.

We were also at PAX East since the last update, which was another great show. It’s awesome to meet fans (or future fans) and to meet content creators and press, and see how much fun everyone has with the game. See more about PAX on our blog. 

Lastly, but not leastly, we came out on NVIDIA SHIELD! Their marketing folks were super helpful and now, if you have a SHIELD, you can play in your living room with their Android.TV box. Very cool stuff!

Alright actually lastly, we have an update about the YouTube hype we’ve been getting. We just got a video from Pewdiepie! If you don’t know who he is, you should. He basically owns YouTube.

We’re now up to over 23 MILLION VIEWS on YouTube of people watching other people play the game. That’s freaking awesome.

Till next time!