Deep dive: Turning around your game's reviews post-launch

gamesindustry.biz:

Simon Carless

Wednesday 16th February 2022

The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by 'how people find your game' expert and GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.

Something we've been fascinated by here at GameDiscoverCo? The concept that 90% of games have a 'Hype' problem (not enough people know about it). But 10% of games have an 'Expectation' problem (people know about it, but what you deliver might not be 100% what they expected).

And we were lucky enough to talk about this to Simon Bachmann of dev Robotality about his team's Chucklefish-published title Pathway. The game is a fetching pixel art-based 2D title where you "unravel long-forgotten mysteries of the occult, raid ancient tombs and outwit your foes in turn-based squad combat!"

Pathway's first month on sale on Steam back in April 2019 had about 350 Positive and 210 Negative reviews, a "Mixed" result that could become an anchor weighing down sales. But the team kept working on it, with only about 200 more Negative reviews during its LTD on Steam from the 1,100+ reviews since launch month, a way better percentage. (It also launched a Switch version last year.)

So we talked to Simon about both expectation management (why he thinks people didn't get the correct impression of the game at launch), and what happened after that (the route to improving review scores and long tail sales).

Q: After the initial 2019 launch of Pathway, it seems like reviews were just 'OK', or a bit mixed. Do you have a strong feeling about why that was? Did you release a bit too early, were people expecting different things from what you delivered, etc?

A: I think it was a mix of both: we knew that the