Why "worse" games go viral

The Viral Success Story

We’ve all heard the story. A solo developer or small team making a game that sells millions of copies and sets them for life.

BattleBit makes 27 million in the first two weeks.

And it seems to be happening more often now. Lethal Company, Content Warning, Only Up… all of these games were made extremely quickly compared to AAA titles, and yet Lethal Company outsold Activision’s Call of Duty in # of copies, netting the developer over 100 million dollars in revenue.

Why do certain games go viral versus others?

Pontypants’ “A Difficult Game About Climbing” caught attention of famous streamers and has sold over 100K copies after only 1 year of development.

Well to be honest, there’s no one answer. But, we can analyze previous games that have gone “viral” and draw conclusions from them. And to emphasize - a game does not need to go viral to earn a lot of money.

Take a recently released popular game Abiotic Factor, now in Steam’s Top Selling Charts. It’s raking in the cash but still nowhere near the social media buzz Content Warning had the previous month.

Abiotic Factor doing numbers. My personal opinion why it did not go as viral as Content Warning is because it’s a more complicated game, so it’s not as easy a sell.

The Streaming Factor

So what are some qualities these viral games have in common? They’re not all meme games, but the biggest factor they have in common are that they are great games to stream.

Streamers are one of the best “free” marketing agents a game can have. One streamer can be the difference between a successful launch and a bad one.

But what makes a game.. streamable? I’ve uncovered some of the top viral games in the last year secrets in my latest video.

A Personal Note

I’m keeping an eye out on these techniques myself for my indie game BUMBI - difficult platformer featuring a super duper cutest accident-prone hero. You can wishlist on Steam here, it helps me a lot :)

BUMBI on Steam →

Journey across hand-crafted worlds to help BUMBI reunite with it’s chewing bone in this challenging precision platformer. Make daring jumps, escape fast moving obstacles, and above all- make sure not to die.

Thanks for reading and until next time!