We did have a secret anchor, not on Steam but on mobile. Then we took that feedback and implemented it all :) And we always asked to get details and further opinions. A major benefit we got from those meetings was lots of feedback about the game. They were all very nice, and my guess is that they just couldn't find the anchor in the market where they could estimate how the game would do. I think this is the reason why all publishers (we talked with all the major ones) said NO to the game. There are escape games, but none of them have the budget and the scope of the Escape Simulator. And that's a hard thing to do because if you looked at Steam, there is not really a game like ours. And we managed to self-finance it and not run out of money. We invested most of our profits from previous games into this game. I wish I could see a parallel universe where we went with a $4.99 price point and what that would have done. Did it work? Who knows, but we were in the trending games for two weeks. The general advice is to price higher, but we felt we're not recognizable as a brand to risk it. So we slightly underpriced the game at $14.99, hoping for more sales and getting more people talking about it at launch. The only guaranteed coverage we had was a launch push from PR and wishlists. Then you don't want to price it too low, so you actually earn something.Īnd then there was this idea in our heads that we wanted to sell as many copies as we could on launch even if we had to go super low. We have a co-op game, and we want it not to be expensive for multiple people to buy the game. And it was like that till the last week before release. It was comical how often players asked us what the game's price was, and we just said we couldn't share. When it came to pricing, we had endless discussions. Some responded, we made the rooms, and they ended up covering our game! The bonus was that we tested the heck out of the editor. With the help of our PR, we pitched that we would create tailor-made rooms in our level editor for select channels. Other than that, we tried to use unique features to our advantage.

I mean, they are making similar games to yours, and if that's not somebody you can talk to, who is :P. It involved talking to many developers and having some super interesting discussions. For example, we reached out to developers of similar games and tried to have them do a promo on our game.

And we've seen good results from some of it. We tried a lot of different 'guerilla' marketing stuff.

Escape simulator price