Deep Dive: Why we chose a forbidden marketing technique for We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as how indie developer Mike Sennott cultivated random elements in the branching narrative of Astronaut: The Best, how the developers of Meet Your Makeravoided crunch by adopting smart production practices, and how the team behind Dead Cells turned the game into a franchise by embracing people-first values. 

In this edition, executive producer Geoff van den Ouden tells us why, for We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip, adopting no marketing strategy was the best strategy of all.  

Hello everyone, I’m Geoff van den Ouden, executive producer from Total Mayhem Games. We’re the makers of the We Were Here series of co-op puzzle adventure games that started out with a free game released on Steam when the team was a group of students (and I was their university mentor). Since then we have released three commercial sequels, as well as expanding our release platforms to include PlayStation and Xbox.

A few weeks ago, we launched a new fifth game: We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip. Like our first game, it’s free (for a limited time at least), but also like our first game, we didn’t do any kind of marketing campaign before the launch.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of our unusual marketing plan for The FriendShip, a little history. It’s always hard to say what led to the success of the original We Were Here game, since it was a student project (back in 2017) and we never approached it as a commercial product. We have always believed that